ARTS MUSIC

Mitch Miller’s part in pop history By Elijah Wald Published: August 21 2009 14:38 | Last updated: August 21 2009 14:38

Record producer Mitch Miller took Rosemary Clooney’s ‘Come On­a 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 studio­recorded version of the song.

The 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, file­sharing 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. Coin­operated 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 African­American jukebox market. And the Texan country singer Ernest Tubb who pioneered the “honky­tonk” 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 hair­splitting 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 long­playing 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 long­playing 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, ear­catching 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 boogie­woogie, and handed it to a jazz singer named Rosemary Clooney. “Come On­a 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 old­line 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 free­form 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 dance­band 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 lip­synching.

Of course, plenty of musicians continue to do live shows. Indeed, in an age of downloading and file­sharing, 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 box­sets of the band’s complete studio oeuvre, and thus today’s biggest­selling 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, www.elijahwald.com

......

It’s black and white – how pop music became divided

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 mid­1960s. 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 mid­1950s, 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 African­American 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. Chubby Checker in a nightclub in 1961 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.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.

"FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of the Financial Times. Privacy policy | Terms © Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2009. ARTS MUSIC

Mitch Miller’s part in pop history By Elijah Wald Published: August 21 2009 14:38 | Last updated: August 21 2009 14:38

Record producer Mitch Miller took Rosemary Clooney’s ‘Come On­a 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 studio­recorded version of the song.

The 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, file­sharing 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. Coin­operated 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 African­American jukebox market. And the Texan country singer Ernest Tubb who pioneered the “honky­tonk” 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 hair­splitting 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 long­playing 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 long­playing 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, ear­catching 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 boogie­woogie, and handed it to a jazz singer named Rosemary Clooney. “Come On­a 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 old­line 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 free­form 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 dance­band 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 lip­synching.

Of course, plenty of musicians continue to do live shows. Indeed, in an age of downloading and file­sharing, 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 box­sets of the band’s complete studio oeuvre, and thus today’s biggest­selling 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, www.elijahwald.com

......

It’s black and white – how pop music became divided

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 mid­1960s. 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 mid­1950s, 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 African­American 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. Chubby Checker in a nightclub in 1961 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.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.

"FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of the Financial Times. Privacy policy | Terms © Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2009. ARTS MUSIC

Mitch Miller’s part in pop history By Elijah Wald Published: August 21 2009 14:38 | Last updated: August 21 2009 14:38

Record producer Mitch Miller took Rosemary Clooney’s ‘Come On­a 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 studio­recorded version of the song.

The 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, file­sharing 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. Coin­operated 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 African­American jukebox market. And the Texan country singer Ernest Tubb who pioneered the “honky­tonk” 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 hair­splitting 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 long­playing 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 long­playing 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, ear­catching 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 boogie­woogie, and handed it to a jazz singer named Rosemary Clooney. “Come On­a 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 old­line 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 free­form 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 dance­band 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 lip­synching.

Of course, plenty of musicians continue to do live shows. Indeed, in an age of downloading and file­sharing, 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 box­sets of the band’s complete studio oeuvre, and thus today’s biggest­selling 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, www.elijahwald.com

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It’s black and white – how pop music became divided

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 mid­1960s. 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 mid­1950s, 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 African­American 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. Chubby Checker in a nightclub in 1961 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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