Highlights in Th Is Issue

H IG H LIG H TS IN THIS ISSUE: A CD now avail able Johnny Mercer made for himself A biography of Paul Desmond now available A Billy Butterfield profile ....and the conclusion of the two part interview with Paul Weston. FIRST-CLASS MAIL U.S. POSTAGE PAID Atlanta, G A Permit No. 2022 BIG BAND JIMP NEWSLETTER VOLUME 99 BIG BAND JUMP NEWSLETTER JULY-AUGUST 2005 PAUL WESTON INTERVIEW - The first question involves his initial work at Capitol Records in 1942. PART TWO BBJ: Everyone who was involved says those early days at Capitol were probably the greatest days in the recording business. PW: They were fun days. It started for me when I was working at Paramount and I did a picture, “Star Spangled Rhy thm.” Johnny Mercer was working on that while I was working on “Road To Morocco,” I guess, one of the Crosby/ Hope things. And I got to know Mercer and so he and Glenn Wallichs had been talking about getting a record com Weston & Stafford in a quiet moment pany together. Glenn had a little recording stu dio in the back of Music Phil Silvers who spoke a The Background single line on record__ City, just a one room This is second of the two installments of an interview place and so John said, “Well, look, would you get of Paul Weston, one of the premier arrangers and studio some guys together and we’re gonna make this thing conductors of his time. It’s taken from a conversation called STRIP POLKA I’ve written.” So we got three with Weston by veteran radio personality Fred Hall and girls to sing the “take it off, take it o ff’ line and Jimmy excerpted from his book “Dialogues In Swing.” As Van Heusen was our piano player. It was sort of a mentioned in the last issue, Paul Weston started his life family thing and Phil Silvers came down just to do the with a degree in Economics from Dartmouth. He one line, “I adore....” graduated Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa, but in his spare time arranged music for the Dartmouth dance It was, as Jo (Stafford) says, Fun in the Parlor. STREP band. The year of the interview was 1989. POLKA was the first record Johnny made. Well, he made one before that, THEY DIDN’T BELIEVE ME, The Scene because the singer who was supposed to do it with Paul The interview took place in the Weston’s home in Whiteman couldn’t feel it and they just said, “Well, Century City, California. The last issue covered his John, why don’t you do it?” And he did it and it was a early days helping create the Tommy Dorsey sound and good record, so right after that Johnny got the Pepsodent his early months after Dorsey writing for Dinah Shore Summer Show replacing Bob Hope and so Jo and the and moving to California to work with the Bob Crosby Pied Pipers and Ella Mae Morse and I j oined Johnny on Orchestra, then getting into movie music work. This that show and then after the summer was over we went part of the interview picks up with his involvement in on for Chesterfield five days a week. I remember we television and as a recording executive. had one release from Capitol that had DREAM, VOLUME 99 BIG BAND JUMP NEWSLETTER JULY-AUGUST 2005 CANDY and ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE....they Martin, Dean’s wife, used to think it was pretty funny. were three gigantic hits and that was the whole release, One time at a Columbia Records convention in Key you know. And if we didn’t like what we did we’d go West we had spent a long day of meetings and went in in and do it over again. to have our dinner and there was a pi JONATHAN AND DARLENE S John really got bugged with the company when he GREATEST HITS ano player there and JONATHAN AND DARLENE EDWARDS found out he had to have regular releases. He didn’t like he was really inept, the idea. He’d say, “Well, we don’t have anything.” So you know, I mean he gradually they hired other people and, of course, Nat w a s . y o u Cole was there from very early days. His album was k n o w __ w ro n g BD8 and mine was BD9 because Johnny let me make chords. After he what eventually got called mood music when I took the packed up and left I strings and then took a band and arranged it pretty much went up and started > V * like a Dorsey or a Joe Haymes Band and then added to play STARDUST strings for this music for dreaming. and some of the guys J.&D. Edwards'album cover were Just tired BBJ: It wasn’t a Mantovani type because you kept -------------------------------------------- enough to think it the beat. was pretty funny and said, “You’ve got to make an album.” When I got back I got frightened and thought, PW: There was more of a j azz feel to it and we made “I’m not gonna do this alone.” We had some time at the a few albums over again in the ’60s and they end of a session and the band would anticipate the beats still held up pretty well because they were good players. and play like a band and Jo would sing a tone sharp and skip bars and stuff. It was a catharsis to get even with BBJ: Few of those good things are available these whoever said you should record this song. (ED: They days. did this for themselves in the beginning. They were made to record songs they thought were terrible in the PW: Well, it’s terribly tough to get anything out. first place.) They’re better now than they used to be. Like, for example, one of Jo’s and my labor of love is an So that’s how the whole thing started. Then after the album of American folk songs we did with strings back first album came out and nobody knew who it was for in ’47 and ’48 and I finally got permission from Capitol about seven or eight months and then Time magazine to put that out. We had re-done it in stereo and that’s exposed us. We had our pictures in there and they wrote on the Corinthian label, too. We were fortunate, too, to about who it was and how it happened and everything get all her two hundred and thirty some masters back and then Look magazine came out and did a series of from Columbia about four or five years ago and they’ve pictures at one of the sessions. And then the next album been the basis for our Corinthian label. We have two was Jonathan, Darlene in Paris. And then we later did of the Jonathan and Darlene albums, which, inciden a sing-a-long, sort of a put-on of Mitch Miller, but tally, one of them is the only Grammy Jo and I ever won. unfortunately Mitch went down the tubes just about the time the album came out and so we didn’t do very well BBJ: For those who don’t know, you did a series of with that one, although my feeling is it’s one of the classic spoofs on out-of-tune singers and dread funniest ones. fully bad piano players under the names Jonathan and Darlene Edwards. How did that come about? BBJ: It must have been tough for Jo to sing the wrong notes. PW: Well, it’s a long story. For years at parties, I used to sometimes go to the piano and play. I PW : She says you hear the wrong note in your head had an arrangement of STARDUST and SUNDAY, just before you sing it. I’ve never been able to MONDAY OR ALWAYS and people like Jeannie understand that. 2 VOLUME 99 BIG BAND JUMP NEWSLETTER JULY-AUGUST 2005 BBJ: You had a string of hits for Columbia Records, rather different than what you did at Capitol. PW: SHRIMP BOATS started it. I wrote that with Paul Mason. That was in ’51 and then in ’52 she had YOU BELONG TO ME and then JAMBALAYA and then the biggest one was a thing called MAKE LOVE TO ME that we weren’t particu larly crazy about except it was nice for her to have the money. In fact it was TIN ROOF BLUES, you know, that they put lyrics to. BBJ: What finally happened at Columbia Records? PW: Rock and roll hit, you know, started in the ’50s, and everybody went down the tubes to some extent and, of course, Jo retired pretty much in the ’ 50s. Billy Butterfield in 1983 BBJ: Meanwhile, you were working pretty hard. his sweet, expressive trumpet heard introducing us to the very first recording of what was to become known PW : Well, I was in television by then. I was at NBC as WHAT’S NEW. The melody was written expressly and did the Chevy Shows with Roy and Dale for Billy Butterfield’s solo with the Bob Crosby Band and Janet Blair and all the specials over there and I did by arranger/composer/bassist Bob Haggart. It is the a year with Bob Newhart on a half-hour show in ’61. I Butterfield trumpet opening the now classic Artie Shaw was with NBC about six years and then went to CBS in, STARDUST recording, clean and neat, setting the gee, I don’t remember....’63,1 guess and did fouryears musical stage for one of the most inspired Big Band with Danny Kaye, the Danny Kaye hour show and then arrangements of that classic.

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