Читать книгу They're Playing Our Song - Max Wilk - Страница 12

EARLY IN THE FALL of 1970, a revival of No, No, Nanette opened in Boston and was immediately the surprise hit of the season. Ruby Keeler and Patsy Kelly, Bobby Van and Helen Gallagher, tap dancing, music and lyrics by Vincent Youmans, Otto Harbach, and Irving Caesar—the critics and the audiences adored it all. Faithfully transported to the stage, this 1924 musical comedy, re-created with style, affection, and respect, was the talk of Boston. (And the utter confusion of Broadway, where nobody had expected anything from its revival.)

When I first heard about Nanette from Lester Osterman, who had booked it for his 46th Street Theatre, I called on Irving Caesar at his Brill Building office on 49th Street, where he has been for more than forty years, to congratulate him on the good news from Boston.

Irving is a short, effusive man in his early seventies, gifted with total recall, a deep fund of anecdotes, and a solid sense of social responsibility. He is also a major American songwriter. He stretched out on his Barcalounger and puffed on one of his ever-present cigars. “You know why Nanette works today?” he demanded. “It’s the Big Pendulum—taste—and, friend, when that starts to swing…. Here it comes, swinging back from all the rock music and the strobe lights and raggedy kids and the nudity. Here’s a show where the old man takes his wife and up on the stage there’s music and pretty people and tap dancing, and he’s sitting there telling himself, ‘This is one those damn kids of ours are going to see—and they’ll enjoy it or else!’” Caesar beamed. “This is camp backlash!

“This whole revival is like a show libretto,” continued Caesar. “Nanette and me—the whole thing was always crazy!”

Young Irving was standing outside the old Friars Club, on 48th Street, one balmy spring evening in 1924. “Waiting for the afternoon poker game to start. I was a kid, but I was doing all right. Songs in the Greenwich Village Follies, and I’d had ‘Swanee’ with my friend George Gershwin, so I had plenty of money for cards and horses. Then Otto Harbach came along. Wanted to know what I was doing. I couldn’t tell him I was waiting for a card game, so I let him walk me over to the theatre where Harry Frazee had Nanette in rehearsal. ‘You know, Irving, maybe you could give us a couple of extra lyrics,’ Otto said. ‘Vincent Youmans and I are running dry and we could use a little help.’

“Vincent and I went home that night and in about ten minutes I wrote ‘You Can Dance with Any Girl at All’—I can write very fast when it hits me. Sometimes lousy, sure, but always fast. What the hell, Gershwin and I wrote ‘Swanee’ in about eleven minutes flat!

“Then, the next night, we wrote ‘Too Many Rings Around Rosie.’ Working with Youmans was like with Gershwin. There was inspiration in just being around the guy. Little by little, I supplanted all the lyrics except for a couple of Harbach’s.

“Now comes the crazy part. We open in Detroit. Disaster. The show dies. Five thousand the first week. Four thousand the second. Harry Frazee, who probably never drew a sober breath in his life but was a hell of a producer, didn’t get upset. Why should he? He never looked at the show. But he knew how to produce. He got hold of me and Youmans and said, ‘You guys write me a big hit for the second act by tomorrow, or I’m sending for McCarthy and Tierney.’ They were hot—they’d just written Kid Boots— so we didn’t want them to take over. I got hold of Youmans, and we met the next morning in the dining room of the Statler, where they had a piano on the bandstand. The waiters were setting the tables for a Rotarian luncheon. We’re up there, working away against time—Detroit’s a town where people eat early. Would you believe it, we had ‘I Want to Be Happy’ in ten, eleven minutes, and we started playing it up there, and, so help me, the waiters were all singing it with us. Even those first Rotarians who came in early joined in, before they ate their lunch!”

That song helped, but not enough. “Frazee was a gambler with guts. He whipped us all. Frank Mandel, Harbach, Youmans, and me, never gave up pushing us to make the show better. We opened in Chicago. Terrible notices. Business rotten. Frazee never quit. Sam Harris, who owned the theatre, let us stay there. We kept on rehearsing, changing, fixing.”

And what about the eventual show-stopper? From what cockeyed set of circumstances did “Tea for Two” spring?

“Hell,” says Irving, “that one is even crazier. We had it before we even went out of New York! I lived in an apartment up on 54th. Gertie Lawrence and Bea Lillie had a little maisonette down the street. They’d just arrived in town in Charlot’s Revue and they were the belles of the town. Gave parties every night. You’d see every blueblood there, hanging around the show-girls. Vince played piano so beautifully, was talented, charming, and I had a song in their show, so Gertie always invited us. She’d run down the street, stand under my window, and whistle up. That meant the party was starting.

