We are filming today for the Hamilton College Jazz
Archive in Los Angeles. My name is Monk Rowe, and I'm very pleased
to have Steve Allen with me today. I would introduce all the things you've done
but that would probably take most of the interview. SA: In that case I'll be running along. MR: Please, not yet. But I would like to see if we could talk a
bit about your involvement in jazz music today. Your upbringing in vaudeville with your parents
and so forth has been pretty well documented. Can you recall the first kind of music that
made an impression on you? SA: Yeah, there were probably three loose
edge stages, counting for the development of my musical tastes and preferences. The first factor is that I was very lucky,
given that I would eventually be a composer, a very busy one, even to the present moment,
because I grew up in the true Golden Age of American music, and in fact world music. I don't know how many Americans know this
and of those who know it I don't know how many care, but in that Golden Age you heard
the best American music, all the Gershwin, Kern, Duke Ellington, Hoagy Carmichael stuff,
all over the world. To take a specific date, in 1958 my wife and
I were in the Soviet Union for about a two week study trip, and we were put up in Moscow
at the Ukraina Hotel, an enormous and rather ugly establishment. But anyway we went down to the dining room
for the first day's dinner and all we were interested in was food, but as I got near
the entrance to the room I was pleased to hear music. I thought oh, a nice extra plus. I wasn't even counting on this. And then as I got still closer I realized
they were playing American music. Now it wasn't to welcome us, they didn't know
who I was, and there were probably 800 people in the dining room at the moment so they couldn't
be playing Philippine music for Filipinos, and American music for - that was out. But what they were doing for the next hour
or so, a little six or seven piece group, they weren't playing jazz, although one guy
was almost in the jazz area, they were just playing songs that they obviously loved to
play. And the great majority of them, and this was
at the height of the Cold War, when American culture in general was more or less spat upon
by the officials there. Nevertheless these guys were playing Golden
Age stuff: Irving Berlin songs and George Gershwin songs and Jerome Kern songs. So I had a big smile on my face all through
dinner. The food itself wasn't that great. MR: So that was the plus. SA: Maybe the music was a distraction. MR: You can almost bet that they learned those
songs off black market recordings, too. SA: Probably, yeah. MR: That the sheet music wouldn't be available. SA: Sometime if we have more time I'll tell
you about an album that I smuggled in to the Soviet Union at that time, and I didn't have
to smuggle it, it was just in my underwear - I didn't have to swallow it and reconstitute
it with water later. Do you want me to tell you the story now? MR: Yeah, I'd love to hear that. SA: Since it's about jazz? Okay. We'll get back to me anytime. Leonard Feather, the noted jazz critic, got
in touch with me, we were friends anyway in New York, and he said, "I hear you're going
to be in the Soviet Union in a few weeks?" I said, "yes." He said, "would you be willing," he said,
"there might be some slight risk but I don't think so," he said, "would you be willing
to take in an album that I would like to get delivered to the people who wrote the music?" And I said, "yeah, I'll just pack it in my
suitcase, and what do I do then? How will I know who they are?" So he said, "well you might not be able to
reach them," he said, "because it is a police state," but he said, "at least you can try." And he said, "there are always people over
there who, despite the government's officials, like Americans and are willing to be civil,
and some of them are hip, and they know the name of the local clubs where any jazz might
be played. And if you could get to any of those clubs
or talk to any people familiar with those clubs, and mention the name of these two musicians,"
and he gave me a piece of paper with two Russian gentlemen's names on it. He said, "you might be able to make contact." I said, "fine, I'll try." And the music had been written by these two
fellows, I should explain that. It had been recorded in the United States
and they had never heard it, and at the time it was apparently difficult to just mail things. I don't know why it was, but so I was told. So when we got to Moscow after hearing that
American music was okay to be played there, I didn't get to talk to those musicians in
that band that night, but after a few days with our official guides, who seemed very
relaxed and pleasant, I began to ask about jazz in Moscow at least, and the word was
well it's officially frowned upon but it happens, which happens with many things in life that
are officially frowned upon. So I got the names of two or three clubs and
they said, "they're not like jazz clubs in Paris or New York, they're just places where
maybe a couple of nights a week some people come in and play a little jazz. In other words, jazz is not on the outside
of the club. They gave me the names, the Red Rooster or
How's Your Truck or whatever the places were called. And so one word led to another, one contact
led to another, and I finally was able to meet - I'll try to shorten the story - I finally
was able to meet somebody who said, "yeah I know who those guys are." And I said, "great, big progress, could you
give them a call and tell them I'm here at the Ukraina and tell them I have an album
and I'm told they'll be very pleased to hear, and they'll have to take it from there because
I don't know how to get to them." He said fine. So a couple of days later the phone rings
at the hotel at my room, and the fellow is speaking naturally with a Russian accent,
said, "Mr. Allen?" I said, "yes." He said I am - whatever his name was - "I'm
downstairs with my friend," - the other man's name - and he said, "we understand you have
something for us?" I said, "I certainly do, and a pleasure to
hear from you." I said, "come on up." He said, "no we can't." You couldn't go to a foreigner's room in those
days, the police would talk to you about it. So I said, "fine, I'll come right down." And we did a little description of each other,
because I don't think they knew who I was, they didn't see my shows in the Soviet Union
and "The Benny Goodman Story" hadn't gotten over there yet." So I said, "I'll be right down, I'll be carrying
an album, that'll be one way you'll recognize me." Anyway I went downstairs, now here's the weird
part of the story, there were maybe visible at the moment I descended the stairs, 250,
300 people. It's a big hotel with an enormous lobby. This is if you were in any big hotel. And believe it or not I picked the guys out
immediately. Now you might say, you know they weren't wearing
zoot suits or carrying trumpets or any cartooney factors that might have accounted for my quick
recognition. They just looked hip. MR: Isn't that weird? Even in Russia. SA: Yeah, even in Russia, and this was 1958,
again, Cold War time. So I couldn't be sure that was them because
somebody could have looked hip and been with the KGB, just to throw me off. "Send our hippest man, we've got an American
on the line." But sure enough it was them, they came up
and smiled and they spoke some English, I spoke only about three words in Russian so
we worked in English. And I gave them the stuff. And that's about the end of that story. Anyway, now we jump way back to in my childhood,
and that was the time when all of this great world music was being created by - well the
names are so well known I don't have to recite them again. And there were no car radios in those days,
