Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Sinatra was part of their shared soundtrack, but far from the entirety of it. He and his peers represented old values which were threatened by teenage culture; adult pleasures, too, whether they were adultery, alcohol and the roulette wheel, or in Sinatra’s case hobnobbing with the mob. From their artwork to their rich orchestrations, they symbolised sophistication: hard-won, well-earned, part of the post-war settlement between America and its middle class. With the swing and swagger of Sammy Davis Jr’s dance steps, the teasing sensuality of Dean Martin’s voice and the carefree ease of Sinatra’s phrasing, adulthood had never seemed so desirable or so hip.

  It was inevitable that the most durable and malleable of the teenage stars would share the same goals – after all, Sinatra had been the subject of adolescent screams himself. So Elvis Presley was eased, after his return from the army, into pop confections such as ‘It’s Now or Never’ and ‘Surrender’, on which he sublimated the reckless sexuality of his earlier rock hits into adult flirtatiousness. His biggest 1960s hits were borrowed from the Italians, for whom operatic drama and epic romance were second nature. Bobby Darin modelled himself on Sinatra; even teens such as Bobby Rydell and Paul Anka were persuaded to record cabaret favourites. In 1960, Presley appeared alongside Sinatra on a TV special, while Darin and Anka recorded live albums at the Copa nightclub in New York (and Anka subsequently penned the English lyric for ‘My Way’, of course).

  But it was the older generation, veterans of the dance-band era, who established the market for albums. LP records were priced as luxury items for adults (even more so, the equipment on which to play them). During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the likes of Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Doris Day, Johnny Mathis and dozens more enjoyed lucrative sales with records that often drew from the same limited pool of ‘standards’ and recent Hollywood movie themes. What they were selling, ultimately, was their vocal personality, and the guarantee of quality entertainment: quality implying dependable and familiar, as well as aesthetically pleasing. If you were investing in an album, you expected a laminated, full-colour sleeve; tasteful art direction; liner notes to reinforce the virtue of your choice; and music to create a mood, and sustain it.

  Other artists than Frank Sinatra offered a soundtrack for a lifetime, evolving alongside their audience in ways at which he would have baulked. In France, the chansons of Gilbert Bécaud, Jacques Brel and the notoriously risqué Georges Brassens offered sophistication with a hint of the gutter, preparing the path for the even more outspoken Serge Gainsbourg. The scenario of Brassens’s 1952 hit ‘Le Gorille’ – a giant ape extravagantly well endowed for sexual congress – would have been unimaginable fare in any English-speaking culture before the 1970s. Time magazine recounted that his repertoire covered ‘the brutalities of war3, the vagaries of love, the folly of politics, and the hardships of being a gravedigger or a streetwalker’: the stuff of literature, not the romantic ballad.

  Petula Clark’s world was more respectable. She had been a child prodigy in wartime Britain, a pop starlet in the early 1950s, a songwriter, a star in her adopted homeland (by marriage) of France, and finally, in the 1960s, the UK’s closest equivalent to a Sinatra or Bennett, who could channel their sometimes bitter experience into the way they phrased a line. Her equivalent in Japan was Misora Habari, whose forty-year career spanned everything from swing to boogie-woogie, tango to twist, cabaret sophistication to bubblegum pop. Like Clark, her catalogue provided a one-woman history of pop’s surreal progress from the Jazz Age to the Swinging Sixties.

  Even more central to the album market were the collections of songs, themes and incidental music from Broadway shows and Hollywood musicals. (‘It looks as if the minds4 of those who commission LPs can only think in terms of tinselly pastiches of the so-called Roaring Twenties, or of Broadway show-tunes, or albums designed to exploit every percussion instrument’, Gramophone complained in 1962.) In the 1950s, only Elvis Presley’s Christmas Album (itself a common gimmick for the adult market) out-sold the cast LP from My Fair Lady, featuring Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison. The film soundtrack for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! set rural nostalgia to music reminiscent of an operetta: quality, indeed. Most popular of all was South Pacific, as cast album and then movie soundtrack, from a drama involving – scandalously – inter-racial romance, although the liaisons between an American serviceman and an island girl, and an American nurse and a Frenchman, were carefully designed not to rile the Ku Klux Klan. This was Rodgers and Hammerstein again, with such enduring songs as ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ and ‘Nothing Like a Dame’. Yet the cultural reach of the Hollywood musical paled alongside the all-conquering force of its equivalent in India. There, almost all films were musicals, and the handful of ‘playback singers’ who provided the vocals for the actors on screen were stars as potent as any Sinatra or Presley. (And much more prolific: in a career stretching from 1948 to 1984, Lata Mangeshkar recorded approximately 30,000 songs for cinematic use.) The instrumental arrangements of India’s so-called ‘Golden Era’, from 1950 into the mid-1960s, were as extravagant as the emotional dramas that they decorated.

