Eighty years ago this October, the Number One record in America was, as happened quite often in those days, an unforgettable song from an entirely forgettable film. Orchestra Wives opened in September 1942, back when the husbands of orchestra wives were some of the biggest celebrities on the planet, and the biggest orchestra husband of all was Glenn Miller. If the bland, bespectacled, somewhat portly Miller seems an unlikely movie star, well, so what? He was an unlikely pop star, too, but it didn't stop him: It was an age when instrumentalists, chaps in tuxedos fronting orchestras, were as lustrous as any Hollywood leading man. Their moment did not long outlast the Second World War, but that wasn't a problem for Glenn Miller, whose plane disappeared over the English Channel in 1944. So Miller's sappy, banal movie vehicles from a couple of years earlier were retrospectively freighted with tragedy - at least to everyone except our old friend Artie Shaw, who remarked of his fellow bandleader, "It would have been better if he'd lived and his music had died."
But it didn't. As Artie himself told me way back when: "The Mozart Clarinet Concerto, we know that's a good piece of work: Here it is a couple hundred years later." Well, here's a Glenn Miller Number One record eighty years later, nearly halfway to immortality:
A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I Got A Gal
In Kalamazoo
Don't wanna boast
But I know she's the toast
Of Kalamazoo-zoo-zoo-zoo-zoo...
Notwithstanding his dominance of the hit parade, 20th Century Fox seemed to intuit that Glenn Miller was not exactly brimming with charisma on the big screen. For his first film, Sun Valley Serenade (1941), they brought in Olympic champ Sonja Henie to skate up a storm. It was a hit - and a year later, for the Miller band's follow-up Orchestra Wives, they felt confident enough to hang up the skates. The score for the picture was by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon, and they provided Miller with a trio of winners - "Kalamazoo", the big production number, plus two gorgeous ballads, the magnificent, brooding "Serenade in Blue", and one that would become better known a generation later in Etta James' version, "At Last". That last was actually written for Sun Valley Serenade, but after the preview the studio chief Daryl Zanuck said, "There are too many big ones in this picture. Let's save that one for the next." So they did, and (save for a few bars of instrumental in Sun Valley) "At Last" was formally introduced to the world in Orchestra Wives.
"Kalamazoo" is pretty obviously an analogue of Miller's big hit from the previous picture:
Both "Chattanooga" and "Kalamazoo" are songs about taking the train to see some hometown gal several states away. That's a cute trick to pull off once, never mind twice. But Harry Warren was the master of the Great American Train Song: "Chattanooga Choo-Choo", "On the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe", "Shuffle Off to Buffalo"...
Whether or not he liked trains (as his sometime lyricist Johnny Mercer certainly did) is unclear. As you'll recall from previous entries in this space, he was famously cranky and disliked all manner of things, especially the celebrity of other songwriters such as Mercer and Irving Berlin ("They bombed the wrong Berlin," he remarked in 1945) and his own comparative obscurity ("Even my best friends haven't heard of me"). At a certain level, the grouchiness was surely an act, but faute de mieux, and one more limiting than his music. At any rate, almost everything he is reported to have said or done outside the music can seem churlish and sour, and yet no bitterness infects the songs. He appears to have relished the idea of writing for the Miller band, and in fact conceived "Kalamazoo" as an instrumental - because, after all, if you're a composer composing for the Glenn Miller Orchestra, it's the orchestra and the orchestral voicings that's the appeal rather than whichever vocalists are sitting down the back of the bus this season. So, as Warren later explained, he had "written the complete melody as a kind of rhythmic exercise, with no thought of lyrics". Hence those eight repeated E flats at the beginning. You wouldn't write that if you were planning a song: That's for the band to show off.
But the studio wanted a production number - something for the musicians, the singers, the dancers, the works. And, more specifically, they wanted another "Chattanooga Choo-Choo". "I've had a lot of titles about places that I've never been to," said Warren. "I think everybody around in those days was writing about far-off places they'd never been to. A lot of fellas wrote southern songs about Dixie and they'd never been down there, they didn't know anything about it. But they wrote them just the same." You can hear Irving Caesar, lyricist of "Swanee", telling me about one boffo example of this phenomenon on this month's first Song of the Week. As for Harry Warren, he was made an honorary citizen of Chattanooga, but in the four decades between his Number One record and his death he never felt minded to go there, either by choo-choo or any other mode of transportation. He once shuffled through Buffalo, yet without stopping to get off. But he wasn't a homebody all his life:
I had been in Kalamazoo when I was very young and had carved my name on the wall of the railroad station there. I guess maybe that was the basis for the lyric.
