Hank Moore Interview
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Hank Moore:
I had just interviewed the biggest star in the world, first performer, first celebrity I ever interviewed ever in my life. And I was 10 years old and I was working one Saturday afternoon and suddenly the door of the studio behind me flings open and I was running the console. There was an adult there supervising. You don't just give a 10 year old child carte blanche to do whatever. He said, oh, this army soldier walked in and he says, "Hi, I just thought I'd stop in and talk to you, do an interview." I thought, "What is an Army soldier doing here?" And he sits down and I look over and his badge said, "Private Elvis Presley".
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests. Hank Moore became a radio DJ at just 10 years old, then went on to influence the broadcasting industry. You'll hear about his experiences interviewing Elvis Presley, working as an advisor to President Lyndon B. Johnson, and earning two inductions into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. From Payola to the negative effects of the deregulation of broadcasting, he offers valuable perspectives on the music industry. Hank has crossed paths with legends like Ed Sullivan, Frank Sinatra, and Burt Bacharach, and lived through many moments that defined popular culture. We discussed his Pulitzer Prize nominated "Pop Music Legends" and some of the many highlights from his varied and fascinating career in broadcasting and business. Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast, and I've also linked the transcript.
It's a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you, and I do all the many jobs of research, production, and publicity. Have a look at the show notes of this episode where you'll find all the links, including different ways to support this podcast and other suggested episodes.
Hank, thanks so much for joining me here today.
Hank Moore:
My pleasure. Nice to visit.
Leah Roseman:
I was interested to hear from you. You're not my usual guest, but I couldn't pass up the chance to speak with you. So thanks for sending me a couple of your books. So I did read them, "Pop Music Legends" and "Pop Icons and Business Legends".
Hank Moore:
Right. Those are the two companion books.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. With "Pop Music Legends"you'd planned on a second one, volume two. Did that get written?
Hank Moore:
Yes. Actually, it is still going to happen. I think what's going to happen in its place or before it comes out, actually, and I have an endorsement from Ariana Grande in it. There's more I'm going to include in it. This is a book that I wrote a number of years ago called The Classic Television Reference. And I'm kind of obligated to do a rewrite. I'm doing an update of that one. This was a book that I had done over 20 years ago. That was the book that got me on the Oprah Winfrey Show. And I was on with a panel of classic TV stars. Florence Henderson from the Brady Bunch and Ed Asner from the Mary Tyler Moore Show and Leslie Nielsen. And we were chit-chatting about what was then old Hollywood. And it covered basically the first 40 years of television. Well, I need to do an update on it.
Then will be book two. I tend to do series of books. My other current book series, which is business books, totally different. The current book is book four. There were three others in the series. And it's just ... So half of my books are entertainment books, which this definitely is. And the others are business books because you can't believe a lot of what you're seeing and hearing from business. And they tend to be encyclopedic in nature. And that's what my other books, my entertainment books are too. The kind of material that you just can't see or find on the internet. When it comes to pop music, people are going to promote what they like to hear, not necessarily what the overall audience needs to hear. So yeah. So I did Pop Music Legends as a book that I had wanted to do for 40 years.
And of course, as the time went on and I was obligatorily doing the other business books, and I've done probably eight of them contractually, I had to finish those series before I could get back to my favorite, which is the music. That's where I started. Books are kind of like our children. We love them all, but each one, certain ones stand out for reasons. But if I were to pick my very favorite, it would be "Pop Music Legends" followed very closely by "Nonprofit Legends". My other favorite topic of charity involvement.
Leah Roseman:
There's so much to get into, Hank, and I do want to get into your life in music. But before we leave this, you mentioned in passing, you were on the Oprah Winfrey Show with Ed Asner and these other people. And I know you've met so many luminaries in your career.
Hank Moore:
Plenty. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
But that experience, what was it like?
Hank Moore:
Well, it was interesting. It's funny. I had been previously to that, I had been on CNN talking about the downfall of Enron. And so it was nice after talking about corporate scandals on TV to be talking about that because it was just nostalgic. I had met Florence Henderson. Again, that's another phase of my life, but there was about what I call my Hollywood period of time in the early and mid '70s where I was ... When you pick up the TV section of the Sunday newspaper and someone writes about the latest shows and stars, that's what I was doing. But I got in on the tail end of the golden age of early television, and a lot of them are people I had interviewed back in the day. And so it was nice to do nostalgic. I have done other nostalgic interviews and podcasts with music people too.
And one of my very favorites, I do actually cross paths with classical music, the one and only Sir André Previn.
And I was able to reunite with him. These pictures are from back in his ... When he first got into conductingnnnn classical music with the Houston Symphony Orchestra, and then later Pittsburgh and then the London. And then we did a podcast together shortly before he died talking about the wonderful confluence because he came from jazz, then he went into Hollywood music, then he went into classical, and we were talking about the confluence of all of it together. And that's what pop music is. It's a synthesis of a lot of different forms. And as you know, you've seen the book, there's even a chapter on classical music adapted to pop music. And it's done because, well, some of it was done for financial reasons, because a lot of those melodies were in the public domain, so they could just put lyrics with it. It's kind of like the reason why you hear so many old pop songs on TV as commercials.
It's not just to connect with the nostalgia factor, it's because it's cheaper to use old records than it is to write original sometimes not so good jingles. So that's why there's such a proliferation of those around right now. But what that then does is younger people who are trying to ... Young people have always loved learning more about music and classical, jazz, certainly old rock and roll and pop, because a lot of it just kind of came together, country. I mean, I've taught college level courses on pop music, Broadway show tunes, rock and roll, even country. The one area that I haven't done is classical music, because there are many more people, much more qualified than me to do it. But knowing the confluence of all the music as part of everybody's lives,
That's what I kind of specialized in. And I've been called a musicologist for many years. I started the concept of radio oldie shows really when I started. I grew up obviously loving music, but I started working as a radio DJ when I was 10 years old, and that was a very young time to be working. The owner of the radio station was a very famous person named Lady Bird Johnson, who later became First Lady of the United States, but she was an old family friend, and my parents had gone to school with her back in the 1930s. So our families had kind of grown up together. And about that time, and this was 1958, a brand new show had just come on television called American Bandstand with the one and only Dick Clark. And most people don't know who ... Younger people know Dick Clark as that old guy that they propped up on the New Year's Rocking Eve telecast the last few years of his life, but for the first 35 years of his career, he was known as America's oldest teenager.
And my whole goal was to be America's second oldest teenager. At that point, then my other mentors, Lady Bird Johnson and Bill Moyers said, "You can like someone, you can admire someone, but you can't go through life as a carbon copy of them. So you want to be your own best." So that's how I got diverted into being a business guru and a nonprofit volunteer of hundreds of thousands of hours and mentor. I just got involved, but the launching pad for me was music. I never lost the interest in it. I kept writing about it. Even though I was also contractually having to write about business and other related issues, but music is just such a joy to discuss with people and learn from people. And that's how I grew up. I was around a bunch of famous people who gave me a bunch of great advice with the understanding that I pass it on.
