Gene Krupa and His Orchestra Live at the Meadowbrook (NBC, 1940)
“The butler did it” was already a cliché by the time Gene Krupa learned the hard way that, once in awhile, the butler—or at least the valet—really does do it. In 1943, his youthful valet doing it, by way of a going-away present to the drumming bandleader and lying on the witness stand in short order, while the valet was supposed to be heading off to World War II, nearly destroyed Krupa's career.
It was easy enough to understand how and why Krupa became an instrumental star in the first place, even before he made his no-questions-asked irrevocable splash anchoring Benny Goodman's orchestra. He was arguably the earliest white drummer to prove on records that you didn't have to be black to swing (he earned those spurs in a legendary 1928 Austin Hill Gang recording for Okeh); he was, moreover, as close to movie-star handsome as any jazz musician came in the 1930s, especially compared to his studious-looking boss. (The too-much-troubled Artie Shaw was likewise movie-star handsome, but it may have been a hindrance more than a help in the end, considering Shaw's eight marriages, five to film actresses and one to a composer’s daughter.)
Krupa was also, and by far, the most flamboyant player on his instrument seen and heard in the art to that point. That probably proved a little too much for Goodman; the clarinetist and his drummer butted heads in the wake of Krupa's once-and-for-all starmaking turn at the famous Carnegie Hall concert of 1938, Goodman feeling Krupa's often over-the-top showmanship had become too distracting from the music. Krupa left the Goodman organisation later in 1938 to put his own band together.
As a bandleader, Krupa had one wounding flaw in his early, and it could have proven Goodman right—it took the drummer several years to begin getting the idea that not every number he would cut or perform required a drum solo, even if his name was the band's crowd-puller. Only Krupa's acute sense of music dynamics kept him from being completely dismissable as a showboat whose exhibitionism overrode his musicianship and his band's delivery. This is probably the number one reason why it took Krupa's own band a few years to graduate from vehicle to bona-fide.
By the time it did, however, Krupa was still the matinee idol of the traps—there were far superior drummers around the circuits who didn't have his exuberant charisma (or his flair for design; he helped Slingerland pioneer a few changes to drum design, particularly tunable-on-the-spot tom-toms)—and he was sitting appropriately on that perch when big trouble came at the height of his bandleading career in 1943.
By then I was the glamour boy—fifteen camel-hair coats, three tunks around me all the time—and he couldn't think of what to get me. Finally, he thought, “Gee, I'll get Gene some grass!” At the time, California was hot as a pistol. You could park your car for a bottle of beer and get arrested. So he had a rough time getting the stuff. He probably shot his mouth off a little: 'I'm getting this for the greatest guy in the world, Gene Krupa'.”
—Gene Krupa, remembering his drug arrest in San Francisco.
John Pateakos was Krupa's youthful valet, whom the drummer hired in the first place to take care of his beloved Slingerland drums. Shy of 21 and about to enter the U.S. Army as a draftee, Pateakos was bagged at San Francisco's posh St. Francis Hotel, where Krupa was staying during a stand at the Golden Gate Theater. The implication was that Krupa had sent the kid back to the hotel to dump the evidence; the headlines seemed to blare that Krupa was corrupting the nation's youth.
He was charged first with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a misdemeanor. The original headlines blasted implications that Pateakos was a mere seventeen; the 21-year-old testified at first that Krupa had indeed asked him to get an envelope from a coat pocket, an envelope that contained a few joints. Krupa himself decided the better part of valour would be to plead to the midemeanor charge, after his attorney advised him he'd probably receive a suspended sentence, but there was a surprise in store: Krupa was hit with a $500 fine and a 90-day lease in the calaboose.
Then prosecutors decided to try him formally on a felony charge of using a “minor” to transport narcotics, figuring, perhaps, that if Krupa pleaded to contributing to delinquency, they could indeed bag him on the felony. They plowed ahead despite the fact that Pateakos was suddenly missing. Testimony included suggestions that musicians used marijuana either to improve or sustain their performances—testimony at which Krupa himself scoffed on the stand. (A man's ability to beat his drums faster than someone else is because he has developed his technique to a higher point and it is easier to play fast than it is for someone to play slow; if I am able to play faster than someone else it is because I have studied it, and developed my technique.) He added that, if anything, using marijuana or other narcotics might be just as likely to slow a musician down.
