The B Side

by Ben Yagoda

  Also that same week in 1958, the nation’s disk jockeys held their first annual convention in Kansas City. They had secured Mitch Miller as their keynote speaker, despite the fact that Miller was notoriously unenthusiastic about the most popular disks the jockeys spun. As the titular boss of “popular” music at the label, he couldn’t afford to ignore rock and roll, but he was ambivalent about it. Way back in 1951, he had put out Johnnie Ray’s “Cry” and “Whiskey and Gin,” which he later called “probably the very first rock and roll record.” He wrote a perceptive article for The New York Times Magazine in April 1955, just as the harbingers of rock were first being felt. He quoted an unnamed “paunchy prophet of doom” as complaining, “Every time I get within earshot of a jukebox, someone is throwing in a coin to hear something called ‘Oop Shoop’ or ‘Sh Boom’ or ‘Tweedle Dee’ or ‘Ko Ko Mo.’ What does it mean? Doesn’t anyone write a nice, simple love song any more?” Miller’s answer, in part, was that “nonsense syllables in popular songs could be traced all the way back to Elizabethan times.” He referenced two of the biggest hits of the “good old days,” the 1920s: “Yes! We Have No Bananas” and “Diga Diga Doo.” He suggested that the popularity of rhythm and blues might represent in part “a steady—and healthy—breaking down of color barriers in the United States.” His main point was that the pop music of every era offended and mystified the older generation, and he concluded: “In twenty years, when Junior has grown into a sedate married man, father and pillar of the community, he will remember ‘Ko Ko Mo’ wistfully and be distressed no end by the songs his son admires.”

  But the rawness of rock and roll, as it presently emerged, was antithetical to Miller’s approach, which emphasized craft, polish, judicious gimmickry, and production values. “Emotion never makes you a hit,” he said in an interview in his later years. “I always tell this to singers: Emotion is not something you feel. It’s something you make the listener feel. And you have to be very cool and know what you’re doing.” Elvis Presley was cool and hot at the same time, a combination with which Miller was not familiar, or comfortable. When Elvis was looking to leave Sun Records in Memphis, the Beard made a lowball offer and was blown out of the water by RCA Victor; later he passed on the chance to sign Buddy Holly, a rock-and-roller from Lubbock, Texas, who, unlike Presley, wrote his own songs. The Big Beat had passed Mitch Miller by, and it was drowning out the sound he worked so hard to create. The previous year, Columbia was responsible for only one of the twenty songs to hit number one, “Chances Are,” by the young California vocalist Johnny Mathis; indie labels Cadence, Roulette, and Dot each had more.

  Miller’s talk to the disk jockeys in Kansas City was titled “The Great Abdication”; the abdicators, in his view, were sitting in front of him. The Beard made no attempt to spare their feelings.

  To say you’ve grossly mishandled this great, fat money-maker—radio—would be understating the case. . . . You carefully built yourself into the monarchs of radio and abdicated—abdicated your programming to the corner record shop; to the eight- to fourteen-year-olds; to the pre-shave crowd that makes up 12 [percent] of the country’s population and zero percent of its buying power, once you eliminate ponytail ribbons, Popsicles and peanut brittle. Youth must be served—but how about some music for the rest of us?

  By that time, the deejays’ power was ebbing, thanks to a new format in which the playlist and frequency of play was strictly determined by record sales. The deejay could gab about this or that between songs, but he had no authority to decide which songs to play. The format, called Top 40, had started in the late forties at Gordon McLendon’s and Todd Storz’s stations in Texas and Nebraska, respectively, but by now had spread all over the country.

  Variety reported that the jocks gave Mitch Miller a standing ovation.

  • • •

  Schwartz v. Broadcast Music, Inc., after attracting a flurry of publicity when it was initiated in 1953, crept on at a petty pace, with action limited to pretrial examinations of all parties. When a special master appointed by the court ruled that BMI would be permitted to examine performance cards of more than 200,000 ASCAP songs dating back to 1934, it appeared that the case could quite literally go on forever. Accordingly, the plaintiffs lowered their sights, focusing on structural rather than financial matters. A 1956 Variety article characterized the songwriters as “adamant in their demands for complete divorcement of the broadcasting business from the music business. That covers not only the broadcasters’ ownership of BMI but the webs’ control of disk affiliates and music publishing companies.”