but I spent a lot of time in the car with my mother and my stepfather, they were performing
in vaudeville, and I remember clearly at the age of 4, 5, 6, what we used to do is sing. And you can only sing what you've heard, or
I guess you could make up a song and sing it, but the people with you would be in trouble,
so we would do the popular hits of the day, unaccompanied by any musical instrument, and
it was great brainwashing. Again, at the age of 6 I didn't know that
I would end up being a professional composer, but given that I was headed that way, isn't
it nice that I heard all those wonderful songs sung by my mother and my stepfather. Then in about 1936 or 7, the biggest guy in
the music business, as far as the majority of Americans were concerned, this has nothing
to do with jazz but it had to do with good music, was a piano player named Eddie Duchin. I don't expect you have any of his albums
in your library, and you shouldn't, because he knew nothing about jazz and never played
a note of jazz in his life. But he was a good step leading people to good
things because he had marvelous taste. He was also handsome and he wore tails and
had love affairs, and then they made a movie of his life starring Tyrone Power I think. But Duchin is still remembered even if people
don't remember him, today's teenagers, if they get at pianos, can sometimes play those
old styles of introduction [scats]. A lot of Eddie Duchin's arrangements started
with that piano intro. So any American kids who were interested in
the piano could play both chopsticks and the Eddie Duchin intros. MR: Similar to "Heart and Soul." SA: Yeah, exactly. The first sixteen bars of "Heart and Soul." None of us ever knew the bridge. MR: It has a nice bridge. SA: It has a great bridge, but the bridge
is real composition. The other is pretty lightweight music, although
it's a nice song and it deserves to be a hit. But anyway, every American kid like later
they wanted to be Elvis Presley or Mickey Mouse or whoever American kids at one point
or another want to be. A lot of us wanted to be Eddie Duchin in those
days. And parenthetically I've run into maybe 200
guys within a certain age bracket since I did the Goodman movie who told me that when
they were little they wanted to be Benny Goodman or they decided it would be nice to be Benny
Goodman after seeing the movie, because they got here a little too late to see really Benny
himself. His records were still available of course. So anyway, that was the phenomenon. He was the biggest thing in the business and
he was a role model for us, to use that common phrase. Now - we're jumping about different places
in my 77 year life - I was coming back from Los Angeles, to which I had advanced when
I ran away from home in Chicago at 16, stayed away for a year, eventually came back and
entered a high school, a public high school their called Hyde Park. It was there I met Mel Torme, he was another
student, and some other guys who did not go on to become well known but were into jazz,
were interested in it and could play it, starting to learn, working with neighborhood dance
bands and stuff. And it was there that I got interested in
jazz, just listening to records at these kids houses. Before that I had of course heard jazz and
enjoyed it. You might say well how could you be hearing
jazz and enjoying it without being sort of emotionally involved with it. The explanation of that seeming paradox is
that jazz, as you know, was middle of the road music. Everybody loved jazz, even people who were
classical musicians loved jazz. They didn't know how to play it, but they
liked to go like that when dancing, whatever. Jazz was all very rhythmic and harmonically
much simpler than it later would get in the 50s. But I liked it but it never somehow had it
open up to me. I was still into melody. I was a melody freak, and still I am as a
composer and as an appreciator of other composers. So suddenly it was just the social contact,
the other kids at school knew about jazz. I didn't but within about a week I was turned
on to it. I began to listen to Ellington records and
Basie records and Erskine Hawkins and Fletcher Henderson and all the good jazz bands of that
day. - [door knock] I'll be right out - somebody's
on the phone - yes, come in and change my clothes please, while I'm on television. We're here at a hotel, folks. MR. Yes. Well we'll keep talking here for a moment. You mentioned the music of the Golden Age
as being mostly superior to what's going on today. SA: Oh forget mostly. It was superior. MR: It was superior. SA: That settles that. MR: What parts of the music, in your opinion,
became less emphasized after the Golden Age? Or more emphasized? SA: Okay, for historical reasons we should
probably specify some arithmetic. When I refer to the Golden Age it was a roughly
thirty year period, the 1920s, 30s and 40s, so that brings us up to the middle of the
century, 1950, '49-50. And oddly enough it was right at that point,
right smack in the middle, that American taste went pow, right into a deep ravine or canyon,
from which it has never fully emerged. That is not to say that there was no good
music after that median point, of course there was. There wasn't nearly as much of it and for
the most part it wasn't as good as the giants of Cole Porter and Irving Berlin and Richard
Rodgers and all those giants. They really had the gift of melody. Unfortunately, well it seems to me unfortunate,
it is possible to write songs without having that gift, because there are certain mechanical
things, clich� things, harmonic clich�s you can employ and if somebody said, "I'm
going to play some chords at a piano and then you'll notice - yeah thank you, thank you,
bring that refreshment right in here, I'll get this book out of your way - if somebody
said I also have a gun in my hand, and I am going to shoot you. You'll say that's a crazy thing to do, yes,
I'm going to do it because I'm crazy, I'm really going to shoot you unless you can avoid
death, but I will shoot you unless to the accompaniment that I will play on my piano
or my guitar, you improvise a little melody, everybody would do it. Even people who are tone deaf, you don't want
to get killed so you'd - and it is just such melodies that are now on the radio, and have
been for 20, 30, 40 years. It's not that tough to write a simple song. In fact it's easy. I've written, by this time this gets on the
air my total output will be about 8,000, literally. I once wrote 400 in one day. So it's like some people could wiggle their
ears, I can too if I hold my fingers but I can't do it without the fingers, I can write
all the songs you want. Big deal. It's not even work for me, it's just easy
to do. So where were we? Oh yes, the superiority of the Gershwins and
the Johnny Mercers and all those great writers, Gus Kahn and everybody knows the names or
they can look them up, was the songs were highly melodic. Now that is almost a meaningless term if you're
talking about only melodies. As a result, nobody ever does talk about only
melodies, not since Gregorian chant or something where a guy was singing a capella [hums] that's
a melody but it's not very interesting and nobody ever went nuts about it thinking oh
yeah, that was my first girlfriend, we went ooh. It'd be nuts if you did that. But when you take a melody and wrap it in
harmonics, then the result is true beauty if you did it right. And we had a lot of composers in the old days
who could do it right, in addition to the 20 giant names that are known, there were
other people who write just as good music but maybe only wrote two or three songs, or
they didn't have a publicist or whatever. Parenthetically one of the greatest composers
