The B Side

by Ben Yagoda

  In a 1953 New Yorker profile, Robert Rice commented on Miller’s “deep lack of interest in—in fact, almost a contempt for—popular music.” The implication was that his respect was saved for the classics. “Popular songs and singers are only more or less marketable commodities to him,” Rice went on. “His appraisal of them is quite unaffected by prejudice or emotion, since he regards them all as negligible from an artistic point of view.” Johnny Mandel summed up his sense of Miller’s operating aesthetic: “Mitch used to say, ‘If I hated it, it would be a hit.’” “I wouldn’t buy that stuff for myself,” Miller told Time magazine in 1951, referring to the hits he produced at Columbia. “There’s no real artistic satisfaction in this job. I satisfy my musical ego elsewhere.”

  Performers and musicians who came out of jazz, broadly speaking, and who did not view popular music as artistically negligible chafed at Miller’s approach. Mandel told Will Friedwald, “I think Mitch Miller set the music business back thirty or forty years, which is inexcusable for somebody who was as great a musician as he was.” Bandleader Elliot Lawrence said simply, “I liked Mitch as a person, but his taste was horrendous.” Tony Bennett, a young singer from Astoria, Queens, had been signed by Miller and had huge success in the early fifties under his direction, but wasn’t happy with the material presented to him—for example, country singer Hank Williams’s “Cold, Cold Heart,” which was about as far from Queens as you could get (naturally, it was a BMI tune). However, the fact that Bennett’s record reached number one on the charts in the summer of 1951 and stayed there for six weeks couldn’t exactly be ignored. “Mitch had a knack for finding these snappy little novelty tunes,” Bennett recalled in his autobiography, The Good Life. “I wasn’t interested in singing that type of song. Yet Mitch kept trying to push these kinds of tunes on me, and as much as we liked each other, there was always tension between us. I wanted to sing the great songs, songs that I felt really mattered. . . . Fortunately, Mitch and I came to an understanding. We were still doing four tunes per recording session at that time, so we worked out a deal. He picked two songs and I picked two songs.”

  At one point, Miller hired Johnny Mandel to arrange a Doris Day album. “I loved Doris, she was a wonderful singer and girl,” Mandel recalled. “But she was constantly doing terrible material. When I was working on the album, Mitch Miller came in like a general and said to me, ‘Kid, you’re about to make a lot of money. I’m gonna teach you to write like Ray Conniff.’” Conniff was a former big-band trombonist who emerged as an arranger for Columbia in the mid-fifties. His specialty was (wordless) choral backing vocals, and he was so successful on Don Cherry’s “Band of Gold” and other songs that in 1957 Miller let him start putting out mood music albums under his own name.

  “And I said, ‘Mitch, it’s been wonderful meeting you,’ and I’m out the door,” Mandel said. “I apologized to Doris, and I haven’t seen her since. She was one of the really great singers that were totally trashed.”

  Rosemary Clooney balked when Miller presented her with “Come On-a My House,” which had been concocted by the playwright William Saroyan and songwriter Ross Bagdasarian (later the creator of Alvin and the Chipmunks) on a cross-country drive. She recalled in her autobiography: “I thought the lyric ranged from incoherent to just plain silly, I thought the tune sounded more like a drunken chant than an historic folk art form, and I hated the gimmicky arrangement: It was orchestrated for jazzed-up harpsichord, of all things, with a kind of calypso rhythm.” She told Miller: “I don’t think so.” “Know what I think?” he replied. “I think you’ll show up because otherwise you will be fired.”

  Miller’s relationship with Sinatra was chilly from the moment the Beard arrived at Columbia. At that point Sinatra was not only under contract but in debt to the label, which had advanced him $100,000. He was finding it hard to pay up because his career was at its nadir, the bobby-soxer screams of the 1940s a distant and nearly indistinct memory. Miller emptied his full bag of tricks to get Sinatra a hit record, but, with occasional exceptions like a 1950 cover version of “Good Night, Irene,” which peaked at number five, his sides didn’t sell. Sinatra, never known for his graciousness when things weren’t going well, privately and publicly demeaned Miller and his “repertoire” choices, including this exchange with an Atlantic City disk jockey about the folksy lullaby “Good Night, Irene”:

  DJ: Hey, that’s a nice tune.

  Sinatra: You wanna bet? (pauses) Naw, it’s really cute.

  DJ: You oughta do a lot of songs like that.

