Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett

Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett are in the news these days.  The reason is that they have just released a new album called "Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga:  Cheek to Cheek".  They are also doing a TV special that will be broadcast in October.  The album and the relationship have become a "thing".  Like lots of other people (that's why it's a "thing") I am fascinated by the fact that it's happening and that it's a "thing".  I try to write about things I think I know something about.  I am pretty ignorant about the music business so I should probably stay away from the subject.  But as something in the way of an experiment I am going to charge ahead anyway.  So now that we have established that I am on shaky ground, in an attempt to at least simulate being on solid ground let me start off the way I start off a lot of these pieces, with some history.

If we go back to the 1800's the music business existed but in a quite different form.  The technology did not exist to record and distribute music.  Theoretically, live performance in a theater was an option but, here too, things did not work very well.  There was no way to amplify sounds so singers had to sing loudly enough and the house had to be small enough so that patrons in the back could hear.  Bands and Orchestras worked better but they were very expensive.  So then as now most music was consumed at home.  Rich people owned a piano.  Poorer people made due with a guitar, banjo, or even a home made flute.  The music business at the time catered to these people by selling them sheet music so they could make music themselves at home.

Then in 1877 Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.  Early versions were not very practical.  For technical reasons Edison used cylinders.  They were big and expensive.  So the first improvement to the technology was the replacement of the cylinder with a thin flat platter.  That helped.  But the way early phonographs worked was that a needle followed a wobbling groove in the record.  The needle was hooked to a diaphragm which was hooked to a horn.  You see examples in movies set in this period.  But the whole process didn't work very well.  There is very little energy in the wobble of the needle.  The energy of the wobble was transformed into sound by the diaphragm and the horn.  So what came out of the horn was pretty quiet.  You had to have your ear pointed at the horn and positioned within a couple of feet of the mouth of the horn to hear anything.  The scenes you see in the movies where several people in a room are listening to one of these old phonographs are fantasy.

Then in 1906 Lee De Forest invented the Triode.  It was basically an incandescent light bulb with a couple of extra parts added in. But the point was that a Triode could be used to make an electronic amplifier.  As with the phonograph, some development was necessary to make electronic amplifiers practical.  But World War I came along to speed things up with the result that usable and inexpensive phonographs incorporating an electronic amplifier became widely available in the '20s.  Now there was a lot more energy available to push air around with so the volume of sound produced by these phonographs made it practical for a group of people to sit around in a room and listen to a phonograph record.  And they did in large numbers.

The triode based amplifier also made radio possible.  But radios are more complex so a practical radio at a price that consumers could afford in large numbers didn't arrive until about a decade later in the '30s.  Radios of the time were quite expensive so a family typically owned one and everyone listened together.  The cementing of the connection between records and the radio happened in 1935.  Benny Goodman was a struggling band leader.  In the early years he worked in New York.  A "network" had just been created so that radio shows could be broadcast across the country.  Goodman was failing in New York.  So he and his band embarked on a cross country tour that finished up in Los Angeles.  Unbeknownst to anyone in New York the band had become extremely popular on the West Coast due to broadcasts of their performances as they crossed the country.  They were greeted by massive crowds when they opened in L.A.

And there is a connection to the modern era.  They played at the Palomar Ballroom.  The event was so popular that they started playing several shows a day.  Live performance was a key component of a band's success at that time and it is again now.  The success of the Goodman band was instantly noticed and the music business quickly reoriented itself to using radio as a promotional tool.  Goodman's success also spun into success for other band leaders like Gene Krupa, Count Basie, the Dorsey brothers, Harry James, Glenn Miller, and others.  This close tie between radio and the music business was to last for decades.

Records and radio continued to evolve in parallel.  The "78" record evolved into the "45" and, with the "33", the "album" (a collection of about 10 "pop" songs).  The album then morphed into the audio "CD", a change in technology but a continuation of the concept.  Radios got better.  They got mush smaller and more efficient with the replacement of the old light bulb based triodes with transistors.  The broadcast specification morphed from "AM" to "FM".  FM produced a much better audio quality and allowed the introduction of "stereo" (two audio channels) to supplant "mono" (a single audio channel).  But something else happened in the '50s.