of the Golden Age was a man named Harry Warren and probably a lot of people listening to
me right now will say Harry who? He just never became well known, even though
he wrote probably 30 of the most beautiful songs, and most popular songs, of that day. Now at your request I'm making a distinction
between the Golden Age material and stuff since then. Let's talk about the good stuff since then,
so people don't misunderstand my point, they will anyway, but that will make it a little
less likely. The first breakthrough composer after '50
to suddenly be original and richly melodious and great, was Jimmy Webb, "By the Time I
Get to Phoenix," and a lot of other good songs about that time. Then I'm not sure I have these in chronological
sequence, but another one who then showed up was Burt Bacharach, who gave us about a
dozen of the best songs ever written. I got angry the other night, last time I guess
it was, watching "60 minutes," they did about a 15 minute tribute or coverage of some time
of Burt Bacharach, and they were talking to some people who didn't seem to know enough
about music in my opinion to have been called to provide that service. Burt Bacharach, his good songs, are great. I don't mean they're pretty good compared
to something else, I mean they're as good as popular music gets, and they're also very
individual. A lot of pretty songs, you really couldn't
tell for sure who wrote them. Thank God for them, they're still glorious
music, but they're not stylistically unique. Whereas mostly if you hear a Burt Bacharach
song, you can be pretty sure that it was written by Burt. Then Henry Mancini provided several lovely
melodies, Billy Joel has given us some lovely things, and guys have come along - out of
the Beatles we got maybe seven or eight good songs. So there are these post-1950 examples. But if you add up all that stuff in one big
blender, it's just not as good - with a few individual song exceptions - it's not as good
as the Golden Age stuff, we're talking about in a general, averaged out sense. MR: Do you think technology had anything to
do with that? The advent of electric guitar, then later
on of course drum machines and synthesizers and computers? SA: An interesting question. Yes, it had something to do certainly with
the sounds, and when I do that I'm not putting the music down in another context, I am putting
the music down, but listeners, for the most part teenage kids who buy most of the records,
are interested in a sound, a unique sound, usually it's a highly rhythmic sound, although
it could be the voicings of instruments or the unique sound of a given human voice. There's something about it which they will
listen to and be fascinated as the case may be with a given piece of music. And that has become more common since the
1950 point. Why? I don't know. I could come up with answers but we're busy
at the moment. MR: We can take a pause for our coffee here. [pause]
SA: Another of the great composers of the post-1950 period is Michel Legrand. Beautiful stuff. Another of the best really great composers
of the recent decades is Antonio Carlos Jobim and some of his fellow South American composers. It was Jobim who brought back melody into
American popular music when it had been pretty well cast aside. There were many little digressive routes down
which the fans flocked after the 50s, sometimes the people they were following, the pied piper
was given performer, Elvis for example. Except for Lieber and Stoller, who knew what
they were doing and deliberately wrote down, away from Gershwin, away from Jerome Kern,
dumbing down and created songs like "You Ain't Nothin' But a Hound Dog" and keep off of my
"Blue Suede Shoes," I don't know, all of those songs they wrote. But they were deliberately writing for Elvis. Elvis, I was able to be of help to him early
in his career. I always liked him, he was an unassuming guy. He got to be the biggest thing in the history
of show business, and it really never went to his head. Every time I'd see him, if you can believe
it, he would say, "nice to see you Mr. Allen." Imagine calling me Mr. Allen when he was God
in the industry. But that was typical of him. He was always a nice country boy, whereas
some performers who if you went to high school with them and later you meet them, forget
it. It's Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. But Elvis was always consistent and nice,
and the biggest. So you're not going to write for him songs
that you would write for Frank Sinatra or Ema Sumack, or a lot of other more talented
singers. What Elvis had was not an enormous talent
in the traditional sense of that word, in the sense that Mel Torme had a glorious singing
sound, it was the hippest probably white singer and maybe colorless, maybe just the hippest
singer of all time. That is talent. Barbra Streisand is talent, we all know what
talent is. Elvis was not in that category. He had something in terms of popularity more
important than talent. You're probably thinking what could be more
important than talent? So I'll tell you, if the purpose is to make
it, he had star quality. Star quality is not the same as acting talent. A lot of very fine actors are character actors
and will never be stars in their lives. They give you realism and you love them in
the movies, but they don't get fan mail, women don't run after them down the street. Elvis had that mysterious thing. Marilyn Monroe had it, Clark Gable had it,
there are various people you could name, and again, to get back to Elvis, he definitely
had that. So he deserved his success, if any of us deserve
anything. But he was one of the reasons for the erosion
of taste. Because he was so fascinating he could sing
[scats] and people would say hey give me that [scats] - garbage, but they would love it
because he did it. MR: Was the change in musical tastes, and
I'm kind of steering back towards jazz now, totally the fault of the audience or did the
musicians and producers have anything to do with it? SA: All of the above. A very good question. I love all kinds of jazz. I love some kinds a little more than the other,
but I've never heard jazz where I would say that is rotten, get rid of it. I just love jazz. Boom. But one form that I enjoy, which is bop or
progressive or bebop, is clearly, I don't know if anybody else ever thinks this, but
I'm right. We're not going to send out for a vote, folks,
trust me I'm right about this. That wonderful form of music left all of America's
teenagers, all the 17 year olds around the corner and down the road, because you can't
dance to bop. I guess there must be a few tunes that are
[scats], that you can dance to, but you can't dance to "Night in Tunisia," or a lot of the
great stuff. The only one of the bop or progressive stars
or noted players, who was such a genius and so melodic that in his case it almost didn't
matter because his soul roots were really back in the beautiful days when he was growing
up. He was hearing beautiful music, and that's
Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker, as you know, you probably
know a lot more about this than I do, played such beautiful solos, even on very fast renditions
of tunes, that a group called Supersax has made a lot of beautiful albums, I recommend
them to everybody, where they simply took, note for note, they wrote a Charlie Parker
solo and then voiced it for five saxophones. So Charlie himself was the least to blame
for the good-bye teenagers thing, but they went from [scats] they went into country,
they went into Frankie Avalon type, you know let's all make a movie about going to beach
and see the girls in their bathing suits music. So there are a lot of reasons why jazz veered