  Sinatra: Don’t hold your breath!

  Sinatra would crack the top ten only one more time at Columbia, with a swinging 1951 number called “Castle Rock.” The ever-resourceful Ervin Drake, together with his partner Jimmy Shirl, had put words to an instrumental by the jazz saxophonist Al Sears, including the lines “We rocked to romance to the Castle Rock” and—years before Bill Haley—“rock-around-the-clock.” It’s not often mentioned as one of the first rock-and-roll numbers, but it belongs in the conversation.

  Eventually, Sinatra went to Billboard with his complaints about Columbia, the magazine reporting: “Chief beef hinges on Sinatra’s claim he isn’t getting a fair shake on song material. Sinatra has waged a long-smoldering feud with Mitch Miller.” “Do I still think it’s hard to find a decent new pop tune these days?” the singer rhetorically asked in a 1953 Down Beat interview. “Man, it’s worse than ever. These trick songs are coming out of my ears. . . . I think it’s all part of a cycle—including the echo chambers and the other gimmicks—that will exhaust itself.” In later years, Sinatra would accelerate his attack, claiming that the Beard forced him to record “Mama Will Bark” and other dreck. In interviews through the 2000s, Miller always countered that neither he nor the label could force Sinatra to record anything—that the singer had right of refusal on song selection and moreover that his career was in such bad shape at the time that he was willing to try anything, even “Mama Will Bark.” Sinatra, Miller commented in the 1980s, “was trying to find a scapegoat for the dip in his career.”

  And Sinatra did indeed turn down some songs. At one session Miller presented him with “My Heart Cries for You” and “The Roving Kind.” The former had been adapted by Carl Sigman and Percy Faith from an eighteenth-century French melody, and Howie Richmond had concocted the latter from an old British sea shanty called “The Pirate Ship.” Sinatra opined that both were just too corny to put on wax. Miller had the musicians, technicians, and studio already booked, so he brought in a young singer named Albert Cernik to perform the numbers. Cernik did a creditable job, but the name had to go. Miller said, “My name is ‘Mitchell’ and you seem a nice ‘guy,’ so we’ll call you Guy Mitchell.” “The Roving Kind” climbed to number four on the charts and “My Heart Cries for You” to number two. Mitchell went on to have four more top-ten hits for Columbia in the next two years.

  Columbia finally dropped Sinatra in 1952. At his last session, the singer, who was possibly the least twangy human being in America, recorded a twangy Percy Faith–Dick Manning number called “Tennessee Newsboy.” Miller had hired a steel guitar player named Wesley “Speedy” West, who, according to Paul Weston, “was known for making the guitar sound like a chicken. Frank sang the vocal, and Mitch rushed out into the studio, and everybody thought he was going to congratulate Frank for getting through. . . . Instead, he rushed right past Frank, and embraced Speedy West, because he’d made a good chicken noise on the guitar. Frank was disgusted.”

  In 1956, a House of Representatives subcommittee held hearings on the issue of possible monopoly in the broadcast industry. One day the chairman, Emanuel Celler, read into the record a telegram he had received from Sinatra. It was basically a complaint about Mitch Miller, expressed with a Damon Runyon faux formality. Sinatra claimed:

  Before Mr. Miller’s arrival at Columbia Records, I found myself enjoying a freedom of selection of material—a freedom which I may modestly say resu
lted in a modicum of success for me. Suddenly Mr. Miller by design or coincidence began to present many, many inferior songs all curiously bearing the BMI label. I, on my own behalf, to protect my career then and for the future, engaged Mr. Miller in a series of discussions concerning the merits of the said material against my own choice which by coincidence in each case was from the catalog of ASCAP. If you will pardon the expression, Mr. Congressman, I refused to beat my creative head against the wall. The point is before Mr. Miller’s advent on the scene I had a successful recording career which quickly went into a decline.

  The next day Celler remarked from the chair, “That is the trouble with a situation like this, when you put a telegram in the record you get a telegram in reply.” The reason for his remark was that he had received a sworn affidavit from one Mitchell Miller, asserting “[Sinatra’s] charges against me are false. . . . The source of music, whether it be ASCAP, BMI, or another, is immaterial to my choices of songs.”