Fat lot of good that did. Krupa was convicted of the felony and, with his original 90-day misdemeanor sentence short enough of expiration, got one to six in San Quentin.
Perhaps a little too conveniently, however, Pateakos re-appared and was turned over to the district attorney by the Feds, somehow immune to the draft laws of the time that included five years in the Federal cage for ducking them. Krupa appealed the felony conviction posthaste and came out of the cage on $5,000 bail while the appeal made its course. By the time a year had passed since the whole thing began, Pateakos was telling a court he'd lied in his original testimony, under coaching from narcotics agents, and admitting he never had been asked to retrieve pot from Krupa's St. Francis suite.
Come May 1944, Krupa was a free man in legal terms. In the middle of snickering and moralising around the by-now-obviously trumped-up charges, few understood or caught on that by his own admission marijuana wasn't exactly Krupa's substance of choice in those years.
The ridiculous thing was that I was such a boozer I never thought about grass. I'd take grass, and it would put me to sleep. I was an out-and-out lush. Oh, sure, I was mad. But how long can you stay mad? So long you break out in rashes? Besides, the shock of the whole thing probably helped me. I might have gone to much worse things. It brought me back to religion.
—Gene Krupa.
Roy Eldridge had taken over the Krupa organisation in the leader's absence; they made some remarkable recordings but the band was forced to break up before Krupa was finally free of the trumped-up charges. That didn't stop Krupa from working his way back into the music world's better graces. In fact, he had Benny Goodman, of all people, to thank for the first big step, when Goodman welcomed him back officially not long after the drug case was tossed. Krupa would move on to a stint with Tommy Dorsey's orchestra before re-forming a new big band of his own, sustaining it until 1950, though accusations of commercialism dogged the new organisation for its entire life.
But Krupa would also be one of the first swingmen in Goodman's wake to embrace some elements of bop; baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan was one of the latter Krupa band's key arrangers. He'd work mostly with smaller groups following the demise of his latter big band, until his health and other problems including his rocky marriage forced his retirement from most active performing by the 1960s, other than appearances with Goodman-led quartets and a few special-occasion appearances. (He was in on the fun when the first Benny Goodman Quartet—Goodman, Krupa, pianist Teddy Wilson, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton---reunited circa 1970.) His last recording sessions in the early 1970s (Jazz at the New School) would be with the same man who afforded him his first, Eddie Condon, before his death of complications from leukemia and emphysema in 1973.
Did he ever live down the trumped-up drug charges? Put it this way: The Gene Krupa Story (1959) played it soberly and without making it a key fulcrum in putting the drummer's life on film, and he eventually worked as an anti-drug lecturer for Slingerland.
Tonight: Krupa in 1940 is within striking distance of graduating his band from an excuse to hoist his drumming exhibitions into a solid all-around jazz ensemble when he appears at the Meadowbrook on New Jersey's Newark-Pompton Turnpike, the pike that would provide Charlie Barnet with a secondary theme for his own band. Trying to make a jazz swinger out of "Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay" should have you tried by jury for attempted murder in bad taste, customarily, and Krupa has had a penchant for corny songs almost equal to his drum-solo-a-song early policy that must have helped keep him from truly advancing his band. Forgive him that, however, and you can have a pleasant half-hour's listening tonight, as Krupa drives his charges through a brisk workout with periodic flashes of genuine inspiration.
FURTHER CHANNEL SURFING . . .
Adventure
Escape: Present Tense (CBS, 1950)—A poet (Vincent Price) who hacked his wife (Joan Banks) and her lover (Charles McGraw) to death escapes during his transport to prison, after which his return home includes discovering his victims very much alive and well, provoking him to a surrealistically grisly reprise of all the foregoing events including another escape and return. Additional cast: Harry Bartell, Ben Wright, Tom Culley, William Malley, Jeff Corey, Paul Frees. Music: Del Castillio. Director: William N. Robson. Writer: James Poe.