In the '30s radios were expensive enough so that a family could afford only one.  So people listened to radio programs that had a broad enough appeal to be acceptable to every member of the family.  In the '50s radios were inexpensive enough so that they could be put into cars.  And a family could now afford multiple radios.  This made it possible to split the market.  And thus was born "rock and roll".

I was a kid when this was happening.  And I was confused.  I just couldn't figure out what was and was not "rock and roll".  I spent about a decade wrestling with this conundrum.  I finally decided that "rock and roll" was "whatever they played on 'rock' radio stations".  Enough time has passed so that it has become abundantly clear that I was right.  As an example, the show and movie "Jersey Boys" has put the spotlight back on Frankie Valli, a rock and roll icon of the era.  The original songs may have been arranged to be high energy but the themes are similar to many non-rock "pop" songs. 

Another example:  There is a "country and western" standard that includes the line "somebody done somebody wrong song".  This is supposed to be the core of what makes a C&W song a C&W song.  But the sentiment is a common one in "rock and roll", "blues", "rap", and other supposedly different genres.  I have since decided that this is broadly true.  The boundaries between genres are completely artificial and have much more to do with marketing than with structure and content.  Teens want "not their parents' music" so everybody pretends that "rock and roll' songs are different from "pop" songs.  And that "country" songs are entirely different from both.  But mostly people are people and at some level they all like the same things and dislike the same things.  But people like to have an identity and the type of music they listen to is part of their identity.  So it is important to be able to say with a straight face that "I like country and I hate rock and roll" or whatever.

The music industry figured this out in the '50s and has used this information to advantage ever since.  And, it turns out, (I take my segues where I can find them), one of our two stars first got successful in the '50s.  Back when the theory was that there was only one market that market was called "popular music" or "pop" for short.  (In the U.K. the term "pop" still means "whatever is the most popular" so what we in the U.S. call "rock and roll" the Brit's call "pop".)  But Bennett was firmly in the "pop" camp.  He did not do rock and roll and was not played on rock and roll stations.  Nevertheless, he achieved a substantial measure of success and maintained it for some time.  Another success of the period was Rosemary Clooney.  Today she is remembered mostly as the aunt of George Clooney.  Bennett, Clooney, and many others were part of a large stable of successful performers.  Of that group Bennett is the only one still performing.  Most of them were harmed by rock and roll.  But what did them in completely was the "British Invasion" of the '60s.  The two biggest "Brit" groups were the Beetles and the Stones.  Like Bennett the Stones are the only ones still standing of what was originally a large group.

Bennett was hurt by this double whammy.  By the late '70s it looked like his carrier was over.  But then he did something that turned out to be really smart.  He turned his business affairs and the management of his carrier over to his son Danny.  Bennett had stuck with his "saloon singer" style all along.  His son decided that he should continue to do this.  But he needed to market himself to a new generation.  So Bennett started playing college campuses.  And it turned out there was an audience for Bennett's "old fogey music".  The college kids' parents and grandparents might have been familiar with Bennett's material but the kids weren't.  And the universality of the themes shone through Bennett's "no frills" presentation and connected.  The success of this strategy is best demonstrated by Bennett's appearance on the TV show "MTV Unplugged".  MTV used to be a music operation that pioneered showing music videos on TV.  It was a formula that was easy to imitate so lots of people did.  This hurt the MTV business model so they diversified.

One relatively early effort at this diversification was the "Unplugged" show.  The idea was to have popular "rock" musicians unplug their electronic instruments and play on acoustic instruments instead.  Some of the rockers were actually highly skilled.  After some of them went the "unplugged" route with considerable success the show became popular with both rockers and fans.  Bennett, of course had never gone the electronic route, so unplugged was his natural style of performance.  The show was a risk on both sides but to the surprise of both the Bennett people and the MTV people it was a ratings bonanza.  This catapulted Bennett straight into the "successful crossover artist" category and generated lots of sales for his albums and concert tickets.