Leah Roseman:
There was a lot of just interesting little facts in these books that I took notes on I wanted to mention to people. One of the things I thought was so funny in 1956 that Chrysler thought it was a good idea to put a record player in the glove compartment instead of a radio.
Hank Moore:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
It makes no sense.
Hank Moore:
At the time, how do I explain it? There's a chapter actually that's going to be in the next book on the impact of the automobile on world culture. And what happened was Chrysler Corporation was kind of the number three. It's like the TV networks in the 50s and 60s. CBS and NBC were it and ABC was the little train that could. And it took them three decades to become the number one network. That's what happened with Chrysler. I met Lee Iacocca when he was chairman of the board of Chrysler, and this was in the 1980s. I was an advisor to him. In fact, I gave him, people used to talk about how he had walked on the assembly lines and given wonderful advice and tried to be a friend to his employees as well as a boss. And he used to walk on the assembly line with note cards full of notes on the people to show empathy.
That was my idea. And anyway, I asked him, I said, "What about the Chrysler thing?" Because he was with Ford in the 1950s and '60s and he had championed the Mustang and Henry Ford got jealous of him because he became a bigger celebrity. So he had no choice but to leave the company after the gigantic success. And the thing about that music of any kind, I mean, classical music in the olden days, in the early days of Victrolas and recordings, in order to get those pieces, that's how albums came about because of classical music, not because of pop music. It was the technology, how you get it to people. So the trend has been over the years to get the sound crisper, cleaner, to get the grooves on the record compressed together. And today's ... And the original records, the Victrola records, the original ones were classical and they were one-sided.
Leah Roseman:
So Hank, if I could just go back to this idea though.
Hank Moore:
Sure.
Leah Roseman:
The turntable in the glove compartment. I mean, cars, even the smoothest ride, it's going to be some bumping. This is what I'm trying to understand.
Hank Moore:
It was a gimmick. It was a marketing gimmick to rise from number three.
They were doing everything they could to beat. It was a trademarked product that Ford had turned down, GM had turned down. The other prominent manufacturer, which was out of Canada, Studebaker, turned it down. And the only, out of desperation, they did it to tide themselves over until such time as cassette tapes, which were then being developed, but it took a while. So it was only when cassette tapes, later 8 track tapes, later CDs, later streaming music improved the quality of the sound. It was just an opportunity to get people and families. And we had at the time an invention called the EP. Now, in today's music, you hear about EPs all the time. Artists are putting out four songs on a downstream release. Why are they doing that? Because they don't have 10 or 12 songs in them, to be quite honest. But they can say, "We have an EP." The EP was something that you could compress two songs on each side and classical music could put up to 10 minutes on each side of an EP so you could get more of the longer form pieces that way.
But that was how it was done. I mean, automobiles in the 1950s became synonymous with youth culture. That's when Highway Systems expanded. That's when fast food restaurants came about. All of that's in that other chapter, but it's a matter of the technology.
Leah Roseman:
You mentioned tapes. Another thing that came up that I thought was so interesting was Bing Crosby bringing Reel to Reels from Germany to pre-record his radio show.
Hank Moore:
Yes. He wanted to spend more time on the golf course. I have met many great singers. I have not met Bing Crosby would that I had. I have met his wife. I've had lunch with her. What happened was Bing Crosby was really busy. He was at his peak in the 1940s. He had become a movie star. He did all those movies with Bob Hope. He had business interests. He owned golf courses. And he was trying to find a way to make it easier than giving up time to be in a studio to do a nightly radio show. And in fact, his last radio show, when I first got into radio, which was 1958, it was the last two years of network radio. And we played the Bing Crosby radio show. So he did it to see about the improved quality. Originally, he got engineers. What was starting to happen was the reel to reel tape machines were beginning to be used to master recordings for a long time, but they finally figured out a way to record long form radio shows.
So he could, what they called gang taping. They could tape three, four, five shows in one evening and then there's a month's worth of radio. That's why it happened. And then it became more technologically advanced for recording, multi-track recording, all of that. But he brought it over. What that did though was it was the beginning of the end of network radio because at that point you had all these live dramas and CBC in Canada continued doing big time network radio up into the 1980s, but American radio stopped doing. And 1960, all that network radio went away. And it started out because Bing Crosby brought the tape machine, which was modern technology, but it showed ways that people didn't have to go in a studio every night anymore. The way Orson Wells did with Mercury Theater players and all that. Those kind of things just went away.
It started out because Bing Crosby and it had big rippling effects on the radio and television industry.
Leah Roseman:
So you were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice and the first time as a radio DJ. You mentioned you got into it when you were 10, but then there must have been a ...
Hank Moore:
Well, what happened ... Yeah, when I was actually inducted, it was by Sonny and Cher, the one and only. But it was interesting. When I got into radio, I was told by Lady Bird, she called me over one day. I had just interviewed the biggest star in the world, first performer, first celebrity I ever interviewed ever in my life. And I was 10 years old and I was working one Saturday afternoon and suddenly the door of the studio behind me flings open and I was running the console. There was an adult there supervising. You don't just give a 10-year-old child carte blanche to do whatever. It's a learning experience. And so he said, oh, this army soldier walked in and he says, "Hi, I just thought I'd stop in and talk to you, do an interview." I thought, "What is an Army soldier doing here?" And he sits down and I look over and his badge said, "Private Elvis Presley." I was in Austin, Texas, where I grew up.
He was in Killeen, Texas, just north of Austin at Fort Hood doing his basic training. And I later found out that Lady Bird asked him to do it. Her whole thing for me over the next 50 years was to teach me lessons and introduce me to really interesting people. And I met Winston Churchill and on and on and on. So that's how that happened. And that's where the books came from. Even though I was doing business books, I had to share all these entertainment experiences. And so Elvis, I remember the first question, a 10-year-old child is not nervous and you ask what's on your mind. And I said, first question, I said, "What do they feed you in the army? What's your favorite food?" And he said, "Burned bacon. I eat it whether I want to or not, but I like it. " And that became one of his favorite foods the rest of his life.
And then my second question, I said, "Well, what about this brand new art form of music or form of music, rock and roll? That's just kids' music. Is it going to last?" And he looked at me and he said, "They won't always be kids." So those kinds of ... Then I got inquisitive to do that. And I later met the Beatles and Frank Sinatra and on and on and on. And I'd always ask questions other than what you would expect people to ask. And it was always ... And the typical response would be, "No one's ever asked me that question." When I first met Sir André Previn, I said, "Well, you still have the plaque off the wall at MGM Studios where Louis B. Mayer said there will be no minor chords in MGM music." And I said, "And you took that off the wall and that's been one of your mantras and you're composing is to be sure and include those minor chords."He said, "That's right." He said, "No one's ever asked me about that.
