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  Another veteran songwriter, Jack Lawrence, the lyricist of “All or Nothing at All,” “Tenderly,” and “Beyond the Sea,” described his own experiences in a similar way:

  I took a Broadway show score and a Hollywood picture score to both Columbia Records and NBC-RCA-Victor records. This represented over a total of twenty-odd songs and perhaps two years’ work or more. In both instances I got not one single recording. Now, perhaps it is true that I’ve lost my touch for writing and creating hit songs in my twenty-odd years of writing professionally. And it could be true that two or three or four of my fellow writer-members have also lost their talent for writing hits. But when you see hundreds of premium quality writers who have written great songs, memorable songs that have lasted for years and years, suddenly confronted with an accusation of having lost their touch and talent, or their feeling for what the public wants today, I think this is too great a coincidence.

  You will note that neither the phrase “rock and roll” nor the name Elvis Presley is mentioned by Lawrence or Schwartz as a possible reason for the change in their and their colleagues’ fortunes. In 1954, Elvis was just commencing his recording and performing career in Memphis. And “rock and roll” would, at that moment, have produced a blank look on the face of most Americans.

  At this point, the “somebody” who had sabotaged the songwriters, in their increasingly certain estimation, was actually an interwoven collection of entities: the biggest radio networks, CBS and NBC; the record companies they owned, Columbia and RCA Victor, respectively; and a song-licensing organization they had collectively formed more than a dozen years earlier, Broadcast Music, Inc., commonly known as BMI. BMI was a competitor to the venerable association Arthur Schwartz, Jack Lawrence, and everybody like them belonged to. A long-standing financial dispute between ASCAP and the radio networks—which depended on ASCAP songs for the bulk of their programming—had come to a head in 1941, and then, for about a year, the networks banished ASCAP material from the airwaves. In its place, listeners heard classical pieces, works in the public domain, and songs that had been hurriedly signed to the brand-new BMI. BMI writers were not the likes of Arthur Schwartz. Rather, they were people who had been unable to crack ASCAP (the membership policies of which were reminiscent of the most restrictive country club) or who hadn’t even thought to try. A lot of them were from places other than New York City—very other. They were African-Americans like Lead Belly, whose song “Good Night, Irene” was number one for the Weavers in 1950, westerners like cowboy crooner Gene Autry, and outliers like Pee Wee King, a Polish-American accordionist from Milwaukee (birth name: Julius Frank Anthony Kuczynski) who reinvented himself as a country-western singer-songwriter. (His song “The Tennessee Waltz” would be a number-one record for Patti Page in 1950.)

  The ASCAP ban lasted only ten months. And since 1942 the two organizations, ASCAP and BMI, had coexisted on the airwaves and among the music publishers of Tin Pan Alley. But the radio stations still owned BMI. Radio stations determined what would be played on their air. Didn’t it stand to reason that they would favor songs licensed to the organization they owned: BMI?

  It certainly did to Schwartz and his peers. In April of 1952, Billboard reported that ASCAP had filed a complaint against BMI for “antitrust violations.” The magazine commented ominously: “ASCAP has tried to live with the BMI competition, but it is no secret that a segment of Tin Pan Alley’s upper crust has come to the conclusion that the battle must be to the death.” In the middle of 1953, a group of top songwriters met in Oscar Hammerstein II’s house to discuss strategy; among those present, Variety reported, were Hammerstein’s partner, Richard Rodgers, and another titan of popular song, Cole Porter. In November a group of thirty-three composers and lyricists brought a $150 million antitrust suit against BMI; the four major broadcasting networks (NBC, CBS, Mutual, and ABC, which had grown out of NBC’s Blue Network); RCA Victor and Columbia Records; and sundry other parties. The $150 million figure derived from the plaintiffs’ claim that they collectively had been denied $50 million in revenues from a conspiracy against them and their works; the Clayton Antitrust Act empowers injured parties to sue for treble damages.

