by Ben Yagoda
The smoothest of them all, Nat King Cole, who had enjoyed such great success in the early fifties, managed only two top-ten records in the second half of the decade, both with rock overtones. “Send for Me” was a mildly propulsive twelve-bar blues, and “Looking Back,” which Billboard termed a “rockaballad,” had that emerging subgenre’s characteristic backing triplets. But, as the singer announced in a number he was featuring in his nightclub act, he balked at being asked “to throw away your senses and your self-control.” Briefly put: “Mr. Cole won’t rock and roll.”
Bearing some striking similarities to Cole was a new young singer, Johnny Mathis, whom George Avakian, the head of popular albums at Columbia and the label’s in-house jazz specialist, had discovered in 1955. Upon hearing Mathis in a club in his native San Francisco, Avakian wired back to the home office: “Have found phenomenal 19 year old boy who could go all the way. Send blank contracts.” On Mathis’s debut album for the label, Avakian presented him as a sort of male Sarah Vaughan, working with such jazz stalwarts as John Lewis and Gil Evans on standards like “Prelude to a Kiss” and “It Might as Well Be Spring.” When the album sold poorly, Mathis was put in Mitch Miller’s stable. Their first collaboration was a contemporary ballad, “Wonderful! Wonderful!,” with one of Ray Conniff’s trademark string- and voice-heavy arrangements. It made the charts, and the Mathis–Miller team followed it up with two more ballads (by Brill Building stalwarts Al Stillman and Robert Allen), two more Conniff charts, and a production that emphasized the feathery, trembling quality of the young vocalist’s tenor, giving him a bit of the sound of a one-man doo-wop group. The first single, “It’s Not for Me to Say,” went to number five and the second, “Chances Are,” to the top spot. In 1958, Columbia released an LP called Johnny’s Greatest Hits, despite the fact that Mathis had not really been recording long enough to have an album’s worth of hits. It was the first use of that now familiar phrase for an album title, and it was number one on the Cashbox charts for sixteen weeks.
Young women made up the bulk of the single-buying market, and even singers older than Mathis could occasionally pass muster as heartthrobs. The thrushes—the onetime girl singers—did not have that advantage. Peggy Lee, Margaret Whiting, Doris Day, Jo Stafford, and Rosemary Clooney among them charted only two records post-1956, Day’s “Everybody Loves a Lover” and Lee’s “Fever.” Columbia and Mitch Miller dropped Clooney in 1958. The following summer she was playing her hometown Kentucky State Fair and was taken aback to read the headline FABIAN, NEW TO MUSIC, HELPS STIR INTEREST IN FAIR’S CLOONEY SHOW. (The reference was to a good-looking Philadelphia youth born Fabiano Forte, a wholly fabricated teen idol, who was to open for Clooney.) At that moment, Clooney later said, she realized “the rock wave was cresting, about to break.”
The ever-prescient Arnold Shaw summed the situation up in an article for Harper’s in May 1959: “What we have been witnessing is the demise of an entire generation of artists, specifically those who appealed to public taste from the end of World War II until 1954.”
Livingston and Evans had written for those artists, of course, but may have felt that their Hollywood sinecure protected them from the troubling changes in popular music. It didn’t. “Tammy,” in 1958, was the last significant song of theirs to feature a Livingston melody. In notes prepared for an “And Then I Wrote” act they performed on cruise ships a couple of decades later, the boys described experiencing, in the years that followed, a change in the rules of their familiar game.
Ray: The so-called background composers—the men who write the dramatic music to underscore a scene—suddenly insisted on writing all the music in their pictures, including the music for all the songs. And they had enough clout to make this stick. Suddenly there was no more work for songwriters.
Jay: This put the great music writers like Harry Warren, Sammy Fain, Jimmy McHugh, Jimmy Van Heusen, etc. permanently out of business.
Ray: But these background composers still needed words to go with their melodies, and in order to survive, we began to write words for melodies that we hadn’t written.
The team combined to produce lyrics for movie themes by such composers as Max Steiner, Percy Faith, Neal Hefti, and David Rose. Their most fruitful collaboration was with Henry Mancini, with whom they wrote “In the Arms of Love” (the theme from What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?), “Wait Until Dark,” and, in 1964, their last Oscar-nominated song, “Dear Heart.” They also provided lyrics for several of Mancini’s jazz instrumentals from the television series Peter Gunn.