  The 1950s was also the decade of mood music, easy listening, what the French composer Erik Satie called ‘furniture music’. (He once held a recital at which he demanded that the audience talk while he performed, and was outraged when they insisted on listening.) The vast majority of popular albums during this decade fell into one of these categories. The finest auteurs attracted sales and loyalty worthy of any pop star. Mantovani, for example, used Decca’s ‘ffrr’ sound enhancements to create a cascading string sound, which was debuted on the 1951 hit single ‘Charmaine’, and then dominated more than fifty chart albums over the next twenty years. So luscious was the orchestration on his 1958 LP Film Encores that its effect was positively unnerving, as if aliens were using violins as methods of mass hypnosis. Ray Conniff was just as popular: his trick was to identify hooks, or patterns, beneath the obvious pull of the melody, and accentuate them. His breakthrough album was S’Wonderful from 1957, demonstrating the wordless chorale (four men, four women) that was his trademark. Concert in Rhythm applied the same almost seamless blend of voices and instruments to familiar classical themes. His only unsuccessful venture was Dance the Bop, a pseudo-rock album which was too … not abrasive, perhaps, but present, too obtrusive to work as background music. Conniff’s singers set the pattern for easy-listening music to come. As the chronicler of ‘elevator music’, Joseph Lanza, wrote: ‘Shadow choruses were so common5 by the late 1950s and early 1960s that few instrumental artists prospered without featuring them on at least one album, and hardly any pop singer could decline to enlist their powerful background magic. The singing style went completely counter to the sweat-passion of jazz, soul, rock and folk. When not voicing wordless choruses, these singers practiced subdued lyricising with a willingness to be as self-effacing as the quiet, dreamy fiddles sharing their space.’ Commercial king of the chorale was Mitch Miller, whose Gang – twenty-eight men, harmonising on old, familiar tunes – gained enormous success with their Sing Along With Mitch albums between 1958 and 1962.

  This was an art of exquisite touches, and consummate marketing. Once established, the brand of the 101 Strings, the Living Strings or the Mystic Moods Orchestra could prosper for decades, living proof of the power of what Vance Packard, in his 1957 exposé of the advertising industry, called The Hidden Persuaders. Classical pianists Ferrante & Teicher doubled as experimentalists for the gorgeous, almost obese romanticism of their keyboard, chorale and orchestra concoctions. ‘They devised a series6 of “original gadgets” to extend the tonal range of the pianos’, historian Joseph Murrells described. ‘They used strips of sandpaper, cardboard wedges, etc., in their pianos applied to the strings for weird effects to resemble drums, xylophone, castanets, gongs and harpsichord, reaching into the pianos to pluck, strum and pound on the strings in novelty numbers.’ Scientific invention and musical proficiency combined to create
aural stimulation – but not too much of it. As Reader’s Digest magazine noted of the Muzak service in 1946, ‘brain workers find that it7 lessens tension and keeps everyone in a happier frame of mind’ (although a minority of passengers in Washington, DC protested vehemently in 1948 when authorities extended Muzak to the city’s buses). To ensure that the service would never take its listeners by surprise, Muzak’s engineers would ‘squeeze down the dynamic range8 to a maximum of 25 decibels (compared to 50 on normal LPs)’.

  Those who bought easy-listening records – or wallowed in their radio equivalent, the so-called ‘good music’ shows – were not buying into the jazz or rock ethic of constant reinvention and progression; not, at least, in terms of musical progress. For this was an era of dramatic changes in the process of sound reproduction. Bizarre though it might seem to anyone raised in the era of surround-sound cinemas and stereo headphones, recorded music was an entirely monaural affair before the late 1950s: one speaker, one channel of sound. Then, a revolution: two speakers, two separate sources of music: the stereophonic era had arrived.