off from the popularity it had enjoyed for centuries, or I mean decades. I've got to get some blood sugar so I won't
say words like that. MR: New York in the - let's say the late 50s
- when you got to do your TV shows, did you have the initiative or the power to say look
I want jazz musicians on this show? SA: I did. And now and then I said it, but the nice thing
was I didn't personally have to bring it up at all. There were always a well trained cadre of
the professional jazz musicians who were really trained professional musicians. There were some exceptions, guys who couldn't
read music, but they were so great they got by. They couldn't sit in with a lot of bands,
because you've got to play that arrangement if you're with Woody Herman's band, but as
soloists they were great and they had their own personality. But most of the guys had spent years playing
with Benny Goodman or Woody Herman or Buddy Rich or Jan Savett and his Top Hatters, or
some band, the Jimmy Dorsey band, Tommy Dorsey band. And consequently if you put a piece of music
in front of them they can play it right now. It had to be that way. If you're doing a TV show, you have to play
it right. You're on the air that night. There can be no saying, "can I come back Thursday
and try this again?" No. Get out of show business if you're that inferior. So they all stayed in show business because
they were great. Some of them were never distinguished as soloists,
others were sensational as soloists. But at least they could play in the Basie
band or the Goodman band, or any of the big named bands, Glenn Miller, whoever, and do
well in those categories. So to respond to your question more directly,
when it came time to provide me with musicians, with a band on one show or another, just if
they looked out the door and whistled, almost all the guys that showed up were the standard
studio musicians in New York. I don't know, maybe there were four or five
hundred of them, and a lot of them were interchangeable. Sometimes people who hear a phrase such as
"The Benny Goodman Band" and "The Count Basie Band" imagine, if they don't think very clearly
about the matter, that it was the same 15 guys for 47 years. They were lucky if it was the same guys for
nine weeks. Because one trumpet player would quit or hurt
his foot or get drunk or something. They were always coming and going in those
bands. Consequently one of the best albums I ever
did was done in connection with the Benny Goodman movie. A record producer with a lot of chops in jazz
named Bob Thiele died not long ago. He said, "let's do a Benny Goodman album with
you," and he said, "but you play a piano solo every place where Benny played a clarinet
solo" which was a clever idea. So we did, and it's a swinging album, and
the reason I mention it in the context of this point is that everybody in that album,
everybody who played in band that day, had played with Benny Goodman. So it was in the legitimate sense a Benny
Goodman orchestra. And that sort of thing was quite common. MR: On the "Tonight Show" you seem to have
brought some of that vaudeville aura right on to the show, especially with Bob Rosengarden
responding to some of the things that would happen, either spontaneously or sometimes
set up. SA: Well if we did a sketch obviously that's
set up. You don't suddenly find cowboy hats if you
don't write a sketch and order the hats. But the rest of it was all spontaneous, ad
lib, as a talk show it has to be. We didn't get as much chocolate on our fingers
in those days as we do now, but a finger with chocolate on it actually tastes good, just
don't go too far, you'll hurt yourself. Yeah, the shows that I did -
MR: A napkin, Tim? SA: Yeah, could we have a napkin, or a towel
from the ladies room, or whatever you have. Thank you. The shows that I did always had a sort of
a hip jazz club atmosphere. That's partly because of my own love for jazz
and participation in it, and secondly I would never dream of saying that my version of the
Tonight Show is better than anybody else's, that's always a matter of taste. But there are certain factual statements about
it we can make, and that was that - thank you very much - that my versions of those
shows were hipper, partly because we paid more honor to jazz. Can you imagine David Letterman saying "our
main guest tonight is Scott Hamilton?" Of course not. In the days when I did the show you could. We had all the jazz greats, the only jazz
great we never had and I still don't remember why, - thank you- here at Strouds we have
a sale on, no I'm kidding - we had all the jazz guys, the only one I never had was Charlie
Parker, and I don't recall why that happened, maybe he was out of town when we tried to
get him. But anyway, when we would book a jazz giant,
Art Tatum or Erroll Garner, whoever, we would not only let him do a number, obviously he
will do that, but we would let him do two or three numbers, take about a 20 minute slice
of time, and sit in with our band or if he brought his own he could play without our
group, and then sometimes after they would do their two, three or four numbers, then
our gang would roll in a second piano and I would sit in with the band. A guy came up to me in an airport a few years
ago, after he recognized me, and he said, "I just wanted you to know Mr. Allen, I really
love your album with Art Tatum." And I laughed when he said that, because to
me that sounds like the guys said, "I just saw the films of your fights with Muhammad
Ali, beautiful. And I said, "sir, thank you, but you must
have somebody else in mind, I never made an album with Art Tatum." He said, "well it's funny you should say that
because I have the album." And so I got so interested in his air of certainty
that I took his address and we exchanged letters, and he was right. We were both right. I never did an album with Art Tatum, but realizing
that Tatum was a genius and would only pass this way but once as we say, there were people
recording his performances off radio guest shots and television guest shots, about the
legality of that I don't know anything, but in an artistic sense it's nice that it happened
because we now have a lot of recordings we never would have had otherwise. And so this was one of those nights on the
"Tonight Show" when we had the great pianist stretch out at great length, and then they
rolled in a second piano. So we traded choruses, very long, I think
we must have played for six or seven minutes on the old tune "Fine and Dandy" [scats]. Sometimes it's a vaudeville clich� of entrance
music. MR: Oh yeah. I didn't even know that was the name of that
song. [scats]
SA: Oh really? Yeah. Anyway, so there it is, a jazz album with
Art Tatum and myself. If you can play jazz and if you have a great
rhythm section, you sound good. You don't sound as good as Art Tatum, and
later I would do that with other people. My favorite pianist of all time, and a dear
man too, was Erroll Garner, who couldn't read a note of music, he was just a genius. At the age of four his genius was recognized. And we could talk about him sometime for six
hours, I love every note he ever played. But again, there's a recording of Erroll Garner
and myself playing [sings] "The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else." Swings like mad, but if somebody had said
listen we want to get you and Erroll into a studio to record, I would have laughed at
them and said please, leave the man alone, I'll only slow him down. MR: Were you able to get a copy? SA: Yeah, if you'd like either of those tracks
I'll send them to you. MR: Yeah. SA: Let me make a note of that [dictates]
Darrell or Jim, find the old tracks where one is from an Art Tatum album consisting
of recordings made off radios and TV shows, and the two of us are playing "Fine and Dandy,"
