It is often claimed that popularity has something to do with quality, but I consider this errant nonsense.
These days particularly, if music, a film, or whatever, is popular and makes a pile of money it seems an automatic sign that it is in some way good. Justin Beiber must be pretty talented otherwise those throngs of prepubescent girls wouldn't mob him. Avatar must be a great movie – why else would so many people flock to see it?
More and more the lists we see of ‘Best' film, book or music is not a critic's choice but the bestsellers. This has existed in music forever, the charts being a measure only of sales (if that).
But this is rubbish and we don't need modern times to remind us – you can go right back to Mozart and Salieri, one of the most popular composers of his day, the other buried in a pauper's grave; or look at the bland apology for art people were merrily buying while Van Gogh died penniless in his cornfield.
I mention this because a man who epitomises this idea – that popularity and quality are unrelated – died last week, aged 99. Not only did he prove that disposable crap sells handsomely, but he is a fine example of why not to judge a book by its cover.
His name was Mitch Miller, known as an influential producer, a massively popular recording star and a big hit on television. He was also much more…
I had my childhood scarred by Mitch Miller's records, but that was a long time ago. I suspect that every second Kiwi household owned at least one of his albums. For now though, let's start closer to the beginning.
Mitch Miller first achieved fame as a producer of novelty hits in the 50s. He paired singers with unlikely songs and even more unlikely instrumental arrangements, had a pile of huge sellers, and launched not a few careers, including Tony Bennett (‘Because of You'), Rosemary Clooney (‘Come On-a My House') and Jimmy Boyd (‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus'). By the end of the 1950s Miller's ear for talent and songs had helped make Columbia the top-selling record company in America.
And then he had his great money-making idea – he recorded old standards with a chorus of some two dozen male voices and printed the lyrics on album covers.
The ‘Sing Along With Mitch' album series, which began in 1958, was an immense success, finding an eager audience among older listeners looking for an alternative to rock 'n' roll. Mitch Miller and the Gang serenaded them with chestnuts like ‘Home on the Range', ‘That Old Gang of Mine', ‘I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen' and the song that still rings in my brain all these years later, ‘There is a Tavern in the Town'.
The concept was adapted for television in 1961 with the lyrics appearing at the bottom of the screen and Mr. Miller leading the sing-a-long with his beaming smile and neatly trimmed moustache and goatee.
It was awful. Truly great music – nascent rock ‘n' roll and so much more – was emerging and yet Mitch Miller and the Gang recorded more than 20 albums and by 1966 they had sold 17 million copies. Quality has no connection to popularity.
But getting back to that brief comment about not judging a book by its cover, here are some other things Mitch Miller did.
He played the oboe so well that by the age of 15 he was with the Syracuse Symphony. In New York City he was playing with the CBS Symphony during the notorious Orson Welles ‘War of the Worlds' radio broadcast. He also played in an orchestra that accompanied George Gershwin on a concert tour as a pianist, and when Gershwin's ‘Porgy and Bess' opened on Broadway, Mr. Miller was in the pit orchestra. Later he played on the recordings jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker made with a string orchestra. Not bad.
He was also a studio innovator and, along with the guitarist Les Paul and a few others, helped pioneer both overdubbing and the use of what came to be called an echo chamber. Not bad at all.
And he was a realist. Interviewed by Time magazine in 1951, Mitch Miller was less than enthusiastic about the kind of gimmicky pop records that became his specialty. 'I wouldn't buy that stuff for myself,” he said.
'There's no real artistic satisfaction in this job. I satisfy my musical ego elsewhere.” Fair enough.