Authors: Gary Giddins
Other than Frank Corkery, according to the account by Ted and Larry, Bing now socialized mostly with boys at North Central.
Among his drinking partners, Dirk Crabbe best shared his sense of humor and verbal inventiveness. Benny Stubeck’s and Russ
Bailey’s occupied many days, and vaudeville and silent movies occupied many evenings. The first recordings by Bennie Moten
out of Kansas City arrived at the shop and became great favorites for a few weeks. Al’s home life improved: his father remarried,
this time to a “lovely” widow from Stockholm with a conservatory background, who schooled Al in classical music.
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But Al gravitated to the Crosby home, where he grew fond of Catherine and Mary Rose, whom he had known slightly at school.
He recalled that the Crosby house was sparsely furnished, a reflection, he surmised, of the difficulty Mr. Crosby had making
ends meet. Al liked Harry (“His dad was anything-goes, a nice guy, Irish guy”),
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but not Kate (“a real matriarch, ugh, very strict disciplinarian on Catholicism”)
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He and Bing practiced at the piano, and Bing surprised him by comfortably singing E and F, high for a baritone.
By spring 1925 the band was kaput. After graduation, Jimmy Heaton moved to Los Angeles. Miles was heading for the University
of Illinois, and the Pritchards were planning to attend Washington State; all had lost interest in being Musicaladers. “Bing
and I were left alone,” Al ruminated.
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They became avid golfers, playing with old wood-shafted irons, hickory-shafted woods, and repainted golf balls on a public
course at Downriver Park. Al was seventeen and Bing almost twenty-two. For two dollars each, they bought the Model T
from the other four boys and stored it in a vacant lot adjacent to the Crosby house. George Lareida was under the impression
that they planned to leave Spokane in the spring (he recalled his father giving the boys tires for the trip) but thought they
changed their minds when they landed a job at the Clemmer Theater. His memory is not supported by other accounts, however,
and the possibility seems unlikely, because Bing and Al had not yet figured out what to do musically in the absence of a band.
They learned that at the Clemmer.
Doc Clemmer’s theater, at Sprague and Lincoln, had become something of a Spokane institution in the ten years since it was
built. The Clemmer was the city’s second movie theater, dated only by Ray Grombacher’s Liberty, which had opened four weeks
earlier. A square four-story building in the neoclassical style of 1915, enviably located across from the luxurious Davenport
Hotel, its ornamented off-white brick facade and pillars masked an elaborate interior. Howard S. Clemmer, a dentist turned
showman, believed a theater had moral responsibilities and in 1918 persuaded Spokane County to ban
The Birth of a Nation
as “detrimental to the best ends of patriotism.”
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He was much admired for his policy of “juvenile edification” and his Saturday-morning children’s hour never failed to attract
less than a capacity audience of 900. He wrote and published
The Klemerklink,
a loose-leaf illustrated book that he handed out a page per week to the kids as part of the nickel admission. Doc was a character.
He was concerned about redheaded boys, whom he believed bore a “cross of affliction.” His Red-Head Club offered free admission
and transportation to and from the theater to preteens who suffered that malady; he hired only redheaded boys as ushers. When
their ranks were thinned by the war, he announced his willingness to hire redheaded girls, but that drastic step was averted
when an official of the YMCA advised him of the surfeit of unemployed boys.
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Clemmer had little use for live entertainment, especially jazz. His impact on Bing’s life was significant but entirely circumstantial:
in March of 1925, just as the Musicaladers were disbanding and Bing and Al were turning to golf, he and his silent partner
sold the theater to Universal Pictures. If he had not made the sale, it is almost certain that Bing and Al would have gone
separate ways, with what effect on American popular music one can scarcely imagine.
Universal took over on May 1, installing R. R. (Roy) Boomer as manager and approving expenses for a new marquee, carpet, and
lighting.
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Boomer was brought in from San Francisco, where a combination of vaudeville and movies was fashionable. In Spokane he was
considered, in Bing’s words, “a progressive type, for stage shows were pioneer stuff then.”
