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Show ZOOMS BOOM! MusicMad America 'Eats Up' Mew Tunes Faster Than Composers Can Write Them The Song You Mum Today Will Be a Headache Next Week! V t '' 1 ' ' ' i . t. ' z - - X . : y . . ' ' . ' :yiK - '-'' '-'' f ! j N. s II jjl By JOSEPH W. La BINE It's not so many years since you heard a good phonograph record at your neighbor's house, thereupon rushing right down to the music store to buy a copy for your own gramophone. Maybe it was one of Gene Austin's remarkably remark-ably successful songs remember? re-member? In those days, a composer could write "Yes, We Have No Bananas" or "Margie" and settle back to watch the profits roll in from sheet music, recordings and dance orchestras. For a year or more, "Carolina Moon" swept the nation and nobody tired of it; indeed, in-deed, we haven't tired of it yet. But that was long ago maybe 10 years in the dim, halcyon days before be-fore home was not the same without a radio, before music became a high-speed industry instead of a leisurely lei-surely profession. Nowadays you get shivers up the back one week from "A-tisket, A-tasket" and the following week you scream whenever when-ever anyone hums it. The first time you hear "Flat Foot Floogie" it has a novel catch; but after it's been smashed all over your living room by every band from Benny Goodman to the Hot Shot Six, "Flat Foot Floogie" really falls fiat. In other words, if you've any ideas about making a million by writing a popular song, get rid of them. The tide has changed so rapidly, so completely, that the modern composer com-poser starves to death unler.s he can grind out several new tunes a year. Zoom Tp Boom Down. Take "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" it actually did, in three months, simply through too much radiocasting. Overnight it zoomed to nation-wide popularity; almost as fast it fell with a thud and a boom that resounded up and down New York's Tin Pan Alley. Looking at incidents like this, the American Society So-ciety of Composers, Authors and Publishers ("Ascap" to the trade) is trying to promulgate fair trade practice rules to stop carrying a good tune too far. In common practice, a publisher's publish-er's representative approaches a nationally na-tionally broadcast dance orchestra leader like Guy Lombardo or Rudy Vallee and begs him to give every new tune a trial. It's really quite an honor, they say. to offer a number num-ber over the air fur the first time. If the public likes it, the song becomes be-comes a national favorite overnight, and is thereby ruined. What Ascap wants is control over the number of performances a new song gets over the airwaves. And though some may cry "Monopoly!" and "Unfair!" it still isn't a bad idea. Ascap is composed of most major song writers, who complain they must now write 10 times as many songs as in pre-radio days, and even then their sheet music and recording record-ing profits are smaller. The best index to this up-and-down trend of public acceptance is found in the radio program which asks its listeners to vote on their favorite numbers each week. No tune has ever stayed in first place more than a few weeks; seldom do they stay in the running more than two months. Billy Hill's Experienre. Ascap, which pools all musical copyrights of its members, collects royalties and distributes them, has won some success in its campaign. In Nebraska, where Ascap was held an unconstitutional restraint of trade, an appeal brought a temporary tempo-rary injunction against the decision. The organization claims it simply protects its members, which could hardly be called "racketeering." Gene Buck, Ascap president, likes to tell what happened to Billy Hill, who found himself broke while his "Home on the Range" was being hummed all over the nation. Since the public eats up new tunes so fast, composers and orchestra or-chestra leaders are getting gray hair trying to meet the demand. The result has been some ingenious devices. One method is to take an old tune and rearrange it, change it from waltz to foxtrot time and back again. "What," asked Benny Goodman Good-man recently, "can you do with a semg like 'My Gal Sal' after you've played it 4,000 times? You've got to kick it around!" Another method, which ties up with Goodman's idea, is to go back into history. Ella Fitzgerald, Negro vocalist, completely abandoned modern tunes when she saw how fast they wear out. Instead she combed through the files and revived old numbers like "S'wanee River," finally final-ly reaching the nursery rhymes. As a result, "A-tisket, A-tasket" was brought into the limelight. Schubert to Swing. Some months ago an opera lover was amazed at the familiarity of a tune he heard being played by a jazz orchestra. The melody kept running through his mind at its fast tempo, exasperatingly, until he slowed it down and discovered the truth: An