Bing Crosby (97 page)

Part of Decca’s invasion of the past focused on new versions of Crosby classics from before 1934, before Decca. Jack and Bing
had several possible motives. For one, they were good songs and, as Bing’s style had radically changed, warranted new interpretations.
For another, many of the songs were by Bing’s friends and associates, so he was doing them a favor. For a third, the idea
of making a movie based on Bing’s life had been in the air for a couple of years, since the deal Bing attempted to broker
for Ted Crosby and Grover Jones, and was thought more likely now, given the vogue for pictures about contemporary entertainers.
In that event, Decca would want to own versions of the essential records Bing had recorded for Brunswick. That was the nub
of the matter. Brunswick had recently been acquired by CBS, guaranteeing an impending rivalry.

In 1938 William Paley, who had declined to invest in Decca when the recording business was moribund, bought ARC (the holding
company for Brunswick and Columbia), with the intention of reviving Columbia as a prominent label. RCA Victor’s executive,
Edward Wallerstein, itching to leave the company, had convinced Paley to purchase ARC for $700,000. Paley did not need much
convincing. As the economy revived, he looked with increasing jealousy at David
Sarnoff’s NBC, which not only controlled two networks to his one but operated the profitable and prestigious RCA. The record
business had rallied: Kapp’s visionary pricing, Crosby’s steady and increasing sales, and the tremendous commercial breakthrough
of the swing craze brought the industry back to heights approaching the glory days of 1927. The turnabout would be complete
by 1940. Yet Paley had more than business on his mind. He wanted revenge.

Paley and Sarnoff had competed bitterly for ten years, frequently over cultural programming. At a time when intellectuals
disdained radio and Capitol Hill vetted its contributions to the national good, the networks strove for prestige; highbrow
signings were essential, even if they could not attract sponsors. In 1930 Paley brought off a historic coup by hiring the
New York Philhamonic, under the direction of Arturo Toscanini, for Sunday-afternoon broadcasts. Toscanini remained a CBS staple
until 1936, when he declined to renew his contract with the orchestra. Paley and the Philharmonic hoped he would change his
mind but in the interim reluctantly accepted his no. Sarnoff and his programming chief, John Royal, did not. Toscanini was
a prize catch, and they came up with an offer he could not refuse: NBC would create for him his own symphony orchestra. It
was a stunning, buccaneering gamble, the kind Paley prided himself on making. Paley went to war. With RCA’s former chief,
Waller-stein, in his camp and ARC in his pocket, he hoped to cut RCA off at the knees. His timing could not have been better.

By 1939 the synergy between records and radio had grown so significant,
Variety
initiated a new feature, “Network Plugs, 8
A.M.
to 1
A.M.”
— a list of the records most played on the flagship stations of the NBC (WEAF and WJZ) and CBS (WABC) networks, computed
over a week. Twenty to forty plays in a week was considered high and certain to increase the sales of sheet music and records.
The need for accurately tracked sales and playlists was answered in July 1940, when
Billboard
aced
Variety
and published its first chart of bestselling records, a signal tribute to a flourishing industry. By then, as
Time
reported in a September 1939 survey of the “Phonograph Boom,” it had “fattened into one of the fastest growing business in
the U.S., with an annual gross of some $36,000,000.”
²¹
Time
assigned most of the credit to “the five-year-old Decca concern, with Crosby as its Caruso.”
²²
Decca sold 12 million records in 1939, second only to
RCA (with 13 million), for an estimated annual gross of 4 million dollars. Bing accounted for a sixth of Decca’s sales — “a
post-Caruso record record.”
Fortune
reported that Decca ceased to advertise because the company could no longer keep up with orders. In 1940 Decca sold 18 million
records, still a close second to RCA.