“Well, one night I was lying down, taking a little nap before the party, and Youmans came into my apartment and started shaking me. He had a tune he wanted set. ‘Aw, Vince,’ I mumbled, ‘not now, I’m half asleep— tomorrow.’ But he went to the piano and started it—dee, da dum, dee da dum, dee da dum, and me, I’m like a fire horse, I get up, I’m half awake, he plays it a couple of times and I say, ‘Okay, here’s a dummy lyric: tomorrow I’ll write the real one. “Picture you upon my knee, with tea for two and two for tea, and me for you and you for me alone.” That’s lousy, but it’ll do.’ ‘Keep going, keep going!’ he yells, and I went on, still half asleep, so help me, and groggy. I don’t know where the words were coming from. Subconscious, I guess. Anyway, in about eight minutes it was done, finished!

“It went in in Chicago, after that lousy opening. We kept on working, and after a couple of weeks, would you believe it, we got the critics back in? We got raves! We stayed in Chicago for three years! We had four companies playing all over the country before we ever opened it in New York!”

Eventually, we began to discuss the deep cloud of anonymity which has descended upon songwriters in the past decade or so. In times past, a more receptive public had treated its balladeers as celebrities. In fact, audiences flocked to night clubs and vaudeville theatres whenever popular composers appeared.¹

“With the material we had, how could we be bad?” said Irving. “You know, there never was a songwriter who ever played vaudeville who wasn’t a hit! And we could do it again today, believe me.” (A fact which he was to prove in his one-man recital at the YMHA on 92nd Street in New York, and in several appearances on the David Frost TV show.)

I asked him why there was such rapport between audiences and song-writers.

“We make contact!” said Irving, between furious puffs of his cigar. “I’m a lyric-writer, correct? What is a real lyric-writer? He’s a fellow who can’t help singing, and he sings through his words. A poet or a versifier—they must be satisfied to write their words down. That’s all. But a lyricist—he’s a minstrel! Think how this whole business of popular songs came about— through the old-time minstrel shows. The fellows who sang in those shows needed more songs to sing, and if they could write ’em, they wrote ’em for themselves, and if they could write fast enough, instead of going on the road for ten dollars a week and living in those terrible boardinghouses in small one-horse towns, they learned that they could sell their songs—for ten dollars or fifteen—and it saved them from going out on the road! So some of the earliest writers of popular songs and this country were those guys who wanted to stay home!

“Now take me. I’m an inarticulate composer. Believe me, if I could write music instead of lyrics, I’d be glad to, because it’s much easier. Why, composers, even the great ones, ought to get down on their knees every day and say, ‘Thank God I’m a composer—it’s so easy. I can write a tune every hour of the day or night, but thank God I don’t have to write the words!’ Look at the statistics! For every lyric-writer there are thirty composers, at least! Now, when I tell you I’m inarticulate, I mean most of the time I’m hovering over the piano with my collaborator, helping him get the right melodic line. Just remember this fact—when you write a song in ten or twenty minutes, nobody knows who did what to whom!”

Ten or twenty minutes?

“It’s happened,” said Irving. “An idea hits you—you both take off. You know all this stuff about how songs are written? Well, kid, if you’re a born songwriter, you just know how to do it. It’s instinct. Go ask a tightrope walker how he walks that tightrope. He says, ‘Well, when I think I’m going too much to the left, I go to the right, et cetera.’ And he walks his tightrope and he makes a helluva living.”

When was he first infected with the songwriting virus?

“Oh, a long time ago. I was a kid, and somebody took me into the Minor’s Burlesque Theatre, on the Bowery, near Houston or Stanton Street. A very famous place. Harry Minor was a great producer of burlesque; he also owned Minor’s Drugstore. This would be about 1909 or 1910. Anyway, there was Irving Berlin, and I heard him up there singing ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band.’ See, that’s how you sold a song in those days; you got up and sang ’em to the people. So if I’m a songwriter today, it’s because of Irving Berlin.

“The next time I can remember getting a thrill was when I saw Harry Von Tilzer, at Hammerstein’s Victoria—a music hall. I can see him before me right now, in his striped pants and cutaway coat (in those days it was called a Prince Albert). Ah, he looked so smart and dapper; he had a little grayish hair, and he was singing all his own songs, huge hits of the day: ‘Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nelly,’ ‘I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl Who Married Dear Old Dad,’ ‘She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage.’

“That’s when I decided I wanted to be like those guys, standing up on the stage and singing your own song, and getting such a great audience response—all the people in the theatre humming along with you, letting you know they like your stuff.”

All the great people who’ve written the music and lyrics that my generation grew up with for the past forty or fifty years—why doesn’t anybody want to list to them?