Kalamazoo? A town of 50,000 (then) in south-west Michigan? Why not? It's a mellifluous name - certainly more mellifluous than the name of the original settlement - Bronson - after its founder, Titus Bronson. But they ran him out of town, after he was fined for stealing a cherry tree, and in 1836 de-Bronsoned the burg and adopted the Potawatomi name Kalamazoo. As Warren recounted it, the repeated crotchets in the first two bars and his boyhood anecdote about carving H-A-R-R-Y at the station combined to inspire his lyricist to spell it out:
A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I Got A Gal
In Kalamazoo
Don't wanna boast
But I know she's the toast
Of Kalamazoo-zoo-zoo-zoo-zooYears have gone by
My, my, how she grew
I liked her looks
When I carried her books
In Kalamazoo-zoo-zoo-zoo-zoo...
Years ago, I was on the BBC one Saturday morning, on "Loose Ends" with Ned Sherrin, Stephen Fry, Carol Thatcher and the gang. And Ned had among the guests an English fellow who'd spent a couple of years teaching at a college in Kalamazoo - "as in the famous song 'I've Got a Girl in Kalamazoo...'"
And I had to interject to protest: "It's not 'I've Got a Girl in Kalamazoo', it's 'I've Got a Gal in Kalamazoo'. 'Gal' rhymes with 'Kal'. Otherwise it would be 'I've Got a Girl in Burlington Arcade'" - a covered alley of high-end emporia connecting Piccadilly with Bond Street.
"That was unusually impassioned of you," said Stephen Fry afterwards. "Quite correct, of course."
"Well, I felt I had to," I said. "'Gal'/'Kal' is what makes it American."
That said, one should note that the official title is "(I've Got a Gal in) Kalamazoo", but the published sheet and every discriminating singer render that first line as "A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I got a gal..." - which is even more American.
The man who wrote those words was Mack Gordon, whose "You Make Me Feel So Young" Sinatra kept in his book for over 40 years. Harry Warren's two most productive partnerships were with Al Dubin in the Thirties and Mack Gordon in the Forties. Both were large men who died young. Al Dubin ate all day, and drank and womanized all night. Mack Gordon ate all day, didn't drink, and struck out with showgirls. Likewise, there's a little more life in Dubin's lyrics, a little more "hip-hooray and ballyhoo", as he put it in "Lullaby of Broadway". Gordon's love songs tend toward the tried and tested, and occasionally veer into the incompetent. But he's on cracking form here, as the singer expresses his need to see again the gal in Kalamazoo whose books he carried:
I'm gonna send a wire
Hoppin' on a flyer
Leavin' today...
Isn't that great? We no longer have wires or flyers, so that's a moment - America, 1942 - distilled for all time. But, much as I like the rhyme, neither is my favorite word in that couplet: that honor is reserved for "hoppin'". He doesn't catch the flyer, board the flyer, buy tickets for the flyer, reserve passage on the flyer; he hops it - and it's just the perfect choice for the song's debonair urgency. Just lovely. And how does Gordon wrap up the middle-eight? Very adroitly:
Am I dreamin'
I can hear her screamin'
Hi-ya, Mister Jackson
Ev'rything's O-
K-A-L-A-M-A-Z-O-O what a gal!
A real pipperoo!
Did anyone ever say "pipperoo"? Or was this a coinage of Gordon's? I can't find any published use of it pre-1942, but am happy to be corrected. At any rate, the ensuing production number is an even pippier pipperoo. It may be the pippiest pipperoo ever pipped. The Glenn Miller Orchestra playing the part of "the Gene Morrison Orchestra" throw everything plus the kitchen sink at it for eight minutes, and it never outstays its welcome: There's the band, creamy boy vocalist/saxophonist Tex Beneke, then Marion Hutton and the Modernaires doing some solid hep-cat shoulder moves, and finally the Nicholas Brothers show up for the last half to more or less demolish the joint. There's enough talent for three or four numbers in this one routine - and bear in mind what Gregory Hines used to say: They can never make a biopic of the Nicholas Brothers until computer technology gets way better, because there are no human beings on earth who can do what they did (like rising from a split without using your hands). Enjoy:
Years ago, after I'd exhumed that clip, our late friend Kathy Shaidle re-posted it with the terse PS:
"Also: This is America."
As I said to Kathy not long before she died, I wish that were true, but I'm not so sure. And she agreed.