Paley soon killed the various smaller ARC logos as well as Brunswick, reserving Columbia for his status signings, which included
several symphony orchestras, along with such conductors as Stokowski (Toscanini’s rival), Mitropoulos, Rodzinski, and Stock,
and just about any swing band with an open contract, including Goodman, Basie, Ellington, James, Krupa, Red Norvo and Mildred
Bailey, and Kay Kyser. Then he borrowed a page from Decca’s playbook. Kapp’s reduced prices had revitalized the whole industry;
Paley reduced the price of twelve-inch classical discs by half, to a buck apiece, driving a wedge into RCA’s dominance in
the field (the one area Kapp neglected). Meanwhile, there was now the issue of who owned the Brunswick catalog that Kapp had
nursed before leaving the company to create Decca. A deal was made. All Brunswick records made before Warner Bros. leased
the company to ARC, in December 1931, would go to Decca — in which Warner Bros. maintained a financial interest.
²³
All Brunswicks made after Warner Bros. had given ARC a ten-year lease, including most of the Crosby sides, would remain part
of CBS’s ARC holdings.

With Columbia going toe-to-toe with RCA and the increased acceptance of reissues, it was only a matter of time before both
companies would release old Crosby sides. At Kapp’s suggestion, Bing recorded new versions of his benchmark recordings, including
a couple that remained in the Decca trove. Kapp believed that the Bing of 1939 was far more acceptable to audiences than the
Bing who originally recorded “Star Dust,” “I Surrender, Dear,” “It Must Be True,” “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams,” “Home on
the Range,” and “Just One More Chance.” Most of those songs had been hits in late 1930 and early 1931; however mannered or
naive they may have sounded in 1939, they had been lanterns in the musical landscape of their day. Good songs ought to withstand
many and diverse interpretations, as indeed these did. Yet Bing’s remakes could only display, at best, a great singer singing
great songs. They could not recapture the novelty of brand-new songs rendered in a brand-new style. The originals
helped define the time in which they were created; the remakes helped define the ripening of Crosby.
²⁴

All the same, some were improvements over the originals. Bing was right to reclaim “Star Dust,” which had become one of the
most performed of all songs in the eight years since he introduced the lyric. Unfortunately, he dropped the verse, but his
entrance — after a spacey introduction with a long harp arpeggio (the kind Spike Jones later parodied in “Holiday for Strings”)
— is alluring and his follow-through is flawlessly composed, if a bit stentorian. After
East Side of Heaven,
Bing invited Matty Malneck to record with him on this session, and passages in Malneck’s swirling arrangement would later
be referenced by Gordon Jenkins in the setting he devised for a definitive 1956 Nat “King” Cole version. Malneck’s ensemble
included Manny Klein and accordionist Milton DeLugg, both of whom are scored high so that Bing’s voice is the low instrument,
an anchor for the others, especially on another strong tune from the session, “Deep Purple,” notable for Bing’s range and
expansive low notes.

He was unable to replicate the magic of the 1933 “Home on the Range,” but he did bring a renewed authority to the Harry Barris
remakes, ensuring their survival as standards. The new “I Surrender, Dear” is more deeply felt and conversational than the
original. The long instrumental prelude and jazzy tempo changes of the Jimmy Grier arrangement are gone, but a comparison
of the vocals reveals the greater finesse and weightiness he now brought to the song that had hastened his journey to network
radio.

“Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” is more remarkable, supernally relaxed, especially in the effortlessly dramatized bridge. The
song lends itself to Bing’s legato phrasing with a two-bar rhythmic pattern that occurs eleven times — that is, for twenty-two
of its thirty-two bars: quarter note
(wrap)
quarter note
(your)
eighth note eighth note
(trou-bles)
quarter note
(in)
dotted half
(dreams)
quarter note
(and).
On every occasion, Bing expands the dotted half note, pushing the following quarter note into the next bar, producing a subtle
syncopation and a canny example of his musical pulse at work. In a second take, sung at a brighter tempo, his embellishments
are more overt, and it might have been chosen for release, except that an apparent change in the arrangement confused Bing
as he headed into the final
bridge, resulting in the most famous of Crosby fluffs, played out to the bitter end:

Castles may tumble, that’s fate after all

Life’s really funny that way

Sang the wrong melody, we’ll play it back

See what it sounds like, hey hey

They cut out eight bars, the dirty bastards

And I didn’t know which eight bars he was gonna cut

Why don’t somebody tell me these things around here

Holy Christ, I’m going off my nut.

The fluff take was instantly bootlegged, and fifty or so copies were released on a label stamped Triple-X. Soon numerous bootlegs
of the bootleg were pirated — an underground hit.