Irving shrugged, and stared out his office window at the skyline of the city. After a moment he spoke softly. “Time is very cruel,” he said. “Nobody pays any attention. Turn on your radio—what do you hear? Music? No. Noise!” His voice began to rise along with his temper. “There’s a whole new generation out there that’ve never heard of us. Why? Because they’ve been brainwashed. Yes, you heard me right, brainwashed! The people who have taken over this so-called music business—the jukeboxes, the record business, the mass communications media, radio, TV—they have it tied up tight, and they’re peddling junk. It’s easy—you keep good stuff off the air long enough and fill the kids’ ears with junk, something quick and noisy, twenty-four hours a day, then what do you expect the formative minds will prefer? Read Pavlov! We’re raising a generation of zombies!

“And it’s a damned shame,” he went on, “when you consider that the popular song of the past half-century had the largest impact on American culture of any so-called art form. Why, for God’s sake, the popular song is American culture! A universal language, we exported it all over the world. Our jazz, our dances, they loved it everywhere! Ballads, fox-trots, one-steps, everything—we made the world sing and dance. But today our own kids haven’t a clue.”

Wouldn’t they tell you they created their own art form?

“I tell you, they’ve been brainwashed,” Irving said.

I went away from Irving Caesar’s Brill Building office that afternoon feeling depressed. I walked up Broadway, past the busy record shops with amplified noise braying from speakers above their open doors.

Irving had claimed that the success of Nanette was indicative of a change in public taste—that the pendulum was swinging back toward melody. But was it? Or was the success of Nanette just an isolated fluke, an outpouring of nostalgic worship for the good old days by middle-aged types like yours truly, who’ve grown up with American popular music as a sort of second language?

I stepped inside a record shop. Outside, the store window featured the latest hits on LPs and tape cassettes. Down the street, the film version of Fiddler on the Roof was playing, but this store was featuring the latest recordings of Cat Stevens, Chicago, Sly and the Family Stone, Joe Cocker, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. The “groups,” the purveyors of “youth-oriented” music, were all over the place.

Show tunes? In a small bin, about eighteen inches deep.

Jazz? In the same segregated area.

Pop singers à la Sinatra, Dean Martin, Ella Fitzgerald, Barbra Streisand, and Steve and Eydie? Also tucked away in a small pocket of their own.

Sheet music? Forget it. Thirty, forty years ago it was part of our lives, available on racks in every music store, or at your local Woolworth’s, where the pianist would cheerfully “demonstrate” the latest songs for you before you plunked down your quarter and took one home.

A few days later I talked with the late Robert Emmett Dolan, who was a composer, conductor, and film producer of musicals for more than four decades. “In terms of harmonics, I don’t feel that we’ve simply stood still,” he observed. “As opposed to the 1930s or ’40s, when songwriters like Gershwin and Kern and Rodgers and Arlen were using harmonics, I actually think we’ve retrogressed. Those days were much richer musically. Remember how often the word ‘lush’ was applied to our popular music? One of the things I’ve said to my own son Casey, who’s seventeen and very much into this hard-rock thing, is, ‘I listen to it, but I get no surprises.’ I’ve heard records galore today where, literally, the guitarists will play one chord, from beginning to end. They’ll keep on doing variations on that one chord, but it’s the same chord all the way through.”

A few weeks later, when I came to discuss this phenomenon with Harold Arlen, he said ruefully, “Nobody wants harmony. This is a percussive era.”

I am the father of two young men, and in the past few years, whether I wanted to or not, I’ve been exposed to a good deal of what they considered “current.” And, believe it or not, this middle-aged Social Democrat has discovered quite a few current talents to whom he responds. I was a Beatle fan from the first yeh-yeh-yeh. I am impressed by Bob Dylan, enjoy Simon and Garfunkel, respond to Joan Baez and Judy Collins, rock with Carole King, and find the classic blues form well served by Taj Mahal, B. B. King, and quite a few others. Burt Bacharach and Jim Webb are writing first-rate songs, and so is the less well-known Randy Newman, and if you dug Bessie Smith, how can you not respond to the late Janis Joplin?

I may not be completely turned on, but I will not stand accused of refusing to tune in.

Conversely, I am not a mindless idolator of everything that’s gone on before. I refuse to serve as the Clarence Darrow of kitsch and try to make some sort of case for the “cultural value” of most of what’s been pounded into our ears for the past half-century by tone-deaf publishers, greedy jobbers, and all those hack songwriters who’ve been trying to turn a fast buck. Perhaps you enjoy such exhibits as Roy Acuff and his Smoky Mountain Boys singing “I’ve Got Pins and Needles in My Heart,” but I pass. If your psyche was touched by “There’s a Star-Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere,” good for you. Mind was not, and I can also do without most songs about Dixie, Texas, sweethearts named Ida, Charmaine, Marie, Sue, old farm homes, old gangs, buddies, pals, rivers, lakes, and hometowns. (Of course they were popular hits. Wasn’t it H. L. Mencken who postulated, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating American public taste”?)

