Crash Course Timeline, No. 32: The Mills Brothers, the Pride of Piqua, OH

Classic line-up.

Overall, the Mills Brothers’ story is one of a steady climb to success, if with a side of tragedy. Even the tragedy followed from their success, if accidentally.

The four Mills Brothers - from oldest to youngest, John Jr., Herbert, Harry and Donald - were born between 1910 and 1915 and into a family that ultimately included nine children. Their parents raised them in Piqua, Ohio, a town north of Dayton, in what sounds like a comfortable and musical environment. Their mother, Ethel, sang light opera and their father, John Mills, Sr., both ran a barbershop and sang in a barbershop quartet called The Four Kings of Harmony. John Sr. taught his boys everything he knew, but he had no way of knowing how far they’d take it. And, in the end, him.

They learned music singing in a pair of church choirs growing up (Cyrene African Methodist Episcopal and Park Avenue Baptist) and put that knowledge into practice at impromptu performances in front of their father’s barbershop with a kazoo for accompaniment. They officially formed the act in 1925 and started working around Southwest Ohio playing house/lawn parties, at music halls and supper clubs. If their official career started anywhere, it would be Piqua’s May’s Opera House where they found work singing between Rin-Tin-Tin features. When the same venue hosted an amateur contest, the Mills Brothers signed on - and stumbled into what became their, for lack of a better word, gimmick:

“They entered an amateur contest at May's Opera House but while on stage Harry realized he had lost his kazoo. He improvised by cupping his hand over his mouth and mimicking the sound of trumpet. The brothers liked the idea and worked it into their act. John, the bass vocalist, would imitate the tuba. Harry, a baritone, imitated the trumpet, Herbert became the second trumpet, and Donald the trombone. John accompanied the four-part harmony on ukulele and then guitar. They practiced imitating orchestras they heard on the radio.”

The Rin-Tin-Tin gig opened its first door in 1928, when the Mills Brothers traveled to Cincinnati with the Harold Greenameyer’s orchestra for an audition at WLW Radio; the station manager passed on Greenameyer & Co., but hired the Mills Brothers. Though they quickly established a solid local following and brought the entire Mills family to a new city, the Mills Brothers didn't wait long for their next big break. When Duke Ellington and His Orchestra passed through Cincinnati, someone arranged to have them sing for him. Impressed by what he heard, Ellington referred them to his New York contact at Okeh Records, Tommy Rockwell, who quickly signed them. That took them to New York and one small step from the national stage.

One Hit No More, No. 92: Sniff 'n' the Tears, in the Driver's Seat

Have I mentioned Roberts painted all the album covers?

The Hit
“…a few acoustic guitar strums and then pow, the musical gas is punched in the form of a single gunshot-styled snare drumbeat.”

“This revs things up instantly as the drumming intensifies and cocksure electric guitar riffs join in, followed by a set of gritty vocals that sound simultaneously guarded and vulnerable, all underscored by punctual synthesizer blips.”

Finding that description of Sniff ‘n’ the Tears “Driver’s Seat” on Vintage Rock spared me from trying to describe a song I still haven’t wrapped my head around. None of those adjectives - e.g., “gritty,” “guarded” and “vulnerable” - match what I hear in the song, but doing 91 of these posts has helped me appreciate the struggle of translating music into words.

Sniff ‘n’ the Tears landed a pretty damn big hit with “Driver’s Seat,” one big enough to lift the album it was on into the Top 40 on the Billboard (the single peaked at No. 15 on the singles chart), and it took them to a place or two…which, it bears noting, didn’t jive with expectations for some key members of the band. One, however, soldiered on, and for long enough to get some of those wayward members back into the fold. Circling back to Vintage Rock:

“Lyrically, the song is about picking yourself up after a breakup. Musically, it started as a riff; behind the riff was a revolving chord sequence. I abandoned the riff when I realized it was a bit similar to something else, but the acoustic pattern was unusual and led to a certain propulsive tension that suited the fragmented state of mind implied by the words.”