Other kinds of nostalgia permeated Bing’s 1939 recordings. Accompanied by Victor Young, he turned to Gershwin for the first
time in three years to essay exceedingly slow and reflective versions of “Somebody Loves Me” and “Maybe.” He also returned,
after three years, to Dick McIntyre for two of his best Hawaiian songs, “To You, Sweetheart, Aloha” and “My Isle of Golden
Dreams,” displaying the candor that enriched his readings of songs from the Gus Edwards era. His affection for the melodies
is unmistakable, as is his evident enjoyment in the sound of his voice. On two occasions, in 1955 and 1960,
²⁵
Bing cited “My Isle of Golden Dreams” as his favorite record, an intriguing selection because Decca rarely saw fit to reissue
it during the next sixty years. Say this much: it represents the purity of his voice and his agile control at a glorious peak.
The phrasing is unerring, the high notes full and fair, and the mordents — varied in stress and duration — are never merely
ornamental; they
do
something, advancing meaning and feeling.

Those qualities were no less apparent when, with Johnny Mercer’s lyric, he transformed “And the Angels Sing,” Benny Goodman’s
jazzed-up
fraylich
— a Yiddish dance tune drawn from klezmer music — into a ballad. Goodman’s record propelled the jitterbugs with its heady
two-beat interlude by trumpet player Ziggy Elman, who devised the piece. In turning it into a love song, Bing understates
everything yet brings his own undulations into play: on the superb release, his mordents roll out like ripples in a stream.

For sentiment of another kind, in March Kapp recorded Bing singing Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” written in 1917 but
suppressed by the composer because he thought it a shameless flag-waver, until Kate Smith asked him for a patriotic song on
the eve of the Second World War. He also recorded Francis Scott Key’s “The Star Spangled Banner,” written in 1814 and decreed
by an act of Congress as the national anthem in 1931. They were not chosen for musical or commercial value, though the convincingly
sung Berlin song sold remarkably well — almost as well as Kate Smith’s. Bing’s take on the national anthem is unsurprising;
he sings it straight and sober, as though he were standing in a ballpark. These records convey little significance today.
They are musical heirlooms. But in their day they imparted a political meaning beyond rote patriotism.

In March 1939, when the Berlin and Key songs were recorded, patriotism was a sorely contested idea. In one of the strangest
consequences of political opportunism, the far left (communists) and far right (American Firsters) snuggled together under
the covers of isolationism. Hitler was not the problem, they agreed; it was either J. P. Morgan and Jewish bankers or commies
and Jewish radicals, or the imminent invasion of an Asian horde (the Yellow Peril) sweeping westward to wipe out civilization,
Christianity, and white people. Personalities as anomalous as Father Charles E. Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh were heard
by millions on radio, arguing that Hitler was the last bulwark against greater evils. The country refused to consider war,
and Roosevelt despaired of mobilizing aid for Europe. Even as he pushed through the Lend-Lease Act in 1941, providing credit
for opponents of the Axis, the Almanac Singers sang, “Franklin D., listen to me /You Ain’t a-gonna send me ‘cross the sea.”
²⁶

“The Star Spangled Banner” is not an isolationist song. Before Bing, the last singer to make a popular record of it was John
McCormack, in the spring of 1917, as General Pershing’s American Expeditionary Forces headed for France. In the immediate
weeks before Bing made his version, Franco marched on Madrid, and Hitler — after conscripting all German youth and refusing
to meet with Roosevelt — invaded Prague and Memel. A couple of weeks before that,
in the United States, 22,000 Nazis congregated in Madison Square Garden; anti-Nazi protests of equal size followed. Music
was invariably caught in the crosshairs: the Daughters of the American Revolution declared Marian Anderson unfit to perform
in Constitution Hall because of her color; Germany banned jazz and swing; Russia purged the leadership of the Komsomol for
permitting music that encouraged the rumba, tango, and jitterbug; Italy allowed swing but barred Jewish music and musicians
as well as most American movies. In 1940 the recently resigned ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, addressed fifty
top Hollywood executives at a luncheon and told them to “stop making anti-Nazi pictures or using the film medium to promote
or show sympathy to the cause of the democracies versus the dictators.” He warned them to “get those Jewish names off the
screen.”
²⁷