  They also moved their battle to different venues. One was the press, where they found a vocal ally in New York Herald Tribune radio and television columnist John Crosby. There was also favorable coverage (favorable to ASCAP, that is) of the issue in both intellectual and slick magazines. In the upper-middlebrow Reporter, Marya Mannes asked “Who Decides What Songs Are Hits?” Her answer was “an army of disc jockeys” who have “reduced perhaps our greatest area of talent—folk music—to the level of ‘Hound Dog’ and the tonal and vocal jitters of rock and roll.”

  An article called “The Battle over the Music You Hear,” in the wide-circulation monthly Redbook, began with a pair of the sort of hectoring questions you might expect from an Anacin commercial, followed by an answer:

  Have you, along with millions of other people, noticed a change in popular music in the past few years? Does much of what you hear today strike you as being raucous and hackneyed, with childish, often suggestive lyrics?

  If so, you should know that the music on radio and television today does not always reflect the nation’s tastes. You should know that you are not being given a full opportunity to hear the best popular music being written, that second-rate songs are being promoted at the expense of those with more imaginative music and lyrics.

  The author, Booton Herndon, offered two explanations for this state of affairs. The first was the excessive power of BMI. The second was the widespread practice of “under-the-counter bribes, called ‘payolas’ in the trade.”

  The fizzling of the Schwartz suit led the songwriters to conclude that Congress might serve better than the courts as a venue in which to pursue their agenda. They found a willing ally in Representative Emanuel Celler of New York, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who in 1956 called subcommittee hearings into supposed monopolistic practices by the networks, one of the main areas of inquiry being their stake in BMI. Russell Sanjek, a longtime employee of BMI but generally a reliable historian, described Celler as “one of ASCAP’s best friends” and reported that he “had chosen the broadcasting networks for his ticket to the U.S. Senate.” The substantial portion of the hearings that dealt with music was essentially a debate on the merits of Schwartz v. Broadcast Music; every witness was closely aligned with one of the two parties.

  Scheduled to testify on the first day of the hearings, held at the Foley Square Courthouse in New York, was Billy Rose, a fifty-seven-year-old showman who was notorious for having grabbed writing credit on such antique songs as “Me and My Shadow,” “Without a Song,” “It Happened in Monterey,” and “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” despite not having contributed a note or word to them. The witness was not in the hearing room and Chairman Celler read into the record a telegram explaining that he was unable to attend because of an urgent meeting about an artist exchange with “Iron Curtain countries.” Inspired to expand the metaphor, Rose charged in the telegram that the networks and BMI had set up “an electronic curtain . . . to keep the music of America’s best songwriters away from the public.” The play on “Iron Curtain” was fighting words in 1956, and when the witness finally showed up the next day, he backed away from the analogy; he also acknowledged that he had been out of the music business “since 1930, nine years before there was a BMI.” However, that did not keep Rose from blaming that organization for “rock and roll and the other musical monstrosities which are muddying up the airwaves.” H
e went on:

  Not only are most of the BMI songs junk, but in many cases they are obscene junk pretty much on a level with dirty comic magazines. An ASCAP standard like “Love Me and the World Is Mine” has been replaced by “I Beeped When I Shoulda Bopped.” A lovely song like Irving Berlin’s “Always” has been shunted aside for “Bebopalula, I Love You.” It’s the current climate on radio and TV which makes Elvis Presley and his animal posturings possible.

  When ASCAP’s songwriters were permitted to be heard, Al Jolson, Nora Bayes, and Eddie Cantor were all big salesmen of songs. Today it is a set of untalented twitchers and twisters whose appeal is largely to the zootsuiter and the juvenile delinquent.