How did you know that when I left MGM, I took that off the wall?" I said, "I know" and just make sure people know that you're passing on. These kinds of stories you can't make up, it's just unusual. So then as the time went on, I would meet more people, I would ask them, and I met just unbelievable numbers of people. And then as a result of radio, you get asked to do public appearances, you'll appear ... We used to call them record hops, and they later became disco dances in later years. And so one year I emceed three movie premieres, and I was about 19 at the time. And by that point, I wasn't a full-time DJ anymore at that point. My boss, Lyndon Johnson, had become President of the United States, so I was also working with him and Lady Bird as a White House advisor.
And that was my job from ages 16 through 21, though I kept doing the music. Well, anyway, so I was doing these three movie premieres, and one of them was Sonny and Cher. They were at their peak. This picture was taken in 1967. Their hit record at the time was The Beat Goes On. And they had a movie out, and I emceeded the movie premiere, and I had MC two other premiers that same year, and one was the Batman movie with Adam West, and another one was The Reluctant Astronaut with Don Knotts, formerly of the Andy Griffith Show. And so we stayed in touch over the years, and this is weird. This is weird. 25 years later, though I was long past retired primarily from radio, I mean, I was a business guru doing stuff, and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, basically, they have seven sections that most people don't know that.
It's kind of like when you watch the Oscars for the motion pictures, and they'll say, "Earlier this week, we had a ceremony and we recognized some great people. Could we have a round of applause, please?" Now, back to the show. That's what Rock & Roll Hall of Fame did too. There are seven sections, one for songwriters, one for technology people that develop all this new technology, and you can't forget radio DJs. So they would go around the country and they would pick names of older people that had contributed. And I was picked because I was one of the originators of the radio oldies show format. I didn't think of it as anything new. I mean, I walked in for work. I started working in spring of 1958. A month later, I'm interviewing Elvis Presley, whether I wanted to or not. I mean, it was just a great experience.
And then the next year I come into work, the date was February 3rd, 1959. And my boss, Cactus Pryor, the program director, said, "Well, I don't know if you heard, but that young guy, Buddy Holly, just died last night in a plane crash. Apparently this new rock and roll music has come of age. Would you start documenting it, please?" So I did an oldies show and rock and roll music was only three years old at that point because the music we were playing as Golden Oldies was big band music from the 1930s and '40s. And a lot of the big band music was classical music adapted because every time there's a recording strike, they'd pull out the classical music and add new lyrics and come up with hits. I mean, it was an economic thing, but it was also a quality thing because classical music is great and it's adaptable and to pop.
And so they came up with this list. So one of the list was DJs. So I go and it turns out I had met Sonny and Cher in 1967 when I emceed their movie premiere. 25 years later, 1992, I was just there again. They had already divorced at that point. Sonny Bono was in Congress. This was shortly before he died in a ski accident. And so I've seen Cher since then.
These things just happened. So the other time I was quote inducted, unquote, it's not really a ceremony. Your name's put on a list. So it's an honor, but it's not like the people aren't there to see you. They're there to see the performers. So I was at it again as an author because even though my books were primarily business books, there was always a music chapter in each book. It was a telltale sign that there were more books coming of just entertainment. Music books are filled with a lot of wrong information sometimes. I mean, there's the technique books for music, but the trivia books sometimes have a lot of wrong information. So that's how I got on the second. It was just an honor. It's not like you compete, you're not elected to it, but there are a lot of people in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame that did a lot of behind the scenes things in the music industry, and they should be honored, even though they don't make it onto the broadcast.
You don't do the work. I've got 150 awards for different things, a lot of it for business things. Most of them that I'm proudest of were for charitable things. I've got Lifetime Achievement Awards and I got a United Nations Hall of Fame award one time for charity work, volunteer work.
The fact that Audrey Hepburn was standing next to me on the stage, we were working together for UNICEF at that time, and I had written and produced commercials, and that was fine. I got to direct my favorite actress. So charity and humanity are at the root of everything. And the music, the last thing I'll say is the music industry is wonderfully good at so Supporting causes at charitable activities, doing more than their share, artists doing benefit concerts. That's how I met Van Cliburn. He was probably the hottest selling classical artist with pop audiences at that time. And then later to be replaced by André Previn.
Leah Roseman:
I think you'd mentioned that you were advisor to Lyndon Johnson and you helped draft the Civil Rights Amendment.
Hank Moore:
That's true. You can't make this stuff up. When Johnson always had this adage, he'd always say, "You always start at the top." And that helps understand what you're made of. Again, Lady Bird called me over when I was 10 years old. I had just interviewed Elvis and she said, "Always have the humanitarian side to what you do. " She said, "You're a visionary or you will grow into that role and you're a humanitarian." That's always the guiding force of everything. And in those days, radio stations were regulated would that they were now because part of the regulation is a mandatory requirement to do public service,
To do public service announcements, to do programs. And we used to have to do ... And I was put, I was assigned to work on the license. So the license ... And I'm 10 years 11, 12 years old. And we used to do, and again, would that corporations would do this now, obviously I'm saddened at a lot of deregulations that have happened on various industries. And I testified before US Congress 30 years ago, I begged them, "Do not deregulate radio and television. Make them do the public service." They said, "What's going to happen?" I said, "Within a few years, a handful of corporations are going to own all the stations. There will be no more mom and pop stations." I grew up working for a mom and pop station. The mom and pop happened to be Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson who became national figures, but they were deeply committed to charity.
And it saddened me that they deregulated broadcasting and all this conglomerate stuff that's happened. It really kills me. And I've warned them about that 30 years ago, "Please don't do that. " But they chose not to listen to me. Anyway, when the best lesson that I ever learned from Lady Bird and some other people, former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, I met all these people. I met Mrs. Roosevelt and Churchill when I was 12 years old. I didn't realize that I was in such greatness, but I was. So they said, always teach people. You teach people what you've most recently learned and it's not when you learn, it's that you ... All this great advice. And so I used that experience of working on community activities. About a month after Johnson had become president, and this was in December of 1963, I was 16 years old.
I was really young then. And he walks up to me at this party at the ranch and he says, "You still doing all that work with the minority communities?" I said, "Oh yeah, I'm very proud of it. " Because we were going in, meeting people, asking them what can we do to improve life other than make money hand over fist on advertising? What can we as corporate citizens do? What are some of the issues that you'd like us to address in our news coverage and in our public service? Would that broadcasting did that now? But anyway, and we had to do that to get our license from the FCC renewed every three years. Well, anyway, so he walks up to me and he says, "You still doing all that work with minority communities?" I said, "Yeah, darn proud of it. " He says, "I need you.