  The lead plaintiff was Arthur Schwartz, whose law degree had finally come in handy! He was joined by Alan Jay Lerner, Ira Gershwin, Dorothy Fields, Virgil Thomson, Gian Carlo Menotti, and others from both the popular and classical worlds. (Variety noted, “While top names like Rodgers & Hammerstein, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin do not appear among co-plaintiffs, they have contributed to the legal war chest, which is now variously estimated at around $300,000.”) The lawsuit claimed that the radio networks and record companies had conspired to give “preference to the performance of BMI controlled music.” A widely publicized statement signed by the plaintiffs alleged that the defendants had been guilty of “placing American music in a strait jacket manipulated through BMI.”

  After generating a flurry of publicity, the lawsuit adopted the petty pace that would characterize it till its resolution, which took a Jarndyce v. Jarndyce–like eighteen years. Slowing things at the outset was the discovery process, which in just five years would generate “20,000 pages of testimony, some 11,000 exhibits consisting of approximately 55,000 pages, and almost 3,000 pages of answers to written interrogatories.” Schwartz’s reading of this material gave him to understand that it wasn’t just the conspiracy to favor BMI songs that was holding him back. There was another kind of conspiracy. In a deposition for the suit, Mitch Miller testified that in his capacity as head of artist and repertoire for Columbia, none other than Bob Merrill would customarily bring him songs intended for Guy Mitchell, a Columbia recording artist. “I made many suggestions, and he was very grateful for them,” Miller testified. “He asked me to be part writer. I said no; I was only doing an editor’s work.” But then, lo and behold, after “Mambo Italiano” and “Make Yourself Comfortable” became hits (the latter for Sarah Vaughan), Miller starting receiving checks from Merrill’s publisher, totaling about $4,000. Schwartz took that to mean Miller was protesting too much: the payment was a kickback, pure and simple—or, to call it by the term that Variety had been using since the late 1930s and that had been a characteristic of the music industry for years before that, payola. A similar thing happened in 1952, Miller testified. During World War II, GIs had turned the old English folk song “A Knave Is a Knave” into a bawdy ditty called “A Gob Is a Slob”; a young American singer and writer named Oscar Brand had recorded it on an obscure folk label in 1949. He brought a cleaned-up version called “A Guy Is a Guy” to Miller, who showed it to the Columbia singer Doris Day. Miller testified that she “didn’t like the lyrics as they were”—presumably feeling they needed even more cleaning up—“so we had it changed.” Day’s record did well, and Miller “received compensation” of $1,200.

  Miller’s willingness to take and maybe even solicit such payments wasn’t the only thing that made him a controversial figure. A graduate of the Eastman School of Music, he started out as a classical oboist and became a highly respected one, playing on recordings under Leopold Stokowski’s baton and for over a decade in the CBS Symphony Orchestra. But his career changed in 1948, when his friend John Hammond recruited him to head the pop A&R department at a new label, Mercury. Miller created two number-one hits—a sort of folk spiritual called “That Lucky Old Sun” and a cowboy number, “Mule Train”—for the singer Frankie Laine (born Francesco LoVecchio), who had previously had middling success at Mercury with a series of jazzy numbers. Miller’s Eastman School classmate Goddard Lieberson lured him to Columbia in 1950 to spearhead a new approach to popular music for the label. “Hereafter,” Lieberson said in an announcement, “more emphasis will be placed on selecting the right artist for the right tune and an imaginative, creative effort to produce the best records possible will be made at the main source of every successful record—the recording studio.”

  Lieberson made an intriguing analogy: “A record is in a sense l
ike a play. It requires a beginning, a denouement and an end.”

  The strategy worked. Within a year and a half, the label’s pop music sales had increased 60 percent, catapulting the company from last to the first among the four major labels. (The others were RCA Victor, Decca, and Capitol.) Miller—commonly referred to as “the Beard” because of his trademark goatee—was responsible for a series of smashes, including Johnnie Ray’s “Cry,” Rosemary Clooney’s “Come On-a My House,” Tony Bennett’s “Because of You” and “Rags to Riches,” and “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” which sold more than three million copies and was sung by a thirteen-year-old freckled Mississippian named Jimmy Boyd. (When the record was first released, the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston banned it because it mixed sex with Christmas.)