  ASCAP staffers, members, and allies offered variations on Rose’s theme. Jack Lawrence—author of “Play, Fiddle, Play” and “All or Nothing at All”—had no objection to the “electronic curtain” idea. What was happening on the radio, he said, resembled what the Communists did when “they managed to jam the airwaves and keep American words of hope away from the freedom-loving peoples behind the Iron Curtain. Now, the networks have adopted this technique of jamming the airwaves with exactly what they feel should and should not be heard.”

  A statement by Otto Harbach, a songwriter since 1902, a founding member and past president of ASCAP, and still a member of its board of directors, was read into the record:

  A few years ago, when I first began to realize the enormity of the conspiracy launched against good music, it occurred to me that the greatest melodies of the past would never have had the chance to reach the public if they were written now instead of then. Would “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” be allowed by the broadcasters to be heard instead of “Be-Bop-a-Lulu”? Could “Indian Love Call” penetrate the airwaves which are flooded with “Hound Dog”? It is to me a shocking thing that the power of broadcasters has been used to debase popular music.

  No doubt some or many of the congressmen didn’t like rock and roll any better than Rose or Harbach did. They certainly would have been receptive to testimony that offered a solution to the menaces of both communism and juvenile delinquency, and their mastery of the musical scene was not sophisticated. At one point Carl Haverlin of BMI, backing up Mitch Miller’s telegram to the committee, noted that of Frank Sinatra’s sixty-six recordings under Miller at Columbia, only six were BMI. He proceeded to name them, beginning with “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy.” Kenneth Keating, Republican of New York, interjected, “That was a good song.”

  Mr. Haverlin: Thank you.

  Mr. Celler: I don’t admire your taste.

  Mr. Haverlin: “Good Night, Irene”—

  Mr. Keating: That was good, too.

  Mr. Haverlin: Thank you, sir.

  Mr. Keating: Somebody said BMI was just this boogie-woogie stuff.

  Mr. Haverlin: They attempted to say so, but I am not going to comment on their testimony on the record.

  Mr. Keating: “Good Night, Irene” was a very good song.

  Mr. Haverlin: Thank you, sir.

  But the committee was not presented with support for any “conspiracy” or deliberate boycott of ASCAP material by the recording or broadcasting industries. Only a few pieces of substantive evidence were entered into the record. One was a quote from a 1944 article published in the BMI Bulletin, a publication sent to broadcasters. “This is a BMI number—meaning it is your own music,” it advised. “Be careful of the other side of this disk, it is not a BMI tune.”

  Even in the unlikely event that the twelve-year-old article was part of a concerted campaign, the committee members weren’t given any reason to think that the campaign worked. On the contrary, Haverlin testified that the music played on the radio in 1954 was 71.1 percent ASCAP and 17.6 percent BMI. (The remainder was in the public domain or licensed through other organizations.) ASCAP’s advantage was even greater in television, with 78.6 percent compared with 10.4 percent for BMI. The radio networks, he went on, “use a smaller percentage of BMI-licensed music than the thousands of independent stations which are not BMI stockholders and are not affiliated with the networks.” For their part, the ASCAP side offered evidence that BMI songs represented some three-quarters of the Hit Parade’s top-selling records. But these figures actually damaged ASCAP’s case. That is, they demonstrated that consumers were buying the (mostly BMI) records they wanted to hear despite a comparative lack of airplay.

  BMI’s attorneys inserted into the record some fairly powerful testimony from the Schwartz lawsuit, which, they pointedly noted, had been given under oath (unlike congressional testimony). Richard F. Murray, the head of the ASCAP division “which counts performance of music broadcast over the air,” gave even more striking numbers than Haverlin had, stating that approximately 85 percent of radio, “well over 95 percent” of television, and nearly 100 percent of motion picture music was ASCAP-licensed. As for the alleged preference for BMI music on the radio, Murray had this exchange with a BMI attorney:

  Q. From your reading the program logs, was it your conclusion that the broadcasters were discriminating against ASCAP music?

  A: That, I couldn’t deduce.

  Q: That was not an inference you ever drew from your analysis of the logs?