" Every request he always made Johnson was, "I need you to fill in the blank." And he said, "I need you to be on a committee. I think your perspective will add to the committee." And so I show up after that, two, three weeks later, when and where I was told to show up and I was 16 years old. I was in 11th grade in high school at the time. And so I show up one night at the federal building and I walk in and suddenly I see all these people that I used to know from the radio station, all these ministers and community leaders and stuff, and there are people that I had met from doing community ascertainment and working with and helping coordinate that their public service messages would get covered. And it was a pleasure to ... That was the job that no one wanted at a radio station, but I enjoyed it and I gravitated toward it.
So we were told our assignment that night was to write the Civil Rights Act. No one asked what you knew. Well, they knew that you knew something and we were there to provide perspective. We were assigned two meetings to write the first draft. The ninth draft is what passed Congress. And so I was one of 30 people on the committee. I provided the youth perspective to diversity, and there are a lot of aspects to it. And Johnson always said, "You start at the top." First star I ever interviewed Elvis Presley, first assignment I ever had to do something positive for the government was serve on that committee. I worked on other projects later. I had my areas of expertise during that five years.
I was 16 when he became president. I was 21 when he left office, and I wasn't old enough to vote for anybody, but I could serve my country. And my areas of expertise were civil rights, environmental, international trade, and the world's fair. We had had a world's fair in Texas. It was hemisphere in 1968, the year after the world's fair in Canada, which we visited, and we had visited the New York Wealth Fair. We had visited the Seattle World's Fair to get ideas to make ours better. And our fair, I was 20 when that was, and that was part of the Johnson legacy. So anyway, that's what happened. It was because I was so committed to community stewardship and serving nonprofit organizations. That's why I later wrote my book, which is up there on the wall behind me, the one with the raised hands, nonprofit legends.
If I were to ask what are my two favorite books, it would be pop music legends and nonprofit legends because of the charitable component. So that's what happened. I worked with him. And then after he left office, I was in my senior year in college at that point. So I finished college and then was working on my MBA and I was on the committee that created the presidential library. So I had some involvement with the Johnson family and it was because I owed it to them because I learned so much through them, not so much ... Some of it was from them and a lot of it was through them, some of the people that I met.
Leah Roseman:
I hear that he was quite a character, President Johnson.
Hank Moore:
Yes. Yes. He was a great big teddy bear. People think that he was this crude, corrupt person. No, he wasn't. It kind of reminds me ... That's the best way that I can say that. You've known and met a lot of accomplished people in the music world. I have too. Some of them are on the inside, they got a heart of gold, and sometimes they have to project a tougher image on the outside. Number one example of that would be the one and only Frank Sinatra. He was basically shy, believe it or not. I met him in 1960, Lady Bird introduced him to me. And then I walked 10 years later, I was in a nightclub in Hollywood, California during my time that I was going out interviewing stars for TV to write about for TV sections of newspapers, which later became my book, Classic Television Reference.
That's this one, the one I'm presently updating and rewriting as classic TV legends, because a lot of TV has happened since the 1980s that I need to update. Anyway, a lot of performers, there are the insecure ones, certainly. Johnson was not insecure, but he was a good-hearted person. He started his career as a school teacher, as did Lady Bird. Lady Bird and my mother were student teachers together in the 1930s, and that's how ... She met him through being fellow teachers in education, and that's what my mother was too, was a teacher. And so he was a great big teddy bear is all I can say. The last time I ever saw him, which was two weeks before he died, he died just about four years to the day after leaving office. And during that timeframe that he was president, it was a whirlwind thing.
He was trying to finish the Kennedy legacy. He was trying to add his own legacy. Politically, the Vietnam War did amen, but he was a guy that always listened. I'll tell you two final, not to bore you with ... It's not about politics. It's just about humanity. He used to have meetings in the White House where the staff members, each person was expected to say something. We didn't just sit there like Bobby Heads. We would contribute. And we were having a discussion. I was working there, this was in the summer of 1965, and I just graduated from high school, and we were talking about ... The reference was made to how we distinguish ourself from the term that, as they said, those people from Massachusetts, meaning the Kennedy holdovers.
And Johnson said, he used to say," Well, you talk slow and the people think you're stupid, and then you come up and bottom on the butt. "In other words, you use people's predilections to seeing you as not an East Coast Ivy Leaguer, as a good advice. During that meeting, I said, and I knew he had said that, that comment about using language to disarm people and to use your smarts every way you could. And so I said one day, I pulled up a ... His drink of choice in the White House was ice cold fresca, and he used to have a tap at the right side, bottom of his desk, same position where Richard Nixon later kept his tape recorder, another subject, and he would dispense. And his thing was always," Serve you a cup of drink. "Fresco was his drink of choice. And if you remember in the '60s when diet salt drinks first came out, they were terrible.
We all drink them now, but they were terrible then. They didn't taste like the real thing. And we were taught then to get off of sugar. Anyway, so I'm sitting there holding this cup and I said, talking about comparing us to those East Coast people, he was really talking about Robert McNamara, the former defense secretary. They didn't get along. He loved Kennedy. He loved Bobby Kennedy. He loved all of them except for McNamara. And I said," People see this cup, this Dixie Cup, and they think this is us. "And I said," It's the only time I ever invoked Kennedy's name in a meeting. "And I said," Kennedy used to serve his guests in crystal glasses. Every detail that we do is symbolic of something else. "And he said," That's great philosophy. "I said," You know who I learned that from? Your friend, John Conley, who had previous been Secretary of the Navy under Kennedy, how every little detail moved up to something bigger in its significance.
"And I've heard that line from music people. Andre Previn used to talk that way, is the compositions, the little off the wall things that you add make it a totally different and better ... They all used to talk about that. And all the composers, Burt Bacharach and all the serious, the other composers that would always talk about the little things that you pull out of left field and put in there. So I said," This symbolizes us and our level of culture. "And he said," Son, we don't do anything the way Kennedy did. "I said," That's because we're smarter, but it's up to us to show people that. "He said," Good comeback point well taken. "And he started serving crystal glasses. So the last time I met him, I saw him was in January of 1973. He had left office in 1969, and he was president from 1963 to 1969.
And we were at a concert. It was a country and western concert. I didn't like country music in those days. I came to respect it later for what it is, which is a confluence of pop culture styles. And I said, I ran into him at the intermission, at the beer stand, and I walked up to him and he was kind of trying to be incognito. He was very tall. He could not be incognito. He had shoulder length white hair at the time, and he was wearing his sunglasses, and I walked up to him and I said, It's the boldest thing I'd ever said. I always said, Mr. President, Mr. Johnson, I never ... So the one time that I was casual, I walked up and said," Hey buddy, you want to buy me a beer? "And he turns around and he says," Oh, it's you."
