The B Side

by Ben Yagoda

  Once again following Rodgers and Hammerstein’s lead, most of the standout stand-alone songs that did emerge—“Almost Like Being in Love” from Brigadoon, “They Say It’s Wonderful” from Annie Get Your Gun, “So in Love” from Kiss Me, Kate, “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” from Finian’s Rainbow—represented a change from the prewar era, when the Broadway tunes of Porter, Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, and even Kern had a jazz quality. These new ballads hailed back to the earlier tradition of operetta; one could imagine Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy essaying their soaring melodic lines. Jazz bands and small combos could and sometimes did take them on, but it was hardly a natural fit.

  For songwriters unable or unwilling to try their hand on Broadway, hanging around Hollywood was an option. The studios would occasionally throw out some work, and if you were on the level of a Jimmy McHugh, you could live off your royalties and lead a life of sunny leisure and country-club schmoozing. Ira Gershwin started to write again a few years after his brother’s death and teamed with Arthur Schwartz on Broadway for Park Avenue in 1946. But after the show’s relatively poor performance, he put down his pencil and, with one notable exception, spent the remaining four decades of his life writing occasional essays and enjoying a life of Beverly Hills leisure. The exception was “The Man That Got Away” and the rest of the exceptional score he and Arlen wrote for the 1954 film A Star Is Born.

  The one first-rank writer who stayed in Hollywood and stayed busy, at least for a while, was—despite the “dismissal” perceived by Jule Styne—Harry Warren, who had become too much a creature of California to leave. For MGM, Warren scored the eminently classy The Harvey Girls (1946), Summer Holiday (1948), and The Barkleys of Broadway (1949), which reunited Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers after a decade apart. But his contract with the studio ended in 1952, after which he did such work for hire as “Zing a Little Zong” for Crosby in 1952, “That’s Amore” for the 1953 Dean Martin–Jerry Lewis film The Caddy, and, in 1957, the title song for An Affair to Remember, a number-seventeen record for Vic Damone.

  Jimmy Van Heusen had some Broadway success. But California always called to him. He and Johnny Burke kept doing movie work for Hope or Crosby, or Hope and Crosby together, in yet another Road picture. (In the final iteration, The Road to Hong Kong, Hope’s character is given Van Heusen’s real name, Chester Babcock.) Van Heusen would reemerge in the late fifties with an exciting final chapter to his career, but for the moment his writing was not up to previous form. “The Road pictures symbolized the life span of a whole profession,” Wilfrid Sheed wrote. “The Hollywood songwriters had entered the war a short while before as fresh and bouncy as the annual New Year baby, and they were already leaving it as old men and has-beens, their best work behind them.”

  V

  What Happened to the Music?

  1946–1954

  The Sinatra phase had ended. And there was nothing happening, except modern and progressive jazz. Stan Kenton and Dave Brubeck, and, of course, bop. It was wide open and we offered a simple beat that the kids could dance to.

  • Bill Haley

  When jazz and popular music lose all contact with one another, they both degenerate into pretentiousness, chaos, and absurdity.

  • Dave Gelly

  The postwar years saw broad shifts in the kinds of music Americans wanted to, or could afford to, listen to. Price controls in the United States had ended in 1946; living costs jumped, and going out for an evening to hear live music became an investment. People didn’t have much time or inclination, either; they had missed out on a lot during the war, socially and vocationally, and now was the time to catch up. Americans began marrying in record numbers in 1943, and the presence of one or more small children around the house was yet another reason not to go dancing. Even at home, swing wasn’t what people wanted to listen to anymore. These sounds had been around for a long time, and young people—not known for musical fealty—were in the mood for something new. In 1945, major networks dropped twelve big bands from their regular radio shows. Nor were the economics of live performance favorable to the bands. Ballrooms closed or cut their opening hours, and bands’ fees dropped dramatically, while their (by definition) big payrolls stayed big and travel costs nudged upward. In a matter of weeks in December 1946, a startling number of bandleaders dissolved their groups: Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Harry James, Tommy Dorsey, Les Brown, Jack Teagarden, Benny Carter, Ina Ray Hutton, and Alvino Rey.

