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| Know that I know what it took to make him smile.... |
Somewhere in the middle of 1935, shortly after a strike at Nabisco put NBC’s Let’s Dance on ice and gently flopping as a replacement for Guy Lombardo’s Orchestra at Manhattan’s Roosevelt Grill, Benny Goodman reformed an orchestra and took it on a cross-country tour. Or something like that; Wikipedia’stimeline is fer shit.
The band left with a couple of Goodman’s all-time hits to support - “King Porter Stomp” and “Sometimes I’m Happy” had just come out as a 78 rpm - and they had some successes as they went, particularly a show in Pittsburgh that saw young fans dancing in the aisles, but that proved an outlier. They arrived at Oakland’s McFadden Theater on August 19, 1935, expecting more the same, but instead they received the most rapt reception they’d had on the entire tour. When they played Pismo Beach the following night, they didn’t know what to expect…but, when yet another audience stayed polite and seated, they wrote off the McFadden gig as a fluke. Goodman et. al. had no reason to believe they’d just walked up to the cusp of history; nothing to that point had indicated otherwise.
After setting up at Los Angeles’ Palomar Ballroom on August 21, 1935, Goodman’s orchestra opened with stock arrangements. Faced with a muted response, Goodman and his orchestra put their heads together and decided to kick off the second set with arrangements by Fletcher Henderson and Spud Murphy. Somewhere in that huddle, Goodman’s drummer, Gene Krupa, reportedly rallied behind the decision with this:
“If we're gonna die, Benny, let's die playing our own thing.”
Not only did Goodman, Krupa, Bunny Berigan and singer Helen Ward not die, the crowd at the Palomar went just as nuts as the crowd at McFadden’s. Music historians credit the Goodman Orchestra’s three-week engagement at the Palomar with officially kicking off The Swing Era. Other bands, some led by Goodman proteges, others by outcasts from Goodman’s orchestra, would join a musical movement that dominated American popular music for most of the next decade. Goodman’s great night at the Palomar was and wasn’t an accident - and for reasons I’ll get into below - but, as a music writer named Donald Clarke put it:
“It is clear in retrospect that the Swing Era had been waiting to happen, but it was Goodman and his band that touched it off.”
The band left with a couple of Goodman’s all-time hits to support - “King Porter Stomp” and “Sometimes I’m Happy” had just come out as a 78 rpm - and they had some successes as they went, particularly a show in Pittsburgh that saw young fans dancing in the aisles, but that proved an outlier. They arrived at Oakland’s McFadden Theater on August 19, 1935, expecting more the same, but instead they received the most rapt reception they’d had on the entire tour. When they played Pismo Beach the following night, they didn’t know what to expect…but, when yet another audience stayed polite and seated, they wrote off the McFadden gig as a fluke. Goodman et. al. had no reason to believe they’d just walked up to the cusp of history; nothing to that point had indicated otherwise.
After setting up at Los Angeles’ Palomar Ballroom on August 21, 1935, Goodman’s orchestra opened with stock arrangements. Faced with a muted response, Goodman and his orchestra put their heads together and decided to kick off the second set with arrangements by Fletcher Henderson and Spud Murphy. Somewhere in that huddle, Goodman’s drummer, Gene Krupa, reportedly rallied behind the decision with this:
“If we're gonna die, Benny, let's die playing our own thing.”
Not only did Goodman, Krupa, Bunny Berigan and singer Helen Ward not die, the crowd at the Palomar went just as nuts as the crowd at McFadden’s. Music historians credit the Goodman Orchestra’s three-week engagement at the Palomar with officially kicking off The Swing Era. Other bands, some led by Goodman proteges, others by outcasts from Goodman’s orchestra, would join a musical movement that dominated American popular music for most of the next decade. Goodman’s great night at the Palomar was and wasn’t an accident - and for reasons I’ll get into below - but, as a music writer named Donald Clarke put it:
“It is clear in retrospect that the Swing Era had been waiting to happen, but it was Goodman and his band that touched it off.”