  Miller, forty-two years old on the day he was to meet with Schwartz, was considered the “golden boy” among the A&R men, in the words of a 1954 Vogue magazine article about the music industry. But he was not so well liked by people, such as Arthur Schwartz, who felt, whether they put it this way or not, that a popular song could reach the artistic heights of classical music.

  Miller’s attitudes and actions had brought him into conflict with some of the singers Columbia had under contract, notably Frank Sinatra. Sinatra was the greatest singing star of the forties; his intimate, exquisitely controlled tones made girls scream and swoon and earned him the nickname “the Voice.” But by the early fifties he had fallen on hard times. The Voice’s voice was in poor shape, and Sinatra chafed at the fluff and novelty tunes Miller gave him to record, such as “The Hucklebuck,” “Bim Bam Baby,” and “Mama Will Bark,” a duet with a buxom television personality named Dagmar, the gimmick of which was that dogs actually barked in the background. In every possible way, the Beard annoyed the Voice. Drummer Johnny Blowers remembered years later that at one recording session Miller fiddled so incessantly with the dials that Sinatra “looked in the control room, pointed his finger, and said, ‘Mitch—out.’ When Mitch didn’t move, Sinatra turned to Hank Sanicola [a longtime Sinatra associate]. ‘Henry, move him.’ To Mitch, he said, ‘Don’t you ever come in the studio when I’m recording again.’”

  Columbia dropped Sinatra in 1952; soon afterward he signed with Capitol Records and his career began to turn around. But the singer’s grudge against Miller remained. During a Copacabana engagement in 1953, according to author Arnold Shaw, the singer “donned a coonskin hat, snapped a bull whip, and honked derisively like a wild goose.” (The whip was a reference to “Mule Train,” which very prominently featured the sound of a whip—created by wood blocks—and the honk to another folksy hit Miller had with Frankie Laine, “The Cry of the Wild Goose,” in which the wild goose’s cry was simulated with French horns. The Davy Crockett craze would not occur for another two years, but coonskin hats had become a trademark of Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, so Sinatra may have worn one as an act of general rural derision.)

  Songwriters, for their part, couldn’t afford to affect disdain for Mitch Miller; they needed him. He needed them, too. Every Monday afternoon he opened his doors and let the writers’ representatives, publishers, show their wares. Robert Rice of The New Yorker sat in on one five-and-a-half-hour session—during which Miller smoked five cigars—and his account is worth quoting for the general sense it gives of the tenor of Tin Pan Alley in 1953, when the Korean War was in full swing and rock and roll was a whisper in the air that was just out of hearing:

  There were publishers of almost every possible age, size, shape, and costume, most of them carrying demonstration records but some with piano or guitar players in tow. There was a tall young crew-cut publisher in a regimental tie who crooned; a short, fat, middle-aged publisher in orange slacks and a hound’s-tooth sports jacket who bounced; and a tieless, cauliflower-eared, mash-nosed, ex-prizefighter of a publisher who bellowed. There was a businesslike publisher who said, “Mitch, I have two things here, one extremely important”; a highbrow publisher who said, “Mitch, this thing is melodically unoriginal but lyrically powerful”; a timorous publisher who said, “I’ve got a beautiful little thing here, Mitch, that you’re going to turn down”; an aggressive publisher who said, “Let’s get lucky together, Mitch”; and an articulate publisher who said, “They all flip for this thing, Mitch.” There was a publisher with a number called “Korean Love Song”; when Miller said that it was difficult to associate Korea with love these days, the publisher asked why. There was a publisher with a song called “Off the Coast of Capri on the Way to Sorrento”; when Miller said to him, “Capri yet! Why not Brighton Beach? Why does it all the time have to be so arty?,” he replied, “Why, Mitch, nobody’s ever used Sorrento before.” There was a publisher with a song called “Cigarette, Cigarette,” which was about a wild gypsy girl and whose tune was a theme from Mozart’s symphony No. 40 in G-Minor; when Miller said, “Mozart’s ode to nicotine, eh?,” the publisher answered, “Why not? I made money with Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.” There was a publisher with a song called “Till I Waltz Again with You,” written in fox-trot time; when Miller protested against this anomaly, he said, “But, Mitch, that’s the whole kick.” . . . There was a young and excited publisher who sprinted in waving a record of a song called “Heartbroken Me and Brokenhearted You.” “Mitch,” he said breathlessly, “I got a sensational switch on heartbreaks.” From this welter, which he bore with astonishing meekness, Miller extracted just two faintly possible songs.*

