Bitter crop, p.5
Bitter Crop, page 5
There had been a recent informal discussion between Columbia Records and Earle Warren Zaidins, Billie’s attorney, about her returning to the label, where previously she had enjoyed success. So she instructed her management to set up an appointment in early January 1958 for her to meet with Irving Townsend, an executive producer with the company. In the meeting, she told him she wanted to record a new album, but with one stipulation. “I’ve got to sing with Ray Ellis,” Townsend later recalled her saying that day. “I want this album more than anything else, and I want it to be good.” Townsend was receptive to Billie’s overture, although he was surprised by her proviso about Ellis, who did not seem to be a probable collaborator for Billie. But the prospect of bringing Billie Holiday back to Columbia Records was too tempting for Townsend to resist. He told her he welcomed her idea. As for Ellis, the only way to determine if he was interested would be to give him a call.
Ray Ellis had learned his craft as a musician and arranger working local gigs in Philadelphia, his hometown, and then playing in military bands in the U.S. Army during World War II. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he played tenor saxophone with bands headed by Gene Krupa and Paul Whiteman. In 1955, he caught the attention of Mitch Miller, the head of A&R at Columbia, when his arrangement of “Standing on the Corner,” a Frank Loesser composition to be recorded by the Four Lads, was selected from an open-call competition for arrangers. The song would go on to become a hit, thanks in part to its whimsical yet memorable arrangement. Miller was looking for innovative new arrangers to bring to the label; now he had one in Ellis, who during the mid-1950s had additional hits with the Four Lads. That success allowed him to make his first album for Columbia under his own name, Ellis in Wonderland, which became much talked about in the music industry. It also received excellent notices, with one reviewer observing that Ellis—“talent personified”—created an album emblematic of “his imaginative and creative ability that has made him one of Tin Pan Alley’s much sought after arrangers.” Another critic implored anyone interested in “nice, easy-going listening [to] try Ellis in Wonderland [which features] a fine covey of standards.” When Billie listened to the album, she knew she had found her Nelson Riddle. That was why she made her stipulation with Townsend. Ellis, she was convinced, was who she needed to help her make the album of her dreams.
“On January 3,” Ellis later wrote, “I received a call from…Irving Townsend asking if I was free [in mid-]February. On my reply, he said, ‘Great! Billie Holiday is in my office, and she wants you to write the arrangements for the album she’s about to record for Columbia.’ ” Ellis was flabbergasted that Billie Holiday even knew who he was; of course, he would be honored to work with her. Soon a contract was drawn up. Columbia agreed to an “unlimited budget” and a thirty-five-piece orchestra featuring a fifteen-piece string section for an album to be recorded in three sessions. Musicians would be paid $60 a session. Billie would receive an advance of $150 a side against a 5 percent royalty. The album would be comprised of songs Billie had not previously recorded. There was one notable legal requirement. “Columbia Records had a provision in her contract,” music historian Michael Brooks later wrote, “that made [Holiday’s] attorney, Earle Zaidins, personally responsible for her prompt appearance at the recording studios.”
Billie first met Ellis when the parties assembled in Townsend’s office to sign the contract. In the days after the meeting, Townsend and Ellis went to a local music store and gathered a selection of songs, almost all of them American standards. When Ellis showed the songs to Billie during the week of January 10, she made the final selection of what she wanted to sing. “It didn’t dawn on me at the time,” Ellis would admit, “but just about every title she picked was the story of her life, unrequited love.” Her decisions were based almost exclusively on lyrics. She wanted the songs to form a kind of narrative instead of constituting merely a collection of songs. Sinatra had all but perfected the “concept” album. His contributions to the genre, besides In the Wee Small Hours, included Songs for Young Lovers, Swing Easy!, and Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! Billie intended her album to take its place in the same tradition.
With the song list complete, Ellis went off to write his arrangements, which he did by secluding himself in the study at his home in Westchester County, north of Manhattan, where he obsessively labored on the music around the clock, barely sleeping, until he finished. As she waited to record her new album, Billie promoted the paperback release of Lady Sings the Blues by appearing on two national radio shows: Luncheon at Sardi’s at noon on February 4 and The Barry Gray Show at midnight on the fifth. She was encouraged by a letter she received from her publisher, which informed her that “250,000 copies of the Popular Library edition went on sale in January on newsstands throughout the country, and from the indications so far, Lady Sings the Blues is expected to become one of the biggest paperback bestsellers of 1958.” That turned out to be true. By 1959, the book had sold two million copies and had been translated into fifteen languages, including Japanese.
Recording dates for Lady in Satin were set for three late-night sessions on February 18, 19, and 20 at the Columbia 30th Street Studio, which pleased Billie. A former Presbyterian church converted into a studio, the reason it was nicknamed “the Church,” it was considered by many members of the music industry—from Glenn Gould and Leonard Bernstein to Miles Davis and Charles Mingus—to be among the finest recording facilities in the country because of its superior acoustics. If there were no complications, the album could be released by early summer. After all these years in the music business, after recording more than three hundred songs and logging—literally—countless live performances, Billie Holiday was finally being afforded what she felt she was due—the opportunity to record a studio album accompanied by a full orchestra with strings. As a professional accomplishment, it may not have seemed like much, but for Billie, it was everything she wanted.
