Crash Course Timeline, No. 42: Glenn Miller, the Sweetest (and Shortest) of the Bandleaders

With this chapter, we turn to the sweetest and, arguably, the squarest of the Big Band leaders. Also, one of the more polarizing ones:

“Miller discovered a popular formula from which he allowed little departure. A disproportionate ratio of nostalgia to substance keeps his music alive.”
- Doug Ramsey, Jazz Times website (1997; quoted in Wikipedia)

“Can any other record match 'Moonlight Serenade' for its ability to induce a Pavlovian slaver in so many for so long?”
- Gary Giddins, The New Yorker (2004; also Wikipedia)

Alton Glenn Miller was born in Clarinda, Iowa, in 1904 to Lewis and Mattie Lou Miller. The family bounced around quite a bit during his youth – they went from Iowa, to Nebraska, to Missouri, to Colorado – but Miller’s love of music was a constant. He started with a mandolin his father brought home (this was probably Nebraska), but traded it for “an old battered horn” in short order, and practiced so much that his mother once said, “It got to where Pop and I used to wonder if he’d ever amount to anything.” They must have worried even more after he dropped out of the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1923 after failing three of five classes. Playing in any orchestra that would take him – Boyd Senter’s Denver-based orchestra was the main culprit – kept him from his studies, but Miller had already settled on a career as a professional musician two years earlier. The bug bit and he was beyond help.

After touring with various orchestras for the next couple years, Miller landed a solid gig as a trombonist in Ben Pollack’s orchestra out in LA. His solos dried up shortly after of one of the era’s great trombonists, Jack Teagarden, came on board and that little piece of fate nudged him to focus on arranging and composing. Miller started early, writing his first composition, “Room 1411,” with another aspiring musician, Benny Goodman; Wikipedia had something about him writing his signature song, “Moonlight Serenade,” during this period using the “Schillinger system,” but, as much as it adds up, that’s the only reference I saw to that. He took his newfound craft seriously enough to publish a songbook titled, Glenn Miller’s 125 Jazz Breaks for Trombone in 1928.

Crash Course, No. 39: DEVO, The Art School Project that Got Real Big

I was witnessing genius...

I had a very satisfying project called One Hit No More, and that’s what steered me to DEVO. At the same time, hitting DEVO put that project into the realm of bands I grew up with, aka, bands I know fairly well. And DEVO fits that better than most.

Having grown up on early (the earliest, in fact) MTV, I couldn’t wrap my head around DEVO as a “one-hit wonder.” Part of that followed from the fact that MTV playe a lot of DEVO; between “Through Being Cool,” “Beautiful World,” “Love Without Anger,” “Freedom of Choice,” and “Satisfaction,” it simply never occurred to me that “Whip It” was their only Top 40 hit.

And that was despite all the visibly weird shit/themes they presented and played with. I remember watching it, understanding it was different, but, young as I was - their prime years hit when I was 9-11 years old - all of it went over my head. So, let’s fill in some blanks.

Somewhat Briefly
“…here are the five basic components of the Devolutionary Oath:

1. Wear gaudy colors or avoid display
2. Lay a million eggs or give birth to one
3. The littlest may survive & the unfit may live
4. Be like your ancestors or be different
5. We must repeat”

Even if I, like everyone from DEVO, came from Ohio, I had no hope of wrapping my head around that. Then again, they had quite the head start…

The main members of DEVO - Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale - met at Kent State, when Kent State was Kent State, i.e., Casale was present for the university’s most infamous moment, saw his friends die, and lived through the hyper-reactionary backlash. Suffice to say, it changed him:

“Until then I was a hippie. I thought that the world is essentially good. If people were evil, there was justice and that the law mattered. All of those silly naïve things. I saw the depths of the horrors and lies and the evil. In the paper that evening, the Akron Beacon Journal, said that students were running around armed and that officers had been hurt. So deputy sheriffs went out and deputized citizens. They drove around with shotguns and there was martial law for ten days. 7 PM curfew. It was open season the students. We lived in fear.”

Crash Course Timeline, No. 41: Artie Shaw, "Musically Restless" Is a Euphemism

I will never see this photo the same way.

I reviewed just two sources for this shallow dive into Artie Shaw - his Wikipedia page, plus a fairly lengthy article titled "The Trouble with Artie Shaw" on a site called Jazz in Europe - but those gave me the essential yin and yang that, based some earlier reading, matches my impression of Shaw. The Jazz in Europe piece unsparingly examines the great clarinetist’s flaws - the word “sociopath” repeats like a refrain - while the Wikipedia page leans into his preferred reputation of a frustrated genius. To start with an odd bit of framing:

“A self-proclaimed ‘very difficult man,’ Shaw was married eight times. Two marriages were annulled; the others ended in divorce: Jane Cairns (1932–33; annulled); Margaret Allen (1934–37); actress Lana Turner (1940); Betty Kern, the daughter of songwriter Jerome Kern (1942–43); actress Ava Gardner (1945–46); Forever Amber author Kathleen Winsor (1946–48; annulled); actress Doris Dowling (1952–56), and actress Evelyn Keyes (1957–85).”