And he pulls the glasses down and smiled and suddenly I could hear people in the crowd" It's him. Oh, could I have your autograph? "He was crestfallen. He felt like a has been. He felt like life had passed him by. And after that library opened on May 22nd, 1971, I was on the committee that planned it. I was at the ceremony. He just kind of dropped out of the public eye those last couple of years. And he just felt like he was kind of put on the shelf and he was forgotten. That's the way a lot of people in the entertainment ... That's what a lot of people in business are. They felt like when I was advising Lee Iacocca on those ideas to become the kind of company that Henry Ford would not let Ford be. And the sad part, he said," But Ford's never going to accord me the credit for what I'm doing.
"I said," I would have, if I were him, I'd be sending you attaboy notes all the time. "I said," But don't expect it. He doesn't have it to give. "And people in the entertainment industry, artists, true artists, they want to do more and better. It's sometimes they're crestfallen that the culture doesn't want better, they want more of the same. And so that's how those things happen.
Music brings out the best in people and it makes them become more external, more introverted. The music does that.
Leah Roseman:
I wanted to ask you about Ed Sullivan because recently there's this Netflix doc, "Sunday Best" about how he broke down barriers in terms of Black artists.
Hank Moore:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a really quick break from the episode. I wanted to let you know about some other episodes I’ve linked directly to this one in the show notes, with Jack Everly, Matt Zimbel, Kat Raio Rende and Carla PatulloIn the show notes you’ll also find a link to sign up for my newsletter, where you’ll get exclusive information about upcoming guests, a link for my Ko-fi page to support this project directly, where you can buy me one coffee, or every month, and my podcast merchandise store with a design commissioned from artist Steffi Kelly. You can also review this podcast, share it with your friends, and follow on your podcast app, YouTube, and social media. All this helps spread the word! Thanks. Now back to my conversation with Hank.
Hank Moore:
Yes. Actually, I met him several times. I was at his apartment. He lived in the Delmonico Hotel in New York, and I was there. Ed Sullivan was a newspaper reporter first, and then he became a host. He was nervous. He was not really slick, but he did that forever. Ed Sullivan got into breaking down barriers in the 1930s and '40s when he was a reporter. And he would be asking, there was a big charity event, ball called the Harvest Ball in New York, and he would give Black entertainers their first exposure because the Black artists that were prominent on the record industry at that time would be Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald. I don't have a lot of pictures. This would be me with Duke Ellington.
This would be me with Ella Fitzgerald. They're considered the Mount Rushmore of jazz, but Nat King Cole, you had those Ella Fitzgerald, a handful of artists, but R&B, Elvis wanted to get R&B artist exposure. There was a time when he started his show in 1948, his TV show, TV was brand new and he was definitely a pioneer. And there was this thing going on in the recording industry. The only Black artists that were getting regular airplay were those handful of people, Nat King Cole, the Ink Spots, and Billy Eckstine and people that had certain kind of voices that would resonate across the musical platforms, shall we say. And R&B was coming along. R&B later, but coupled with country music, created rock and roll. And so what was happening in the music industry at that time was they were covering R&B records. There was a fellow who was head of artists and repertoire, very influential, Mitch Miller at Columbia.
Mitch Miller was classically trained. He was Julliard. He played the Oboe. He was Symphony, the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, CBS and all that. Then they put him in charge of their pop music artists and repertoire division. And he was the one that started having his stable of artists, Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clinton, Frank Sinatra at the time, cover R&B songs and country music songs. Country music was the other no-no out there. It was Hillbilly Music. And Country Music, because of the cover songs, they got very hip and so did R&B at some point that the original artists could do the songs better than the cover artists. Cover artists were okay. They did all right. Tony Bennett sang Cold Cold Heart and some of those, that was a Hank Williams song. Everybody covered Hank Williams songs, but the radio stations would not play the original artists. And what started happening was by about 1955, 56, the artists would start getting airplay.
And then rock and roll enabled by combining R&B and country music together into a new art form. Some would say a commercial form more so than an art form, but that's how Rock and Roll came about. And then a lot of the artists couldn't ... They would let their songs be covered. There was a very prominent R&B singer named Fats Domino. And people said," How do you feel about people like Pat Boone rerecording your songs? That's a travesty. That's not as good as the original. "And he held up his hand and he pointed his great big ring on his finger and he said," See this ring? Pat Boone bought me this ring. "And that's what was happening. Then you had this generation of composers, the Burt Bacharachs of the world, the Paul McCartneys of the world, who everything they wrote was to be covered. And they would consider themselves successful if tons of people.
The most covered song in history is Yesterday by Paul McCartney. That would be 900. Anyway, back to the finish the Ed Sullivan answer. Sorry, I'm weaving a lot of stuff that sets the stage. He got a lot of criticism originally by having so many Black artists on the show. He didn't have too many country. He had some, but country became mainstream in the mid 50s and they started having artists that would make the pop charts and the Marty Robbins of the world and PAtsy Cline and those kind of people. And that's what made modern Nashville what modern Nashville became was that the country music was always considered crossover. And most of the big hits were bigger hits on the pop chart than they were in the country chart. So things just go through cycles, but that was the mood of the music industry at the time was everything was very segregated.
And the Mitch Millers of the world started the trend and there were people at the other labels too. I mean, Frank Sinatra where you recorded an R&B song called Learning the Blues that Hank Ballard and the Dominoes had put out on the R&B charts. But after a while, the cross-pollination happened. And Sullivan was the first on television. And he gave prime and some of the comedians, the Richard Pryors of the world and Flip Wilson, their first exposure. He was very humanitarian. He was very liberal politically, but he didn't push that off on people, but he was just open-minded. And same thing that had happened in baseball. He was friends with a lot of those athletes and he would frequently introduce them from the audience. They couldn't get on the stage and sing and dance, but Ed Sullivan was the genuine article. And whereas then Mitch Miller, what led to his career downfall was he hated rock and roll.
He would not allow rock and roll on his label. That was the downfall of Columbia Records for a long time before Clive Davis took the job and brought Simon and Garfunkel and all of them to the label. But it's just sometimes there's visionaries that you listen to and there's a season and the music industry is very cyclical. Would that other areas of business recognize that things change every couple of years? And if you don't change, you're in bad shape. So research tells us, I'll use a couple of business statistics. 71% of each person and each organization, they change at the rate of 71% per year. So why do some people fight it? Research also tells us that change is 90% positive. So why do people fight change out of fear?
Leah Roseman:
You talk about, let's see, there's so much. We won't be able to get to everything.