then we also have a track where Erroll Garner and I are playing "The One I Love Belongs
to Somebody Else" and we'll get those recordings to the Hamilton folks. MR: Terrific. Great. When the Goodman movie came up, did you have
to audition for that or was that something that they said this is the guy -
SA: Yeah. By the time the thing was brought to my attention
it was a firm offer, we'd like you to do the picture. I later heard partly how that came about. We will never - at least I never knew - how
long the casting list was. I'll explain briefly to people who might not
know about the movie business, that whenever you have a script ready to go or whether it's
based on a famous novel, a play or something your sister wrote last Tuesday, whatever it
is, you don't just call up somebody and say, "get me Tom Cruise," or, "Get me Bill Clinton,"
whoever. You make out a list. Because although you might like to have Tom
Cruise in your movie, maybe you're ten million dollars short and he's not available or there's
a lot of reasons he's not going to do it, because he has his next seven pictures already
scheduled. Whatever. So you make out a list. Well if I can't get Tom Cruise, how about
John Travolta? If he's not available, whoever. So we'll never know whether my name was ninth
on a list or was number one on the list, I don't know. The only other name that I ever heard was
in contention was Tony Curtis, and Tony and I are obviously not the same individual. He's a very handsome fellow, and he had the
advantage that at that time he was under contract to Universal which I never was, so he was
sort of one of their stock leading men, and I've been told that some people at the studio
wanted him to play the lead. But that was vetoed by Benny himself, who
I've been told said, I'm just paraphrasing of course, I wasn't there when he said it,
said I want Steve Allen for this because first of all Tony doesn't know anything about music
and he won't seem real, he won't seem legitimate as a musician speaking, also what can he do
with the clarinet, you might as well hand him a tractor, he doesn't know anything about. I'm punching up Benny's dialogue, but that
was the thrust of his message, the other thing was a little less flattering. He said also, Tony Curtis is a pretty boy. He said I'm not a pretty boy and Steve Allen's
not a pretty boy. And it turned out that I did look more like
Benny than - Tony looked nothing like him, so that had a lot to do with it. MR: I understand Sol Yaged came out and gave
you some - SA: Yeah. As soon as I agreed to do the movie then of
course the question was even though I was a musician I knew nothing about the clarinet,
so we had to hire somebody to teach me, and somebody knew about Sol, our mutual friend
Bobby Rosengarden once said something hysterically funny, he described Sol Yaged as quote the
Jewish Benny Goodman. For you young people, Benny himself is Jewish. But anyway Sol was the perfect choice, and
a very easy guy to work with, so he gave me several weeks of just basic lessons, you know
how to hold it, how to blow and all that stuff. And the reason I did have to go through all
that, some people have said well why did you bother? Why didn't you just go like that and pretend
to play? The answer is my fingers had to be on the
right holes. Now if you're taking a shot from the back
of a ballroom, it doesn't matter, you can hardly see my hands. But on a close up I can't be playing this
if the real notes are over here. So I did have to have my fingers, and I did
have to learn the instrument, and I learned it well enough to do a little playing in public. I once played a duet with Benny himself on
a little tune I'd written. Benny himself that night was in a fog as usual. Benny Goodman lived in a fog. He was Mr. Absent Minded and often didn't
know what he was doing. He'd walk on stage with his fly open and stuff. And through accident, he was just a careless
man and didn't think much about the world. He was just the greatest clarinet player of
them all. So just after the movie, NBC and Universal
Studios got together to do a little promotion going in both directions, so that meant booking
Benny on our show, which was on the air Sunday nights at NBC at the time. So Benny himself played for a few minutes,
and naturally was thrilling as always, and then our production group decided that Benny
and I would do my little song with the two of us playing clarinets. It was sort of a riff thing [scats], an easy
thing to play. So in the script I walked in after Benny had
played his marvelous numbers, and I said, "Benny that was terrific." And his line was, "well thank you, Steve,
say, I see you brought your clarinet, why don't you and I do something together?" A pretty simple line, and he'd had a whole
week to work on it, he had one line with a week to work on it, and he forgot my name. Now it was my show, I was playing him in the
movie, you might figure if there was any name he wouldn't forget it's mine. He might have forgotten his own. But anyway he did, on the air, and he did
what he always did, because he was always forgetting people's names. He had the world's worst memory for names. One night parenthetically I'll tell you about
his memory. He was doing a performance somewhere and his
usual pianist, who was Teddy Wilson, the great black pianist, was not available that week
and so he wasn't at the instrument. I don't know who the other guys was, let's
say the other man was Jess Stacey, although it wasn't, but it was some white player. MR: I think it was Johnny Guarnieri actually. SA: Thank you, then you know the story? MR: Well I want you to tell it though. SA: So Benny is saying, "thank you ladies
and gentlemen, and I'd like to also share the thanks with our great drummer, Mr. Gene
Krupa, and the King of the Vibes, Mr. Lionel Hampton," now he turns to the white piano
player and says "and at the keyboard, uhhh, Teddy Wilson, ladies and gentlemen." That was the only name he could come up with. So that's how Benny was about names. Anyway, back on my show, thirty million people
watching. In those days you did have an audience that
large. So I said, "Benny that was fantastic, beautiful." There's about a two second silence and then
he says, "oh thank you, uh, Pops, say why don't we do something together?" So that was the name he used. He called his grandmother Pops, and anybody. If he couldn't think of a name he called them
Pops. MR: That's terrific. I wanted to ask you about your song writing. Quite prolific. As you said you're a melody person. Do you approach song writing differently if
you are commissioned or have a very specific intent for a song? SA: Yes. Of all the ways that you can approach and
complete a song, I work in all of them. If there are let's say ten ways, it doesn't
follow that I do ten percent Way A, ten percent Way B, I don't think there are any relevant
statistics on that, but it depends on what the assignment is. Sometimes I function as only a composer and
somebody else provides the lyrics. Or sometimes I function as only a lyricist
and somebody else writes the melody obviously. In many cases, the majority of cases, I write
both. But take a number "Gravy Waltz," the melody
of which had already been written by Ray Brown, the great bass player and nice man too. Anyway there was already that cute little
melody [scats] which itself oddly enough was a little riff partly based on a lightweight
song of the late 1930s called "The Umbrella Man" [scats] Anyway he started with that little
thing, did an interpolation and wrote a marvelous jazz waltz. So it was my assignment to provide the lyric
for that. And it was a little tougher than often, because
the title was already there, I couldn't suddenly come up with a new thought, like [sings] how's