  The light shines in the eyes9 of every recording musician, the least important man in the band is now on an equal level with the soloist, his performance can be heard. He plays with a fresh spirit. The bandleader knows that the whole world can now hear the band as he’s always heard it – standing in the middle of it. This is something we all dreamed about and never thought would happen. This will be looked back on as the golden age of sound.

  Bandleader Ted Heath, 1959

  Each manufacturer has invented10 some damned silly name by which its recordings are more sonic than others.

  American Record Guide magazine, September 1962

  In the final weeks of 1959, more than 2,000 people filled Portsmouth Guildhall for a demonstration of the new stereo sound. Composer and arranger Stanley Black was in attendance, as the audience studied everything from his film scores to excerpts from Wagner’s operas, all blaring out in this artificially separated format. Almost thirty years after EMI had first patented a system of stereo sound recording, it was finally being made available to the public (a year later in cash-starved Britain than in America).

  Each record label coined its own hyperbolic language to describe its stereo releases: the Full Dimensional Stereo of Capitol, for instance, the 360 Degree Sound of Columbia, Visual Sound Stereo from Liberty, Stereosonics, Living Presence and the rest. Decca trumped them all with Phase 4 Stereo, and its saga of engineers marching towards sonic perfection. Phase 1, apparently, replicated the experience of being in a concert hall; Phase 2 allowed tricks that were soon known in the industry as ‘ping-pong music’, whereby sounds skipped from one side of the room to the other; Phase 3 involved ‘moving’ sound; and in Phase 4, the culmination of mankind’s millennia on Earth, there were ‘new scoring concepts11 incorporating true musicalese of separation and movement’. It was, Decca concluded, the equivalent of leaping from two to three dimensions. (Fortunately for the addled brains of its consumers, Decca never reached Phase 5.)

  Initially viewed as a gimmick, stereo was soon appreciated on aesthetic grounds. ‘The more spacious the music12 and the larger the orchestra,’ said British bandleader Cyril Stapleton, ‘the greater the thrill.’ To illuminate the fact, countless stereo demonstration albums were recorded, between 1958 and 1970. Percy Faith was one of the first arrangers to glimpse the potential of being able to alter the sound picture with sudden or slow movements of instruments (though one American reviewer dismissed this style as ‘music to test your speakers13’). Capitol Records exposed their thinking with their Staged for Stereo series, boasting: ‘It is obvious that the audio engineer14 has become an important creative force in the presentation of musical ideas.’ This prompted a sniffy response from the American Record Guide: ‘The music is being made15 to fit the medium; the medium is not being used to serve the music.’ The doyen of this style was Enoch Light, dismissed as ‘the King of the Bouncing Ball’ by the media.

  The phrase ‘high fidelity’ (hi-fi for short) had been popularised in 1954 to describe the sound offered by 33 rpm LPs; and it became shorthand for the constant developments in phonographic sound. This was a lucrative industry: sales in the US increased by 500% between 1952 and 1955. ‘Dedicated audio fans16’, one report noted, ‘insist on buying components separately … the price can go as high as $2,500.’ It was soon a cliché, albeit one with a certain wry accuracy, that some consumers were more interested in the fidelity of their sound than the content of their records; the opposite end of the spectrum being occupied by those who used antique or damaged equipment to indulge their passion for music. (Hi-fi enthusiasts, it should be noted, were said to be almost always male, often middle-aged, usually single, and with a ‘compulsive personality17’. In some cases, a clinical psychiatrist claimed, their record collection represented a ‘symbolic harem18’.)fn1 The record industry always viewed the classical market as being the target audience for its sonic innovations. But the ability to paint more expansive pictures in sound inspired artists of varied ambitions.