That’s Paul Roberts talking, who seems like exactly one of two people that you really need to pay attention to for this one…

The Rest of the Story
Sniff ‘n’ the Tears started in England’s pub rock scene, circa 1973, playing mostly night clubs. The band’s name came from Roberts - who had wrote a band named “The Tears” into “a dystopian novel” he’d “attempted" - and the band’s manager, who added the “Sniff” to the name as a nod to Roberts’ struggles with hay fever. They knocked around that scene for a year or two, gigging, even recording a dozen songs to shop as demos, but nothing took beyond some paying work. With what looked like nothing but deadends ahead, having a guitarist check out to join the military was all it took for that first line-up to disband. Roberts, for his part, relocated to France to “pursue his painting” according to a 2012 post on blog titled Riff Raf, a theory that, without confirmation, seems entirely reasonable in the grand scheme.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 31: The Boswell Sisters, Queens of Prog Swing

"Why don't you choke those Boswell Sisters?" Jesus...

“Why don't you choke those Boswell Sisters? How wonderful it would be if they sang just one song like it was written. Really when they get through murdering it, one can never recognize the original.”

“Please get those terrible Boswell Sisters off the station! You can't follow the melody and the beat is going too rapidly. And to me they sound like savage chanters!”

Consider that another installment in the “don’t let your grandparents tell you [_______] about how rude people have become these days.” Also, trust me: you will not understand where that anger comes from by the end of this post. Or even after one listen to the sampler.

Despite the rage-mail that haters sent to their employers and sponsors, the Boswell Sisters achieved remarkable renown in their prime - about 1930-1936 - and some of the biggest artists and bandleaders their era appreciated working with people who knew their way around music as well as they did. Unfortunately, that didn’t keep the musical world from forgetting them. As one of the first close-harmony singing groups in the recorded music/radio era, they opened space for contemporary competitors - e.g., the Three X Sisters and the Pickens Sisters - and paved the way for some famous imitators, most notably, the Andrews Sisters. Left-filed shit like “savage chanters” notwithstanding, those disgruntled fans had a point. From a long passage about some of their most famous recording sessions, quoted by Wikipedia (fwiw, my overwhelmingly primary source for this post):

“Some of the sessions with Dorsey Brothers' band musicians were notable in having the young Glenn Miller writing instrumental arrangements for his bandmates from Connie’s dictation. Melodies were rearranged and slowed down, major keys were changed to minor keys (sometimes in mid-song), and unexpected rhythmic changes were par for the course. The Boswells were among the few performers who were allowed to make changes to current popular tunes since, during this era, music publishers and record companies pressured performers not to alter current popular song arrangements.”

Now, the story of how the Boswell Sisters earned the right to tell music publishers and record companies to blow.

Crash Course, No. 37: Blur & Tumult

Totally missed the boy-band thing with them....

I’ll start with a confession: if it wasn’t “Song 2,” I couldn’t pick a Blur song out of a line-up. This past week’s deep dive showed a knew a couple more songs, but, and in my defense, Blur was always much, much bigger in their native UK than they ever got in the U.S….

…and “Song 2” wasn’t even their biggest U.S. single. That was “Girls & Boys” from 1994’s Parklife…which, for the record, started a string of six albums by Blur that topped the UK charts, everything between there and 2015’s The Magic Whip. As I said, much, much bigger in the UK.

And now, a crash course on their story. And anyone who wants to read more will find links to every source I used for this post at the bottom of it.

The Very Basics
“There’s Albarn, the intense workaholic who will collaborate with anyone from Malian kora players to cartoons; Coxon, the cripplingly shy guitar nerd who couldn’t cope with the band’s gigantic 90s fame; James, the party animal who subsequently reinvented himself as a gentleman farmer; and drummer Dave Rowntree, about whom people still know so little that they describe him as the “everyman” or “normal bloke” despite the fact he works as a criminal solicitor, has a pilot’s licence and stood as the Labour party candidate for the Cities of London and Westminster, which doesn’t seem very everyman.”

