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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.

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