Nevertheless, I hail the sentiment. When I was a kid I loved the Nicholas Brothers, not just as dancers but as singers, too. I especially treasure their chorus here with Fayard's spoken interjections to Harold's vocal:
Years have gone by
My, my, how she grew!(Man, did she grew!)
And:
O what a gal!
A real pipperoo!(She's a fine chick!)
I must have been seven or eight when I first saw the above routine, and I've never forgotten it. I had the pleasure of watching it with my own youngest not long ago, and I'm pleased to say he was almost as tickled by "Man, did she grew!" as I was. By the end, you're as eager to send that wire and hop a flyer:
I'll make my bid
For that freckle-faced kid
I'm hurrying to!
Goin' to Michigan
To see the sweetest gal
In Kalamazoo!
Goin' to Michigan on my first visit many years ago, I made a point of making a small diversion to Kalamazoo, and thought it perhaps not quite as compelling as Glenn, Tex, Marion, Fayard, Harold et al had made it out to be. For a not very large city, it has over the years produced stoves, buggies, cigars and mandolins, and musically speaking was the original home of the Gibson Guitar Company. But as Tom Dietz of the Kalamazoo Valley Museum conceded:
Glenn Miller's ditty about goin' to Michigan to make a bid for a freckle-faced kid probably did as much to put Kalamazoo on the national and global map in the 20th century as The Upjohn Co. and its cornucopia of products.
How about those gals from Kalamazoo? The song proved so popular that it was decided the town really did need a gal from Kalamazoo. So the local lads voted and Kalamazoo College junior Sara Woolley, "a dazzling dark-eyed beauty", was proclaimed "the toast of Kalamazoo".
And then a man called Ira B Arnstein decided that he was the real toast of Kalamazoo.
Who is Ira B Arnstein? Well, he's the composer of, among many others, "Night and Day", "Begin the Beguine", "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?" and "White Christmas".
According to him.
According to everyone else, Arnstein was a serial litigant who took Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and many other songwriters to court claiming that they'd stolen all their monster hits from him. He'd already sued, unsuccessfully, Harry Warren over "Boulevard of Broken Dreams", but he figured second time's the charm, so took Warren and Gordon to court for plagiarizing "(I've Got a Gal in) Kalamazoo" from a Wagnerian burlesque he'd written in 1926 in which the title "Kal-a-ma-zoo" was set to the Grand March from Tannhäuser. The "humorous travesty on grand opera" had never been performed or published, so Mr Arnstein was obliged to explain to the court how Messrs Warren and Gordon would ever have heard it in order to steal it.
The plaintiff testified that, seven years after he wrote his Wagnerian vocal quartet, he was living in lodgings at 171 West 71st Street, Manhattan, and that Harry Warren was partial to calling on his landlady, Mrs Seltzer. One day Arnstein played Warren his operatic parody. Shortly thereafter, the manuscript of it mysteriously vanished from his room. Arnstein then filed a complaint about Warren with Ascap, the songwriters' society. Shortly thereafter, Mrs Seltzer mysteriously vanished. And shortly after that Warren himself went on the lam and hightailed it "to Hollywood and became a great songwriter", as Arnstein testified - presumably having taken the precaution of bringing with him Arnstein's manuscript just in case he needed a song about south-western Michigan a decade hence, and having taken the additional precaution of disposing of Arnstein's landlady somewhere en route. Mrs Seltzer was a real pipperoo, but she knew too much.
Ira B Arnstein lost that suit, as he lost every other. (There is a splendid biography of him by Gary Rosen, Unfair to Genius, which, in its catalogue of the wreckage of Arnstein's life, nevertheless acknowledges the impact of his suits on musical jurisprudence in America.) Harry Warren denied he'd ever met Mrs Seltzer or been to 171 West 71st Street, and Judge Bondy believed him. But you have to wonder if Warren, so resentful at being the most unknown hitmaker in America, didn't occasionally secretly wish he'd confessed to offing Mrs Seltzer and gotten splashed all over the tabloids as the "Kalamazoo" Killer...
It was not to be. Instead Ira B Arnstein slunk home to his rooming house to prepare for his next doomed suit, against Cole Porter. And every time he switched on the radio the Glenn Miller Orchestra seemed to be taunting him anew:
A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I Got A Gal
In Kalamazoo
Don't wanna boast
But I know she's the toast
Of Kalamazoo
Sue! Sue! Sue! Sue!
~Many of Steyn's most popular Song of the Week essays are collected together in his book A Song For The Season, personally autographed copies of which are available from the SteynOnline bookstore - and, if you're a Mark Steyn Club member, don't forget to enter the special promo code at checkout to enjoy the special Steyn Club member discount.
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