  No act received more intense and widespread acclamation from the critics in the early hi-fi age than the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra. Formed by two of the top swing arrangers, Sauter-Finegan set out to occupy the previously unnoticed gap between dance music and light music. Their gimmick (every band needed one) was their experimental use of as many unorthodox instruments as their orchestra could muster hands and mouths. Their repertoire mixed original material with reworked classical themes and revamped pop standards, achieving a peak of ambition with the extended suite ‘Pictures from Sauter-Finegan Land’ and the luscious instrumental ‘Sleepy Village’, of which the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson would have been proud. One critic described them as ‘the first band whose existence20 has been made possible by the widespread use of high-fidelity equipment’. ‘We sound awful21 on a jukebox’, Eddie Sauter admitted. They toured with a ‘special rheostat control panel22’ with which their two arrangers could mix and remix their orchestra’s sound in situ. But their organisation proved too expensive to keep on the road, and instead the two men were reduced to creating jingles for advertising agencies.

  Sauter-Finegan were never a jazz band – they abhorred improvisation on stage – but their willingness to cross artistic borders was shared by the most controversial bandleader of the post-war era: Stan Kenton. His orchestra debuted in New York in 1942, and was immediately criticised for its over-serious tone. Voted the Best Band of 1946, it was described – in what was intended as a compliment – as inducing ‘a kind of musically manic state23 in a land of music lovers whose tastes are as wild and as varied as the violently opposite reactions of any manic-depressive can be’. In late 1948, Kenton followed Artie Shaw’s example by quitting the business rather than trying to satisfy an audience he viewed as innately conservative. This was a representative reaction from a British jazz fan: ‘If playing flat simultaneously24 in five different keys … if collecting a large group of presumably accomplished musicians only to set them to work doing sound effects for a paranoid nightmare, if all these things add up to anything remotely deserving the title progressive jazz, then I’m a Carpathian mountain goat.’

  A year later Kenton was back, daring his listeners to brave a tour entitled Innovations in Modern Music. (British bandleader Vic Lewis borrowed a sheaf of Kenton arrangements and billed them as ‘music for moderns’.) Some found his new sound explosively inspired; others showed their displeasure by sitting on the edge of the dance floor until he agreed to dust down his wartime swing arrangements. Meanwhile, his records became increasingly modernist: he moved beyond the conscious polytonality of Darius Milhaud’s compositions into areas where Schönberg might have feared to tread, notably with the City of Light and This Modern World suites written and arranged by Bob Graettinger. Their structure, it was revealed, was planned using ‘mathematic computations25, colour charts and graphs’. Jazz Journal responded with a ‘progressive’ joke: ‘During a long intermission26, a waiter dro
pped a tray of dishes, and three couples got up to dance.’ There was no further that jazz could go whilst masquerading as a form of popular music: free jazz would prove to be an aurally and intellectually stimulating arena in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, but only for a cult audience.

  There’s always an uncomfortable27 feeling when I listen to modern jazz. The American people have created modern jazz out of a world of nervousness, confusion – and when I listen to modern jazz, I too become very confused, emotionally, and I want to get away from it.

  Eartha Kitt, 1954

  If this is what jazz28 is going to sound like in a few years’ time, then I hope I won’t still be listening to new records.

  Jazz Journal review of Ornette Coleman, August 1962

  ‘I saw such men as Miles Davis29 and Lee Konitz playing to the furniture’, revealed a Melody Maker correspondent after a tour of New York’s barren jazz clubs in autumn 1956. In 1950, Teddy Wilson proclaimed that ‘jazz is dead’. For Stan Kenton, the realisation that ‘jazz is finished’ came in 1964. Yet this was an era of jazz landmarks: the ‘birth of the cool’, the West Coast sound, Kind of Blue, free jazz; Miles Davis collaborated with Gil Evans, and with John Coltrane; Gunther Schuller imagined music that would be neither jazz nor classical but a ‘third stream’ pitched midway between those poles; the Modern Jazz Quartet refashioned jazz as chamber music; Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp and many more explored the liberation of pure self-expression. Yet in retrospect what is stunning about all this music is its comparative unpopularity. Even Kind of Blue, the most famous jazz album of all time, could not muster enough sales to feature amongst the Top 50 LPs in America: its renown was accumulated slowly, almost by word of mouth, and many could not initially grasp the beauty of what Davis and Evans had created. The riches of this era, and those that followed, seeped with agonising slowness into the collective consciousness.