MITCH MILLER’S PART IN POP HISTORY
By Elijah Wald
Financial Times
August 21 2009 14:38
Record producer Mitch Miller took Rosemary Clooney’s ‘Come On-a My
House’ to the top of the pop charts for eight weeks in 1951
In the summer of 1966, Paul McCartney stood with his fellow Beatles
on stage at Tokyo’s Budokan Hall and counted off the opening beats
of "Paperback Writer". They were starting their final tour and the
harmonies were a bit rough but the filmed performance still has a
loose infectious energy.
That performance is a highlight of The Beatles: Rock Band video game,
due to be released on September 9. But instead of using the actual
Budokan performance, the gamemakers have manipulated the concert
footage to match the studio-recorded version of the song.
EDITOR’S CHOICE More from Arts – Nov-24The idea that a live performance
should recreate a record, much less be rejected as inferior, would
have been incomprehensible a few decades earlier. But by 1966 the
Beatles were devoting most of their energy to making music they could
not play live and when they quit touring it was widely viewed not as
a retirement but as an artistic advance.
Pop music technology has changed dramatically since the Beatles’
heyday. Synthesizers, drum machines and digital editing have changed
how recordings are made, while CDs, MP3s, file-sharing and video games
have altered how they are distributed. But the Beatles’ evolution from
live performers to studio innovators marked a far more fundamental
change: the triumph of recordings over live performances.
As with most fundamental changes, it did not happen overnight. Though
pop records first became available in the 1890s, until well into the
20th century most people continued to listen to most music as they
always had: in performances by friends or professionals, or played at
home on their own instruments. And songs rather than records remained
the principal currency of the pop market.
My father, born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1906, had a terrific memory
for the hits of his youth and I grew up hearing "The Sheik of Araby",
"When Frances Dances with Me", "Yes! We Have No Bananas", over
and over. I would sometimes ask, "Who sang that song?" – a normal
question for any pop listener born after 1950. But it made no sense
to him. Everybody sang those songs; that was what a hit was. Record
dealers assumed the average customer would be happy with any decent
performance of a hit – just as casual buyers of classical music still
shop primarily on the basis of the composition and composer.
Such thinking remained common up to the rock ‘n’ roll era. In the
United States, the main pop music countdown on radio from the 1930s
into the 1950s was Your Hit Parade, which featured not the week’s
hottest records but the hottest compositions, performed live on the
air by a house staff of musicians and singers – among them Frank
Sinatra, who cemented his status as a teen idol by presenting each
week’s winners.
In retrospect, it might seem surprising that Your Hit Parade never
played records but that is an apt reminder that the vast majority
of music heard on radio through the 1940s was broadcast live. And,
because it was cheaper, far more pop fans were listening to radios
than to phonographs.
Besides, a 78rpm disc lasted only three minutes so, even if you had a
changer that could stack five or six records, it would only play for
about a quarter of an hour. Anyone who wanted to have music playing
while they did homework or housework, or cuddled up with a book or
a partner, listened to the radio.
The one place where records ruled was on jukeboxes. Coin-operated
music machines took off with the end of Prohibition in 1933, and
trade surveys estimated that by 1940 they accounted for almost half
the records pressed in the US, and were driving current recording
trends. John Hammond recalled that Columbia Records let him make
dozens of different recordings with Billie Holiday because they wanted
versions of the latest hits tailored for the African-American jukebox
market. And the Texan country singer Ernest Tubb who pioneered the
"honky-tonk" style added electric guitar to his band because a jukebox
operator complained that his records were too quiet to be heard over
evening bar crowds.
Meanwhile, anyone going out to a dance hall expected to hear a
live band and relatively few of those bands were ever recorded. The
most popular orchestra leaders of the 1930s – Benny Goodman, Duke
Ellington, Glenn Miller – made hundreds of records, which is why their
names are still familiar today. But most dance orchestras were local
groups, playing a mix of old favourites and current hits for ballroom
crowds. And since the tunes they played were available in roughly the
same arrangements on records by Ellington and Guy Lombardo, there was
no reason to preserve the version performed by a local orchestra in
Northfield, Minnesota.
In modern parlance, those ballroom outfits would be called
"cover bands" but that was not the way people thought of them at
the time. Like customers in dance clubs today, the young couples
jitterbugging to "One O’Clock Jump" in Northfield expected to hear the
current dance mix. And the fact that they were hearing Count Basie’s
hit played by the locals rather than by Basie himself did not bother
them, any more than club dancers today are disappointed to be hearing
a record rather than the actual Black Eyed Peas.