  That meant Rey’s trombonist, Johnny Mandel, was out of work. “We were playing to empty ballrooms,” Mandel recalled, “because the jitterbugs never came back from the war. The kids who used to dance to the bands before the war, they had no thought for tomorrow. When they went to war, they went through all kinds of hell. The ones that made it back, they wanted to go on with their lives, and jitterbugging wasn’t part of it. They married those girls they used to jitterbug with, they were spending all their money on babysitters, on building houses, and nobody was dancing.”

  Whatever the reasons, the era was definitely over. For a dozen years—roughly 1934 through 1946—for the only time in American history, the most popular music in the country was high-quality jazz, and a staple of that music was good and great songs. Now the center of jazz was no longer holding. Two contentious groups were left at the margins, neither one especially interested in the products of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, or Hollywood. The first faction hailed the music and performers of New Orleans and Chicago from the 1920s and earlier—which they called “trad,” for “traditional”—and asserted that nothing that had come afterward was authentic jazz, or worth listening to. One early success for trad enthusiasts was the discovery in 1943 of venerable trumpeter Bunk Johnson, working in Louisiana’s rice fields. He was sent out on a national tour that included a San Francisco concert that Time called “the most historic jam session in the annals of jazz.” The early forties were a propitious time for these revivalists both because the war effort had claimed so many musicians and because the AFM strike had turned off the flow of new instrumental material. At Decca, Milt Gabler, whose enthusiasm for classic jazz was reflected in his Commodore Music Shop, headed a new label for the music, and other labels took similar action. (This aesthetic found staunch advocates in England, including the poet Philip Larkin, the novelist Kingsley Amis, and the writer and vocalist George Melly, who continued channeling Bessie Smith and Jelly Roll Morton in his performances into the 2000s. One notable U.S. proponent was the young Turkish immigrant Ahmet Ertegun, later to start the Atlantic record label. By now, the main expression of trad is in Woody Allen’s performances on clarinet and the soundtracks of his films.)

  The trad proponents—many of whom yoked their cause to vigorous left-wing politics—raised hackles from the start, notably among the second group, who sniffed at swing. This contingent wanted jazz to look ahead, not back; they called the trad camp “moldy figs.” (The term was coined by Leonard Feather in his book The Jazz Years: Earwitness to an Era.) A West Coast bandleader named Stan Kenton refused to play music for his audience to dance to; he wanted them to listen. He talked of jazz as a new classical music and later said it should never have been “mixed up with popular music.” Meanwhile, on the East Coast, young musicians like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were creating bold new sounds at epic jam sessions at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem and other venues. It was hard to dance to this stuff—eventually dubbed “bebop”—or hum it, for that matter. Tin Pan Alley not surprisingly turned up its nose. Reviewing a Gillespie concert in 1948, Billboard sniffed that the music was

  different only in that its purpose seems to be to create as uninhibited and unorthodox a product as the human ear can tolerate. Melody as such is totally eliminated from the scheme of things, with full emphasis falling to awkward (and at times, painful) harmonic combinations, soloists favoring unconventional intervals in jumping from one note to the next which is worked against a background of untamed rhythmic torrents.

  Lou
is Armstrong—who didn’t need rediscovering but benefited from the New Orleans revival—complained about bop, which he called “that pipe dream music, that whole modern malice.” He warmed to the theme: “So you get all them weird chords that don’t mean nothing, and first people get curious about it just because it’s new, but soon they get tired of it because it’s really no good and you got no melody to remember and no beat to dance to.”

  Boppers, for their part, thought the handkerchief-waving, grinning Armstrong was an Uncle Tom, and sometimes said so out loud. But the music was just as bad to them as Armstrong’s obsequious antics. One modern-jazz arranger commented, “We’re tired of that old New Orleans beat-beat, I-got-the-blues pap.” Bop may have had the cool factor, but it didn’t have anything close to the popularity that had been enjoyed by the big bands. And that would be increasingly true—of bebop, post-bop, and, in fact, every variety of modern jazz. To be sure, there were occasional exceptions, as releases by Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, or Stan Getz intermittently struck a nerve with the public in the fifties and sixties. But at the end of the twentieth century, jazz was a niche market, its records accounting for less than 5 percent of total sales.