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The gala May 9 reopening offered Universal’s
The Phantom of the Opera
and a few live acts. Boomer had been scouting for local talent to provide entr’actes between pictures. Bing and Al heard
about his inquiries and were determined to audition. But what could they do? They had no band and little confidence in themselves
as a duo. Neither one suggested the obvious: a voice-andpiano team. Instead, they drafted three pals, including a boy soprano,
and offered themselves as a vocal group, with Al playing piano in the pit. Boomer took them on, assigned them songs, and staged
them before a Norwegian tableau.
Boomer proved to have the vision Crosby and Rinker lacked. He tired of their act and fired all the singers save one. “Why,
I don’t know,” Al wrote half a century later. “I guess he saw something in Bing. Perhaps his singing and personality.”
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Boomer also retained Al as accompanist. In what amounted to a shotgun wedding, Bing and Al were finally forced to come up
with an act on their own. This time Boomer did not assign them songs; he allowed them to choose. As much as they needed the
job, Bing was nervous about accepting it. He had never before sung to paying customers on an otherwise bare stage.
For their first show, with Al in the pit, Bing walked out and delivered a reasonably assured rendition of “Red-Hot Henry Brown,”
a new tune they had picked up from records by the prolific Irving Kaufman and the Ray Miller Orchestra (including C-melody
saxophonist Frank Trumbauer and pianist Tom Satterfield, who two years later would be their bandmates). The audience responded
encouragingly, and Bing proceeded with a ballad, “Save Your Sorrow (for Tomorrow),” taken from another Ray Miller record (lyric
by Buddy DeSylva, a Jolson songwriter who went on to produce
Going My Way).
The ballad relaxed him, allowing him to purr and trill his high notes, and the reception was warmer still. After two more
songs, Bing left the stage, applause ringing in his ears. Boomer was satisfied and told Bing he had the job.
During the next week or so, Bing sang the same songs show after show, but he never got used to having the stage to himself.
Everything about his musical drive (the polyphony of jazz) and wit (the banter of vaudeville) demanded a partner he could
engage in harmony or horseplay. The situation at hand was more like the sodality meetings at which he sang “One Fleeting Hour.”
At parties, he and Al had often sung together: Why couldn’t they do that now? They would work out a few routines, inject more
pizzazz into the show. Bing was so insistent that Boomer agreed to give them a try. But they could not put the piano on the
stage, as it would interfere with the projection of movies. Since the pit was shallow, almost level with the orchestra seats,
Bing came down from the stage.
Until this point, Bing and Al had worked chiefly from the music of others, copying arrangements and adapting them to the instrumentation
of the Musicaladers or offering a conventional recital of familiar songs. Their most fanciful performances had taken place
at parties. Invariably, their audiences were dancing, drinking, or otherwise distracted. At the Clemmer, none of the usual
formulas would avail. They had to devise an act. Situated with the stage at their backs and an audience out front waiting
for the movie to begin, they were expected to fill some fifteen or twenty minutes. What did they perform? Al thought the numbers
included “Mary Lou,” “Paddlin’ Madelin’ Home,” and “I’m Gonna Charleston Back to Charleston,” but he probably confused the
1925 Clemmer engagement with one a year later at the Liberty. (The first two songs were published in the interim.) “I’m Gonna
Charleston” may have figured in the Clemmer shows, though not at the beginning; a favorite of bass saxophonist Adrian Rollini,
who recorded three versions that summer, the little-remembered song was cowritten by Roy Turk, among whose subsequent hits
was Bing’s theme, “Where the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day.” Whatever they sang, they went over big. Al said
Boomer told them, “You guys are great. Let’s keep it this way.”
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He paid each of them thirty dollars a week.
They continued for nearly five months at the Clemmer. One of the most ornately detailed theaters in the Northwest, the place
was an acoustical gem ideally suited to Bing’s particular vocal projection. A blue, purple, and gray fretwork board — touched
with gilt, suspended by wires, and thought to be the first of its kind in any
theater — focused the sound while concealing the organ loft and its four-manual, 3,000-pipe Kimball pneumatic organ. The mammoth
instrument, which could simulate the range of a forty-four-piece orchestra, was used for intermission solos, recitals, and
movie scores.
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The celebrated Jesse Crawford had played the Clemmer organ from 1915 until 1917, before moving on to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre
in Hollywood and the Paramount in New York. While Bing and Al were in residence, the instrument was temporarily silenced.