your sister does she have a blister - you know I couldn't come up with anything new
like that, it had to be Gravy Waltz, which is kind of tough, because waltzing is one
thing and gravy is another and they have no connection whatsoever. So I wrote a lyric as if speaking in a sort
of an African American sensibility, [sings] Pretty mama's in the kitchen - so I painted
a picture of a woman in the kitchen, and anyway lyrically it was justified in the song, in
fact it won a Grammy when it was judged. But that was a little tough. In connection with writing the lyric for "Picnic"
the theme from the famous movie "Picnic," there again, the title was a given and it's
not a good title. It's only one word and it conveys nothing
except the image of a picnic. If somebody said to any song writer, "write
a song about a picnic," they would have come up with a thought, a phrase, "I met you at
the picnic," or "can't wait to see you at the picnic," you know. All we had was "picnic." It's a word like "chair" or "bread" or something,
it gave me nothing. But nevertheless I was stuck with that so
I had to work within those confines. And it turned out nicely. You work with the melody of course. MR: Yeah. Did you have the story line? SA: No. That raises an interesting question. If you're writing the theme for a film or
there's already a famous novel or a famous play with the title, are you obliged as lyricist
to somehow incorporate reference to the theme, and the answer is no, you're not. I hadn't even seen the movie by the time I
wrote the thing, so I didn't know what it was. It didn't matter. I knew that some action took place at a picnic
or the play wouldn't have been called that. The thing came up recently when I wrote a
theme for Sidney Sheldon's novel, if it's ever made into a picture presumably they'll
use it, his new novel was titled or is titled "Tell Me Your Dreams." So I started with that title. But my lyric has nothing to do with the story
of his novel which is about a woman with multiple personalities. So a psychiatrist would be interested in her
dreams of course. MR: If you sit and write a tune that's really
meant to be an instrumental, such as the thing you did with Benny Goodman or something like
that, is it sometimes a little chore to think of a title to put on it? SA: That also is a marvelous question, that's
what you do for a living, you ask marvelous questions. I jump back to, I don't know about 40 years
ago, I once got intrigued by that question, and I wrote to about 20 band leaders, including
Benny. This was long before I'd met him. He had some instrumentals, one was called
"Benji's Bauble," and another one with the name of one of his daughters. Now I didn't know that those were named after
two of children until he wrote back and said Dear Steve, in answer to your question, Benji
is one of my sons - his own name, Benny, Benjamin - and I forgot what the other one had to do
with. But anyway he'd used the name of his two children. But I was noticing, or what I had originally
noticed I should say, was that there was really no meaning, nor could there be any meaning
to a pure melody. You might somehow think of a message if you
hear a march or something of that sort, but that's your own interpretation and a thousand
people would have a thousand separate interpretations. You can't say a note means a word or a thought,
or if you do you're talking nonsense. So anyway, to get back to your earlier question,
all of the ways there are to write songs I work in. Sometimes I just start with a title. One of my hit songs, in fact just last night
I was listening to three different recordings of it doing some organization work, it's called
"Pretend You Don't See My Heart." It was a big hit by Jerry Vale and it's been
sung by Vic Damone and a lot of good singers. It's a very Italian waltz, purposely written
in the Italian vein. It was originally written in fact, no it was
recorded as an instrumental but it was always in the Italian groove. Anyway what occurred to me first was the title,
that obviously would relate to a broken love affair, and the question, oh what will happen
if I run into her or him or whatever. So pretend you don't see her, that would be
the solution, just don't get involved anymore, it's too late. Everything's too sad or whatever. So again in that case, starting with the title
thought. In other cases, in most cases in fact I have
a melody first which has no meaning whatever, although it does have a mood. There is such a thing as really sad melodies. There are other things which are soaringly
romantic melodies, at least to American ears or western European ears. What an Eskimo would think of if he heard
"Rhapsody in Blue" well we'll have to ask him. MR: Let me play a little excerpt, one of your
many songs, and we were talking about some of your jazz work. [audio interlude]
SA: Oh yeah. MR: Do you recall doing that one? SA: Yeah. I even remember where I was when I wrote that
one. MR: No kidding? SA: I was at a house I'd lived in for a few
years in Van Nuys I think it was, a subsection of Los Angeles. I had an inferior piano. I don't know how I acquired that but it was
an old upright. But the fellow you hear playing the clarinet,
a very good clarinetist and marvelous guy named Gus Bivona, who made some big band recordings
with his own group. Gus was one of those rare people who - the
meeting of which I recall clearly. And that's odd because I don't remember how
I met most of my friends. My mother yes? I think I can safely assume that we got together
that way. But other than that I just have a vague memory. I remember we went to the same high school
or worked at the same hot dog stand or whatever brought us together. But the first moment of confrontation I have
no recollection of except for Gus. I had moved away from another little house
and had one of those U-Haul trucks. So I pulled up to this new house and nobody
was with me, so I had to get all of the stuff out of the truck by myself and begin lugging
it into the house. And suddenly this friendly guy comes walking
across the street. And he didn't know who I was because I was
just on the radio then, I wasn't recognizable. And he said, "hi, need any help?" I said, "yeah, sure." So he helped me for the next hour or so carry
chairs and things into the house. And that was Gus Bivona. We were friends until he passed away a year
or so ago. Marvelous guy. Anyway I remember showing that to Gus shortly
after I'd written it, this was in the same neighborhood, and I think I just called it
"Baby What You Did." The titles that I give melodies either make
sense - that sounds like a dumb category - or they don't. But even the ones that don't make sense in
terms of some coherent thought I had in mind that I was trying to convey as I write it,
do fit the melody. In fact that is why I give them that at the
moment of composition. Because I can't read music, which means I
can't write it down. We send tapes of my songs to other people
who can't write songs but can put them on paper. Anyway once I'd written [scats], I just thought
of that phrase "baby but you did" like somebody else did [scats] baby what you did. So that's how that got its title. MR: You probably could have, if you wanted
to, put a lyric to that. It might have taken a certain amount of manipulation
with - hey I have too many notes here, I need a few less for the syllables. SA: Well it's possible even actually if you
have too many notes in an ideal sense, to nevertheless do that. The only time I can remember being as we now
say "challenged" in doing so was when I made what still seems to me an astonishing discovery,
to jump back to the beginning of the story, back about 1937 or 8, the Bob Crosby Dixieland