The flesh out the surnames in the above, that’s Damon Albarn (vocals/songwriting/control), Graham Coxon (guitar/earnest intensity), Alex James (bass/enthusiasm)…and the quote gives Rowntree’s (drums/drummer personality) full name: those were, and may yet continue to be, the members of Blur. Those original pieces fell in place over a two-month period when Albarn joined James’ band, Circus, in December 1988, two months after Rowntree and Coxon, who’d already joined in October. They played as Seymour - named after J. D. Salinger’s, Seymour: An Introduction - but landed on “Blur” a couple years later and from a list of alternatives pitched to them by Andy Ross, Food Records’ A&R rep.

They came up in the so-named “Scene that Celebrates Itself” of the London/Thames Valley (see also, Chapterhouse, Lush, Moose, Thousand Yard Stare, See See Rider, and Stereolab for further research/listening), but broke out of it, to borrow words from NME, as “the acceptable pretty face of a whole bunch of bands.” Related, I once read Coxon marvel bitterly about being packaged as something of a boy band. Their debut album, Leisure chased the fraying threads of the Manchester sound’s coattails, but Blur dug deeper into their English pop roots (The Kinks, Beatles and XTC get name-dropped) over the next several albums - from Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993) through The Great Escape (1995; here’s the discography). Coxon was not a fan (“Talking as a guitar player, Britpop for me was dull”), but the inspiration for the tonal switch came from a charming place: homesickness for England. Blur “discovered” they were in a ways in debt after Leisure and tried to recoup money on a U.S. tour where they “were forced to play their Anglocentric songs in tiny venues to bewildered crowds.”

Crash Course Timeline, No. 30: How Chick Met Ella

“This is it. I have a real singer now. That's what the public wants.”
- Chick Webb, NPR review of a Chick Webb box-set (2013)

No one really knows the year of William Henry “Chick” Webb’s birth - some say 1905, but they wrote 1909 on his tombstone - but he was born in Baltimore, MD. While he would become one of the most famous drummers of his era, the path he took to playing that instrument has to be rare in music history, if not unique. A spill down the household stairs as (according to Wikipedia) an infant crushed several vertebrae; tuberculosis crept into his spine furthering the damage, “leaving him with short stature and a badly deformed spine which caused him to appear hunchbacked.” In a diagnosis that sounds straight out of the times, a doctor suggested Webb pick up the drums in order to “loosen up” his bones. Whether medically-sound or not, doctor's orders paid off...but Downbeat Magazine’s 1937 edition used some tres passe phrasing to  hail Webb at the height of his success:

‘The Rise of a Crippled Genius”

Webb never let his childhood injury hold him back. He moved to Harlem at age 17, where he signed on to a number of tours and sustained other acts through residencies and generally established himself in one of jazz’s hottest scenes. It didn’t take long either, as noted in an article posted on the site Modern Drummer:

“In 1926, the drummer formed his first band and began performing at various NYC jazz clubs, including Black Bottom, Roseland, The Cotton Club, and the Strand Roof. As the ’20s came to a close, Webb’s band—dubbed The Harlem Stompers—gradually picked up more members, eventually growing into a full-size eleven-piece big band.”

By 1931, Webb established his orchestra as the house band for the Savoy Ballroom, a premier club in Harlem. Though unable to read music, he managed his band just fine by memorizing the arrangements and guiding them through from a platform in the middle of stage. His reputation grew through the early 1930s, but, per the quote up top, he thought it would take a star vocalist for him to breaktrough. Webb’s orchestra played behind a guy named Charles Linton, “an old-school crooner…with pre-jazz-age enunciation.” And then came 1935 and Ella Fitzgerald…

Crash Course, No. 36: Blondie, Definitely Important, but Also Better than I Thought

Not the inspiration, btw.

The format I used for the posts on Black Sabbath and Blitzen Trapper doesn’t feel like a good fit for this. It probably wasn’t a good fit for either of those, but there’s just…something about Blondie’s history that makes more sense of telling it all at once.