And Danny continued to smartly manage Bennett's carrier.  Bennett could perform in the manner he liked to and still be very successful.  As Danny was fixing the public side of the Bennett operation he also fixed the business side.  Old tax and other problems were fixed and the business side was smoothed out so that Tony could focus on performance knowing that the rest of the operation was being run well.  Life became sweet.  And, with Danny's help, Tony became a beloved institution.  The PBS TV show "American Masters" did a show on Bennett in 2007.  The show was produced and hosted by another beloved institution Clint Eastwood.  Another Danny idea was to continue to do crossover events.  So Bennett put out an album called "Duets" in 2006.  For each number Bennett is paired with a different musician.  The list of musicians included James Taylor, Paul McCartney, Elton John, k. d. lang, Stevie Wonder, Tim McGraw, Bono, and others.  The artists were drawn from a broad range of genres.  The album was a success and success breeds imitation so "Duets" was followed by "Duets II" in 2011.  This time one of the artists was Lady Gaga and this is the first time the paths of the two publicly crossed.

But the two had actually met for the first time a short time before.  Bennett attended a charity event that included a performance by Gaga.  He asked to meet her backstage after the show and they hit it off immediately.  This resulted in Gaga appearing on Duet II.  The recording session was documented in a New Yorker story by Gay Talese, of all people.  It would appear that the two have nothing in common.  He's 88 and she is sixty years younger at 28.  He is known for his "straight ahead no frills" approach to performance while she is known for her elaborate productions.  But they are both New Yorkers of Italian descent.  And so are a lot of other people who have never connected.  But the two did.  And the connection is real.  Talese does a good job of putting it on display in the New Yorker piece.

It is founded on a mutual respect for the talent and professionalism each has for the other.  It is often hard to tell from the outside how much of a performance is real and how much is production magic.  I have been aware of the problem for a long time.  I remember listening to rock bands in the '60s.  It wasn't something I was really interested in but I would try to be fair and determine whether they were actually good or not.  I never came up with a good method.  The rule of thumb I finally adopted was "if the band is not drowning out the singer then they must be pretty good".  That's a terrible rule but it was the best I could come up with.  And many years later I found others who use the same pathetic rule I do and for the same reason.  But this rule doesn't work in a lot of cases.

For a while Nancy Sinatra, daughter of Frank, was a "thing".  She sounded pretty good to me so I wondered why her carrier was so short.  I only found out the answer recently.  She sang "You Only Live Twice" for the James Bond movie of the same name.  It turns out they had to splice small snippets from each of the 32 takes she did to get a usable final version.  In other words, she can't sing.  They were able (just barely) to cover this up in the recording studio.  But apparently it was obvious in her live shows.  And at some point everyone decided that the amount of studio work necessary to produce an acceptable final result wasn't worth it.  So with that as background, can Lady Gaga sing?  I don't know but I don't think Bennett suffers fools gladly.  So I take him at his word that she can sing.  And certainly he can sing.  I've seen him sing live.  And the sound guy for that particular show was incompetent.  There's no way any "smoke and mirrors" was going on.

The problem is that there are a lot more people who can sing well than there are successful singers.  Gaga has broken out by adding in a lot of showmanship.  The problem with this is that there is a conventional wisdom.  The conventional wisdom is that showmanship is easy to pull off.  Conventional wisdom couples this with the idea that the only people who use a lot of showmanship are people who have no talent.  And certainly people keep trying to get away with completely faking it (and sometimes succeeding).  Nancy Sinatra was an example at least of the "trying" part.  Some years ago there was a duo called Milli Vanilli.  They were successful for a while.  Then it leaked out that the two performers were just that, performers.  Someone else had actually done the singing while the front men were just lip syncing along in their "live" performances.  And its not always completely black and white whether it's completely real or totally fake.  Andy Williams was a successful singer for many years.  But his "sound" was based on being augmented by a "reverb machine".  It was his electronically reprocessed voice that we liked.  He could and did sing but his actual unaugmented voice just didn't sound that good.  Is he real or a fake?  There is no clear cut answer.  Enough on the "singing" side of things.  Let me now move on to the "performance" side.

