The Music Business and the Monkey Business: Recollections

By Larry Elgart and Lynn Elgart

Offering out-of-the ordinary tales, The Music Business and the Monkey Business by Lynn and Larry Elgart shares a range of experiences and characters. Humorous and bittersweet with gossipy vignettes, it explores the struggling days of the 1940s with the brothers Elgart trying to work in business together. It tells how Larry became the more famous brother with the mega hit Hooked on Swing and narrates what it was like to be an overnight sensation at age sixty. From the high seas to the Outback, Lynn and Larry give insight into their whirlwind life and music career.

With photos included, The Music Business and the Monkey Business offers a glimpse into being a musician for seventy five years.

I loved the stories. If its not a best seller then the world has turned to s--t!

Ed Asner

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Nov 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781480812079

Larry Elgart

Lynn Elgart is a graduate of Brandeis University. She managed Larry’s band for 25 years. She now designs jewelry for her company Big Band Beads. Larry Elgart who wrote Bandstand Boogie, the theme for American Bandstand before Dick Clark inherited it and before Barry Manilow wrote lyrics –comes an insider’s view of how the music business has changed through the decades- detailing its ups and downs and the joy of being a part of it. They have been married fifty-one years.

Book preview

1953 AMERICAN BANDSTAND

CHAPTER 1

Sophisticated Swing, our first recorded album, was a turntable hit. The disc jockeys all over the country were playing the record like crazy. How many albums were ever sold, we had no idea. We had no royalties, so there was no accounting, but the phones at the MCA booking agency were ringing off the hook wanting the band for every college prom in the country. The subtitle of the album said Americas College Prom Favorite and everybody believed the phrase. A salesman for Columbia encouraged Les and I to go on a promotional tour to meet the disc jockeys to thank them for playing the record. In those days the jockeys actually picked the tunes they were going to put on the air, Whereas today, program directors pick the tunes for jockeys and they reap the perks. We weren’t working at that time because the bookings were for the coming year, so we went to Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore. Those were important cities in which to get a record going. When we got to Philadelphia, we met Bob Horn who had a local TV program called Bandstand where Teenagers came to dance in front of the cameras to the latest hits. My brother Les approached Bob and asked if we recorded a theme song for him would he use it— and, of course, we would cut him into the writers’ share. Les was doing his old payola routine. Bob said if he liked it and if it were a boogie woogie, he’d use it.

Charlie Albertine and I went back to New York and started working on it. It was one of those times that Charlie said he was coming up with a blank. We were tired. We had been traveling and traveling in the car and staying up nights writing arrangements for the band. After about an hour or so, I said, How do you like this theme? I gave him the melody and then he wrote a release. We went to the studio and recorded it at our regular session. We then drove out to Philadelphia and played it for Bob Horn. He thought it was great. It was a deal. That was the birth of Bandstand Boogie. The writers’ royalties were divided up in this way: Charlie got 50 percent, a large piece in lieu of paying him, then Les, Bob Horn, and I divided the other 50.

Lee Eastman was a very aggressive music business lawyer who was interested in building his catalogue of music publishing. We went to him with Bandstand Boogie. Cherio Corporation, his company, became the publisher. His piece of the pie was that he got the publishing royalties, which was 50 percent. That meant that the four of us, Les, Bob Horn, Charlie Albertine and I were now splitting our percentage from the original half.. Lee Eastman’s daughter, Linda, married Paul McCartney and Eastman then enhanced McCartney’s riches (after his own) by buying up publishing companies for him.

Bob Horn got into a lot of trouble. He was accused of having sex with a 13-year-old girl. He was accused of drunken driving and injuring people. He was accused of statutory rape and was suspected of running a vice ring promising modeling careers to young girls to lure them into porno photo sessions and orgies. He spent three months in jail for DWI charges. It was easy to take Bandstand away from him. They came up with a youthful replacement (he really was young once) named Dick Clark. The show was doing so well they kept the theme song as part of the identity Bob Horn left town and went out to Houston and changed his name to Bob Adams. While mowing his lawn, he died of a heart attack at age 50. His headstone epitaph simply says: BANDSTAND. Clark took over Bob Horn’s idea and show for one month and then went national on ABC and changed the name of the show to American Bandstand. The concept of the show was dancing to the rock-and-roll hits of the day. The rest is history, and the program still uses our recording for the theme song. We never dreamed that 60 years later it would still be in everyone’s vocabulary.