“Q: What do you think it is that makes your songs so appealing to so many generations?"

"[Chris Stein]: They’re cheerful. You know, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don't know. We tap into a lot of things from musical history when making the songs. They’re based on a lot of stuff that’s come before us so maybe that’s… You know, we got one review recently from one of those Canadian festivals. It [was] a really great glowing review, and she said that the band almost sounds psychedelic in its presentation, which I thought was great because I always think that, but I never really see it in print. There’s a lot of influences from the ’60s, ’70s, [and] later music in there, so I think maybe that clicks with people.”
- Time Magazineinterview with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein (2014)

A number of sources I read while researching this post praised Blondie’s genre-bending progress throughout the band’s short, original career. This comes from Wikipedia's section on their “style and legacy,” but something much like it topped several interviews:

“The band is known not only for the striking stage persona and vocal performances of Harry but also for incorporating elements in their work from numerous subgenres of music, reaching from their punk roots to embrace new wave, disco, pop, rap, and reggae.”

I get that and I don’t. The bulk of their eponymous debut listens like a throwbacks to an early-60s sound, if with a “bad girl” twist, and they did more or less leave that behind for the follow-up album, Plastic Letters, only to call it back now and again. There’s no question their music expanded and evolved - the distance between Plastic Letters and Autoamerican is wider than I knew going in - but it all sounds more like...Blondie than any one of the genres they dabbled in. To hit that from the other direction, it feels more natural to say someone else’s song sounds like Blondie than the other way around, even as it’s fair to acknowledge that most Blondie songs sound like something else.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 29: Basie, A Count and a King

Think of the date as beyond time...

This chapter introduces another member of jazz royalty (Duke Ellington, who's early days I covered earlier), if only to the first part of his long career. Even on that shortened timeline, the biography of the auteur in question touches so many members of his musical generation that it tells not just his story, but the story of his times.

William James “Count” Basie was born in Red Bank, New Jersey in 1904, son to Harvey Lee Basie, who worked as a coachman and a caretaker, and Lillian Childs Basie, who took in laundry; seeing how hard his parents worked (and quite possibly for who) motivated Basie to help them get ahead. Despite being a solid student, the younger Basie didn’t see education as the path for getting there; he dropped out after junior high school and started knocking around the Palace Theater in Red Bank, trading chores and odd jobs for free admission and learning things like changing the reels and working the spotlight for the live shows. His parents did play a part in his future as both of them played instruments, the mellophone for his dad, the piano for his mom. His mother took music seriously enough to pay a quarter a piano lesson.

Those lessons paid off in two ways. First, and to lift a good anecdote from his official bio, Basie volunteered to play the music to accompany a silent movie one afternoon when the regular player called in sick. The manager said no, but Basie snuck into the pit unnoticed and played through the movie; the manager invited him back to play the evening show. Second, and more consequential in the grand scheme, he preferred playing the drums…until he met, Sonny Greer, another Red Bank (or Long Branch; depending on the source) native destined for fame. Knowing he would never touch Greer on the drums, Basie doubled-down on the piano as his instrument.

For as long as Greer stuck around, he and Basie played as a duo at little gigs around town - they even landed a show at Asbury Park on the Jersey Shore - but Greer got called up to the bigs (New York City) before long and started his professional career - with Duke Ellington, no less. Basie wasn’t too far behind, moving to Harlem at the fresh-faced age of 16. He filled those years playing shows and rent parties with Greer and others, picking up stride piano from James P. Johnson and Fats Waller (profiled earlier) - who also taught him how to play the organ - and landing his first real work as a musician at a place called Leroy’s, where he sharpened his playing and steeled his nerves competing in cutting contests. Around the same time (1925), Basie started a two-year stint with an act called Kittie Krippen and her Kiddies, playing a revue called the Hippity Hop Show. Whether by luck or fate, the last tour he was on petered out in Kansas City, Missouri. Where big things would happen…