Hank Moore:
This is a lot of stuff that probably hasn't been on your show before, but I'm trying to contextualize. Music is a bridge that brings people together.
Leah Roseman:
I think it might be interesting for people to hear a little bit about the radio back in the day when you had to write spreadsheets by hand and the payola scandal, kind of interesting aspect of the-
Hank Moore:
You read every bit of that book. At that time, we're talking 1958, 59. In addition to working on public service announcements, we had to react to scandals going on in investigations in Congress. And they even tried to investigate Dick Clark, but he was Mr. Clean and he came away from it all, and that was fine. He ran American Bandstand as a honest show. He'd play records and he did not take bribes. Anyway, we were required at one point to keep spreadsheets. We did not have computers in those days, and we had to manually write, and there were columns like a spreadsheet, and you would put the time you played it, the label that it was on to show so that you weren't getting bribes from one label or another. The serial number of the record, I can go to a flea market to this day, and I frequently do a used record store, and I can to this day by looking at the serial number and the label, I can tell you the year the record came out, whether I knew it or not, and I would be right almost every time, because I learned that from having to keep those logs in the studio.
And part of it was the kid would do it because the adults didn't want to. And then you'd see the name of the song and the name of the composer. And that's where I started recognizing names on that spreadsheet that I'd never heard before because the great composers that I knew were Cole Porter, George Gershwin on and on and on and on. And I started seeing names like Carole King, Burt Bacharach, and that got me to want to learn more about them. One of the very first composers that I wrote on that spreadsheet was the name Bacharach. And that was an unusual name in those days. It wasn't Smith or Jones. And the two of his earliest hits I played on the radio were Magic Moments, which was a big hit by Perry Como. And the theme from the movie The Blob, Burt Bacharach was a genius.
It took me 50 years to actually meet him and talk to him about that. And we flash forward to the year 2011. I was in Los Angeles, California. Word was out in the music industry that Dick Clark was near death. He'd had a stroke. He was wheelchair bound. He had kind of stopped even appearing on the Rockin' New Year's Eve thing. He was just very frail. And so music people came together. I was invited to be one of the speakers. I sat at the dance. On my left was Frankie Avalon, the Teen Idol, former Teen Idol. And on my right was Burt Bacharach. And I said to him while we were chit-chatting before the program started, dinner. And I said, "Oh, I started my career as a Dick Clark wannabe and I evolved from there." And I used to play some of your early songs.
I said, "I became a fan of yours before the hits." And he said, "Really?" I said, "I'm not going to talk to you about Walk On By and Raindrops Keep Falling. I don't want to talk to you about those songs. I want to talk to you about the early songs." He said, "You're kidding me. No one has ever talked to me about those early days." And I sat there and I spouted off about 20. He said, "What are your favorites of mine from that era?" And I spouted off about 20 ones. He went, "My God." No one ever talks about it. I said, "I was taught by my mentors, Lady Bird Johnson, and that's one of the things Eleanor Roosevelt taught me when I was 12 years old was you teach people what you most recently learned and that your salad days and your career are what mold you into everything that you're going to be.
And for me, the salad days were community volunteerism and music and sharing music with other people and introducing them to artists and kinds of music that they might not have ever heard before. And so that was ... And he said, "This is an education.
I don't even remember some of those songs". I said, "they were work for hire things that you did, but until you developed the Burt Bacharach style, but they were brilliant songs. They were many of them very big hits. People just didn't know who you were at the time. "I did because of those logs. So Payola was a way for us to learn. That helped me learn more about the music, having to log them. And it went away. There were some disc jockeys that were known to be on the take, notably Alan Freed. That killed his career. But Dick Clark, Mr. Clean, nothing ever happened there. But I wish that that investigation had continued, not as a witch hunt, so to speak, or not as ... And remember, this was very shortly after the McCarthy terrible, terrible era in our history and the things that were said and done.
Those were terrible. And those ruined careers. And I've talked to actors whose careers were Lee Grant and Zero Mostel and people like that. They later came back, Zero Mostel made it big on Broadway after he came back from the Black List era. But Will Gear, I met him during the Waltons period, but he had been blacklisted by McCarthy. Anyway, Payola is rampant in the entertainment industry now, has been ever since probably the '70s, '80s. It got institutionalized in many, many, many ways. Marketing. That's why a lot of artists ... The other thing that I would say is the expense that record companies go to market performers is infinitely more than it was in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. And that's why the number of artists on every label has shrunk and the amount of original music that the public is hearing shrunk. I've got a piece of research to give you that most people would be maybe shocked to hear.
48% of all the music that's released every year downloads and wherever you get your music is re-releases of older songs and catalogs. There's that much in the system that it's cheaper and it also educates younger people. What's the current Christmas song of the year right now, Rockin' Around the Christmas tree from 1956? And it's still charting? The first chapter that I ever wrote for the "Pop Music Legends" book was the Christmas chapter, chapter eight. And Christmas and holiday music is an annuity. It's called an annuity, the gift that keeps giving in the music industry. And that's why 70 years after radio stations stopped playing Bing Crosby records, the one time of the year they do is his Christmas catalog. He was the voice of Christmas and Perry Como and Johnny Mathis and all those kind of people who were wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. And it was one of Johnny Mathis' song titles.
Wonderful, wonderful. But that payola was something we could have learned from. It's still around, but it was one of those fears of the moment that congressional hearings and radio stations, because they were regulated, complied and cooperated. And at one time, we had to keep logs of everything we played. That later got replaced by computer printouts.
Leah Roseman:
You mentioned Perry Como in passing, and there was an anecdote that he was a barber and someone discovered him singing.
Speaker 3:
Oh yeah.
Leah Roseman:
And you also named all these music contests, talent contests. And some of the names that came up that were discovered this way were surprising to me, like Beverly Sills and Maria Callas and pop stars like Britney Spears were discovered in these sort of talent contests.
Hank Moore:
Well, yeah. I mean, the shows like The Voice and America's Got Talent, Canada's Got Talent, I don't think is running anymore, but there are a lot of great, great shows where these ... And what happened was they were on the radio originally, and there was Major Bowes original Amateur Hour. And his biggest name discovery was Frank Sinatra with his singing with his group. He was a lead singer of a group called The Hoboken Four. And they won the talent contest in 1935, and that's what launched Frank Sinatra's career. And so when you move into more modern times, when TV came along, there have been these shows. In the 50s, there was Ted Mack's original Amateur Hour. And among the stars that came off of that show and became major stars, Pat Boone, Patsy Cline, Gladys Knight, lots of them. And then there was another one called Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts.