  Miller went on:

  I have caused a search to be made of the files of Columbia Records with respect to the history of Frank Sinatra’s activities at Columbia Records from the time I went with Columbia Records in February 1950 until Sinatra left Columbia Records after his last recording there in September 1952. The results of that search are summarized as follows: The first 12 songs which Sinatra recorded with me at Columbia were ASCAP songs. His first BMI song of my tenure was not recorded until June 28, 1950. It was Good Night, Irene, and was a great hit. In the next 13 months Sinatra recorded 28 more ASCAP songs and 1 song in the public domain, and no BMI songs. Not until July 19, 1951, did he record another BMI song—Castle Rock. It also was a hit song. Sinatra’s total recordings during the 31 months we worked together at Columbia Records were 57 songs for single-record release, of which 51 were ASCAP, 5 were BMI, and 1 was in the public domain. Of the 51 ASCAP songs which he recorded during that period, 11 were published by music publishing firms in which Sinatra had a substantial interest.

  I have caused a check to be made of the public information about Sinatra’s recordings during the period since he left Columbia Records. His first great hit at Capitol Records in that period was the beautiful song, Young at Heart, a BMI song. In less than 4 years at Capitol, he has recorded a total of 49 songs which were released on single records; of these, at least 10 were BMI songs.

  Miller won that particular rhetorical battle, but he lost the war. Although he outlived Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, and virtually all the singers he recorded except Tony Bennett, they and their advocates among critics and journalists seized the narrative of the 1950s and shaped it into a story of Mitch versus the American Songbook. Miller didn’t help his cause by the career move he leaned into in 1958 with his LP Sing Along with Mitch. The disk featured Mitch and his male chorale, “the Gang,” performing hearty and straightforward renditions of old-fashioned tunes like “Down by the Old Mill Stream” (1910) and “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” (1909). It was comfort food for the generation who didn’t take to rock and roll or modern jazz; the record went to number one on the Billboard album charts and stayed there for eight weeks. Over the next four years Miller released seventeen more sing-along albums, fourteen of which hit the top ten. He parlayed that success into a television series called, naturally, Sing Along with Mitch, which ran on NBC from 1961 to 1964.

  With the demands of the television show—and the inescapable fact that Miller’s sort of music was no longer capable of generating hit singles—he eased into a consultant’s role at Columbia. In 1965 he moved to MCA Records, also as a consultant, but that didn’t take up much time. For the remaining years of his long life (he died in 2010, just after his ninety-ninth birthday), he would occasionally serve as guest conductor for orchestras around the country, and periodically give interviews that were alternately rueful, defensive, and defiant—and almost always got around to Sinatra.

  In one, Miller told author Charles L. Granata that, for a talk show he’d hosted on CBS Radio back in the late fifties,

  I’d go out to Las Vegas and do a lot of interviews, and I got to know Joe E. Lewis. So, this one time, I see him in the lobby of the Sands at about two or three in the morning. He said, “Look, Mitch. Frank is with Jack Entratter [who managed the Sands]. Come on over and say hello.” I said, “No, I’m not interested.” Now, Joe’s a little loaded, and he grabs me. So, we go over, and Joe says, “I brought Mitch over. Why don’t you shake hands.” And Frank, who was half-loaded himself, said, “Get lost, creep.”

  VI

  Brill Building Boys, and Girl

  1950–1955

  An office building at 1619 Broadway was constructed in 1931 and soon after became known as the place where, in the words of the writer A. J. Liebling, “the small-scale amusement industry nests like a tramp pigeon.” By the dawn of the 1950s, a young songwriter at the time, Dick Adler, later recalled, “the Brill Building was Tin Pan Alley. It was the hub of the music business. If you were in the business, that’s where you camped out. When you had something to peddle, you went from floor to floor, and you knocked on doors, and if they’d open, you’d say, ‘I’ve got something great to show you!’ And if you were lucky, they listened. And if it was a normal day, and you were unknown, they didn’t.” There was a particular method to the door-to-door rounds. An older songwriter named Al Hoffman—whose credits ranged from “I Apologize” (1931) through the wartime novelty phenomenon “Mairzy Doats” (cowritten with Ervin Drake’s brother Milton) all the way up to a 1950 collaboration with Bob Merrill, “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake”—took young Norman Gimbel under his wing and explained to him how you should take the elevator to the top of the Brill and work your way down. Gimbel eventually got a job as an office boy at a music publisher, and with Hoffman wrote “A Mighty Pretty Waltz,” recorded in 1952 by Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys. The irony that the Brooklyn-born Gimbel and the Minsk-born Hoffman were collaborating on this country confection didn’t trouble the younger man. “The honesty of country music appealed to me,” he said. (In 1954, Gimbel joined forces with composer Larry Coleman and fellow lyricist Joe Darion on “Ricochet Romance,” a proto-rock-and-roll song that was a hit for Teresa Brewer, and two years after that wrote lyrics for “Canadian Sunset,” a top-ten record for Andy Williams.)