But there is still one basic rule that applies even to current pop music. Only two or three percent of what’s written and recorded “makes it.” Ninety-seven percent of all the music and lyrics that are being recorded in eight-track stereo today will be forgotten by this time next year. Two, three percent get a response from the listeners and make the Top Fifty on the charts, or scale the heights of the Top Ten. The rest, as they always have, disappear into limbo.

What propels those chosen hit songs up to the Himalayan heights of mass success? I only wish I could tell you. I’d be rich and so would you. The best approximation I’ve been able to unearth is that something indefinable in the music or the lyric manages to pluck at a nerve inside the listener. Somehow, it induces a response. When enough of those nerves respond, people remember the song, and the chances are good that they’ll make it into a success.

Some songwriters have pounded away at the piano all their lives and come up with a lot of songs but no hits. Some have hit it once—one song that remains in the public memory bank. When I was young, the entire country was suddenly delighted with a nonsense ditty called “The Music Goes Round and Round.” I leave it to other researchers to unearth what became of its authors, Mike Riley and Eddie Farley. Years later an obscure country-music fiddler named Al Dexter burst into success with a lament called “Pistol Packing Mama.” To the best of my knowledge, he never repeated it … nor did the authors of “Yes, We Have No Bananas” or “The Hut-Sut Song.”

But other songwriters have a long list of “standards”—successful songs that became lasting hits. People listened to their music, responded to it, hummed it. Sang the lyrics in the street, in the shower, or into some lady’s ear. Songwriters who have consistently turned out successes must certainly have something to communicate about the creative process of song-writing.

I went to search for the literature on the subject. Surely, I thought, there must exist a decent number of books in which songwriters such as Irving Berlin or Jerome Kern or their contemporaries—those who have consistently plucked at that public nerve—have discussed the subject.

The library shelves I checked were disappointing.

True, there are a few biographies in which one can ready the early life history of Mr. Berlin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Hoagy Carmichael, and certain others. Cole Porter is the subject of a definitive book, only lately published and long overdue. The Gershwins have been discussed in The Gershwin Years. But from that point on, unless you wish to include those lushly produced and decorated “songbooks,” which publishers are wont to put out from time to time, usually at Christmas, that’s about it.² If you really want to know something about most American songwriters and lyricists, and you haven’t access to Variety’s bound anniversary issues, where rich personal reminiscences are often published, you’re about to enter a peculiar zone of silence.

Songwriters are semi-anonymous.

Eventually, I went to discuss the changes in the American pop music scene with Abel Green, the editor of Variety, who has been reporting and interpreting show business all his life and must be considered a major authority. I queried him on the anonymity of songwriters.

“Yes, it’s true, and I don’t know how to explain it,” said Mr. Green. “Everybody in this country is involved with music. I used to have a gag that, out of a population of a hundred million Americans, there were a hundred million potential songwriters. When the new census figures came out, I rewrote the gag—now it’s two hundred million …

“Hell, there are more stories about songs and songwriters,” he continued, “than about any other branch of show business! I’ve heard them all my life. Whenever you get a songwriter to talk, he’s damned interesting.”

“No question,” I said. “Maybe I’m prejudiced, but very few songwriters I’ve ever met have been dull.”

“You know something?” mused Mr. Green. “I think songwriters have the greatest obituaries in the world. When a songwriter dies, the minute you read the list of the songs he wrote, you start to identify with him. All those titles, they strike nerves inside of you. It’s like Noel Coward said in one of his plays—the remarkable power of cheap music. People read the obit and they respond, ‘Oh, my God, he wrote that. I remember the first time I heard that song, I was at a dance with a girl … ‘ To remember what each one of his songs did to you is like running through the chapters of your own autobiography.”

“A damn shame that reaction sets in only after he shows up on the obit page,” I said.

“Well, I can think of one way to avoid that,” said Mr. Green. “The woods are still full of healthy songwriters and lyricists. Go talk to them now.”

If, as Irving Caesar remarked at the very first stirrings of this venture, there’s a pendulum of public taste and there are signs that it’s beginning to swing away from dissonance and amplified noise back toward melody and harmony and a graceful turn of phrase—well, is it too much to hope that this book may serve to give that pendulum a solid push?

A-one, a-two—and let’s take it from the top.