And one of the biggest names that came off of that show was Rod McEwen, the folk singer poet who was really big in the 60s and 70s. Yeah, they came off of talent shows and we still have them coming off of shows and Britney Spears and some of them, and a lot of them came off of TV shows, the new Mickey Mouse Club. It was just talent comes along at different ages and different times. Good talent also perseveres through the years.
Leah Roseman:
So in terms of music distribution, something that comes up a lot on my show with artists is the problems with the streaming services, especially Spotify. And a lot of people are putting their albums on places like Bandcamp and trying to sell physical as well as just sell directly.
Hank Moore:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
It's gone so far in this certain direction. What are your perspectives on what you see now in the music industry?
Hank Moore:
It's very splintered. A lot of good music. What I've seen happen every decade since the '60s is every year the number of records being put out is fewer, fewer, fewer, and so many styles of music where it's more the same old stuff. There was a time where in the '60s, everything sounded different. It didn't all sound alike. And so what's happening is people will put out things. Everyone that goes into music wants to be Taylor Swift and be this major star. She didn't start out that way. She got ripped off. Her music got ripped off. And the same thing happened with other people where their music, they had to sign their names away. You got the Motown sound out of Detroit. A lot of those artists were working for next to nothing because the music industry at that time was prejudiced against Black-owned record companies.
That's a whole other kind of prejudice, but it's just the outlets are not there. And for some artists, there is still payola. Like I said earlier, it's still there. It's not so subtle sometimes. But for ... I wrote a ... One of the chapters in the book is called CD, and it talked about begging the music industry to stop to not cease production of CDs because the best outlet for performers still is self-produced albums that they can sell at concerts. Same thing with book authors. I mean, it's terrible. Most books die a terrible death unless you have certain outlets. I write business books that get bought by corporations and given out in training sessions. There's outlets other than bookstores is what I'm saying. And there's outlets other than record stores. By the way, record stores hardly exist anymore. I think I wrote about that in one of the chapters.
It's all about the distribution. And it's terrible out there, but artists are committed to the art, not the music business. And a lot of them will give away their songs. There was an artist who was a member of two singing groups in the 1950s. His name was Joe Jackson. And he got ripped off. He was a member of the Flamingos and he was a member of the Falcons. And he was one of those guys that would stand behind the lead singer and do the bop shebop stuff.
Well, he started having a family and he decided he'd put his kids to work, notably Michael Jackson, his son, and he formed a cooperation, a corporation to further Black artists and help Black artists from being ripped off. And major black artists were ripped off. Chuck Berry, in his early years, had to give away half of his royalties to Alan Freed, whose name helped him get radio airplay. And so CDs are very important, sales at concerts of any kind of artists. And that includes chamber music quartets, it includes country bands, it includes everyone. There's got to be ways if you touch it and you see it, and it's a record. I mean, in our days, records look like this. This one happens to be White Christmas by Bing Crosby and picture sleeves, those kinds of things. But I just think if the distribution, artists still keep the distribution where they can control it, because with record companies you can't.
I mean, if Taylor Swift could get ripped off, and it took her years to get those catalogs back. Paul McCartney does not even own his catalog. The Michael Jackson Estate does.
Leah Roseman:
Really?
Hank Moore:
But while McCartney owns the Buddy Holly catalog, because Buddy Holly was his idol and role model. I've talked to McCartney about that too. So corporations will take ... And now you've got the AI thing going on of putting actors out of work and putting musicians out of work. There are a lot of great jingle singers who would sing on jingles, but that's why you don't hear too many original jingles on the air because it's cheaper to get a named song, including Beatles songs. You hear them on commercials all the time. It gives new life to those songs, but it's more of an economic thing. It's not just, "Oh, we're going to play a bunch of songs that people of a certain generation would know. " But it has the effect of spreading the music. And then records haven't gone away. They're still there.
Leah Roseman:
I'm curious, in your house, what does your record collection look like?
Hank Moore:
Very large. A lot of it is not in my house. It's in a storage shed nearby. I had, at my peak, 20,000 records, and some of them I downsized and gave away. And a lot of them I put on, sold a few of them, but gave away. For a number of years, I've been going around. It's not unusual for me to go into a speaking engagement. And even if I'm there to talk to a corporate audience about business, I'll walk in with a handful of records. I'll say, "Does anybody here know what these are? I want to give you each one." And there's still a trick that I do when I do that. I'll walk around if it's a workshop or something. I say, "I'm going to give you here." I said, "I haven't looked at these titles. These just came out of a box in the garage.
I'm going to give you business savvy that you can take back and use at your business." And I got this idea back in old TV days, there was a personality named Steve Allen on The Tonight Show, and he had his variety show, and he'd ask people in the audience to call out notes. And that's where that thing that Tonight Show still does, Stump the Band came from. And they would compose a song on the spot, given the notes that people would call out from the audience. That's what Steve Allen did originally. Steve Allen wasn't just a comedian. He wrote 2000 songs.
But what I do when I do that is I will turn around, I'll look at the title and I say, "Okay, this title is such and such." And I'll say a piece of trivia about the title and I'll say, "Here's what this could mean in your business life if this was your mission statement. And I'll translate it into business jargon." And I have been involved in writing about 400 plans, strategic plans for companies. And some of them are big companies, AT&T, Marriott, Hewlett Packard, lots of them, Texaco. And you ask top executives, "What are your core beliefs?" They don't know. They say, "Well, help me articulate them, please." So for years, I'll sit and I'll ask them, "What are some songs that meant a lot to you growing up?" "Really? You know that stuff? "I said," Yeah, there are those people think that I know music as well, if not better than business.
I happen to kind of know both, and I know the symbiosis of how they work together. "And so they'll say something, they'll say," Well, yeah, old John Lennon wrote a song that said such and such. "I said," Well, what does that mean to you musically, fill in the blank what it means to them. "I said," So in other words, from a business standpoint, this could mean as you evolve your corporation to the next level, blah, blah, blah, because people are more products of the pop culture in which they grow up than they are formal training and development in any field. And music it affects everybody's life and people have memories and they can share the memories and then they can take them into their life. So yeah, it's just the symbiosis of it all is so wonderful, but in music, it can get people thinking outside the box more quickly than anything else.
Leah Roseman:
To wrap this up, Hank, you had mentioned one of the things you were most proud of was your work with nonprofits in the charity sector. So do you want to speak about that a little bit?
Hank Moore:
Well, yeah, it's just one of my mentors, a gentleman named Seymour Cohen taught me a lesson 40 years ago. He said, "Well, you do your best work for free." And he was a longtime friend. And the point being that if we are charitable and if we are community savvy, and for musicians, that's a good thing because doing a volunteer concert or something that gets you known and recognized, among other things, is a way to sell CDs, but it's a way to get your name out there and it's everywhere. The music industry, I must say, is probably better than most other industries at supporting charity.
Leah Roseman:
I thought you might want to share a little bit about your favorite causes or how you've been involved.