In the 1970s, Barry Manilow, a frequent guest on the show, wrote lyrics. His share came out of the writers’ portion of the royalties which then made a fifth piece of the 50 percent pie. But, he revitalized the tune and brought it back to the pop market.

Les would occasionally call me up and ask me to sing the tune. Since he didn’t have anything to do with it except the initial deal making, he wasn’t all that familiar with it.

It was said that musicians couldn’t go on Dick Clark’s show unless they made some kind of deal. Clark couldn’t do this to us because the theme preceded him. He tried to get rid of it, but its identity was equal to his name. He did make it tough however; his office would call me and say that he was making a commemorative video or he was releasing an anniversary album, and I had to waive my royalties to Bandstand Boogie or he wouldn’t include it in the package. It was better to have the song out there at any cost. He did this on every project I was told about.

Once, Dick sent me a gift in a small box. As I opened it, I thought, perhaps a Rolex watch or keys to a new car? It was a $75 brass pencil sharpener with the initials DC on it. A card in his handwriting said, Merry! Dick Clark.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

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PART 1

NOBODY SAID IT WAS

GOING TO BE EASY

CHAPTER 2

When I was about 12 or 13, I used to practice the saxophone and clarinet for hours in the basement and would leave the window open looking out onto the unpaved dirt road. I hoped that Benny Goodman would walk by and hear me. I really believed it was possible. Hymie Shertzer was one of my favorite lead alto players with Benny. He decided he was going to leave the band and get into studio work in New York. When I was 16, I heard he was giving alto lessons on 48th street in a big music building with studios. I went to him and took lessons and we used to play duets. He said to Benny Goodman, If you’re patient, this is the guy you’re looking for to replace me. So on a summer day in 1938, I went down to the New Yorker Hotel where Benny was auditioning for the lead alto chair. He was looking for a replacement for Hymie. There were so many musicians there that I admired! I was scared. I went in and sat down. Benny Goodman must have been 10 feet tall. I don’t think I was able to get a note out of the horn. Benny was very encouraging saying, C’mon kid. You can do it. I finally turned to him and said, I can’t. And I got up and left the bandstand. It was the only time in my life that ever happened to me. So much for the kid who walked around with an autographed reed from Benny Goodman in his wallet. Years later, when I had the tremendous hit with Hooked on Swing, the agents wanted me to do a Radio City concert with Benny. He had just had a stroke and wasn’t able to perform, but he sent me a letter wishing me great success.

My family was a victim of the depression. My mother and father would drive from our little rural community of Riverview to look for work and leave Les and me alone for the day. I didn’t know where they went because my father could do so many things –steam fitting, electrical work, carpentry,,plumbing, building .He also had side jobs – one with a Frenchman making peanut brittle in the basement. He was amazing. He was strong and handsome and willing to do anything and yet it was the worst time. The neighbors, several fields away, had given up and moved on. They left their chickens and a dog, which I inherited. My father showed me how to make an incubator in the oven and my back yard grew to 18 hens and a young rooster. Les was about 12 years old and knew nothing about domestic life. He was more interested in sports, girls, smoking, and drinking. I knew how to fry eggs and I, at age 7, cooked for him. At first, I started with two eggs and Les thought it was good. Then I went to three, four, and then to five. Finally, Les became bilious and never ate an egg again in his life.

When I married Lynn, Les came for dinner and she served steak. In all seriousness, he looked up at her and asked, Is there any egg in this?

By the time Les was 14, my parents tried to stop him from smoking by buying him a car for $10. He and I would drive around the dirt roads but not onto the state road. He didn’t stop smoking. Rather, he drank more and joined a gang.

My passion for music began when I was nine years old. It consumed me for the rest of my life. My parents, though very poor, bought me a clarinet. I used to listen to big band remotes on my $1.50 crystal radio set for hours on end. Les drove me to the big city of Paterson, New Jersey where there was a music store with a teacher of all instruments. I had a lot of questions, and after several visits to Mr. Schertel, who wore spectacles on the end of his nose, turned to me and said, How could you be so big, so dumb? I listened and listened and I wanted to play all the reed instruments. My parents were able to find $100 for an alto saxophone. Uncle Murray had said, Why don’t you write a letter to Rudy Vallee and ask for one of his castoffs? The guy in the music store would get angry with me for taking so long to find two reeds at 20 cents each. He would say, Rudy Vallee comes in here and buys two or three boxes—just like that. Rudy Vallee was the first of a new kind of singer called the crooner. He was as big as Frank Sinatra at his height. Women would swoon in the audience and their husbands would throw eggs and tomatoes at him.