  A: To tell you the truth, to this moment I never gave it a thought.

  Stanley Adams, the president of ASCAP, said the same thing during a pretrial examination, monosyllabically:

  Q: Can you give us the call letters of any single station which discriminated against ASCAP music?

  A: No.

  Q: Do you have any personal knowledge of your own about any acts of any discrimination against ASCAP music?

  A: I do not.

  Once the testimony was complete, the subcommittee went against its chairman and took no action, merely recommending that the Justice Department undertake a thorough investigation of the music industry. Variety reported that “despite an apparent attitude of prejudgment and a sweeping subpoena power . . . the networks acquitted themselves on virtually every score.”

  Two years later, almost precisely the same exercise was repeated, this time in the United States Senate, where George Smathers, Democrat of Florida, had introduced a bill attempting to divorce broadcast stations and networks from publishing music or making records. Oscar Hammerstein kicked off the hearings of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, reading the same 1944 “Be careful of the other side of the disk” quote, and adding to the familiar arguments a new fillip. The current roster of popular songs may in fact be popular, he acknowledged, but after their moment in the sun they will disappear from the public consciousness without a trace. “What do you think is going to happen to rock ’n’ roll songs,” he asked, “and what has happened to the swing songs and the bebop songs and the corny guitar songs that have been played in the last years and have been put up on the top?”

  His answer: “They die as soon as the plug stops.”

  Arthur Schwartz made a return appearance, reporting that his songs hadn’t been recorded more often or gotten any more airplay in the two years since his last congressional testimony. Schwartz nearly smacked himself in the forehead at the irony of Mitch Miller’s decrying rock and roll in his speech to the disk jockeys: “This is the man who was as instrumental as any single person in the recording industry for recording, promoting, encouraging this same brand of music.”

  The chairman of the music department at Brown University, Arlan Coolidge, described what he heard over the radio during a recent cross-country car trip: “Although in a general way I had been aware previously of the cheapening of the character of the music and lyrics going over the air, I was shocked by the perpetual blanket of banality encountered hour after hour.”

  Vance Packard, author of the recent bestseller The Hidden Persuaders, testified that rock and roll spoke to “the animal instinct in modern teenagers” with its “raw, savage tone” and “nonsensical” and “lewd” lyrics. He described rock and “hillbil
ly” as “the cheapest types of music,” forced by the broadcasters on an unsuspecting public. As a result, he said, “our airways have been flooded in recent years with whining guitarists, musical riots put to a switchblade beat, obscene lyrics about hugging, squeezing, and rocking all night long.” In response to a question from the chairman of the committee, John Pastore, Democrat of Rhode Island, Packard testified that his investigations were subsidized by the Songwriters Protective Association—an organization that was essentially ASCAP minus the publishers, and was behind the Schwartz suit.

  Also testifying was another journalist friendly to the SPA, Booton Herndon, author of the Redbook article “The Battle over the Music You Hear.” “Senators present listened in chill silence,” reported Billboard, as Herndon made “a gasper of a statement. Herndon termed songwriters starry-eyed idealists, not interested in money, while the ‘very tone of voice’ of BMI spokesmen indicated to him that they ‘looked on music only as a commodity.’ Senators heard him out, waved him out of the witness chair without question or comment.”

  The record absorbed letters and telegrams favoring the bill from such worthies as George Jessel, Harry Ruby, both Groucho and Harpo Marx, the widows of Sigmund Romberg and Gus Kahn, and Edward Laska, who had written the lyrics to Jerome Kern’s first hit, “How’d You Like to Spoon with Me,” in 1905.

  But the overall case was even less effective in the Senate than it had been two years earlier in the House. Pastore made his own skepticism clear at the start: “I don’t like rock and roll too much as a personal taste, but there are a lot of people who do. And I don’t think it is within the province of Congress to tell people whether they should listen to South Pacific, or listen to some rock and roll.” Later, when an ASCAP representative disparaged the current hit “Yakety Yak,” Pastore countered philosophically, “My daughter bought it. What are you going to do about it?”