Indeed, though critics might prefer a live performance by an original
artist, from the dancers’ point of view a club DJ provides a broader
range of sounds than the Peas do in concert, and the orchestra in
Northfield would have played polkas and waltzes that were not in
Basie’s bag. In both cases, the ideal is a great dance mix, and what
has changed is that the mix once provided by a single, versatile live
band is now provided by recordings of multiple bands.
Through the 1950s, most dancers still considered live bands preferable
to record hops with DJs but the balance was tipping. Teenagers were
falling in love with particular performances, which meant it was
becoming increasingly common for a record to be a hit, rather than
just being a recording of a hit. That might seem a hair-splitting
distinction but it is reflected in the words we still use for
the pop classics on either side of the divide: "standards" and
"oldies". Standards are songs, and even an iconic performance by Frank
Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald is just one recording of that song. Oldies,
by contrast, are records – if we ask a DJ to play "Maybellene", we
expect not only to hear it performed by Chuck Berry but to hear the
specific recording that was a hit for him in 1955.
There are some obvious reasons why the early 1950s were a key period
in this evolution. The pop music world was being rocked simultaneously
by the appearance of long-playing records, a drastic decline in the
dance orchestra business, and the arrival of television. The Big Band
era had been shaped by the special conditions of the Depression,
and it ended with the US’s postwar economic boom. Soaring prices
drove the big touring orchestras off the road, while the erstwhile
dancers were buying houses, settling down, and raising families.
Television, meanwhile, was bringing live entertainment into those
families’ parlours. And the most welcome musical parlour guests were
not bands but relaxed pleasant singers such as Perry Como, Dinah Shore
and Nat King Cole, who treated their listeners as personal friends.
Those singers’ work was preserved on the new vinyl records – not
only light, "unbreakable" 45rpm singles but also long-playing 33rpm
albums. Now, rather than being at the mercy of radio programmers,
listeners could put on a stack of LPs and create a personal sonic
environment, opening a new market for "mood music", Broadway and film
scores, classical orchestras, and instrumental jazz.
Radio was also changing. TV tempted away the national sponsors, and
local broadcasters could no longer afford studio orchestras. So DJ
shows became the medium’s main musical format and, especially when
it came to the top pop hits, the records they played were being made
in a quite new way.
Record producers were also beginning to discover something filmmakers
had understood for years: that studio productions need not have the
same limitations as live performance.
The most influential of these record auteurs was Mitch Miller, an oboe
virtuoso who in 1950 became head of Columbia’s pop division. Miller
produced hits the way Hollywood made films. Rather than simply
recording a working band or performer, he would find a song he
liked, select – or "discover" – a star to sing it, and hire unique
combinations of instrumentalists to give it a distinctive, ear-catching
flavour. Those combinations could be bizarrely imaginative. For
example, in 1951 Miller took a song based on a passage from Christopher
Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage and an Armenian wedding melody,
backed it with a harpsichord playing boogie-woogie, and handed it to
a jazz singer named Rosemary Clooney. "Come On-a My House" stayed at
the top of the pop charts for eight weeks.
Miller’s artists could not replicate the sound of their records at
live shows but that was becoming less important. And as records were
freed from the limitations of live performances, unexpected sounds
and styles began to infiltrate the hit parade. Miller reached the
upper echelons of the US pop charts with songs from Britain, Italy,
France, Portugal, Denmark, South Africa and Rhodesia. His instrumental
palette included everything from symphonic string sections to flamenco
and electric steel guitars, French horn quartets, and bagpipes. As
other producers followed his lead, studios became creative centres
rather than simply places to record.
Rock ‘n’ roll at first seemed to buck this trend. Bill Haley, Chuck
Berry, Little Richard and the early Elvis Presley recorded with their
touring bands, and their records captured the same energetic sounds
they presented on stage. Some old-line music marketers sneered at the
young rockers’ amateurism but many hailed the style for rejuvenating
the live music business and getting a new generation out dancing.
For a few years, that optimism seemed justified. The rock ‘n’ roll
revolution was driven as much by dancing as by music, and by the early
1960s the twist had spawned a wave of increasingly free-form dances
and inspired a last great wave of live dance bands. Many of those
groups were enthusiastic teenagers working for subsistence wages,
but from Dick Dale and the Deltones in the beachside ballrooms of
southern California to the Beatles on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, they
churned out loud, rhythmically powerful music, four to eight hours
a night, seven nights a week.