Hank Moore:
Well, yeah, I'll share that. Yeah, I'll do that. There were lots. I never was a one cause person. I was involved with creating a concept back in the '80s called Neighborhood Oriented Policing, because a police chief was a friend of mine and I used to advise him on how to get people outreached into the hinterlands. I did a lot of work with UNICEF and CARE. Well, I helped create a program with UNICEF to deal with programs and I produced some public service announcements that ran worldwide with Vincent Price and then later Audrey Hepburn. And I got awards from them. One of the awards said this project we had done had saved 5,000 lives in Third World Nations. And I thought, okay, well, I didn't do it to get the honor. For me, it was the honor of working with Vincent Price and Audrey Hepburn. And I got to direct my favorite actress, Audrey Hepburn doing public service announcements for UNICEF.
And even though broadcasting was deregulated, when you get an Audrey Hepburn message, you'll run it for free. And I was standing next to her when I was inducted to the United Nations Hall of Fame for community service. That was on November 5th, 1990. And that was what an honor. I mean, I did it because all I've ever done was support causes. And there were some others. I had done a lot of work at one time along the board or helping create ... It gets into a little current controversy now, but some of that work became known as NAFTA. And it started out as my work with LBJ. I was one of the authors of a program called the Bracero Program, which created agricultural initiatives to stimulate opportunities. And then by the 1980s, the industry ... There was a program called the Maquiladora Program, which is a Spanish word.
Maquiladora is Spanish made by hand, assembly line factories dotting the border. And I put together a project for them that lowered the unemployment rate in that sector of the border from 28 to 13%. And when people are working, they don't do drugs and guns, and life can get better. So a lot of the things ... I was involved at one time with a program that became a major organ transplant. It started out as a volunteer organization to get people to sign the back of their driver's license. And I said, one time, as I want to do, say something very creative, and I was having lunch with your board one time. I said, "Well, I'm sorry to tell you this. There's three organizations that do volunteer advocacy for organ donation. Somebody's got to take the organs to market. Why can't you? " And that's how Life Gift came about.
So that's part of what my contribution to nonprofit organization, it's not just going out, it's not just going to the food bank, it's telling the food bank how to partner with other industries, so to speak.
There's just some great ... I had a group of agricultural initiative of people came to me one time, they came up to me when I was speaking at a conference, and I was up in the Detroit area speaking at a business conference, and this group of farmers initiative came to me and said, "We need to think outside the box. Would you help us?" I said, "Yeah, I'm not going to charge you for it. " And I said, "Well, who?" They said, "We're upset about these ads that are running on TV about California cows. They've stolen our dairy industry from us. These are people from Wisconsin and we need to go on TV and complain about how bad they are and how wonderful we are. " I said, "No, you need to show that you're resilient." "Well, what do we do? "I said," You come up with a strategy and I wrote them a plan to do it of creating agricultural initiatives worldwide.
"I said," People in China, in Russia, and places like that, they'll buy your products. We are in a very global economy, "I said in the 1980s. How did I say that? Because I learned it in the 1960s. It's been a global economy forever. And so those are the things. And I remember one time, sometimes these boards of these charities are so stuck in their ways, and someone has to say ... I was doing one, I was working with a hospice board of directors one time, and I said," Why should death and dying be your only product? What product? We're in a compassionate service. "I said," Well, what about other quality of life services? Why don't you look at areas that the other charities are not fulfilling and you could have a menu of service areas? "That's the part that I do that a lot of people can't.
Now, where did I get a lot of this? Goes back to music always. One of the things I learned, I asked Carole King one time, I said," How do you write a song? Do you write the title first or do you write the song first? "She said," Oh, you write the title. It has to be a catchy title that'll get picked up and played on the radio. "And then I said to her," Well, what do you do when you have writer's block? Can you give me an example? "And she said," No one has ever asked me that question. "I said," Okay, what did you do? "She said," Well, we were having a block and the music industry was changing around us. "I said," Okay, give me an example. "And she said," Well, Jerry, her then husband, Gerry Goffin, she said, "Went up to the top of the building to have a smoke."People smoked cigarettes in those days. I didn't, but never have, but they did."Okay, so what was your dialogue? ""Well, we were wandering around and walking all over the top of the building and trying to ... " And one of us said to the other, "When this old world keeps getting me down, I go up where the air is fresh and clear," and the other one says, "Up on the roof." And she said, "That's how we wrote that song." And a group called The Drifters recorded, it was a number one hit. And then I said, "Knowing the Brill building where you worked and knowing the competition, what did your competitors do to get back at you with an even bigger hit?" And she said, "Well, that's interesting. No one's ever asked me that question." I said, "Don't tell me it was the other guys, Perry Mann and Cynthia Weil that they were your chief competition." She said, "That's right." And so they said, "Well, heck, if Carole King and Gerry Goffin can get a hit from the top of the building, we'll get one from the bottom." I said, "Okay, what did they do?
" Well, they walked out outside and it was bright sunlight. And one of them said to the other one, "They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway." The other one says, "They say there's magic in the air" because it was sunlight and summertime and beating down. That's how these things happen. Songs sometimes write themselves. And pop songs, because they're short and they've got a ... There was a record producer named Phil Spector who used to call pop songs little symphonies for the kids. And you pack as much good stuff, but it has to be commercial or otherwise it will never get an audience. So that's how a lot of those songs just used to come about. And the more that artists can learn to these little techniques from those who came before them, there's always people in the music world that came before all of us.
I mean, for me, I thought I was in hog heaven. I'd already met Elvis Presley. I'd already met Frank Sinatra. And for me, when I was in Hog Heaven, when I met some of those big band people, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman. I mean, they were way before my time. I never knew who any of them were until that first year that I worked in radio. We were playing their music as Golden Oldies. And then my boss Cactus Pryor said, "Buddy Holly's plane crashed. Let's change our concept of oldies from big band music to 1950s music." And so every year, if I were ever to work in radio anymore, I would probably be playing Golden Oldies from the 1990s, about the good old days of the 1990s and what we learned from them. Because even in the 1990s, there's the early part of the decade.
It all changed when 45 RPM records left the market. Half of the music went away immediately. We used to call those B sides and flip sides. That all went away with digital downloads. And so it's been shrinking, shrinking, shrinking ever since, but it can still be great music and a lot of it is. And the classical music of the old masters, hey, how many generations have rediscovered those songs over the years? If the pop songs can get rediscovered through silly things like TV commercials, well, it's better than nothing. It's rediscovering.
Leah Roseman:
Well, thanks so much for this today, Hank.
Hank Moore:
My pleasure.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Keep in mind, I've also linked directly several episodes you'll find interesting in the show notes of this one. Please do share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at leahroseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