I disagree that the performance side is easy.  If it only involves the singing equivalent of "air guitar" where the performance consists solely of going on stage and pretending to sing, as it did with Nancy Sinatra and Milli Vanilli, then the knock is correct.  Most of us are capable of at least a "karaoke quality" level of performance if we don't have to actually sing.  Doing it on stage in front of a cheering mob successfully is harder but it's not that much harder.  But what Lady Gaga does is far more than just standing there and singing.  The whole thing is of a piece with sets, costumes, choreography, etc.  And the parts have to come together coherently into an integrated whole.  She does that extremely well.  Now it's not just her.  There is a whole team contributing.  But I think she sets the tone and makes all the final decisions.  The knock then changes to "well, all she has to do is put together the team".  That sounds easy but it is like putting together a championship professional sports team.  "You just put the team together and get out of the way," right?  If that was that easy then every professional team would win the championship every year.  But they don't.  And, ultimately after the team has done its magic Lady Gaga has to go on stage and make it work for real while everyone is watching.  That's much harder than it looks.

She is the current one and only reigning master of pulling this kind of thing off.  The formula seems obvious.  Go for spectacle, surround yourself with talented people, and just do it.  But there is typically only one person doing it successfully in each era.  So moving backward from the "Gaga" ear let me run through others who have pulled it off.  Gaga has inherited the slot from Madonna.  Gaga has been at the top of her game for from between 5 and ten years, depending on how you measure things.  Madonna was the reigning champion for twenty to twenty-five years.  Both of them built on a foundation of singing.  Neither of them seems to be more than adequate as actors.  But both have developed live shows that are strong on theatrical elements and, as a result, quite entertaining.  But this sort of thing is hard work.  I think what did Madonna in more than anything else is that pulling it off is hard and hard work.  You run out of creative energy and the stamina to do the demanding work the show requires.  Gaga at 28 is in her prime.  I am sure she would like to be able to stay on top of her game as long as Madonna did.  And Madonna has never completely faded from view.

Before Madonna the person who pulled the required mixture of skill and theater off best was Liberace.  He has mostly faded from the scene but at his peak he was the most successful entertainer to date.  And his story is more surprising by far than that of Madonna or Gaga.  Both of them came from modest roots but they were trying to do something (be successful singers) that a lot of people before them had succeeded at so there was an understanding of how to go about it.  Liberace started out as a classical concert pianist.  You may recognize the name Van Cliburn or you may not.  Cliburn is the most famous concert pianist ever and it's a toss up if people now recognize the name.  That's what Liberace was up against. He decided he really wanted to be famous and successful and the opportunities available to even the top man in his field just weren't enough.  So he began reinventing himself.

He became flamboyant.  He dressed in crazy outfits.  He started putting elaborate candelabras on his pianos.  But most importantly he started interacting with his audiences.  He was very good at being charming. He parlayed all this into a successful TV show.  This in turn fed into successful concert tours in both the U.S. and Europe.  As his popularity and fame increased he became more flamboyant.  And, in parallel with Hugh Hefner of Playboy Magazine fame, and before the eponymous TV show started airing, Librace became famous for living a "lifestyle of the rich and famous".  He extravagant lifestyle became part of the act.  Through it all he maintained a close connection with his audience and was able to keep his popularity high.

This was all in spite of the fact that he was obviously gay in an era when you weren't allowed to be gay.  Everybody liked him so everybody pretended he wasn't gay in spite of the fact that his whole persona screamed "drag queen" before the term was even in wide use.  He even successfully sued two magazines for just hinting he was gay.  He was still going strong when AIDS caught up with him in 1987.  The Liberace Museum was a popular mainstay of Las Vegas until a few years ago.  Liberace was very successful at mixing skill, in his case piano playing, with showmanship.  And to do that in a very gay way in an era when being gay got you thrown in jail is a tremendous accomplishment.

And I want to go back one more generation to a person who, like Liberace, is only dimly remembered now.  That was another woman.  Her name was Mae West.  Here again we have a mix of talent  and showmanship.  Ostensibly Mae was a singer and actor.  But her singing was limited and very stylized and not that dissimilar to just speaking.  And when she acted she always played Mae West.  So if she was so apparently lacking in talent why am I putting her on this list.  Actually she was tremendously talented.  It was just that her talent was not singing or acting.  What she was talented at was as a comedienne.  She was brilliant at conceiving and executing comedy.  She was born in 1893 and had her greatest success in the late '20s and early '30s.  She had a great deal of success in vaudeville and successfully translated her act to the movies.  She played a vamp and specialized in double entendres.  A famous one is "is that a pickle in your pocket or are you just happy to see me".  Another is "When I'm good I'm very good.  But when I'm bad I'm better."