Johnny Mercer walked a similar path in Hollywood in these years, with more successful results. With Mancini, he wrote “Moon River,” the haunting theme from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which won the 1961 Academy Award for Best Original Song and the Grammy Award for Song of the Year; “Days of Wine and Roses,” another brilliant composition, which won the Oscar, Mercer’s fourth, the following year; and, in 1963, the theme for Charade. For The Americanization of Emily, Johnny Mandel and Mercer wrote another resonant theme, “Emily.”
The situation in Hollywood was a bit more complicated than Ray’s account would suggest. In that period, according to the film-music historian Jon Burlingame, “the movie business, and by extension the movie-music business, was in the midst of massive change. Yes, younger composers were coming in and gradually replacing the old guard. Not all of them were great tunesmiths—but the best of them were, just as the older crowd had been. Henry Mancini, John Barry, Lalo Schifrin, Quincy Jones, Johnny Mandel, Burt Bacharach and others were great songwriters as well as great film composers. In addition, studio music departments were considered less important and directors were making their own choices of composer rather than a music-department head making it for them, as had once been the case. And if the composer could write a song that could double as the theme for a movie (as Mancini and others did), why not?”
Whatever the precise sequence of the changes, their results were unambiguous: in the 1960s, Hollywood songwriting pickings got slimmer and slimmer. The convention of the title song barely persisted, mainly because of the potential promotional opportunity of a placement on an Andy Williams or Johnny Mathis LP or, better yet, a Best Original Song Oscar. That prospect lured Norman Gimbel to L.A., where he found that the chance to work with “legitimate musicians” was a booster shot for his career. He teamed up with the Juilliard-trained Charles Fox and other composers on dozens of theme songs for films and television series. He was nominated for three Academy Awards in a five-year period, finally winning in 1980 for the theme from Norma Rae, “It Goes Like It Goes,” written with David Shire. But by 1967, when Gimbel arrived in Hollywood, title songs had become a vestigial convention, with very little creative juice. Even the most memorable of the late-1960s themes, like “The Windmills of Your Mind” (music by Michel Legrand; lyrics by Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman) or “Jean” (music and lyrics by Rod McKuen), had nothing to do with the movies they were featured in (The Thomas Crown Affair and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie—or was it the other way around?) and seemed like curious relics from another era.
Meanwhile, the movie musical kept dwindling, as it had for nearly two decades. In 1968, Julie Andrews starred in a big-budget Gertrude Lawrence biopic called Star! The film, which combined period songs with a title tune by Van Heusen and Cahn, ran a mind-numbing 175 minutes and was widely seen as having a devastating effect on both Andrews’s career and the movie-musical genre.
In the 1960s, only the Walt Disney studio had continued success with musicals, of both the animated and the live-action variety, most of them scored by Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman. Their father, Al, was a Tin Pan Alley pro who had gone out to Hollywood in the very early days and written such perennials as “You’ve Gotta Be a Football Hero (to Get Along with the Beautiful Girls)” and the Depression-era anthem “Now’s the Time to Fall in Love.” (Why? Because “Potatoes are cheaper / Tomatoes are cheaper.”) Richard and Robert had started out in the late
fifties writing mindless rock-and-roll numbers for a Los Angeles BMI-affiliated publisher. One of these songs, “Tall Paul,” was covered in 1959 by Annette Funicello, a Disney Mouseketeer on the Mickey Mouse Club television program, and eventually earned the brothers a contract with Disney as staff writers. Among the many films they scored was Mary Poppins, whose “Chim Chim Cher-ee” beat out “Dear Heart” for the 1964 Best Original Song Oscar. They also wrote “It’s a Small World,” which is continuously heard during the “It’s a Small World” boat rides at Disney theme parks around the world, and has been put forth as the most frequently played song in history.