adept arranger had simply sim-ply lifted an aria from the opera, "Martha." Since then, such classical classi-cal composers as Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann and Grieg have been turned over in their graves and changed to swing time. This, say some, is plain "robbery," "rob-bery," yet it's very seldom that a brand new tune comes out of Tin Pan Alley. The June-moon, love-dove, love-dove, blue-you idea runs through so many modern lyrics that it sometimes some-times becomes disgusting. What's more, many a long-dead composer has furnished the inspiration for a Frankie Masters, well-known radio ra-dio orchestra leader, leads his band in rehearsing a brand new tune or is it just an old one revamped with a few notes and another set of lyrics? lyr-ics? modern song writer. A good musician musi-cian can take most popular numbers apart and show what makes them run. Copyright Troubles. "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" had its start in a Manhattan niyht club where Eddie Riley and Mike Farley pulled a verse from the Ford joke book and wrote a tune to go with it. Soon a New York radio station began broadcasting from the club and overnight the song was a national favorite. The interesting sidelight here is that the Ford joke book was not copyrighted, otherwise other-wise its publisher could have collected col-lected $250 from every radio station, sta-tion, cafe and restaurant that used it. Copyrights or lack of them have given many a composer financial finan-cial trouble. Take Shelton Brooks, now pounding piano in a New York cafe. Back in 1910, while doing the same thing in Chicago, he wrote the famous "Some of These Days." No publisher would touch it, so Mr. Brooks and a friend handled it themselves. them-selves. Their net profit at 10 cents a copy was $62.!50. But a few months later a vaudeville trio picked it up and started it on the road to fame. Mr. Brooks sold out to Will Rossiter for $.r00. That's all he got out of it, though "Some of These Days" went on to make a cool million dollars. Since good song writers are few these days, publishers have grasped at a new method of protecting themselves them-selves and keeping the public happy. They're keeping in mind the fact that copyrights on the tunes that thrilled grandfather are now running run-ning out, and that it's often possible to buy renewal rights from the composers com-posers or their heirs. With new tunes so few, orchestra leaders often oft-en find it convenient and pleasing to insert a medley of oldtimers in their programs. Reviving the Nineties. One of the leaders in this old tune business is Jerry Vogel, a New York publisher who got a break several years ago when George M. Cohen turned over his entire portfolio without with-out charge. Thus, Vogel found himself him-self sitting with full rights on such one-time hit tunes as "Forty-five Minutes From Broadway," "George Washington Jr." and "Over There." Sometime later a woman from near Boston dropped in and offered to sell renewal rights on the number num-ber her uncle had written, Henry J. Sayers' "Ta Ra Ra Boom Der E." Vogel snatched it up and showed it to Fred Waring, then playing play-ing on the Ford hour. Waring tried it out and Mr. Ford a lover of old tunes liked it so well he had the orchestra write special lyrics. They used the tune more than a year, which was a nice piece of business for Mr. Vogel on a tune which a few months before had been dead and forgotten. But at best the revival business is only a stop-gap proposition, a matter of securing tunes that will fill in until Tin Pan Alley can turn out more "new" songs. Publishers often get pretty disgusted about the whole thing. Although they receive vast amounts of script from amateurs, ama-teurs, the bulk of it is sent back unopened because there's seldom anything of value. An exception was the song, "Springtime in the' Rockies," which a San Francisco publisher bought from an amateur several years ago. It was a terrific smash. Again, publishers are often the victims of their own disgust or smugness, call it what you will Hoagy Carmichael wrote "Star Dust" quite a few years ago but it gathered dust in the drawer until someone tried it out, having nothing noth-ing else to do on a rainy afternoon ou know what happened. Similar! ly. another publisher tossed "If l Could Be With You One Hour Tonight" To-night" on the shelf until it was for. gotten. Finally somebody wrote a new arrangement of it and a hiKhlv successful recording was made Western Newspaper Union. rw - v i Radio's growing army of entertainers enter-tainers helps devour the new songs, so much that the average tune lasts only a few weeks before the public tires of it. At left, Rudy Vallee of "Stein Song" fame. Below, Phil Cook, song pluggcr extraordinary. xs S j N x " x x ' .j, s ; I , :f c - tt h I X S ,'S'T " x N t V f w 2 " , t. xV I x V ' ' ' x ,V ' , - I I |