Band, which was one of the very popular, nationally popular bands of the 30s, which is right in
the middle of the glorious Golden Age, swing period, was working a lot in Chicago and therefore
they had a lot of airtime. They were on the radio quite a lot, and it's
a composition concerning which I had something to say when poor Bob Haggart passed away. He was the bass player in that band, and he
was a composer and an arranger, a fellow named Ray Bauduc B-A-U-D-U-C was the drummer, and
anyway the song was called "The South Rampart Street Parade." I think it is, I can only talk about the melody
because I wrote the lyric, I can praise the melody. I think it's the greatest Dixieland song of
all time. It's not the most played - "When the Saints
Go Marching In" is most played, but that's really a dumb melody. Think of it [scats] This is not great writing,
folks. It swings, but it's not a great song. "South Rampart Street" is a magnificent melody. In fact it's more than that. It is eight separate melodies. So when the guys put that thing together,
they were creating really a Dixieland symphony. So I wrote these songs long before I'd met
them, I wrote the lyric I should say, and when I finally met them, on the show or some
place, I took occasion to say, "guys, given that there are eight separate melodies on
that marvelous thing you wrote, who wrote what? You know, which of you wrote what? Because there were then three other men's
names on the sheet music, I can't remember the other names. I don't see those names anymore, I don't know
why, you'd have to ask the historians how that got changed. But I thought maybe one guy wrote this phrase
and one guy wrote another, and it might indeed have been done that way. And I've never forgotten Ray Bauduc's answer,
he said, "to tell you the truth, we're not certain that we wrote any of that stuff." He said, "it's just a collection of Dixie
licks, Dixie clich�s, that we have a vague recollection of hearing them when we were
kids listening to those marvelous old Dixieland street bands," which they still preserve in
New Orleans because of the cultural use, and it's nice for a tourist to see that. But it was one of the places as you know where
jazz actually got started. First of all New Orleans is the general birthplace,
not the only one, but it's number one. And there was that tradition of bands actually
marching down the street in the sunshine, playing. Now bands had been marching down the streets
for centuries, so that was not invented in New Orleans, but what they played generally
was marches, and in this song historians have, it's like finding the Dead Sea Scrolls in
the context of jazz research. In that song you have the word "Parade," It
isn't just the South Rampart Street Jamboree or whatever, it's the "South Rampart Street
Parade," and consequently it is partly martial. The reason I'm laughing now is I dictated
that phrase the other day and somebody wrote M-A-R-S-H-A-L-L, as if it was part of the
Marshall plan. M-A-R-T-I-A-L folks. Anyway, it was part of the - and if you think
of it, the very opening phrase is something the guys almost certainly did hear when they
were twelve years old and kids and listening to that kind of music [scats]. Boy that really makes you want to get up out
of your chair and march even with only my mouth singing it. It is magnificent composition. Anyway because of its popularity and it's
greatness, now we jump from about 1937 to 1951. I was in New York and one day I got to wondering,
is there a lyric to that? Because I was also working as a lyricist as
well as a composer. And to my astonishment, when we checked with
the publisher he said no. Why the lyricists of our nation let that masterpiece
hang unadorned with words for so long a time I don't know but it worked out nicely for
me. So I wrote the melody. Now to get back to the word "challenge." I'm the only person you can ask a question
and I get backwards, I keep stepping away father from the answer. Because it had eight separate melodies and
very busy notes, a lot of phrases with [scats] lots of syllables, it was therefore tough
to write a lyric to. Most lyrics I write in I don't know 25 minutes
or so. That one took me a few days. In fact I had to even resort to a technical
gimmick to enable me to complete it that quickly, and that was that most records in those days
were at the 78 revolutions per minute speed. Years later they invented 45 and stuff. But there were also certain turntables which
for the accommodation of radio stations, could play recordings at the speed of 33-1/3 revolutions
per minute, so I discovered that I could take this 78 record, which itself is a classic,
well anyway it's that great, and play it at the slower speed. That helped me enormously, or would have helped
any lyricist because the notes were going by very slowly. So that saved me several hours work once I
stumbled on that idea. MR: Neat. The last thing I want to do is wrap up here,
but I'm going to let you know of the time. It's about five of eleven. I don't know where you have to be. SA: It's okay, I can stay until about eight
after eleven. MR: Eight after, okay. Can you define for me when you hear something
that's really swinging, why? Why does one thing swing and the next thing
doesn't? SA: The dominant factor is rhythm I think. Well people would think of that right out
of the barn, but that isn't all there is to it. There are certain ways of voicing instruments,
if you're talking now let's say about a big band, 14, 15, 16 pieces, there are certain
kinds of harmonies sometimes, now it's so common we don't even notice it or comment
on it, but sometime in the late 30s you began to hear more chords. Even if it's a simple chord, a C chord let's
say, where they added the sixth note of the scale instead of the tonic. [scats]. Let's see C-E-G, to those three notes they
added the A which is the sixth note in the group. And why that sounds hipper, or cooler as they
would say today, it's not easy to explain in purely scientific terms, but that's the
way it is. That had probably happened first, even before
it happened with instruments it happened with voices. If you listen to trios or quartets, there
were no five group singing groups that I know about in the old days, until the Hi-Lo's and
a group like that came along, they didn't get that complex with their harmonies. But we all remember the term "Barber Shop
Quartet" [sings] down by the ol' mill stream. That's nice stuff, but the harmonies are as
simple as possible. Only the necessary notes are there. There's no enrichment or adornment. But then about 1937ish or so a group called
The Merrimacks, if you can find any of their old recording, play them sometime with this
comment, you'll see what I'm talking about. They were the first people to add the sixth
and to add other harmonic enrichments - where they got them I don't know, you'll have to
dig them out of the grave and ask them I guess. But you can hear it in their old recordings. Then from The Merrimacks, that opened the
window of opportunity, I'm very big with clich�s today, and you had groups like the Pied Pipers,
the Mello-Larks, Mel Torme had a great group, the Meltones I think they were called, in
which the harmonies were more typical of what was also happening at that time in voicing
the reed sections, the saxophone sections, of orchestras. When they only had four notes, they could
still put in the sixth and some enrichments, but when they added a fifth saxophone, which
now all the big bands had had for years, somehow that enlarged the harmonic possibilities and
we associated that kind of harmonic hipness, with big band with jazz, with swing. Parenthetically isn't it marvelous that young
people now love that music? I sometimes feel like saying, "hey, where