With Hollywood work ever harder to come by, Livingston and Evans found other markets. Oh Captain!, a Broadway musical starring Tony Randall and based on the Alec Guinness film The Captain’s Paradise, got respectful reviews and ran for 192 performances in 1958. Three years later, another musical, Let It Ride, based on the 1930s comedy Three Men on a Horse, by Ray’s old acquaintance George Abbott, closed after a couple of months. At about the same time, they produced the two Livingston–Evans songs that are still being heard somewhere every day: the themes for the television series Mister Ed (it’s Jay who sings, “A horse is a horse . . .”) and Bonanza. (Ray’s lyrics—starting “We chased Lady Luck, ’til we finally struck Bonanza / With a gun and a rope and a hat full of hope, planted a family tree”—didn’t make it onto the air.)
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At the dawn of the new decade of the 1960s, those who wished rock and roll would go back to where it came from found some reasons to be hopeful. Many of the major players had abruptly left the metaphorical building. Elvis himself certainly had: as of 1958, he was in the Army for a two-year stint. Little Richard found God and gave up secular music. Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry both got caught up in scandals that took them away from performing and recording. In February 1959, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and another rocker died in a plane crash. (A decade later, folksinger Don McLean’s “American Pie” would describe this as “the day the music died.”) Dick Clark emerged from the payola hearings more powerful than ever, while Alan Freed found himself without a job or a platform. This reversal of fortune was reflected in the output of performers like Connie Francis, Brenda Lee, Paul Anka, Frankie Avalon, the Everly Brothers, the Four Seasons, Ricky Nelson, and the three Bobbys—Rydell, Vinton, and Vee. Their sound was palpably sweeter than the first rock-and-roll wave’s transgressive Big Beat.
By 1960, albums had surpassed singles in overall sales and accounted for about three-quarters of revenues in the industry. Though Mitch Miller and Columbia were tanking on the singles charts, the label had over the decade developed a successful five-pronged approach to LPs: classical, jazz, country and western, original-cast recordings of Broadway musicals, and easy-listening pop concoctions, perpetrated by singers like Mathis and Williams and orchestras like Percy Faith’s and Ray Conniff’s. In the wake of the payola investigations and revelations, these tracks got airplay on some radio stations that were changing their formats from rock and roll to softer sounds. That trend inspired Miller to look ahead to a golden age of “good” disk jockeys. “Instead of fearing payola and being burdened by the rock ’n’ roll drivel,” he proclaimed, “they are truly more program minded.” Variety, getting with the wishful-thinking program, ran an article with the headline MUSIC BIZ’S CLASSY COMEBACK, reporting that “the wheel” was “starting to turn in favor of the pro songwriter” and record companies were “in full flight from the rock, the roll, the big beat and the teen tunes.” Another great technological hope arrived in the form of the FM radio band. A New York broadcast executive predicted in 1961 that FM would “knock rock ’n’ roll out of the musical box” by featuring “good pops, show scores, and long-hair music.”
Potentially heartening as well was a flock of crew-cut, chinos-clad young men and long-haired, fresh-faced young women wielding guitars and banjos and singing various kinds of authentic and ersatz folk songs. They were the cleaned-up, apolitical progeny of Lead Belly, the Weavers, and Harry Belafonte, a Harlem native of West Indian descent whose calypso songs took the charts and the country by storm in 1957. The most successful group was the Kingston Trio, out of the Bay Area in California, who took their name from the town mentioned in Belafonte’s “Jamaica Farewell,” made it to number one late in 1958 with “Tom Dooley,” and in 1961 recorded “It Was a Very Good Year,” a sort of new-old song composed by Ervin Drake, as opportunistic as ever. When Frank Sinatra heard the cut, he determined to record the song himself. His 1965 version won a Grammy Award for Best Vocal Performance, Male, and was, along with “I Believe,” one of the two big hits of Drake’s career.
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Could these wholesome lads be the next Elvises and Jerry Lees? Before that question could be answered, a slightly scruffier type, a Woody Guthrie acolyte from Minnesota who called himself Bob Dylan, signed with Columbia. The year was 1961. Significantly, Dylan inked his pact not in Mitch Miller’s office but in John Hammond’s, he of the famously fine-tuned ears. (The previous year, Hammond brought on an eighteen-year-old singer named Aretha Franklin.) A subsequent Columbia act, Loudon Wainwright III, would address Dylan in a song called “Talkin’ New Bob Dylan Blues.” “You were hipper,” he declared, “than Mitch Miller and Johnny Mathis, put together.”