  The more successful writers had their own offices, but that sounds more respectable than the reality. “The offices were so small that there was just enough room for a desk, an old upright piano, and an air conditioner that didn’t work in a window you could never open,” recalled another guy just starting out, Burt Bacharach. “When you finished a song, you would take it to a publisher and play it. If the publisher liked it, he would say, ‘Go make a demo.’ The publisher would pay for the demo and then it would be up to him to peddle the song to an artist who would record it. Some publishers knew a good song when they heard one, and some had no idea.”

  The cleffers who patrolled the Brill Building’s halls had specific demographic characteristics. The older ones—Hoffman, Al Stillman, Ervin and Milton Drake, Johnny Marks, Sidney Lippman, John Jacob Loeb, Bob Hilliard, Mack David and his kid brother Hal, Buddy Kaye, Bob Merrill, Dick Manning—were of Livingston and Evans’s generation but, due to circumstance, temperament, or, frankly, level of talent, hadn’t made it out to Hollywood during the period when one still could make it in Hollywood. (This group did get the occasional one-off movie assignment. For Disney’s 1950 Cinderella, Mack David, Hoffman, and the West Coast–based Jerry Livingston—no relation to Jay—wrote “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes” and “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo,” which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. It lost to Livingston and Evans’s “Mona Lisa.”) Broadway, having turned into a fairly stratospheric songwriting club, wasn’t an option for them. So they were tethered to the Brill Building, in a perennial change-partners-and-write-with-me effort to hit with a concept and a song.

  Dick Adler was twenty-nine years old in 1950�
�the same age as Merrill and lyricist Hal David. However, in addition to being a rather slow developer, he’d been in the Army during the war, as had Sheldon Harnick, born in 1924. The two of them belonged with a rather remarkable cohort of younger songwriters, all born within a five-year span:

  1926 Larry Holofcener, Carolyn Leigh, Jerry Ross, Phil Springer

  1927 Norman Gimbel, John Kander

  1928 Morris “Moose” Charlap, Burt Bacharach, Jerry Bock, Charles Strouse, Fred Ebb

  1929 Cy Coleman

  1930 Stephen Sondheim

  It is a striking list. All Jewish, twelve out of thirteen male, most born and raised in New York. All but Springer eventually found their way to the Broadway stage, but, with a single exception, that idea wasn’t under active consideration by any of them in 1950. The exception was Sondheim, who through a quirk of circumstance in his teenage years had become a protégé and a ward of sorts to Oscar Hammerstein II, and who was determined to one day join his mentor on Broadway. Sondheim graduated from Williams College in 1950, moved to the couch in his mother’s apartment, studied musical theory with Milton Babbitt, did odd jobs to keep the wolf away, and embarked on an apprenticeship in the musical theater. Two years later an assignment to write the score for a musical called Saturday Night appeared to conclude the apprenticeship. But the producers never raised enough money, and he didn’t debut on Broadway until 1957, when he provided the lyrics to Leonard Bernstein’s score of West Side Story. Sondheim, who always aspired to create both music and lyrics, and did so starting with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1962, is more or less the opposite of a Tin Pan Alley cleffer. There is no recorded instance of his attempting to write a hit song, and he has always regarded the success of his one composition to appear on the charts, “Send In the Clowns” (from A Little Night Music, 1973), with bemusement. But in two of his shows, Follies (1971) and Merrily We Roll Along (1981), he had reason to construct deliberately old-fashioned pop songs, and emerged with the splendid neo-standards “Broadway Baby,” “Not a Day Goes By,” and “Good Thing Going.” The last, in particular, sounds as if it could have been written by Jimmy Van Heusen in 1946. Sondheim, in any case, felt a kinship with his cohort, memorably displayed in the late-fifties scenes of Merrily. He has observed that in writing that show “I was trying to roll myself back to my exuberant early days, to recapture the combination of sophistication and idealism that I’d shared with Hal Prince, Mary Rodgers, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, John Kander and Fred Ebb, and the rest of us show business supplicants, all stripped back to our innocence.”