Monday, Aug. 20, 1951
How the Money Rolls In
Mitch Miller, director of pop music for Columbia Records, got a telephone call last week that made him pull his beard. Musical bootleggers, said his tipster, were copying Rosemary Clooney's (and Columbia's) fast-selling disk Come on-a My House, then peddling it cut rate to distributors under phony Columbia labels.
Miller made a couple of calls of his own, put detectives on the case. Such bootlegging could cost Columbia thousands of dollars a week--and in the fairly short time that 40-year-old Mitchell William Miller has been working for the company, he has brilliantly specialized in making the money roll in, not letting it slip away. In just 18 months, his guesses and general savvy have upped Columbia's pop record sales more than 60%, pushed Columbia's label high on bestseller lists. Last week's Variety rating: of the top ten recordings listed, five were Columbia's.
Six Bagpipes. Miller picks the tunes, picks the singers to record them, sometimes even picks the albums to sheath the records. Latest pickings: offbeat instrumentations, e.g., harpsichord background for Clooney, French horns for Crooner Guy Mitchell. Says Miller: "You've got to work out a gimmick that'll get people's attention and hold it. You need that sense of communication." One senseless communication: a Dinah Shore vocal backed by six caterwauling bagpipes. Admits Miller: "It was a dog."
A Rochester boy, Mitch Miller took his time finding the right communication circuit. After the Eastman School of Music, he moved to Manhattan, landed a work-relief job as an oboist in a WPA orchestra. In 1935, he became a staff musician for CBS, played there for 13 years, touring at times with chamber music groups. He was a fine oboist, but playing to "blank faces" was discouraging ("No satisfaction, no feeling of communication").
In 1948, to oblige a friend, he helped Mercury Records get a big backlog of pop songs recorded, found he liked the work. In a short time, as repertory boss for Mercury, he had Vic Damone and Frankie Laine turning out smash hits, topped 1,000,000 copies apiece with such numbers as Cry of the Wild Goose, Mule Train, and Lucky Old Sun. Then came the move to the bigger job at Columbia.
The Musical Ego. Into Miller's mid-Manhattan office three days a week troop 40 or 50 professionally bright-eyed song publishers, each with a few tunes for Miller's examination. If he likes a song, it's in; if not, he may edit or recommend. Next step for Miller: find the right singer to sing it. Says he: "Every singer has certain sounds he makes better than others. Frankie Laine is sweat and hard words--he's a guy beating the pillow, a purveyor of basic emotions. Guy Mitchell is better with happy-go-lucky songs; he's a virile young singer, gives people a vicarious lift. Clooney is a barrelhouse dame, a hillbilly at heart."
Outside Columbia's soundproofed walls, Miller is as far removed from pop music as he is from RCA Victor's Christmas list. He foregoes nightclubbing and dancing, avoids any nonbusiness connection whatsoever with pop songs. Says he: "I wouldn't buy that stuff for myself. There's no real artistic satisfaction in this job. I satisfy my musical ego elsewhere."
"Elsewhere" means occasional oboe performances with chamber orchestras, dates with the Budapest (see above) or Paganini quartets, rare chamber music soirees at friends' apartments in Manhattan.
Miller occasionally faces sharp criticism from serious musicians. When the pressure of the pop business made him pass up a chance to play with Cellist Pablo Casals at the Prades Festival, Miller's friend, Violinist Alexander Schneider rebuked him, called him a traitor to good music. Miller took it with a mild objection: "Why, I'm playing oboe better now than ever before."
But there's one thing Mitch Miller knows "for sure": selling Columbia's pops provides a greater sense of communication than anything a man can do with an oboe.
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