  The fact that Arthur Schwartz was granted a private audience to play the songs from By the Beautiful Sea, rather than having to troop in with the rest of the Monday supplicants, was in accordance with his stature and his body of work. But the composer couldn’t help approaching the meeting with mixed feelings. Private audience or no, it seemed less than respectful that he, Arthur Schwartz, was still forced to appear before this crass A&R man and depend on his good graces. And it was slightly awkward that he had just very publicly sued Miller’s employer, Columbia Records.

  His trepidations were confirmed when, after hearing all the songs from By the Beautiful Sea, Miller said only one of them was a possibility, a ballad called “More Love Than Your Love.” But even that needed “work.”

  “I like the song but I think you ought to make a change in the melody,” Schwartz remembered Miller saying. “I don’t think that the second eight measures should do what they do; I think maybe you should repeat the first eight measures where you now have a new eight-measure section.”

  The composer immediately thought of Miller’s testimony about the payments he got from Merrill’s and Brand’s publishers. It was a shakedown, pure and simple.

  “I will think it over,” Schwartz replied. “Thank you for the suggestion.”

  Thank you, indeed. One can imagine the boiling of Schwartz’s blood, the iciness of his words. This goateed vulgarian whose claim to fame was insinuating a whip in “Mule Train,” who had been responsible for “Come On-a My House” and “Mama Will Bark,” having the nerve to tell Arthur Schwartz, friend and colleague of George Gershwin and Richard Rodgers, to write a song in AABA—the elemental form of American popular song since Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern were starting out—as if this were some kind of brilliant and original insight! And if the “improvement” was accepted, no doubt expecting his palm to be greased!

  “I thought it over and decided I did not want to make the change,” Schwartz said.

  No Columbia artist would record “More Love Than Your Love.” As a matter of fact, only three recordings of it have ever been made, to the best of my knowledge. It appeared on the cast album of By the Beautiful Sea, released by Capitol on a 1950 78-rpm record by Les Baxter and His Chorus and Orchestra; as a filler instrumental track on a 1954 Capitol album by Stan Kenton and His Orchestra; and, improbably, on a 2005 CD by the singer Andy Bey. Lyrically and musically, it is an undistinguished song, sentimental and plodding. It is hard to imagine how it might be improved. Possibly if the first eight bars had been r
epeated, but probably not.

  By the Beautiful Sea got mixed reviews, but Shirley Booth’s star power kept it going till November, when it closed after a seven-month run.

  II

  I Get a Kick out of You

  1885–1933

  The word for Dick Rodgers’ melodies, I think, is holy. For Jerome Kern, sentimental. For Irving Berlin, simplicity. For my own, I don’t know.

  • Cole Porter

  In order to understand how popular songs got so bad, it makes sense to give some attention to how they got so good. A useful place to start is with the first songwriter to make a significant living at the trade, a Milwaukeean named Charles K. Harris. (The greatest songwriter of the nineteenth century was Stephen Foster. The median total payment Foster received from his songs was $36, and he died penniless in 1864 at the age of thirty-seven.) Sometime around 1885, Harris hung out a shingle that read: “Charles K. Harris—Banjoist and Songwriter—Songs Written to Order.” “After the Ball,” his 1891 waltz-time tearjerker about lost love, was this country’s first million-selling song. He followed it up with another hit, “Break the News to Mother,” in which the words of the title come from the lips of a dying soldier. In his 1926 autobiography—naturally titled After the Ball—Harris observed: “I find that sentiment plays a large part in our lives. The most hardened character or the most cynical individual will succumb to sentiment sometime or other.”