Shaw abused Turner emotionally to the point of a nervous breakdown. That sense of anger and disdain for others - to really drive this home, when asked about his kids, Shaw came back with, “Why should I bother? I didn’t get along with their mothers, why should I try to get along with them?” - very likely drove Shaw to seek out creative pathways that would set him apart from his peers. If he got over them, all the better. Jazz in Europe acknowledges his “massive talent” as a clarinetist, but, for lack of a better phrase, shit all over Shaw’s pretentiousness and his abilities as a composer. Time to tell his story.

“I thought that because I was Artie Shaw I could do what I wanted, but all they wanted was 'Begin the Beguine.’”

Born Arthur Jacob Arshawsky in 1910, Shaw grew up introverted and pissed-off in New Haven, Connecticut. His parents were Jewish - his mother from Austria, his father from Russia - but he wasn’t raised in a musical household. He came to the career as a self-starter, working to buy his first saxophone by age 13. By age 16, Shaw had switched to the clarinet and left home.

Jazz in Europe’s article opens on a long paragraph that shows how Shaw’s career mirrored his life-long rival, Benny Goodman, but always a step behind (and I could have used several of these for my write-up on Benny Goodman). Like most of his contemporaries, Shaw fell in and out of performing and recording bands through the 1920s, and into the 1930s. He also got knocked off course in a way that few of them did: he ran over and killed a pedestrian. Though cleared of blame for the accident, Shaw lost his cabaret card and two years of resume-building, but he used the time. From Jazz in Europe:

Crash Course, No. 38: Curtis Mayfield, The Gentle Genius

Legend.

This past week, I tried to get past the only Curtis Mayfield album most people know, 1972’s Super Fly. I could only go so far. The man was crazy prolific, certainly more than I knew.

A Very Short History
Mayfield was born in Chicago in 1942. Because his father left when he was young, he was raised by his mother and his grandmother and very much in the church and the church’s choir. The family moved to Chicago’s North Side and he spent his teen years at the (in)famous Cabrini-Green housing project. Mayfield did not, however, spend much of his teens in high school.

His first step toward his separate musical life came when he found his first guitar at age 7 or 8 (or 10). With Muddy Waters and Andres Segovia for models, he taught himself to play and embraced the instrument to the point of sleeping with it and later saying “my guitar is another me.” He formed his first singing groups in the mid-1960s with his friend Jerry Butler. With Arthur and Richard Brooks in the mix, they performed as the Roosters; when Sam Gooden came on board, they became The Impressions. Mayfield wrote and arranged songs before and after the switch.

A lot of The Impressions music passed through Mayfield’s hands and mind (though not their first hit, “For Your Precious Love”), and he helped pioneer Chicago’s response to Detroit’s Motown, a mix of soul, R&B, and gospel. With The Impressions as his megaphone, Mayfield wrote what some people called the soundtrack of the Civil Rights movement, with anthems like “Keep on Pushing,” “We’re a Winner,” and probably the most famous number “People Get Ready” (which, for the record, was the first song that featured Mayfield’s guitar work). He eventually took his distinct singing voice to lead vocals for the group and they churned out hit after hit after hit, through the 1960s, including five in the Top 20 in the same year the Beatles came to America. And now the story flips:

“Mayfield had written much of the soundtrack of the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s, but by the end of the decade, he was a pioneering voice in the black pride movement along with James Brown and Sly Stone.”

One Hit No More, No. 108: Benny Mardones Goes Off "Into the Night"

There was some amount of not the best idea...

Another one I didn’t know till it popped up in the queue. Maybe if I’d been born in Syracuse…

The Hit
“She’s just 16-years-old/
leave her alone/
they say…”

Those are, 1) the opening lyrics to Benny Mardones, “Into the Night” and, 2) not great, obviously, and it didn’t help that Mardones was 33 years old when the single dropped. And, as you keep digging…yeah. From Wikipedia’sentry on the single:

“The video opens with Mardones walking down a street and approaching a house. The song plays over the video, and the lyrics serve as Mardones's monologue. He is met at the door by a bearded man who tells him, "She's just 16 years old. Leave her alone." Mardones leaves and walks around to the back of the house, peering through a window at a girl sitting sullenly in her room. The video then cuts to Mardones at a pay phone, speaking to the girl on the other end of the line and professing his love. The video then cuts again to Mardones returning to the girl's house, carrying a rolled-up carpet. He crawls through her bedroom window, unrolls the magic carpet, and taking the girl's hand, they take flight into the night sky. The video closes with Mardones serenading the girl as they embrace; the scene finally fades to black as they kiss.”