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“Love is funny.”
She stood in a small nook that had been created for her to the right of the conductor’s stand, where Ellis—clad in dark pants and a long-sleeved shirt and wearing a pair of headphones—hovered before the orchestra playing at full volume. As she sang into the microphone hanging from a boom in front of her, the luxuriant music washing over her in waves of sound, Billie had no sooner sung the line than she was unhappy with it. She stopped.
“Can I get another start?” she said hesitantly into the microphone. “I’m sorry.”
It was after midnight on the first recording session for Lady in Satin, and Billie was feeling her way through a song. Ellis had scheduled the start time for late in the evening at an hour when Billie would have normally been onstage in a nightclub gig. She was told to arrive at the studio at 10:00 p.m., so she assumed the actual call time was 11:00 p.m. She got there at 11:30. Irving Townsend later remembered she was “all dressed up…looking great, as if she were going to perform in public.” In fact, she was not wearing an evening gown—the wardrobe choice in which she usually performed, often accented by a mink stole, especially for an outside concert like a jazz festival—but a handsome outfit reminiscent of business attire. Ellis introduced her to the orchestra, more than thirty musicians plus three players she sometimes used to accompany her—Mal Waldron on piano, Osie Johnson on drums, and Milt Hinton on bass. The orchestra gave her a warm round of applause, signifying to Ellis that “the musicians dug her,” which was not always the way musicians felt about a singer.
As soon as Billie settled into the studio, she was consumed by the self-doubt she often felt when she performed, a nervous apprehension so powerful that, according to Townsend, “she fortified herself with gin.” A cup was placed nearby on a stool when she sang. Gin was often the drug she used when she wanted to avoid something harder; tonight, it was what she needed to get through the session.
With expensive studio time passing, Billie launched into the first song of the evening—“You Don’t Know What Love Is,” a melodious tune that Ellis had arranged with an emotive, dramatic introduction followed by, midway through the song, a haunting trumpet solo played by Mel Davis. But Billie was uncertain of the lyrics, and it took four takes before Ellis felt they could move on. The session’s second number was “I’ll Be Around,” an affecting tune about waiting for a lover to be available again (“I’ll be around no matter how you treat me now / So I’ll be around when she’s gone”). A mournful violin started the song before a full complement of strings came in periodically to add to the mood. Once again, Billie was tentative, this time requiring eight takes before she produced a usable version.
The main problem, Ellis later admitted, was that Billie did not sound anything like she did on the older records, to which he had listened studiously as he wrote the arrangements. To Ellis, Billie’s voice, rough and unvarnished, clashed with the rich, luscious sound of the orchestra. He also mistook her paralyzing nervousness for lack of preparation and at one point took her aside and berated her. “I was so mad at her. I was saying, ‘You bitch! You sing so great, and you don’t know what you’re doing! You’re blowing the whole goddam thing!’ It was an ego thing with me, because I’d slaved over the arrangements, picturing the way she was going to say it, and she wasn’t singing it the way I’d thought, and I hated her. I literally hated her. I think I treated her badly.”
Billie did not lash out at Ellis in response. After all, it was she who demanded he become involved in the project; she could hardly get into a verbal altercation with the one person she insisted work on the album. She had no choice but to live with his behavior. Even so, she was hurt by the way he treated her. The session had to proceed, however, so they moved on to the third number, “For Heaven’s Sake,” a love song about two lovers “alone in the night” who believe “heaven is here in a kiss.” It was the kind of song she had performed numerous times before—a tune that would have been rendered sentimental by most singers but, with Billie, evolved into a touching plea for romance. It required only two takes before Billie fully captured the song.
The final number of the session was “But Beautiful,” written by Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen. After a string-heavy introduction, Billie barely finished the first three words—“Love is funny”—when she stopped, unsatisfied with the way she delivered the line. She asked for another take.
Most of the orchestra ceased; some violins played on for a few additional notes.
Billie rehearsed the line amid ambient chatter among the musicians. “Love is fun-ny.” A beat. “Love is fun-ny.”
“Take two,” a voice said from the control booth over the public address system.
“Oh, it’s sad,” Billie continued. “Love is fun-ny.”
More chatter; a handful of musicians practiced several notes; soon it was time to proceed.
“Love is fun-ny,” Billie practiced the line one last time.
“Take two,” the voice repeated.
There was silence; then the orchestra began.
“Love is funny,” Billie sang, as she launched into the song’s first section, which built to a climax—“And I’m thinking / If you were mine / I’d never let you go”—when the music reached an emotional peak. An interlude followed first featuring violins, colored by a three-person choir singing faintly in the background, next a melancholy trumpet solo, again played by Mel Davis, before Billie continued with the second vocal portion of the song, concluding with the speaker declaring how she would feel if she had her lover with her: “And that would be / But beautiful / I know.” A melodic outro—highlighted by violins and the angelic ooo’s of the small choir—completed the song. It was the most successful number of the night.