West was too old and not pretty enough to be a convincing "hot chick" but people went along with the gag because her movies were fun and funny.  She conceived of situations into which she could introduce great one-liners that people loved.  What West has in common with the others is the over the top character she invented for herself.  I think the character Liberace invented for himself was that of a male Mae West.  West was eventually done in by the Hollywood system.  The studios were pressured into putting in a very intrusive censorship system.  A great deal of violence was tolerated but any hint of sex was not allowed.  During this period the guy always had to have one foot on the floor in bedroom scenes, couples had to sleep in separate twin beds, and bathrooms had no toilets in them.  Even though all of West's gags involved inference rather than anything explicit the censors cut them out.  Without the good gags the movies had nothing left.

So what is the connection between our two stars?  In Bennett's case it might be as simple as he respecting her talent.  If you look at the range of talent that he has teamed up with in his two "Duet" albums it is awesome.  They span the gamut of musical genres.  But every one of them has a reputation for first class musicianship.  If all these other people are so skilled then if Lady Gaga is one of them it must be because she is at the same level of of musicianship.  As I said, this is something I do not have an informed opinion on.

It might also be said that Lady Gaga represents an opportunity for Bennett to expand his audience base.  But he got that benefit by partnering with her on their "Duets II" song.  Bennett has done other joint events with other performers from "Duets" and "Duets II" but it hasn't happened often.  He does not seem to have a significant non-professional relationship with any of his other partners.  And he hasn't tried to put together a whole duet album with any of them.  But he has with Lady Gaga.  So, although it might be beneficial for him to continue to get in front of her fans, I don't think it drives the personal relationship between the two of them.

So what about Lady Gaga?  What's in it for her?  Again, at bottom, she might just respect Bennett's musical ability.  She has said so on numerous occasions.  But beyond that, what else?  Well, Bennett is respected as a person who genuinely knows how to sing well.  By validating Lady Gaga as another person who knows how to sing well some of the respect accorded to Bennett rubs off on to Gaga.  It's nice to be famous and to make a lot of money.  But it is also nice to be respected as someone with genuine talent and skill.  Bennett seems happy to validate her.  And he seems quite sincere when he does it.  So there might just be a mutual admiration society thing going on.  That's nice and it could be a sufficient base to support their relationship.  But I think there is one more thing.

Gay Talese brought this out in his piece in New Yorker.  During the interviews for the piece Bennett spoke about Amy Winehouse.  Winehouse was one of the other "Duet" artists.  Winehouse had committed suicide shortly before the interviews.  She was on Bennett's mind because he had been genuinely concerned that she might take her life.  He wanted to prevent that if he could.  As a long time show business survivor he felt he might be able to get through to her.  He was not able to get in touch so nothing came of it.  And I'm not trying to imply that Lady Gaga was or is suicidal.

But Lady Gaga had gone from nobody to superstar in very little time.  That is a very hard transition to make.  There was talk that for a while that Lady Gaga was thinking about getting out of the business.  With her Bennett saw an opportunity to do some mentoring, to be the show business equivalent of a father figure.  And that relationship is apparently now present. Bennett has been able to show her an example of someone who has been in show business a long time and has found a way to survive and thrive.  Beyond that he has been able to give her some specific advice for handling various pressures and situations that she has apparently found helpful.  So Bennett has been able to engage in some "passing the torch to the new generation" and Gaga has been able to get some practical advice that has helped a lot.  Lady Gaga herself credits Bennett with reviving her interest in staying in show business.

The new album is full of Bennett stuff.  But apparently Lady Gaga is quite happy.  It's good material that has stood the test of time.  She is wise to recognize that.  And, as an artist, what's not to like about an opportunity to do good material?  The TV special is scheduled to air on PBS on October 24.  And this is a case where Lady Gaga stands to possibly pick up some Bennett fans rather than the other way around.  I hope she does.