From where the two performers stood, in the pocket of a gently dipping auditorium, they saw a perfect dollhouse enclosure
illuminated by no fewer than 1,600 incandescent lamps. Directly above the orchestra was a splendid teal dome ornamented with
octagons in gold and beige against a burgundy ceiling. Designer E. W. Houghton had generously dabbed the entire structure
with vivid effects and colors. The vestibuled rotunda glimmered with hidden lighting. The floor was a tiled mosaic, the wainscoting
marble, the chairs in the eight balconied boxes Austrian oak upholstered in mulberry velour. The “women’s retiring room” was
furnished with Louis XIV pieces, blue Wilton carpet, cretonne draperies, a telephone desk, and a davenport, lit by beams from
alabaster urns trimmed with ivory. Men were relegated to a basement smoking room, situated below the stage, which doubled
as a dressing room for performers.
In this setting, Bing and Al gradually honed an act. Al did not have a distinctive voice. He tended to sing high, from the
throat rather than from the diaphragm. But he had drive and accurate pitch, and the more the two rehearsed, the more adept
they became at harmonizing. They were making it up as they went along, with few examples to follow. Quartet singing had developed
out of standard barbershop blends, reaching a popular apex in the recordings of the Peerless Quartet. But the jazzy requirements
of an impromptu duet left them to their own devices. The devices they knew best included the hotcha burbling of Ukelele Ike,
the florid emoting of Al Jolson, the guttural attack of the blues, and the sentimental wailing of Irish tenors. The minstrel
traditions allowed them to try on the masks of black and southern singing, but they were smart enough to distinguish masks
from life. In life, they were a couple of young Northwestern Catholics with smooth voices and much energy who had seen very
little of the world.
Bing saw no conflict between the blues and Irish tenors, nor was he hampered by a bias in one direction or the other. His
key attribute as a troubadour of American song was his capacious appreciation for its diversity, his disposition to follow
music wherever it led. He knew instinctively that as long as he kept in mind who he was, he could make any style his own.
Al emulated his lead, blending his thin baritone against Bing’s poised baritone. Soon they developed a presentation unlike
any other. They were buoyant, ingenuous, youthfully appealing.
The adventurous team attempted many variations, encouraged by the generous support of the Clemmer audience, which often included
old friends like Art Dussault, who came with a contingent of Gonzagans to cheer them on.
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Bing brought his drums along once, but that didn’t work. Eventually, he eliminated the traps except for a stand-up cymbal.
They used kazoos on some pieces and worked up a primitive style of unison scat — a
da-de-ta da-de-ta
— that was rhythmic and novel. Tenors ruled the theater circuit in part because their high, keening voices could easily reach
the balcony’s last row. Bing had his megaphone but soon realized that the Clemmer’s acoustics obviated its need. Besides,
people wanted to see his face. The personableness that delighted Bing’s friends readily translated to the stage. Bing and
Al had plenty of pep, but they also had something most tyro performers lack: charm. They represented Jazz Age bravura in an
unthreatening incarnation while offering contemporaries a musical style of their own. When Bing wrapped his gorgeous voice
around a ballad, he made familiar lyrics sound fresh and original.
Most of their songs were not familiar. With Bailey’s music shop at their disposal, they prided themselves on learning the
latest numbers as soon as they arrived in town. Immediately after Gene Austin introduced (on a double-sided smash hit) “Five
Foot Two, Eyes of Blue” and “Sleepy Time Gal,” Bing and Al adapted and performed them. Wilbur Hindley, drama editor of the
Spokesman-Review
in the 1920s, remembered: “The team of Rinker and Crosby rapidly built up a substantial following. They were often heard
at the old Clemmer Theater where they were great favorites — good looking, pleasant appearing chaps with ingratiating smiles
and an original method of putting over their songs.”
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Yet for every song they used to showcase their growing skill and enterprise, they were required by management to do another
to set the mood for the picture show. Bing described that type of song
as a “prologue”: a sea chanty for a sea movie, a cowboy song for a western, an exotic aria for a movie depicting Hindustan
or Araby.
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The boys were responsible for finding such tunes, and the exercise proved valuable to Bing, increasing his store of and respect
for diverse material. In his 1941 movie
Birth of the Blues,
Bing re-created the Clemmer experience, crooning “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” with an illustrative slide projected
on a screen.