Even the rock ‘n’ roll scene, though, increasingly favoured studio
productions that could not be replicated by a club combo. In 1959 Jerry
Leiber and Mike Stoller backed the Drifters with a full string section,
opening the door for the lavish orchestrations of Phil Spector. And
if Motown’s Berry Gordy lacked Spector’s bombastic pretension, he
also thought primarily in terms of distinctive singles rather than
consistent live acts.
When the Beatles hit the US, they were still playing in the basic
dance-band style exemplified by their cover of the Isley Brothers’
"Twist and Shout". But their arrival coincided with the first wave
of discothèques, which proved that it was possible to attract crowds
of young dancers with nothing more than a sound system and a savvy
DJ. By the later 1960s, dance clubs were no longer expected to have
bands. By the 1970s most dancers would have been disappointed to hear
a live group rather than a club mix.
So when the Beatles quit touring in 1966, it was less a revolutionary
act than an acknowledgment that the world had changed. They complained
that their music couldn’t be heard over the crowd noise but that
was beside the point. The screaming teens had come to see the men
who made their favourite records and didn’t need to hear what was
happening on stage because they knew those records by heart.
So in terms of the audience’s expectations, the video game Rock Band
has it right. By the time the Beatles appeared at Budokan they were
the roadshow for their records, and if they didn’t match the sound
of those records, that can reasonably be considered a flaw.
As the dominance of records became increasingly obvious, later pop
stars would learn to avoid such flaws. Watching Michael Jackson’s
spectacular performance of "Billie Jean" at the 1983 Motown 25th
anniversary concert, it is impossible to tell whether he was singing
the song or lip-synching.
Of course, plenty of musicians continue to do live shows. Indeed,
in an age of downloading and file-sharing, they are increasingly
finding that the only way they can make money is to take to the road.
But outside of a few specialised markets, recordings now define pop
music while live performances are the luxury. If anyone needs further
proof, The Beatles: Rock Band will be released in tandem with box-sets
of the band’s complete studio oeuvre, and thus today’s biggest-selling
act in the music business will be a group that has not existed for
almost 40 years.
Elijah Wald’s ‘How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll’ is published
this week by OUP, £13.99. He is performing at a concert on September
3 at Darbucka, 182 St John St, London EC1V 4JZ,
…………………………. ……………….
It’s black and white – how pop music became divided
Chubby Checker in a nightclub in 1961 The shift from live dance bands
to recorded dance mixes can be viewed as primarily a technological
change. But it also accounts for one of the oddest developments of the
mid-1960s. At the height of the civil rights movement, as the United
States was experiencing the end of legalised racial segregation,
pop music became more segregated than ever before.
Until that decade, although segregation had often kept white and
black artists from playing for the same audiences, it had also forced
them to learn each other’s styles. White audiences wanted to hear the
latest Count Basie or Little Richard hits, so white bands had to be
able to play them, and black audiences wanted to hear the latest Guy
Lombardo or Perry Como hits, so black bands needed to know those.
By the mid-1950s, that formal segregation was cracking. A disc jockey
named Alan Freed popularised "rock ‘n’ roll" as an alternative to the
racially coded "rhythm and blues", Billboard magazine’s term for its
African-American record chart, and sponsored shows that mixed black
and white artists on stage, and black and white fans in the audience.
That overlap increased in the early 1960s, encouraged by the twist
craze and the rise of Motown. By November 1963, Billboard was no longer
even keeping separate pop and R&B charts. But then came the British
Invasion. The Beatles and their followers had innovative harmonies
and interesting songs but their rhythm sections were hopelessly out
of date in the era of Motown and James Brown.
Had live music still been a driving force on the dance scene that would
have been a temporary problem. Like the white orchestras of the swing
era, the white rock bands would have developed serviceable versions of
the current rhythms, or following the lead of twist groups such as Joey
Dee and the Starliters, they would have formed racially mixed outfits.
But the rise of discos meant that there was no longer any need for
bands to master the range of current pop styles. The Motown sound
could be provided by Motown records, and the British sound by British
records. So rather than rock ‘n’ roll building on its integrated
foundation, it split into separate styles called rock and soul.
Black styles continued to dominate the dance floor in white
neighbourhoods but they were heard on records. And rock simply ignored
the evolving rhythmic trends. It is startling to contrast the blend
of black and white at Freed’s 1950s rock ‘n’ roll festivals with the
dazzling whiteness of both audience and performers at Woodstock.
Today, the US pop scene is more segregated than ever, with the rock
category virtually closed to black artists, and the couple of white
rap stars noted as anomalies.
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