My first professional job came when I was 15. It was at the Blue Eagle Hotel in the Catskills. The pay was room and board and a few dollars a week. I played clarinet, flute, and tenor sax. The five-piece band played stock arrangements—watered down simplistic versions of the tune for any size group. We all lived in a chicken coop, sleeping on bunk beds, one on top of the other. We ate in the kitchen, not in the dining room. This was the great opportunity to play in a luxurious resort. At one point, I was so homesick I bought a bus ticket all the way back to see my parents and my girlfriend. I had ptomaine poisoning a few times so I didn’t gain any weight that summer. This was not union living at its finest. I knew when I returned home that I had to get my union card. The bitter experience of that summer kept me from ever wanting to return.

The trouble was the union card cost $50 and you had to be a resident of New York City to belong to Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians. It was before Christmas season and Sears was hiring extra help for the rush of customers. I got a job as a stock clerk/salesman in the housewares department. There were no price tags on things so when someone asked me, How much is this spoon? I would have to ask a full-time sales lady who would begrudgingly tell me as I interrupted her from her own transaction. After a while, I got really tired of this, so I tried to logically reason why one item would cost more or less than another based on differences in weight or the designs being ornate or simple. Then I would make up my own numbers. This worked out fine until one day a person asked me a lot of questions about the price of many things. She was an employed shopper for the store, checking on sales people. In the mornings they had a pep-talk meeting just before the store opened. The next morning when I arrived, I was told, You’re fired. They confronted me with the list of erroneous prices that the shopper had written down. The next job was carrying packages in a supermarket. This was in the days before shopping carts and parking lots. So, I would have my arms filled with packages and would have to walk several blocks to the car. Sometimes I would get a nickel or a dime and sometimes I would get a, Thank you sonny. No big sports in Teaneck, New Jersey.

Eventually, I saved close to $50, but I was not a resident of New York. My father had an idea. He called his older brother Harry Elgart who lived at the end of Borough Park in Brooklyn. I went to the union and gave my address as Uncle Harry’s. Every day thereafter I would get up early in the morning, take the bus to the George Washington Bridge, then the subway downtown, change for the Brooklyn extension and then walk to their house to wait for the union investigator. At night I would do the same trip in reverse. This lasted for a week until he finally showed up to confirm the address and that I was living there. I got my card and I am still a member.

My brother Les was a floornik.: He liked to hang around the union floor. He was always telling me to go to the union to look for work on the three days a week the floor was open. It was in an old building next to the 6th avenue El and a walk up a few flights of stairs into a noisy room with hundreds of people milling around. There was an announcer who would be paging someone all the time. What you got were the same people you knew. Everyone was in a click. If a guy offered you a club date, he would tell you that naturally it paid scale and then he would cross his one leg over the other to make himself shaped into a 4 like a flamingo. This meant that you needed to bring $4 kickback money with you. There were a lot of bands around then, and you would hear about auditions on the union floor.

The next few years were lean. I spent a lot of time at rehearsal bands, at club dates, and practicing, but not working. I lived at home with my dear parents. My mother was dying. I got married against her wishes. My wife tried to commit suicide on our honeymoon—a sign of things to come, but it was the 1940s and times were tough.

I did get l lot of big band experience working with Gerry Wald, Jack Jenney, Red Norvo, and Bobby Burn. I learned from each one. Tommy Dorsey pursued me. It was amazing how long he could hold the notes. He used a compressed minimal air stream and got maximum vibrations. That concept changed the way I played. Frank Sinatra also learned this technique from Tommy. Tommy was a master of his instrument. He was very disciplined and had no sense of humor. Though I never saw him out of control, he was a big drinker and he had a terrible temper. He cared for me because he admired my playing—nothing personal.

