The Beav wrote:Morty wrote:Navy Blue Scrubs wrote:Mitch Miller, Singalong Maestro, Dies at 99
It's been a while since I heard from this one. He was older than Madonna.
low-res TV was underrated
Mitch was a very powerful man in the record business before the TV show. He was A&R director at Columbia, which was about the biggest label in the business at the time. He pioneered the use of extra-musical effects like whip cracks (Frankie Lane "Mule train") and really, really pushed kitchy, gimmick-laden novelty music, realizing that (in the late 40s-early 50s) kids had the most disposable income to blow on records. His fights with Frank Sinatra are legendary, he wanted Frank to record all of these novelty songs like "Mama will bark" with the very un-musical (but stacked to the nines) Dagmar, and other momentary novelty fluff. He led a big stable of singers and musicians at Columbia and for a while made them a ton of money. Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Rosemary Clooney all had their run-ins with Miller. He was living proof of two old sayings: " only the good die young" and "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public" .
To this day, his is the best recording of
Colonel Bogie's March.
Interesting cat. He was a world class oboe player, oboist?, which he started playing because he was late the day they picked the loaner instruments for the school band. I have vague memories of his show and the follow-the-bouncing-ball schtick.
Interviewed by Time magazine in 1951, Mr. Miller was less than enthusiastic about the kind of gimmicky pop records that had become his specialty. “I wouldn’t buy that stuff for myself,” he said. “There’s no real artistic satisfaction in this job. I satisfy my musical ego elsewhere.”
...in 1993, when David Koresh and members of his Branch Davidian cult were holed up in their compound in Waco, Tex., F.B.I. agents tried to flush them out by blasting “Sing Along With Mitch” Christmas carols.
He also called rock and roll "a disease".