In 1962, although he was already deeply involved in the Sing Along with Mitch albums and television show, the Beard was still active enough at the label to go to the Newport Folk Festival to check out the talent. The sensation of that year’s fest was a young singer and Dylan associate named Joan Baez. “Her clear-lighted voice poured over the 13,000 people collected there and chilled them with surprise,” reported Time in an article titled “Sibyl with Guitar.” “The record company leg-and-fang men closed in. ‘Would you like to meet Mitch, baby?’ said a representative of Columbia Records, dropping the magic name of Mitch Miller, who is Columbia’s top pop artists-and-repertory man when he isn’t waving to his mother on TV.
“‘Who’s Mitch?’ said Joan.”
Informed, Baez was not impressed. “The girl did not want to be exploited, squeezed and stuffed with cash,” wrote Time’s anonymous correspondent. Baez signed with Vanguard.
Within a couple of years the Folk Revival came down to earth. Striped-shirts acts like the Kingston Trio and the Limelighters were nudged to the margins, and it turned out that Baez, Dylan—and the Everly Brothers, too, for that matter—were all part of a rock-and-roll fifth column. Whatever sweetness they initially may have displayed was an illusion. Beyond folk, all kinds of harder sounds, most of them based in the electric guitar, were burbling under the surface, ready to come forth. The music historian Albin Zak sees 1963 as the tipping point, with the “greatest ever preponderance of rock and roll records.” The year saw thirteen Top 40 hits by the Beach Boys and other Southern California surfer/hot-rod acts, and fifteen from Berry Gordy’s Motown Records, near the beginning of its amazing ascent.
Then Beatlemania conquered the cosmos. The band from Liverpool appeared on Ed Sullivan’s Sunday night TV show in February 1964, and from that point through May, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “She Loves You,” and “Can’t Buy Me Love” occupied the top spot on the charts, successively. Before the end of the year, the Beatles had three more chart-toppers. The 45-rpm records put out by the band were familiar-looking, to be sure. They were black and round, and bore the traditional label stating the name of the song and the songwriters: “Lennon-McCartney.” That itself was an interesting twist, out of Jimmy Rodgers and Hank Williams (or Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly), the idea that the people singing the song were the same ones who had written it. But that nicety was lost on the older cleffers and singers. The only sounds their ears could make out were electric guitars, pounding drums, and girls’ screams. After the Beatles, the deluge. The charts were suddenly filled, as Tony Bennett put it, with “bands called the Byrds and Paul Revere and the Raiders.” Bennett concluded: “I thought the wo
rld was losing its mind.”
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It was a truism among the older songwriters that with popular music in the thrall of long-haired rockers and Hollywood changed beyond recognition, the only place in which good work could any longer be done was the musical stage. The truism was true, as far as it went. In 1956 alone, Jule Styne, Frank Loesser, and Leonard Bernstein all had ambitious shows open on Broadway—respectively, Bells Are Ringing, The Most Happy Fella, and Candide. The first two were commercial successes; the last, a succès d’estime. A smash on every level that year was a creation of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, little heard from since Brigadoon a decade earlier; the show was My Fair Lady, which vies with Guys and Dolls as the greatest American musical of all time and which became a national phenomenon. The show ran for five years, and the original-cast album, in the new long-playing format featuring Al Hirschfeld’s marionette-themed cover, was an unprecedented success, selling a total of 13 million copies and holding a place of pride in every middle-class American home for a decade. Opening the next year was Meredith Willson’s The Music Man—an ingenious slice of Americana—and West Side Story, Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s groundbreaking reworking of Romeo and Juliet on the streets of Manhattan.
The ambitiousness and frequent brilliance of these shows cut two ways. The songs were not designed to be independent entities, instead serving story, theme, script, and character. The scores leaned less toward the jazz part of the American Songbook tradition and more toward operetta (and even, in the hands of Loesser, Bernstein, and later Sondheim, opera). The shows were major productions, in all senses of the phrase; getting financing, script, score, crew, cast, and production together could take years. The upshot was that much less music happened on Broadway. In the twenties, 432 musicals opened there; in the thirties, 220; in the forties, 147; in the fifties, 119. The trend showed no sign of reversing and produced an ecology where the creators of musicals were an ever more selective group.