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Inside the Big Bands
by
GEORGE T. SIMON
1981, pp. 372-374
VAUGHN MONROE was
one of the most romantic-looking leaders of the big band era. A large,
handsome man with a great smile, he still managed to project a bashful,
little boy image that appealed not only to the teen-agers of the mid-forties
but also to their older sisters, their mothers and even their grandmothers.
The band itself was
never brilliant, even though it improved greatly after its big-time debut at
the Meadowbrook in the spring of 1941. In a review headed "Monroe More
Impressive Than His Band, " I pointed out that:
"The Rapid Rise of Vaughn Monroe," or "A Press Agent's Dream," is certainly
the
current phenomenon of dancebandom. Seldom has nay band come up so
quickly, and clicked so heavily with the audiences it has had to face.
The primary cause is obvious. For, despite all managerial push and
tremendous pressure from press agents, the group would never have had a
chance to score so brilliantly were it not for that one cause--Vaughn Monroe
himself.
Here is a dynamic personality. It's around him, not his band, that the girls
flock. It's when they hear his voice, not his band's playing, that they go
girlishly ga-ga. His smile sends romantic, not musical, shivers down spines
that are just beginning to harden. Here is the modern generation's Rudy
Vallee. [a better and more modern comparison: he was the Robert Goulet of
his day.]
The review found the band dull, except for a seventeen-year-old trumpet find
named Bobby Nichols, a very good girl singer named Marylin Duke and a comic
vocalist named Ziggy Talent. "But were it to stand strictly upon its own
musical merits, chances are it never would have done better than remain a
territorial favorite."
Vaughn's Band had been a smash hit in the Boston area when Willard Alexander
brought it to New York to build it into a national attraction. Vaughn had
been performing as quite a respectable trumpeter, an instrument on which he
began to concentrate during the Depression, when lack of funds curtailed his
operatic coaching and ambitions.
Vaughn's singing was always a bone of contention among those who heard it.
The girls, of course, loved it. His coterie thought it was magnificent. But
the critics, almost to a man, felt different. "He is a baritone who tries
too often to sing bass with tenor accents," wrote Barry Ulanov. I was more
caustic, pointing out that if Monroe would only open his mouth a little
more, less of the sound would be forced to come out his nose.
My lack of appreciation of his singing (opera singers and even
would-be-opera singers take their voices quite seriously) made it difficult
for me to get to know Monroe more than perfunctorily. This, I was told by
those close to him, was my loss, and I believe they were probably right.
Barbara Hodgkins once described him, after an interview, as "one of the most
polite, pleasant and peaceful citizens in the music business--a very normal
person in a very crazy world."
In that interview, Monroe revealed his bandleading philosophy. "The band
business," he stated, "isn't an artistic thing. It's a business. I could
name four or five bands that aren't doing very well today because they don't
do what people ask for. I can't feel sorry for them. You've got to justify
what you're doing; you can't fool a promoter more than once or twice. And
you've got to be right in there working all the time."
"In there working all the time" is precisely what Vaughn did after he
brought his band to New York. He must have known that the group wasn't as
great as his press agents made it out to be, for during the first six months
he made eight important personnel changes. He also hired for a time a fine
lead trombonist and arranger. His name: Ray Conniff.
Much of the band's musical emphasis was on singing--not only on Vaughn's,
which continued to improve, but also on that of his groups--the Murphy
Sisters, the Moonmaids ("Monroe" and "Moonmaid" were alliterative; besides,
the band had a them called "Racing with the Moon")--and, at one time, that
of a whole bunch of his musicians who also sang--few of them well. For a
while the band gave the impression, according to one critic, of performing
like "a kind of legitimatized Sammy Kaye."
The end of the big band era by no mean meant the end of Vaughn Monroe. If
anything, his band, built as it was around so much singing, grew more
popular than ever, while so many other, more instrumentally oriented outfits
lost ground drastically.
Monroe became very big on radio, especially via his Camel Cigarettes
commercials. He continued to handle himself beautifully. His recordings kept
on selling well, built, as they were, around his voice--a situation that did
not make him completely happy. "Don't think I like the idea of making all
those vocal records," he revealed. "We have plenty of good jazzmen in the
band, and I'd like to do some instrumentals. But Victor tells me to keep
right on singing."
And so right on singing he did--not only on Victor records, but also
on behalf of the RCA organization when he became the mammoth
corporation's star image on its long series of RCA television commercials.
Eventually Vaughn Monroe's Orchestra disappeared completely from the scene.
But Vaughn continued to sing, opening his mouth perhaps a bit more widely,
straining less to sound operatic, but always projecting the personality of a
solid, fairly musical and well-respected citizen. By the end of the sixties,
he was spending most of his time in his Florida home. I last saw him during
a rare New York public appearance in the early seventies, and to me he
sounded as good as, if not better than ever. But I was never to see him
again, because Vaughn died on May 21, 1973, after a lingering illness.
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