The last band I worked for in 1945 was the Woody Herman band, which became known as the First Herd. I got the job because one or two of the musicians were poor readers, but they were good jazz players. At that point, we didn’t have any good jazz arrangements so we would spend the night playing riffs—swingy improvisational figures. Everyone in the band smoked pot. I would drive with several guys to wherever we were playing and I couldn’t stand the smell. To this day, I have never tried drugs of any sort. Absurd things would happen when they were stoned. We were playing a high school in New Jersey and Neil Hefti, the composer of Batman, was dared to drink the ink from an inkwell. He downed it and when he returned to the bandstand, he fell backward and collapsed. How high do you have to be for that?

Igor Stravinsky, the classical composer of Firebird, and Rite of Spring, wrote a piece for Woody in 1945 called Ebony Concerto. It must have been very difficult for some of these guys who were very poor readers. The next year, Benny Goodman recorded it with Leonard Bernstein.

My brother Les and I decided we had to start our own band. The only problem was we didn’t have a leader or money,. We might as well have stayed home. I did have one idea – to have a great band.

HOW TO WIN FRIENDS

AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE

CHAPTER 3

Though my dad was struggling to keep us afloat, his brother was extremely wealthy. He and his sons made their money in the clothing business. When we were kids they gave us suits—wool suits—STEEL wool suits. It was very embarrassing to see my father almost grovel to his older brother. We had to perform like seals and thank kind uncle Abe. To this day, I cannot bear wool against my skin.

During World War II, money was pouring in because my cousins had contracts with the government to furnish military uniforms. President Roosevelt imposed an excise tax for the duration of the war. My dad convinced his three nephews, the sons of his brother Abe, to invest in the band business so they could get a sizeable deduction to reduce the tax. He also gave them a very large slice of the band pie. It was some deal. My dad insisted on calling the band Les Elgart since Les was five years older. This was much to the displeasure of my cousins. They thought he was too nervous and not a good front man and that I was the better musician.

At that time, Les was a good section player, which meant he could play any chair but the first, which was lead. He insisted on playing solos during every tune and cracking while we were on the air doing live radio remotes. Les had been tutored by an alto player who showed him how to get vibrato like Tommy Dorsey which only happens when you change your embouchure. It is a very tentative technique. Never the less, he embellished on his name and called the band Les Elgart and his Singing Trumpet.

I don’t remember how much the cousins invested, but I know we needed considerable funds to operate. They seemed to be spending money like water. They paid for Les to have conducting and acting lessons. They hired their lawyer as manager, even though he knew nothing about the band business. I figured we should spend some money on the musicians as well. Les and I were getting minimal salaries. The cousins called it our contribution. I was living at my in-laws house in New Jersey. When I hired a musician, instead of offering him the job and telling him the salary, I would ask, How much do you need to make you happy? As a result, the musicians showed no mercy and the payrolls were excessive. As I recall, they got between $125 and $175 a week. This was when the average per capita weekly wage in 1945 was $23.52!!

I had Bill Finegan, Manny Album, and Nelson Riddle writing arrangements. Nelson was in the army and sent in his work from overseas. When he returned, he said to me, This is such a great band with such great arrangements, why do we have Les Elgart playing solos and ruining everything. It is such a waste. I never spoke to Nelson again. He became a well- known writer for Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Linda Ronstadt.

Finegan wrote some lovely things, but they were very symphonic and impractical. I would play a few notes on the piccolo, switch to the clarinet then to the alto sax, back to the flute for a new more notes, then back to the alto. There was never enough time to hook a strap to an instrument. I got used to playing while holding the sax in my hand and to this day, I don’t use a strap (. About five years ago we were giving a concert at a theater outside of Chicago, and we had a new, very young guitar player who sat on a stool for the whole evening. The stool raised him up so that the audience could see him when he played solos. After the concert, he sat there shaking his head. I went over to him and asked him what was the matter. He said, I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. Here’s a guy three times my age standing up for the whole concert, not using a strap and he’s not tired. I sat here the whole night and I’m exhausted.)

James Caesar Petrillo was president of the musicians’ federation governing all the local unions. He started a strike against the recording industry because he wanted the record companies to pay royalties to musicians when the records they were on got air play. He was warned not to take such a drastic step because the record industry provided millions of dollars a year in musician salaries. But he wouldn’t listen. As a result, no union musicians were allowed to record. The ban went on for about two and a half years. Prior to this, vocalists were secondary to the bands. They never started a tune in a performance. They came in on the second chorus. It was a minor role. Frank Sinatra was featured with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra and Helen O’Connell was with the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra. Singers didn’t belong to the union, so they were unaffected by this ban. Record companies started recording vocalists