  Back in the forties, what the two warring camps shared was a disdain for big bands, both the swing and the sweet. They weren’t interested in following regimented arrangements, they didn’t want to play music for people to dance to, and performance and expression, rather than songs, was at the heart of their enterprise. Some big bands kept plugging along as the forties ended and the fifties began, but with very occasional and intermittently successful exceptions—Stan Kenton, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Woody Herman (who started up a new band, known as the Second Herd, in 1947)—they veered heavily toward the sweet. A year after the war ended, Life noted, “If the songs a country sings are any indication of its mood, the U.S. last week was lolling in an amorous, sentimental daze. On dance floors and radios were heard such plaintive queries as ‘Why don’t you surrender?’ and such pleas as ‘Linger in my arms a little longer, baby.’” In a 1949 Billboard poll, well over three-quarters of college students said their favorite kind of music was sweet; swing was second, while just over 1 percent voted for “Progressive Jazz, barely beating out ‘Corn.’” Some college promoters put a “three-ballads-out-of-four” clause into orchestras’ contracts; Billboard reported that “Cornell University, in addition to asking for the slow dance music proviso, forced an agency to include a clause which would prohibit the ork [orchestra] from smoking on the bandstand.” A William Morris Agency music booker was quoted in a 1947 newspaper article titled “Swing Has Swung”: “Ballroom operators complain that the kids walk off the floor when the music gets hot. Kids haven’t got so much money to throw around these days. When a fellow pays a couple of bucks to take his best girl dancing, he wants to hear music that makes her want to cuddle up a little closer, not swing.”

  The writer of the article, Don Dornbrook, described changes some bands had made:

  Raymond Scott, who rose to musical fame on an unconventional note with such original pieces as “Huckleberry Duck,” has changed to a more saccharin style. So have Charlie Barnet, Sonny Durham, Jimmy Dorsey, Boyd Raeburn, and Charlie Ventura. . . .

  But for the true hepcat, the man who has added insult to injury is Earl “Father” Hines. For the last nine months, this prince of the jazz piano has been fronting a sweet band. That’s almost enough to make a swing fan take to smoking reefers.

  According to Dornbrook, “A 21 year old upstart had a lot to do with pointing up the change in dance music preference. He is Elliot Lawrence, a University of Pennsylvania graduate who likes to wear purple plaid jackets, yellow monogrammed shirts and flowered ties. Last fall he played homecoming dances at nine universities.” Lawrence had gone out on the road in 1944, right after graduating from Penn, and right before the big-band era had screeched to a halt. He grew up in Philadelphia with an inordinately talented and forward-thinking saxophone player named Gerry Mulligan, and after Mulligan joined the Lawrence band, the leader divided his shows in two. “We had a section for bebop and Mulligan, and a section for ballads,” Lawrence said in 2011. But, he said, “the kids wanted ballads to dance to,” and by the time Dornbrook’s article appeared, the band was 100 percent sweet. In a 1947 Billboard poll of college students’ band preferences, “sweet-with-a-beat Elliot Lawrence” was named “most promising.” Lawrence’s yellow shirts and flowered ties didn’t hurt, nor did the figure he cut on the bandstand: he was voted one of America’s most eligible bachelors by Look magazine in 1949. Still, expenses kept going up and revenues down. “Stan Kenton talked to me and said, ‘You have to stay in,’” Lawrence recalled. “He said that we were a dying breed. Woody Herman stayed—he loved to tour. But for me, it was hell. I did nine years of it, and that was enough.” He put away his baton in 1953. (Lawrence began a career providing music for radio and television and ultimately Broadway, where he was the musical director of Bye Bye Birdie and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. He was the musical director and conductor for every Tony Award telecast from 1965 through 2011.)