Comedy
The Jell-O Program Starring Jack Benny: Nightmares of Fred Allen—Jack to Play “The Bee” (NBC, 1937)—Addled with a cold, it's almost time to put up or shut up for our hero (Jack Benny), who's been cleaned at the racetrack when not rehearsing "The Bee" ever since Allen's infamous wisecrack following young Stuart Canin's performance . . . or pondering whether bribery was involved, among other subterfuges. Cast: Mary Livingstone, Kenny Baker, Phil Harris, Don Wilson. Music: Phil Harris Orchestra. Writers: Al Boasberg, Ed Beloin, Bill Morrow.
Texaco Town: Eddie’s Birthday (CBS, 1937)—Ol’ Banjo Eyes (Eddie Cantor) gets a birthday bash that includes a few comic greetings, a dinner (he thinks) from orchestra leader Jacques Benard, a backhanded salute from his sponsor, and other offbeat treats. You can understand why he was popular in his own time but doesn’t travel well beyond it. Parkyakarkus: Harry Einstein. Additional cast: Deanna Durbin, Bobby Breen, Pinky Tomlin. Announcer: Jimmy Wallington. Music: Jacques Benard. Writers: Possibly Philip Rapp, Carrol Carroll, David Freedman, Bob Colwell.
The Halls of Ivy: Professor Warren’s Retirement (NBC, 1951)—Braving a blizzard to borrow Hall’s (Ronald Colman) volume of Satayana and proffer a dinner invitation, Warren (Arthur Q. Bryan) prompts Hall—who discovers just what lack of life awaits the man in retirement—to enlist his successor in a bid to convince the man to stay as a visiting professor, keeping him at his beloved Ivy. A typical installment, which means above and beyond most of what was passing by now for radio sitcom. Vicki: Benita Hume Coleman. Miss Burgess: Verna Felton. Man on Phone: Sidney Miller. Announcer: Ken Carpenter. Director: Nat Wolff. Writers: Don Quinn, Barbara and Milton Merlin.
Crime Drama
The Whistler: The Confession (CBS, 1943)—After killing a rival in self-defence, an underworld gambler romances a young woman whose father is a successful defence attorney priding himself on rejecting guilty clients—but the gambler’s scorned former lovers include his new paramour’s stepmother, who seems to have found one way to get even with him. It just avoids lapsing into soapiness with solid performance and smart writing. Additional cast: Unknown. The Whistler: Probably Joseph Kearns. Music: Wilbur Hatch. (Whistling: Dorothy Smith.) Writer/director: J. Donald Wilson.
Rogue's Gallery: Special Added Attraction (Mutual, 1946)—Rogue (Dick Powell) is only too cynical—at first—when he's hired by a circus manager to stop a murder attempt against the show's star aerialist, a comely woman with a genius for trapeze artistry, an equal knack for making bitter enemies with her withering and overbearing ego, and an intention of a long sabbatical after the evening's performance. Betty: Lurene Tuttle. Additional cast: Unknown. Announcer: Jim Doyle. Music: Leith Stevens. Director: Dee Engelbach. Writer: Ray Bufham.
Western
Gunsmoke: Cavalcade (CBS, 1953)—Doc's (Howard McNear) heretofore obscure past comes back to haunt him and Matt (William Conrad) when a Virginian deputy (Lawrence Dobkin) arrives to arrest Doc---whom he knows only under another name two decades ago---for murder, in a case involving Doc's late wife and a rival suitor whom Doc shot in self-defence . . . a shooting with no known witnesses. Kitty: Georgia Ellis. Miss Kelly: Vivi Janiss. Additional cast: Lou Krugman, Paul Dubov. Announcer: Roy Rowan. Music: Rex Khoury. Director: Norman Macdonnell. Writer: Les Crutchfield.
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