It was now 2:30 in the morning, and Billie had been drinking gin since the session began. She was noticeably slurring her words, but the gin allowed her to get through four songs. At points during the session, she had gone into the control booth to listen to playbacks, which made her so sensitive about the quality of her voice she refused to allow the playbacks to be shared with the musicians over the speakers in the studio. She did not want the orchestra members to hear what they were playing behind. By the end of the session, she was emotionally drained and physically exhausted. She was more than ready to go home.
Once the session concluded, once Billie left and the musicians packed up their instruments and departed, Ellis remained behind to listen to all the playbacks in the control booth. As he did, he became increasingly upset. “When he heard the playbacks,” says Marc Ellis, his son, “he thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is going to ruin my career. What am I going to do?’ He hated what he heard. He thought he was sold down the river on the project. He didn’t know what Billie’s condition was. He thought he was going to get the Billie Holiday from 1945. Now he felt this was going to be the end of his musical career”—and it had just started. Ellis was so distraught, so consumed by dread and despondency, he reacted physically to how he was feeling. Abruptly bolting from the booth, he rushed to a nearby bathroom and threw up.
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Regardless of any misgivings Billie may have had about the previous night, she returned to the studio the next evening for the second session, again scheduled to start at 11:00 p.m. The first song, “For All We Know,” required five takes; the second, “It’s Easy to Remember,” nine. The best song of the session was the third—“I’m a Fool to Want You”—an evocative ballad about being hopelessly in love with someone who is unfaithful. Written by Frank Sinatra, Joel Herron, and Jack Wolf, the song was Billie’s homage to Sinatra, who was, after all, the inspiration for her making the album. Billie poured her heart into the song. “I would say,” Ellis wrote, “that the most emotional moment was her listening to the playback of ‘I’m a Fool to Want You.’ There were tears in her eyes.”
For the session’s fourth song, Billie attempted to record “The End of a Love Affair.” After three tries, plans changed because Billie, as music journalist Phil Schaap later reported, “wasn’t comfortable about singing [the song. So] it was decided to give her a day to learn the lyrics, but the band recorded the song without her…[an] instrumental version [that would] subsequently be added to by overdubbing.” The following night, the final session for the album started out with Billie overdubbing her vocals to the track. Ten takes were required before a finished song was produced. After that, “Glad to Be Unhappy,” “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” and “Violets for Your Furs” went much better. But the best song of the evening, perhaps the most successful song of all three sessions, was “You’ve Changed,” a last-minute addition Ellis included after he and Billie made a 3:00 a.m. trip to Colony Records the night before to find sheet music for one final song. Ellis finished the arrangement just before the third session started. Still, it had all come together, and Billie’s sad ballad about a failed affair was heartbreaking.
With the sessions completed, Ellis had not changed his mind about the recordings. “After we finished the album,” he wrote, “I went into the control room and listened to all the takes. I must admit I was unhappy with [Billie’s] performance, but I was listening musically instead of emotionally.” And the music on the songs was uncommonly beautiful. Over time, the quality of the sound itself would become a topic of discussion; it was the album’s engineer, Fred Plaut, more so than Ellis, who created the sound. “The record was recorded differently than most popular records of that period,” Marc Ellis says. “The engineer was not a pop engineer. He was a classical engineer. So he recorded the album like he was doing a piece of classical music, which was totally different in sound style. One of the shocking things about Lady in Satin is how great it sounds fidelity-wise. Plaut recorded it like he was doing Beethoven. Usually, with pop music, they use a close mike, right up against the instrument. You get a real dry sound, and then they throw echo on it. But, for a classical record, you record from a distance. Plaut grouped the instruments and recorded them as groups. He was able to achieve a lush symphonic shimmering sound.”
3.
In the wake of the recording sessions, Billie got on with her life, content to wait for the songs to be mixed as Townsend and Ellis assembled the final album. In March, she found herself back in court—she had been in and out of court on both the East and West Coasts for over a decade now—when she was required to appear in the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia for an arrest for narcotics possession in 1956. In February of that year, Billie had been seized by the Philadelphia Police Department while she was in the city appearing at the Showboat. “The arrests of the nightclub singer and her husband-manager Louis McKay,” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, “were made during a raid on their room in the Radnor Hotel…shortly after 2 a.m. [on the twenty-third. Police] found in the room an ounce and a half of heroin, five hypodermic needles, a syringe, an eye dropper and a spoon….[Detectives] also found a half ounce of cocaine and in McKay’s suitcase a .25 caliber automatic pistol.” Billie was arrested for narcotics possession, McKay for violation of the Firearms Act. Billie argued there were no drugs in her possession, implying the drugs and paraphernalia were planted; McKay claimed the police planted the weapon before, changing his story, he admitted he carried it for protection. Billie and McKay were released on $7,500 bail, and Billie finished her run at the Showboat playing to what Down Beat called “large crowds.”
