CHOO CHOO CH'BOOGIE (with guest appearance by Billy Crystal!)

http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/4030/28

Monday, 09 May 2011

Song of the Week #186
by Denver Darling, Vaughn Horton and Milt Gabler

Successful businesses grow, but not always in the direction you expect: Sometimes what starts out as a relatively minor branches turns out to be the real trunk of the tree. A little over nine decades ago, Julius Gabler, a Jewish immigrant from Austria, opens a hardware store on East 42nd Street in Manhattan. He names it after the nearby Commodore Hotel (now the Grand Hyatt). The Twenties get going, and radio's the new thing, and a radio set is a kind of hardware, isn't it? So a hardware store should stock a few radio sets, because, after all, nobody's yet invented an "electronics" store, so where else would you buy them?

So the radio sales take off, and by the time Julius' teenage son starts working in the store in the mid-Twenties, it's such a big part of the business that the old man renames the place the Commodore Radio Corporation. There's a lot of music in the air and on the air. Radio stations feature almost unlimited amounts of live performance by either in-studio bands or hotel orchestras broadcasting live from their various ballrooms. Julius sets up a radio speaker to play music and draw customers into the store to buy a receiver. But some of the folks drawn into the store by the music aren't looking for a radio but the song they've just heard. So they say to Julius, "Hey, why don't you sell records?" The son likes music, enough to know the names of the players, the bands they started with, what t
 hey've recorded. So the hardware-cum-radio store starts selling 78s. There are a lot of 'em available from RCA Victor, Columbia, Decca.

And then Julius' boy gets interested in the records that aren't available. Jazz 78s are barely a decade-and-a-half old at that point, but already a lot of them have fallen by the wayside. In 1933 the son starts buying up unwanted copies of old records from the big record companies, and re-selling them to his dad's customers. So the hardware store has now become the first American music business to do "re-issues", and the first to sell records by mail order. It turns out there's quite a market for, say, Bessie Smith's final recording session, especially if you treat the fans with respect: The hardware store's re-issues are also the first 78s to credit all the soloists - something the big labels never bother to do.

So the radio sets aren't as important to the business as they once were, and the store's name changes again, to the Commodore Music Shop. And in 1937 Julius' kid starts putting together some live gigs at Jimmy Ryan's nearby club, and then bringing the musicians into the Brunswick World studio to record the results. Hot stuff - Eddie Condon and "Love Is Just Around The Corner", Lester Young and the Kansas City Six and "Way Down Yonder In New Orleans". He releases the sides on Commodore Records. A year or so later, one of the store's customers, Billie Holiday, offers him a song her record company doesn't want her to do - a strange, eerie number about a lynching down south. She demonstrates it for him a capella, and he starts to cry. So they go into the studio and, though it's not as big as "
 These Foolish Things" and "Pennies From Heaven" and her other Brunswick hits, it makes it to Number 16 on Your Hit Parade, and suddenly the hardware guy's son is a producer of hit records.

And what with all this music recording he doesn't have as much time for the store as he once had, so he puts his brother-in-law in charge of that side of things. And then in 1941 Decca Records make him an offer, and Julius Gabler's son finds himself producing Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, the Ink Spots, the Andrews Sisters, Louis Armstrong... And, through the store's evolution from hardware to radio sets to records and recording, old Julius still keeps the books for the business up in his second floor office and looks over the balcony down to the customers below who once came for wrenches and hammers and now throng the little joint on 42nd Street in search of the latest Ella and Billie.

Julius' son, Milt Gabler, was born one hundred years ago this month - May 20th 1911, in Harlem, New York - and became one of the most successful music producers of the 20th century. He made significant records, like Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit", and the biggest pop record of them all, Bill Haley's "Rock Around The Clock", which to this day rock "scholars" and reference books use as the dividing line that marks the dawn of the "rock era". In between came a lot of cool stuff - Lionel Hampton's "Flying Home" - and a bunch of hits: Bing and "Macnamara's Band", Louis Armstrong's "Blueberry Hill" and "Dream A Little Dream Of Me" (our Song of the Week #2). In an era of big hits, Milt Gabler had some of the biggest - the Weavers and "Goodnight, Irene", the Mills Brothers' "Glow Worm" (SOTW #14
 8) - and helped a lot of new talent to their first success on record, including Sammy Davis Jr with "Hey, There". He produced Peggy Lee's "Lover" and Brenda Lee's "I'm Sorry", and was still going strong in the early Seventies with the original album of Jesus Christ Superstar by our old friends Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Along the way, he produced a remarkable number of my own personal favorite records, including the Jimmie Lunceford Band's "Blues In The Night" (SOTW #147) and Hoagy Carmichael's "Ole Buttermilk Sky" (SOTW #35).

As for the brother-in-law he left to run the store, he was a fellow called Jack Crystal. He and Milt's sister Helen subsequently had a son called William, who grew up to be Billy Crystal. And even that turn of events is part of the direct line from hardware to radio to records to recording, for, as Billy Crystal says, if his Uncle Milt had decided to become an accountant rather than a record producer, the kid nephew might never have gotten the performing bug. Milt was the celebrity in the Gabler-Crystal clan back then - the guy with the showbiz stories about Bing and Satch, Sammy and Ella, and young Billy got to know a lot of the musicians he hung around with. They called him "Face", because he was a great mimic of them. So it's a straight line, albeit kind of askew, from an Austrian Jew s
 elling nails and drill bits to a bigtime Hollywood celeb singing song parodies for his spectacular Oscar Night opening number.

"Everything starts with the song," Milt Gabler like to say. And here at SteynOnline's Song of the Week we agree: that's why we celebrate songs and songwriters rather than records or singers - or producers. But, as the composer Jule Styne told me on more than one occasion, "Without the rendition there is no song." That's to say, Jule can write a tune like "Three Coins In The Fountain", but it doesn't really exist until the Four Aces sing it and Milt Gabler sticks a microphone under them and next thing you know it's a Number One record. And sometimes there's quite a gap between the rendition and the song. In 1955 "Rock Around The Clock" was the rock'n'roll revolution's call to arms, the song the kids tore up movie seats over. But its composer, Jimmy DeKnight, wrote it as a fox trot, and its 
 lyricist, Max Freedman, whose last hit had been for the Andrews Sisters, wanted to call it "Dance Around The Clock". And Freedman was born in 1890: When he was a rebellious teenager, the big songs were "The Merry Widow Waltz", Kipling's "Road To Mandalay" and "When A Fellow's On The Level With A Girl That's On The Square". But in Milt Gabler's studio a song written by a guy born in the 19th century met a rendition by Bill Haley and the Comets, and that was that.

Gabler was a jazz buff who became a pop producer, but along the way he dabbled in songwriting. According to Billy Crystal, he co-wrote the flip side of "Strange Fruit" - "Fine And Mellow" - but gave the song to Billie Holiday. And, as we'll explore next week, at the tail end of his career, he wrote the lyrics to what's grown over the years to become one of the biggest standards to emerge from the Sixties. Today, though, let's spend some time with the first hit song to bear Milt Gabler's name:

   Headin' for the station with a pack on my back
   I'm tired of transportation in the back of a hack
   I love to hear the rhythm of the clickety clack
   And hear the lonesome whistle, see the smoke from the stack
   And pal around with democratic fellows named Mac
   So take me right back to the track, Jack!

   Choo choo, Choo Choo Ch'Boogie!
   Woo woo, woo woo ch'boogie...

Before there was Bill Haley there was Louis Jordan, and in the mid-Forties he and Milt Gabler were on one almighty roll. In 1945, Jordan and his Tympany Five had "Caldonia" and he got paired by Gabler with Crosby on a song called "My Baby Said Yes". 1946 was even bigger: A mere seven hits held the Number One spot on Billboard's "Race Records" chart that year, all of them Decca's and Milt Jordan's. There was Lionel Hampton's "Hey, Ba-Ba-Re-Bop" and the Ink Spots with "The Gypsy". The remaining five were Jordan's: He was at Number One for 33 out of 52 weeks. The following year, 1947, came close: He was at Number One for 30 weeks. "Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens" held the top spot for 17 weeks, but the biggest of all during his hit streak was this one - Number One for four-and-a-half month
 s:

   Choo choo, Choo Choo Ch'Boogie!
   Woo woo, woo woo ch'boogie!
   Choo choo, Choo Choo Ch'Boogie!
   Take me right back to the track, Jack!

Today "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" is regarded as the epitome of Jordan's jump blues signature style, the "jumpin' jive" that bridged the gap between big band swing and the rhythm'n'blues and rock'n'roll of the 1950s. But the song didn't start out that way. Does the name Denver Darling ring any bells? That's his real moniker, the one he was born with, in Illinois in 1909. He was a singing cowboy, "the swishiest country singer of his day", according to Nick Tosches in his book Living Legends And Dying Metaphors In America's Biggest Music. If so, for a swishy guy he knew how to butch up quick: Within two weeks of December 7th 1941, he'd written, recorded and released a song called "Cowards Over Pearl Harbor". It did well enough that in February 1942 Decca rushed Denver Darling into the studio to re
 cord four more bellicose ballads: a song called "Mussolini's Letter To Hitler", another called "Hitler's Reply To Mussolin", a third called "Get Your Gun And Come Along (We're Fixing To Kill A Skunk)", and a final number to round out the session, "We're Gonna Have To Slap The Dirty Little Jap (And Uncle Sam's The Guy Who Can Do It)". The public's appetite for Denver-Darling-goes-to-war fare faded quickly, and by the end of hostilities he was the in-house singing cowboy at WNEW in New York, fronting such combos as the Trail Blazars and the Texas Cowpokes. Not a lot of trailblazing and cowpoking going on at the WNEW studies on Third Avenue: singing cowboy-wise, Denver Darling was heavy on the singing, light on the wrangling. He had an occasional songwriting partner in Vaughn Horton, the st
 eel guitarist in Irving Ross' WNEW house band. Mr Horton was born a few weeks after Milt Gabler on June 6th 1911, and, as his own centenary looms, songs like "Mockin' Bird Hill" and "Till The End Of The World" retain their potency among country fans. But "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" burst way beyond anything Horton and Darling had in mind for it.

Because of Denver Darling's relationship with Decca, they brought it to Milt Gabler as a half-formed country-and-western tune for a Darling session. Gabler, whose great gift was an ability to match songs with singers, heard something else in there, and thought it would be fun for Louis Jordan. It wasn't exactly jump blues, but maybe it could be, with a few changes. Billy Crystal says that it was his uncle who came up with the highly emphatic "Take me right back to the track, Jack!" that ends both verse and chorus and whose rhyme scheme anticipates Paul Simon's "Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover" ("You slip out the back, Jack") by a mere three decades. He also rewrote the lyrics to fit Jordan's comic persona. A lot of demobbed GIs related to this verse:

   You reach your destination, but alas and alack
   You need some compensation to get back in the black
   You take your morning paper from the top of the stack
   And read the situation from the front to the back
   The only job that's open needs a man with a knack
   So put it right back in the rack, Jack!

   Choo choo, Choo Choo Ch'Boogie
   Woo woo, woo woo ch'boogie!

What a great word "ch'boogie" is. There are lots of train songs and we've covered more than a few of them in this space, but this is the only choo-choo that ch'boogies. Who came up with that word? Gabler, Horton or Darling? I would think Gabler: It doesn't seem to quite belong in Horton's and Darling's milieu. But whichever one it was was the man with the knack: Take it away and half the song's gone. Full disclosure: Many years ago, for a TV train-song special, I used "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie", and for a lame joke in the penultimate chorus had a Japanese theater troupe on a hand car singing "Choo choo kabuki". Not sure I'd quite have the nerve for that today.

Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five didn't see the song until the session. "We came in on the train from Atlanta, Georgia to New York to do the recording," he said. "They brought the words in." Jordan looked at them, digested the premise, and said to his pianist Bill Davis, "Leave the chords in the blues vein, and let's see what we can do with it."

They did a lot with it. Another of Gabler's strengths was figuring out what instrumental moments a record needs. He and Jordan came up with that wonderful opening train whistle right at the front - just trumpet and two saxes, but in my disc-jockey days I always loved to play it straight off the back of a news bulletin or traffic update. It was a mere 12-bar intro, but it was the surest way of saying the glumsville info is over and we are moving again. The rhythm section kicks into Jordan's trademark shuffle - a kind of mid-tempo boogie-woogie - and the track never lets up: The alternating twelve-bar verse/eight-bar chorus structure ought to get wearisome yet doesn't: The central idea's so strong, and Jordan & Co are so infectious you hop aboard and you're ready to ch'boogie all the way.

"Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" sold two million copies, and earned Jordan and the Tympany Five their first gold record. Eight years later, Louis Jordan's moment was over, and Milt Gabler was in the studio with Bill Haley and the Comets making rock'n'roll the dominant global brand in popular music. "All the tricks I used with Louis Jordan I used with Bill Haley," he said. "The only difference was the way we did the rhythm. On Jordan, we used a perfectly balanced rhythm section from the swing era ...but Bill had the heavy backbeat." Gabler, the teenage jazz fan from his dad's hardware store, had too good taste not to recognize that, whatever its contribution to the bottom line, that one slight difference was a loss for music. As if in homage to the man who paved the way, Haley and the Comets made the
 ir own record of "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie". Compared to Jordan's original, it feels leaden, weighed down. It doesn't jump, it lumbers. Gabler, who produced both, surely knew the difference.

Various performers have picked it up since then - Johnny Otis, Quincy Jones, B B King, John Denver, . If I had to pick a favorite, I'd go for Asleep At The Wheel. Ray Benson is a Jordan fan, but his western swing-tinged treatment loosens up the phrasing and nods to its singing-cowboy roots. Years ago, an old musical friend from London was staying with me in New Hampshire and we went to see Asleep At The Wheel at an old and somewhat decrepit opera house down south. They got the joint rockin' on "Ch'Boogie" to the point where I worried the place might collapse. Their version doesn't jump quite like Jordan's, and their intro doesn't have quite the instant train-whistle effect of the Tymps' horns, but it does the job - especially live.

I assume only Gabler, Darling and Horton know for sure, but the part that always sounds to me like the original song is the final verse with its anticipation of a pastoral idyll far from wordly cares. It doesn't quite fit with what's gone before, and you can sort of hear how Denver Darling might have done this in a lazy, loping cowboy fashion:

   Gonna settle down by the railroad track
   Live the life of Riley in a beaten-down shack
   So when I hear a whistle I can peak through the crack
   And watch the train a-rollin' when they're ballin' the jack
   I just love the rhythm of the clicketty clack
   So, take me right back to the track, Jack!

   Choo choo, Choo Choo Ch'Boogie!
   Woo woo, woo woo ch'boogie!
   Choo choo, Choo Choo Ch'Boogie!
   Take me right back to the track, Jack!

Milt Gabler had no desire to settle down in a beaten-down shack and live the life of Riley. He was still planning projects when he was 90, and we'll attend to some of his later work next time. Join us in seven days, and we'll take you right back to a big hit track, Jack. And Mac. And maybe Barack.


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