were you a year ago, I tried to tell you it was great." But you had to wait for some guy to have a
hit record with it. Okay. MR: Your new book? SA: Oh yes. MR: I wanted to, if you wouldn't mind handing
it to me. SA: Yeah, it's called Dumbth. It touches on music, chiefly lyric writing
of popular songs. What the problem deals with is, I mean what
the book deals with is the problem that the American people have for quite some time now
been getting dumber. I don't mean I think so, I mean they have
been. Had I never been born, this is just a factual
statement. It's all too sadly documented. We hear constantly horror stories about individual
schools, and it's more than awful, it's even internationally embarrassing. Americans get very excited, and sometimes
very disrespectful, very cruel, if we send to the Olympics, wherever they're held, a
guy who is demonstrably the fastest hundred meter runner in our country, what an honor
that is, wouldn't you be honored if you were the fastest miler in the whole United States? Fantastic. Your name would be in the books. Nevertheless, to be the fastest in the States
doesn't mean you're also going to beat all the guys from Africa and Sweden and Cleveland
and so forth. Anyway if an American only gets the Silver
medal or the Bronze, that's nice but we treat him as if he's almost a failure. Okay, now carry that mindset, forget sports,
apply it to information. Apply it to education. Now when the American students, about geography,
history, math, science, whatever, when they're in an Olympic race, or the equivalent of it,
with about 20 or 30 other nations, we all know the nations: France, Sweden, Germany,
boom, all those nations. Here's the scary part. We not only don't win the Gold, the Silver
or the Bronze, we usually come in last. If that isn't scary bad news - and I'm not
talking about meaningless hooray for America. Sure hooray for every country. I don't give a damn about that, but just in
terms of what kind of doctors are we going to produce? What kind of automobile manufacturers are
we going to produce, and a lot of very practical questions. What kind of airline pilots? We're taking them from the worst of the international
competition. They guys have almost flunked out. So anyway that is the large issue that my
book deals with. And it gets into evidences of "dumbth" in
the lyrics of very popular songs. MR: I think I was making a scene on the plane
on the way here, because I was reading, especially in the beginning, some of your examples and
I'm laughing out loud, and of course the people around me are kind of wondering what's going
on, and I probably was advertising your book pretty well. And I wanted to comment on the thing you said
about 45 minutes ago actually, which I think is significant, when you're describing the
Golden Age, and you called it "world music." I think that's a very telling statement and
I think something, you know when you go to the record stores today you can see a category
of world music, but it's all from Taiwan or music from Indonesia. SA: Well yeah, you're right. The music today, there is a sense in which
America still dominates culturally, but it's not because of great quality anymore, it's
because rock was in or punk rock was in for about a year, or acid rock was in, there are
many subdivisions of garbage music. But those truly golden days, where even if
you grew up in anywhere on the planet, you know a village in Latin America, you still
loved those beautiful Gershwin melodies, those beautiful Jerome Kern melodies. MR: Do you think it's odd that jazz is being
touted in many regards as a great American art form, yet you can't go out and hear it
unless it's at a special concert or if you want to pay $50 to get into a club? SA: Yeah, that's true. It's also even worse than that fact, and you're
right to bring it up, is the fact that American jazz musicians, the well known, the highly
competent among them, can work in France, can work in Germany, can work in Sweden and
many other parts of the world, Australia, whatever, and be treated the way we treated
The Beatles when they would come here. Crowds meet them at the airport. People stand in line for two hours to get
into the clubs where they play in these world capitals, but right here tonight in Los Angeles,
some of the guys are playing and there's eight people out front at the tables. These same musicians playing genius stuff,
which later, if it's recorded tonight, even with 12 people in the audience, that record
may win a Grammy two years down the line. So the stuff is there. The treasures are there. But it's not that much appreciated, particularly
since that 1950 point when American teenagers just suddenly veered away, and we could talk
about that as we already have at some length. MR: Well just to wrap up, what would we expect
from you in the near future? SA: Well more of the same. One of the things I do is write books and
this is one of them, it's my 52nd book, and there are about four more that are ready to
be published. The only one of which is relevant to your
interests is one titled One Hundred Lyrics by Steve Allen. It obviously doesn't have melodies in, although
we're thinking of sending it out with a recording of some kind so people can hear some of the
stuff. But it just features the lyrics and in each
case after printing the lyric then we tell the story of how it came to be written. Either why, or who I wrote it with, or whatever
the story might be, for a movie, for a Broadway musical, for what have you. Then I'm constantly doing performances. I have a big band that is as good as any big
band anywhere. I'm not saying I am, I'm saying the guys are,
and they are. Once you reach a certain level of expertise
it's almost the same as in athletics, Michael Jordan is better than Shaquille O'Neil, but
just a little bit. So once guys are that great, they can play
in any band. I don't have them under contract, but every
time we send out the call we get 15 or 16 of the best players on earth. So the albums we're making and the concerts
we're doing are wild. If you dig that kind of music, you'll have
a very happy evening out front. MR: I love the longevity that's possible in
music too, with the players. SA: Oh yeah. MR: I feel sorry for dancers sometimes, they
have a certain point that they can get to but some of our greatest players -
SA: A very wise observation on your part. The same thing is true of actors, depending
on the kind of acting they do, time can be cruel to them. If what they chiefly market, if what chiefly
explains their success is their physical beauty or handsomeness, they're not always going
to have it. But you can be 74 years old and be playing
jazz probably better than you did at 54 or 24. You know more. And I used to think that at least you would
lose your chops you know, your technical facility as you got old, but I'm now 77 and I play
at least as good at this age as I did at any earlier age. So speaking personally I haven't lost anything. In fact as a composer I am considerably better
now than back when I was writing a lot of my songs that were hits. Because you don't have to be Beethoven, as
we've already established, to write a popular song. But harmonically I'm much more advanced now
and so I'm writing more unusual melodies, despite my age. MR: Well I'm most appreciative of your time. SA: Well you should be at these prices. No I'm honored to be invited, because what
we're laying down here, what you guys are establishing, preserving in your library,
is very important. Because while it's fun to be 77 years old,
I'm not going to be around for a great deal longer, and so - oh here comes death now,
and I'll do one of those. MR: We'd better sign off then. Thanks so much.