  In an uncanny process, jazz was being surgically removed from popular music. Popular music, for its part, didn’t seem to mind. With 350 million records sold, 1946 was the biggest year for the industry ever. The figure climbed to 375 million the following year. The records may have been flying off the shelf, yet the fact remained that they weren’t very good. The writer Wilfrid Sheed’s parents were British, but he spent his childhood in the United States and developed a passion for the great popular songs. He was away during the war, and when he returned in 1947, at the age of sixteen, he was struck that “the Hit Parade . . . seemed to show no variety at all. One day, for instance, it seemed as if the whole city of New York had conspired to play the exact same record out of every door and window I passed, a dental drill of a song called ‘Near You’ that apparently had the power to keep itself playing indefinitely.” “Near You” was written by a Nashville bandleader named Francis Craig, and his recording of the tune had a repeating left-hand piano line that could indeed bring to mind a throbbing drill. The independent Bullet label had released it as the B side of a number called “Red Rose.” But it was “Near You” that got picked up on radio stations throughout the South, spread to the rest of the country, and ultimately reached number one on the Billboard charts. It stayed there for seventeen weeks. The song’s closest rivals that year, both charting in multiple recordings, were equally insipid tunes that shared a soporific tempo and (in most versions) a heavy string arrangement: the 1913 Tin Pan Alley standard “Peg o’ My Heart” and “Mam’selle,” which appeared in the 1946 film The Razor’s Edge. Frank Sinatra, who as host of Your Hit Parade was forced to sing all three songs, singled out “Near You” as especially “decadent” and “bloodless.”

  Sheed observed:

  And just like that, the magical coincidence of quality and popularity was over, the music in the public square is nowhere near the best music anymore. Listening to a program recently of the top pop hits from 1940 to 1955, I was startled all over again at how sharp the break was at the end of World War II, as if the bad stuff had been waiting for its cue. And perhaps it had, because several of the new hits seemed to depend on the latest gimmickry and special effects, to celebrate technology more than music. The kid at the piano syncopating everything had died in the war and been replaced by his country cousin.

  “Country” is right: during the postwar years, ASCAP writers, the major record companies, and national audiences finally came fully on board with the folk, quasi-folk, western, and hillbilly sounds that BMI had introduced at the beginning of the decade. The most successful record of 1948 was Dinah Shore’s version of Livingston and Evans’s faux-western ditty “Buttons and Bows.” (Shore was from Tennessee, Patti Page from Oklahoma, and Rosemary Clooney from Kentucky, so all three could convincingly put across homespun.) Number one in 1949 was a slightly more authentic western tune, Vaughn Mo
nroe and His Orchestra’s “Riders in the Sky (A Cowboy Legend),” in which a cowboy has a vision of a herd of cattle being chased by the spirits of a group of damned cowboys, one of whom warns him about being doomed to join them, “trying to catch the devil’s herd across these endless skies.” A guitarist with the Monroe band, Bucky Pizzarelli, recalled some sixty years later that an RCA Victor A&R man brought Monroe the tune while the band was on the road in Chicago. “Our arranger, Don Costa, wrote the arrangements in pencil on the bus,” Pizzarelli said. “We went to a studio in the Wrigley Building with a small group, some singers, maybe a couple of trumpets. Don Costa borrowed a guitar, and he was on the session with me. The next night we played in Detroit. We had to play the song three times—the people went bananas. Something grabbed the audience. I saw it happen.” The song was number one on the charts for twelve straight weeks.

  Another notable country hit that year was a Capitol novelty number called “Slipping Around.” It was notable because it was a duet between a bona fide country-western singer (Jimmy Wakely) and Margaret Whiting, the daughter of veteran Hollywood songwriter Richard Whiting (“Hooray for Hollywood”), who was a former big-band singer with impeccable pop credentials.

  Interviewed by a California newspaper in 1950, Jay Livingston and Ray Evans mentioned “Slipping Around” as an example of the way genres seemed to be cross-pollinating, and pointed to some currently popular songs with an oddly old-fashioned flavor. One was Teresa Brewer’s “Music! Music! Music!,” which, though written the previous year, begins, “Put another nickel in, in the Nickelodeon.” Another was “Johnson Rag,” which was composed during the ragtime craze of the 1910s; Jack Lawrence had added some lyrics in 1940, and now it was a hit in four separate recordings. Both songs had a kind of ersatz 1920s feel, which was referred to as “Dixieland”: in essence a watered-down, self-consciously white floater-hat version of the New Orleans jazz championed by the moldy figs. “It’s a throwback,” Jay told the reporter. “People are trying to forget the H-Bomb. History goes around in circles. Music does the same thing. Musicians got so progressive with bebop, they had to start over. Most people can’t understand it. It’s just noise.”