All…that notwithstanding, the song has a touching backstory. Mardones fleshes out the full story in an audio clip posted to Songfacts in 2011, but, long story short, the father of a family that lived in his building Spanish Harlem left his wife and three kids for a member of a chorus line. Equal parts touched and angry by the desertion, Mardones gave each of the three kids odd jobs (and overpaid them), and he tasked the youngest girl (age 16) with walking his basset hound, Zanky(sp?) every morning. When a long night of working on some songs turned to morning, the young girl knocked on the door for Zanky’s daily constitutional. After she closed the door behind her, Mardones’ then-writing partner, Bobby Tepper, started with something like “my God (as Billboard’s obit put it, he “got leery”) and Mardones cut him off with, “she’s 16, leave her alone.” He comes off like a decent guy, and I believe it, but that video…

Getting back to the song, it’s a soft-rock ballad with some nice piano twinkles, but it’s mostly washed-out synths and a simple, sparing arrangement of traditional rock-band instruments that lay out like a stage for Mardones’ vocals - who, when he really gets going, doesn’t sound so different from Journey’s Steve Perry (eh...on further listening, I was in a mood). He picked up “The Voice” as a nickname for a reason…

One Hit No More, No. 107: Stealing Away with Robbie Dupree

Quite possibly wishing he was elsewhere.

Hold on. Putting on my sailing cap…though something about it doesn't feel right...

The Hit
There’s a better than fair chance that even the people who know 1980’s “Steal Away” think somebody besides Robbie Dupree recorded it. God knows someone else did. When he heard it, a music writer for the Los Angeles Times named John D’Agostino ripped it as a “blatant, wimpy rip-off of the Michael McDonald/Kenny Loggins’ composition ‘What a Fool Believes’”; the Washington Post flagged similarities in Dupree’s vocal style and the backing keyboards. McDonald didn’t give a shit, apparently, but his publisher flirted with a lawsuit for theft.

If you toggle back and forth between “Steal Away” and “What a Fool Believes” over and over again - as I’m sure D’Agostino and McDonald publishers did - yeah, the similarities in the backing keyboards come through. But the vocals?

Once you expand to the song as a whole - i.e., include the thicker (better) bass on “What a Fool Believes,” or the way the musical elements in “Steal Away” play together, while McDonald’s tune has more contrasts and oppositions - you get what the critics heard, basically, all the way down the “wimpy,” but Dupree’s slipped in some nice touches - e.g., the big, twanging strings that dominate the bridges, the way the song fades in as if you’re waking up to it. You don't have to love it, but give it credit for having a different mood.

The song came out of nowhere - and it took a minor miracle for it to go anywhere further than Dupree’s head - but he did not.

The Rest of the Story
As just about anything you read or hear about Robbie Dupree points out, you’d think he was from anywhere but Brooklyn. Born Robert Dupuis in 1946, he grew up and went to school much like anyone else - i.e., he didn’t have any immediate household influences - but he loved music, especially soul/R&B artists like Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye and played from an early age. When he made the decision to take a swing as a working musician, Dupree moved north to Woodstock, New York - which, as he regularly points out, was not the sight of the famous/infamous 1969 rock festival. In a 2018 retrospective on PopMatters, Dupree recalled his Woodstock:

Crash Course Timeline, No. 40: Tommy Dorsey, aka, The Angry One

The beginning...of this story.

Far too many weeks ago, I profiled one half of the famous, tumultuous Dorsey Brothers. In this post, I talk about the brother who made it tumultuous. First, to set the scene:

“Dorsey was also an occasionally mean drunk who was known to fire many of his sidemen if they had an off night. He had an erratic personality, loving a good fight but also being warm and generous much of the time, as long as things went his way.”
- Syncopated Times biography (best of the bunch, fwiw)

“Tommy was always punching someone out.”
- Swingmusic.net biography

“…and so began Dorsey's long-running practice of raiding other bands for talent.”
- Radio Swiss Jazz biography

Finally, from a mash note to both Dorsey and the Swing era, in a post within a post on Swingmusic.net:

“He could be a rugged guy offstage or to work for, but on stage, he was there for the paying customers...and for the kids. In 1946, when the bottom dropped out of the band biz, he was one of the first leaders to cut his price to venues so that not only would he keep his guys working, but so that 'the kids will have something to come dance to' again.”

Tommy Dorsey was born in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania in 1905, 21 months after his older brother Jimmy. Their father, Thomas Francis Dorsey, Sr., was a bandleader, taught them play, they played with literally any musician 9/10th of the people who know something about the era could name, they recorded for the first time starting in the second half of the 1920s, they had formed the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra by then (though they recorded as the Dorsey Brothers Concert Orchestra, the Dorsey Brothers Novelty Orchestra, and the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra from 1928-33), but they only officially debuted it in 1934 at a ballroom up in New England. If that reads rushed, my apologies, but I touched on most of the details in my post on Jimmy Dorsey, and I’d direct anyone who curious about that to that post. For those who feel like they can do with less, this paragraph should catch you up nicely: