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From "White Christmas" to "God Bless America" - Was Irving Berlin The Greatest Songwriter Of All Time? · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_03: Hello, everybody.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_03: If only everyone could experience that.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_03: I see you getting you get all giddy like you're waiting for it.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_03: I and I and anticipate, you know, I'm just like ready for it.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, for sure.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to another episode of Dirt Knap City, the show about interesting dead people.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Alex.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: I'm here with my buddy Kelly.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: Kelly, what's up, man?
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_03: Hey, glad to be here.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_03: Um, we were just talking about our t-shirt order that we're going to be doing soon.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_03: So if you are a big fan of the show and show it to us by uh either donating, I think$150,000, we'll get you a Cadillac and uh and a t-shirt, or just join our Patreon.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_03: You know, there's lots of ways.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_03: $180,000, okay.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_03: I think$150,000 we'd still give them a Cadillac.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_03: What do you think?
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_03: A small one.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_03: A small one.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_03: One of those tiny Cadillacs.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_03: Mini Cadillacs.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_03: Um, yeah, very glad to be here.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_03: I I heard your power went out today.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_02: Power went out and uh immediately got uh a text from uh the electric company saying it was approximately affecting 1,357 people in the area.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: So it's nice to be approximate.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, and I like to blame it on Microsoft Teams.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, sure.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_03: I was in the middle of a meeting when it happened.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: Well, what are we doing today?
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_02: Well, today, you know, is is uh it's somebody so much in my wheelhouse that I'm surprised I haven't already done them.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_03: Ah, okay.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um just, you know, so what's my wheelhouse?
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_03: Uh white guys in their 20th century, I think uh Yeah, they might have something to do with sports, or they might have something to do with uh business.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: I haven't done a lot of sports ones, it's you that are always pulling out the sports ones, but uh you know, or entertainment, right?
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and that's what I got today.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, this guy was so much in the 20th century, he um he practically lived through all of it.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_02: He was born in 1888 in Russia and died in 1989 in New York City.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: So that's right.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_02: We have a centenarian.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_02: Is that how you say it?
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_02: Centenarian, right?
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: Centenarian who lived a hundred years.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_02: I wanted to say Centurion or Cent Centaur, but those are that's something different.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_03: So so you said 1888 to 1988, 1989.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_03: 1989.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, okay.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_03: So he I was gonna ask if it was 88, he might have like gotten really close, but not made the hundred years.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: Nah, he lived to be 101, actually.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, and so he was alive for both the horse and buggies and MTV.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, okay, and he was Russian.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the um clue I'll give you is uh from a quote from our buddy Walter Cronkite.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_02: We ever told that story before on here about our about meeting Walter Cronkite.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: Well, another day.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe someday Walter Cronkite will be uh uh and we can talk about it then.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_02: I'm surprised we haven't done that.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_02: I'm surprised too.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: White guy 20th century.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's my wheelhouse.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: So he said this guy helped write the story of this country, America, capturing the best of who we are and the dreams that shape our lives.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_02: He was a songwriter.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_03: Ah, okay.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_03: Uh a songwriter from Russia.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_03: Was was he was he like did he seem to be Russian?
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_03: Did he have a Russian accent or Russian name?
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_03: Or you just happen to be born there?
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: I think if you if you were around back then, you would have known that he was like an immigrant, but that's you know, his name, his name that we know him by, um, because it's you know a statement.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_02: Leonard Bernstein.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, but that's a Leonard Cohen.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: No, Leonard Nemoy.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: I never said it was Leonard, anybody.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: I was just guessing.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_02: He wrote some of the most famous songs of all time.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_03: Um well, didn't Bernstein wasn't Leonard Bernstein a songwriter?
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but I already said that's wrong.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_03: No, but I just want to make sure I'm on the right.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_02: You're not gonna convince me that it's Leonard Bernstein.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_03: Uh what about um who was who were the who are the guys that wrote all the musicals?
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um Rogers and Hammerstein.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_03: No, no, that's a good that's a good guess, but those are two.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_03: Was it super musicals?
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_02: Was it musicals that he did?
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_02: He wrote musicals, he wrote um uh movies soundtracks, he wrote uh um his his most popular song.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh this is the biggest clue I'll give you.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: His most popular song was White Christmas.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: Is that Bing Crosby?
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: No, he sang White Christmas.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I'm talking about Irving Berlin.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_03: Irving Berlin.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_02: Irving Berlin.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_03: Who would I I would have assumed was German.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: Well, his name wasn't Irving Berlin, it turns out.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: His name was Israel Berlin.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: Bell E-I-L-I-N.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_02: And actually, um, the way he got his name was um was uh when he recorded uh or when he wrote something one time, his secretary um uh published it, but put the wrong spelled the name wrong.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: And um she put I Berlin and um it was a hit, so he just went with that.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_03: Well uh I I guess Alec, that's how people's names get changed, right?
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_02: Right, yeah.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_02: No, one thing I like to do whenever I I find a subject on here is I cross-check um and uh find if they've ever had any intersection in their life with anybody else that we've featured on this show.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, right, right.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_02: I have um my uh my uh uh AI assistant uh I have a list of all the people that we've ever talked about, and then I ask it if they've ever had any chance meetings or anything like that.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_03: And it Yeah, so he Irvine Berlin wrestled against Andre the Giant one time.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: There was actually so no, but there, you know, with all the people that we've talked about in entertainment, um none of them had an interaction with this guy except for what there was one person, and it's not who you it's probably a Roosevelt, right?
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_03: Because they seem to be in everything in the roose.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_02: No, you know who it was?
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: It was Tiny Tim.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_03: Tiny Tim and Irving Berlin.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_02: So Tiny Tim included an Irving Berlin song on uh one of his records.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: It was a uh as obviously it was an obscure Irving Berlin song.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't one of the famous ones, it was an obscure anti-war song from like 1916 that Tiny Tim had found.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: And according to Tiny Tim, so take it with a grain of salt, Irving Berlin became a big admirer of Tiny Tim and sent him a big book of song books of his own that Tiny Tim said was would have been worth like$10,000, and that he said that that Irving Berlin was one of his biggest fans.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_02: Now I some humble bragging.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think that's true at all.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if Erling Berlin actually even knew who Tiny Tim was or if he liked him, but that's the story that's been repeated over and over by Tiny Tim, and it's part of Tiny Tim's biography, but not necessarily wasn't necessarily a big moment.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_03: And Irving Berlin was he was born before Tiny Tim and outlived him, right?
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that's he was probably born before most celebrities and outlived him.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, he he died in 1989, yeah.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: That's crazy.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: Like that's we were in college when he died.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_03: And and and to think that he had written all these songs back in the 20s that were popular and 30s and 40s and all that.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_03: So he had written he wrote like 1,500 songs.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, that's a lot.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_02: So one of the things about Irving Berlin that's notable is that um that he won a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony Award.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: Never won an Emmy.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_02: But if you do win all four, do you know what that's called?
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_02: Have you ever heard that?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: The 4-cinco.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's called an E got.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_02: It stands for Emmy, Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_02: E got so there's 21 people that have won egots.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_02: It's not something you win, but it's that won all four.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: Accomplishing.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: Have an e-got.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: Like the triple crown.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_02: Can you name any of them?
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_03: Uh Grammy.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh uh there's a lot of names on this list that you would know.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_03: John Williams.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: No, that's a good guess, but he must not have ever won a Tony, I'm guessing.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_02: Tony's for uh Broadway Broadway, yeah.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_03: Uh okay, what about Rogers and Hammerstein?
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: Rogers did.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, okay.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: Rogers, that's a good that's a good one.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um uh he won it in uh he completed it in 1962.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: He won uh Oscar in 1946, a Tony in 1950, a Grammy in 1960, and an Emmy in 1962.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_02: Most of um Irving Berlin's life was pre-TV, so the Emmy would have been the hardest one for him to get, probably.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and and and it does seem like like music on television, unless you do like you know who Mike Post is.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I wonder if Mike Post is he on the list?
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_03: No, no, I think the Tony's files he didn't know.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_02: The Tony's probably the one that's the hardest just to get, just because most people aren't in Broadway on Broadway, yeah.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_02: But some of the names that you may have heard of, um uh John Gilgood, right?
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_02: Do you know him?
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_02: No, um uh Audrey Hepburn, yes, uh Mel Brooks.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, uh Whoopi Goldberg.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um this guy, the youngest person to ever do it, is um also the only person that's done it each one twice.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_02: His name's Robert Lopez, and he writes like Disney songs.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: He's wrote he low like um the songs from Frozen.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so he's he's written a lot of and he's so he's in the Broadway world and the movie world and the TV.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_02: So he, you know, um and if you're a songwriter, it's pretty easy because the Grammy is the probably the hardest thing to do if you're not a songwriter, right?
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_02: Andrew Lloyd Webber, John Legend, um, Elton John.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah, that makes sense.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_02: I don't really count the ones that have the honorary awards.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_02: So like James Earl Jones would have an he has an honorary academy award, but that that's a little cheating, I think.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_03: You know, what does that mean?
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_03: He didn't actually win one, it just was like we we've got a lot of things.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_02: Right, like a lifetime, yeah, like a lifetime achievement.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_02: That's you know, Quincy Jones got that.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's great for you, but it's not a legit e-got, I don't think.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no, I would say the competitive e-got is the one that's that's tough to get where every one of your awards you got by competing against somebody else.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_03: Have any podcasters done that?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I mean, like Joe Rogan, does he have an e-got?
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_02: No, I don't think he has any of them.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I think first.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_02: You know what's funny though is uh did you ever watch the show Miami Vice?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, Jan Halmer.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_03: So you know uh but then he closed the the Yeah, forget about that though.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_02: You know the uh Philip Michael Thomas was on that show, right?
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_02: It was uh Crockett and Tubbs, right?
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_02: So he was the black guy.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_02: What was that?
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_02: Was that I don't know what I never watched the show, so yeah, uh so he was Tubbs.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_02: He was actually the one that came up with the term egot, and he said in 1984, he said, It's my goal to win one in the next five years.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh well he's never been nominated for any of them before, uh, but he does have a people's choice award.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_03: What what whatever happened uh what was his name?
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_03: Thomas Michael Phillip, Philip Michael Thomas, right?
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_02: That that's the guy I'm talking about.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, but whatever happened to him, like you know well, he got into the uh psychic network.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_02: He was um doing a lot of stuff with the uh psychic network.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: Remember Miss Cleo?
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_02: I think he came before Miss Cleo.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: There should be a special award category for that, or for making bad predictions, right?
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_02: So, anyway, um we haven't talked about Irving Berlin at all, and we're uh 13 minutes in.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: So uh well, I do want to describe uh this guy because I think there's three things that are amazing about um Irving Berlin in particular.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's a bunch of contradictions here.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_02: So um he became, like Walter Crankide said, the you know, writing the story of America, the soundtrack for America, and he wasn't born in America.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_02: He wrote the most popular Christmas song ever, White Christmas, and he didn't celebrate Christmas, he was Jewish.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_02: And he wrote God Bless America, um, which some people say is like a second national anthem, and he wasn't um born in in in this country, and he was atheist, and and he was musically illiterate, he did not know how to read or write music.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: He just wrote lyrics, wrote no, he wrote the music too.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_02: He just didn't know how to write it, like he didn't know how to write music.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_02: He would hummet, and then he had this special piano where they had these piano do you play the piano by any chance?
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_02: No, um, but you've seen a piano, right?
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_03: I have I have played I have played a piano, but not very well.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_02: So you know there's the black keys and the white keys, right?
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, um, so ebony and ivory, right?
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_02: So he only he didn't play the piano very well at all, and he only played the black keys.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: So every song that he wrote was basically in the key of F sharp, because that's the one where you could pretty much stick to the black keys.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_02: But he had this special piano that they had back then called transposing pianos, where you slide this, there was like a lever under the under the uh keys that you slide over, and they would move the hammers so you could play the same note, you could play the same key again and get a different note, right?
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and the reason and reason they had those was because when people back when that was the entertainment and you'd sit around and and sing songs with the family, um, you could move that thing and play in a different key if it if if you wanted to, if you're if your family couldn't sing in that key.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_02: But he would use it by he'd be like, I can only play the I'm only want to play these seven black keys.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_02: So by moving that thing around, he could still play the same keys, but he would get different notes out of them.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_02: It sounds like the X-ray shoe fitter.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: He would he was crazy because if you watch, if you could play one of his songs, you could basically do it without with one of those transposers without really ever moving your hand.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_02: You can have your can on the same seven keys and just kind of play them and then move that lever.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's kind of a cheat.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_02: But you could see how it would be perfect for someone that didn't know how to play the so he didn't know how to write music or really play the piano, and he wrote 1,500 songs and some of the most popular songs in American history.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's pretty cool.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: It is.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so he's a whole bunch of contradictions, you know.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_03: And you know what?
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_03: What you said about playing only the black keys.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_03: You know why?
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: Here he comes.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_03: No, no, this is true.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_03: This is I'm this is not a joke.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_03: This is a true story.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_03: My grandmother had an organ and a piano, and um, she would only let us play the black keys because we had when we were kids, because we had dirty hands.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, maybe so she didn't want us leaving fingerprints on the white keys, but you couldn't see them on the black keys.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_02: So if you knew this, you could have had a whole Irving Berlin song.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's a true story.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: I thought you were gonna make some pun about the band, the Black Keys.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, no, no.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, well, he grew up um, you know, in he was born in Russia, and his family moved out um because um of the uh programs.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: Have you ever heard of a program?
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_03: No, did this have something to do with the Bolshevik revolution?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: It was just generally a program, is where they're like there's violence to to drive a group of people out.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_02: So this would happen a lot with uh Jews in Eastern Europe.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um, this was like the you know, eight late 1800s.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_02: So whatever country you're talking about, whether you're talking about Poland or Russia or wherever, there was lots of these, and the police would look the other way because they were into it too.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's basically to drive a group out so they would light people's houses on fire and just have a lot of violence.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, he was a little kid, so his family moved to America to get away from all that stuff, and he grew up, you know, poor and uh crowded uh tenements.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_03: Did he drive an ambulance?
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_02: He never no, not only that, 101 years old, never drove a day in his life, didn't learn didn't learn how to drive.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_03: Um I guess if you if you um use a use a slider to play the piano, you're not gonna learn to drive either.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: He um he uh but you know a lot of kids back then, poor kids, um, would go to work and he's he did what you do back then and and sell newspapers on the street, you know, um hustling.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_02: And then when he was uh teenager, he got a job at a saloon where he'd you know wipe tables and deliver drinks to people and um and sing songs.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_02: And he noticed that customers tip better when he sang songs that they liked, and he had a knack for remembering um melodies, and he had a knack for improvising words, like different words, kind of like Weird Al.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, to uh improvising different words to pop songs, and they loved that stuff, but he couldn't read music, so he didn't know if he could ever make it in the music business.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_02: But back then, the music business, this is like pre-radio, you know.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_02: So the music business, what do you think the music business was before radio?
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: Vaudeville, is that right?
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, but how would you like how um the average family aren't going to like vaudeville acts usually?
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_03: So I guess churches they they they'd play music in churches, they'd have tent revivals, they're gonna be able to do that.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_03: But like there was actually shows.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: There was, but there was actually a pop music industry that was just starting, and it was all about sheet music because most houses had like pianos, and that was their entertainment, like I said, and you would buy, you could make money by writing songs and selling sheet music, and people would buy it.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_02: And so there was a job called a song pluger.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, a song plugger was somebody who would work in like music stores or theaters or just stand on the street and they would sing songs loudly and get people to like, hey, what's that song that guy's singing that kind of like when you go to a record store and they're playing a record and you like it?
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you like it, and you buy it's like that, but it's live entertainment.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's a guy that works in the storage singing songs.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_02: You go, hey, I like that one.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: Do you have that?
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_02: And then that's how sheet music would be sold by kind of just by a song plugger.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, song pluggers existed, and he did that like this is like 1907, 1908, like a long time ago.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_02: And he improvised a tune one time called Marie from Sunny Italy.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: That's the one that's the one that the publisher printed and misspelled his name as i Berlin, and where that typo became his his stage name from then on.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_02: But that song became a hit song.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_03: Marie from Sunny Italy.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and when I say hit song back then, that's what I mean is it sold a lot of sheet music.
• 21:31
  unknown: Okay.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_02: So he came up with this song in 1911 that I'm sure you've heard of.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, that a lot of people say is like one of the first pop hits of all time, and it was called Alexander's Ragtime Band.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I've heard of that.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: That was 1911.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_02: So that's like how far the American pop music industry kind of goes back.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_02: It made him instantly wildly famous.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_02: That song was.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Such a hit, people said it changed American music.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_02: It was the first hit song to kind of uh be syncopated, and um uh back then people considered ragtime music.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_02: That was the genre was ragtime.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we talk about ragtime when we talked about uh our history of rock and roll.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_02: I think we did.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_03: I think we uh you know, I don't I was about to ask if you know the origin of that phrase.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_03: Like what why is it called ragtime?
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_03: Is it from poor being poor?
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and saloons.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: It was the kind it was saloon music, it was rowdy, okay, low, kind of low class, um and it was racially coded as black music.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uh well, Alexander's ragtime band was the moment where mainstream pop kind of started absorbing the African American forms of music, and it went, it hit like the white mainstream.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_02: You might have thought that started with Elvis, but that started in 1911 with Alexander's ragtime band.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_02: He didn't rip it off, it wasn't like an existing song, like when we talked about uh a lot of the the guys in the 50s did.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_02: He it was an original song, but it had a feel of the kind of stuff they played in ragtime, and I guess maybe because it was a white guy doing it, um, it was more accepted in the mainstream.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_02: So it got very popular and made him an instant success.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_03: People said it changed American music, but it wasn't that wasn't his band name, that was the name of the song.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_03: Alexander band, right?
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, it became a national craze.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: Newspapers, newspapers were calling it a fever that was a infecting the country, and it kind of was the beginning of the jazz age because of that syncopated before that.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: Every kind of popular song was very much like a crooner kind of ballad or um nothing you could really dance to, maybe other than like a waltz or something like that.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_02: Well, have you ever heard the term tin pan alley?
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_02: Tin Pan Alley was an actual um do you know what it what it was?
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, was that a place where people played music on the street to try and get money, like kind of holding out your hat?
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_03: Close.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_02: It was actually like the the music publishing district in New York.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_02: But if you were to walk down those streets, you would hear music, but it was coming from the buildings because there were upright pianos in every every every building, and it was uh musicians playing all at the same time, and it would give kind of this metallic clanging sound like tin pants, but everyone was playing their own songs, but not for the people on the street, but they were like writing.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, they were auditioning for something inside or playing it for somebody inside.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and that's basically where the pop music industry was invented in the in America and from like 1890s to the 1930s, that's where it all was happening.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_02: And publishers would hire songwriters to come in for a flat fee for a day and just write songs all day long.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_02: Again, they're trying to sell sheet music, so they're just trying to come up with different hits, and song pluggers would be would take those songs and then they would go around to the different theaters and bars and department stores, wherever they sold sheet music, and try to get these songs like earworms inside people's heads, where people would like singing songs.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's so weird to think of pre-radio that they were they were like viral songs, right?
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_03: But sung by a live person.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_03: And and and the thing is, you never would hear the song the same way twice.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_03: Like on radio, you pretty much hear, you know, you hear the song, but if you hear a different song plugger than somebody else, you might have heard a you know what I mean, the like the same song, but done differently, maybe even different lyrics, right?
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, maybe, yeah, the lazy song plugger.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, being a song plugger sounds like a cool job.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_03: Because I guess, I guess if you if you were out at bars anyway, and and you're getting paid to be a song plug, you know what I mean?
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_03: It's like, okay, I'm I'm here, I'm gonna just and I like to sing, so here we go.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it was just like having the radio on in the background, but it was live people just singing everywhere you went.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_02: I have this romantic notion that you would go into New York and there were just people singing on the streets, but they'd kind of be singing the same 40 songs, like a top 40 radio station.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_02: 40 radio, and you would hear the kind of the same songs over and over.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_02: The thing that that I can't get over though is how then why uh doing that in New York would make a song popular nationwide, but it did.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_02: So that sheet music would be sold, and then they'd go out to the rest of the country, and they would have their own song pluggers trying to make that stuff famous.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_02: But talk about going viral, like in the most um low-tech way possible, right?
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_03: I wonder if uh song pluggers had a union or a or a trade association.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_03: They might have been part of ASCAP territ territories, you know.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_02: This is my block, you know, you can't sing here.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I see what you mean.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they probably did.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: But I think people I don't think people were freelancing, like they were getting paid by the department store to be a song plugger.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, okay.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_02: They were it was like it's like hiring a I'm a Montgomery Wards song plugger, yeah.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's like hiring somebody to play the piano in the airport or something, you know.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_02: Just it's it's not background music though, it's to sell the the sheet music.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_03: But it's also nice background music, you know, it's kind of kind of double purpose.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_02: So this tin pan alley, it was done to sell sheet music, but it started the idea of a hit song and the idea of having professional songwriters, and the idea of pop music, popular music, eventually song plugging, and then Tin Pan Alley was killed by radio.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_02: Why would you buy sheet music if you could just turn it on and hear it?
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_02: Why would you need a song plugger if you could just turn on the radio and hear yeah?
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_02: The um movies, talking movies came out, yeah.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_02: So that kind of killed that.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_02: The Great Depression, also, you know, you don't have disposable income to buy sheet music anymore.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then there was the um the you mentioned the unions, the uh the union of the songwriters uh and publishers at the Writers Guild.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, ETCAP, yeah.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they went on strike around that time too.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_02: So that kind of put it into Tin Pan Alley.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then of course, then World War II started, and um, you know, that put it into a lot of things, and eventually video killed the radio star.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_02: That's exactly right.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_02: That's exactly right.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so um, some of the songs that this guy wrote were um not only White Christmas and God Bless America, but putting on the writs.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_02: Taco.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and there that's a perfect example.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_02: I watched a video where you can play Putin on the Writs without hardly moving your hand, if you especially if you have one of the you can play the first part, and then you'd need a transposer to you can do that with all mostly black keys and hardly moving your hand at all.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_02: And then if you want to play the the second part, you have to do the transposer.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: He wrote, There's no business like show business.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, these were big time hit songs, but they're mostly you know in the key of F sharp.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um personally, he um he married uh uh a Catholic heiress, like a really rich lady.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, remember he was a poor Jewish guy, it was a big mismatch.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_02: Her family, uh her father disowned her, but the real tragic thing is she died after six six months into their marriage of uh typhoid fever.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_02: Oh typhoid Mary.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think it was Typhoid Mary's fault.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_02: There were other ways to get typhoid fever, it wasn't just from that one lady, yeah.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_02: Well, but uh if you haven't heard that episode and you want to learn a little bit about typhoid, it's uh it's a it's fascinating, believe me.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_03: If you like to hear about uh uh poop with the with the message in it, I actually think that's an underrated episode.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, agreed.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_02: All right, so he remarried uh the uh another rich lady, a daughter of a banker.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the family opposed again because he was a poor jury, he still didn't have any money.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_02: He ended up being super, super wealthy from the royalties of these sons, but um, and they were married.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_02: His second wife, they were married until 1988 when she died.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_02: So um a long, long time.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um, tragically, their first baby died um at three weeks old on Christmas Day.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_02: Of typhoid.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_02: But they say that knowing this, like when you hear White Christmas and the melancholy kind of nature of White Christmas, and knowing that his baby died on Christmas, and he didn't really celebrate Christmas either, that that really kind of hits different when you know all that about him.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, uh it is a melancholy song.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_03: I hadn't really thought about it, but it it is.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, we'll get into White Christmas here in a s in a second.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um well uh let's get into that now, actually.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's the best Christmas, best-selling Christmas song on earth.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_02: And like I said, he didn't really celebrate Christmas.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_02: He wasn't over very religious at all.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he wasn't uh too much of a practicing uh Jew, but um, but definitely didn't really Christmas wasn't part of his uh celebration either.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_02: But he was in uh he was writing a soundtrack for a movie.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_02: There's a movie called White Christmas, and it's actually a movie that I like to watch at Christmas time.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_02: It's a real old movie from um you know the 40s, and it's Bing Crosby and it's real cheesy, but I love it.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's about a a hotel where they um they celebrate um every month there's like one big holiday.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_02: So that's that's like the the um the theme of the of the hotel is like you know, if you go in um you know July, they're celebrating 4th of July.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_02: And if you go in uh you know April, they're celebrating Easter.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_02: And so there's a song for each one of these holidays, and some are more memorable than others.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um White Christmas is kind of the the big one.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_02: So he's writing all these songs for different holidays, and he was doing so in Palm Springs, and it was the middle of the summer, and it was 110 degrees, no air conditioning, um, back then in the 1940s, early 40s.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and he um burst into his office and he told his secretary, Grab your pen.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_02: This is the best thing I ever wrote.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I just think that's so cool because so often we hear about people not realizing when they've done something great.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_02: He knew it.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_02: He knew when he wrote that song grab your pen.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_02: This is the best thing I ever wrote.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_02: Grab your pen, Tuts and yeah.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh take a note.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_02: He said that it's it's successful because it wasn't just a Christmas song, it's a homesick song.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_02: You don't have to be religious, it doesn't mention anything about religion.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: And back then, most Christmas songs were religious.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, um, it doesn't mention that, but it also really doesn't mention it, doesn't mention Santa Claus, it doesn't mention, you know, a lot of the uh things that we think about uh on Christmas, um, it doesn't mention those things, but it's a song about being homesick and not being there.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_02: Well, this song debuted on Christmas 1941 on Bing Crosby's radio show, and it was 18 days after Pearl Harbor, right?
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_02: The Pearl Harbor was December 7th.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_02: This is Christmas 1941.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we we've uh just gotten into the war, and or we're about to get into the war big time, about to send a lot of people, just sent people, a lot of people missing their first Christmas, kind of the perfect storm of a hate song, right?
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_02: It became the song of World War II because it kind of captured homesickness and longing and winter memories and the fear of not returning home.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it got that captured the mood, like you said, of of the of the country.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, it was so popular that radio stations were complaining that their copies, their records, were physically degrading from playing too much.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: Now I don't know.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_02: That's you were a DJ for a little while.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: You were playing records.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_02: Is that a thing that could legitimately happen?
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_03: You can wear you can wear a record out.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_03: You can wear out the groove of a record by.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I I it also probably depends on when the record was made, what it was made of.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_03: You know, some some earlier records might have worn out, but yeah, I I could see that being uh, you know, not like it won't play, it just that doesn't have the same bass or the same richness that it had the first few times.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_03: The needle's just vibrating on little grooves, you know, just on little pits in the plastic.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_02: I mean the wax.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_02: I wanted to run that by you and see if that was uh a thing that really could 100%.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it was also an easy song to sing.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it wasn't uh, you know, it was in the it was in a key that was easy to sing, and it wasn't uh typically rain real rangy or anything like that.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and it was a short song, you know, a couple of verses, you're in and out.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um and um so it just kind of had all the magic ingredients.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_02: It sold 50 million copies, um became one of the biggest selling uh records of all time, um, of any genre, let alone Christmas.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I I it's hard to really compare because now you have streaming, and obviously, you know, there's probably songs that we don't even know that have more streaming than White Christmas, right?
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_02: But that doesn't make them more Gangham style, yeah.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure there's Christmas songs like B-side cuts from Justin Bieber that probably have more streams, right?
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_02: But but they're not White Christmas, you know.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_03: I do think the B-side to Gangam Style was a Christmas song, as I recall.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_03: Sigh.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_02: P S Y.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um well let's talk about God Bless America.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_02: So God bless America, he wrote in 1918, and he threw it in a drawer for 20 years.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_02: So he was he was in the army at the time, and he was um and he was writing, but he was like a writer, you know.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_02: Back then they used to have like entertainment people in the army and doing entertainment stuff, and he was writing for a comedy show, like a review, musical review kind of show.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_02: Bob Hope style.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um yeah, it was uh yeah, but really probably really corny.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_02: And he had written this song called God Bless America, but he thought that's a little too serious for a comedy show.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_02: And he's right, it wouldn't have fit in a comedy show.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_03: Might have been a good closer, you know, like kind of the feel good closer before if it was like a variety show, maybe, yeah.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so he just throws it in a drawer, and then in 1938, uh the singer Kate Smith, who was a very popular singer of the day, she was about to do a show for Armistice Day.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_02: You know what Armistice Day is?
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_02: Is that the day that we won in Europe?
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think we call it Veterans Day now.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, it's what we used to call Veterans Day, Armistice Day.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_02: And she was doing a radio show for Armistice Day and called up Irving Berlin and asked him if he had a patriot any patriotic song she could sing.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_02: And he pulls this thing out of a drawer.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_02: He's like, I wrote this like 20 years ago.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_02: Blows the dust off.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if it's any good.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_02: And people lost their minds over the song.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_02: They burst, there were stories about people bursting into tears listening to the song for the first time.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_02: They've called it the second national anthem.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't accepted by a lot of people though, and because remember, there was a lot of anti-Semitism back then.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and people there were people that were upset.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_02: It was a controversial song, believe it or not, because he was Jewish.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_02: The people on the left left that leaned politically left thought the song was too nationalistic, and the people that lean right thought it wasn't Christian enough.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, even though I don't think then the uh um well it is God bless America.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_03: I mean God bless the first word.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_02: Starspring a banner isn't Christian at all, right?
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, it's true.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't know what not Christian enough means.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but anyways, that was code for it was written by a Jew.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so they didn't like that.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but then when World War II started, like three years later, FDR embraced the song.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_02: And um, but it's just kind of cool that it came across.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_02: And here we go back to the Roosevelts.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's just kind of cool that an immigrant wrote the second anthem, yeah, and that uh a Jewish guy wrote the greatest Christmas song of all time, and that uh a guy who can't even read music becomes one of the greatest songwriters of all time, right?
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's amazing.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_02: This is just a it's I hate to use that term only in America, because I think Don King over overused that phrase.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, only in America, but seriously, like these are the kind of American stories that and 20th century, kind of uniquely 20th century stories.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_02: You know what I mean?
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_02: That's kind of why I always say it's my favorite century.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_03: Think about the evolution of the media during that time period, you know, as far as starting with these uh what did you call them?
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_03: Shout song shouters, sound songs pluggers, song pluggers, all the way up to, like you said, MTV, you know, and and and 4K video, you know, at the end of the 20th century.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it it's just it it was a lot of change that happened in that century.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the idea of well, you couldn't have pop music when you don't have a medium to share that stuff, but they tried.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, like this, I think it's really I wouldn't have guessed that pop music started before radio.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_02: It kind of blows me away.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_03: I would, I wouldn't have I wouldn't have guessed that it started before the 50s, honestly.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, sure.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_02: You know, although radio was really popular.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_02: We can't underestimate how popular radio, like people would gather around their radio, yeah, yeah.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I you know that is somebody I've heard the name a million times.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_03: Irvine Berlin didn't know much about him other than he wrote a lot of songs, but I couldn't even name him, and that I'm kind of embarrassed by that, honestly.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_03: So uh very good.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_03: You know what he said?
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_02: He said, I've outlived the music business.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_02: He was old, he he lived long enough to see like the changes that were happening in the music business to say I've outlived the music business.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_03: So I actually do wonder if if we will be doing a dead end soon about songwriting, because it does seem like AI can do a pretty good job with writing songs.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_03: We do it every week, don't we?
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_03: In styles.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_03: We do we do use AI songs every week, and you know, occasionally they are really good.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_03: Occasionally I'm like, wow, that one really hit the mark.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_03: And it, you know, takes a little bit of prompting, takes putting in the right things for it to be, putting in the right prompts for it to be the song you want.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_03: But ultimately, to write something that's clever and rhyming and has some interesting syncopation and you know, the things you were talking about earlier, AI is getting better and better at that.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_03: And I feel like songwriters are not going to be around much longer.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you knew this, but currently, as we're sitting here in November of 2025, the number one song on the Billboard Country Charts.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_02: Is an AI generated song with an AI singer that sounds very much like the kind of songs that we put out every week.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's a little bit better, like it has a better hook, but honestly, I think some of the ones we've put out are just as good.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_03: I was really happy with the Healy's episode.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know how I feel about that though, man, because like I I think a lot of that stuff, especially the stuff we put out, is slop.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's just it shows how it shows how lazy you can be to be a songwriter.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_02: Like it just there's a formula to it.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_02: But then when you listen to some classic songs that have stood the test of time, some of those Beatles songs that we've talked about, like I don't think a computer could write those songs.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_03: I it well, I mean, getting into songwriting, um, what surprises me, having done AI songs for the last two and a half years or so on this show, is how much I am more recently originally when I would put in a prompt, it would come out with something very simple, very much following the prompt and not a lot of imagination.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_03: And I use that word sort of metaphorically, but you know, it would just be like, okay, that's a song about this, it has this kind of dynamic, it's it works.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_03: Now I am kind of surprised that we'll they will add little things like little ad libbed um spoken parts or uh little weird beats, you know, little weird quirks in the beat, or I and so AI seems to Be understanding more and more, and those are the kinds of things that make a song really great, right?
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_03: When there's a little drop in it that you know is coming, and you you know you get ready for it, and then you're like da-da-da-da-da, you know, and it does that thing.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_03: Um, that that isn't really part of the main song, but it's personality.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_03: And yeah, can AI ever replace the personality of a human?
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_03: I hope not, but it seems like it's getting closer every time I use it.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_02: So let me clarify too, is that I absolutely think a computer could write yesterday, right now, because it's been trained on those kinds of songs.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_02: But I don't think a computer could write the new version of yesterday when that song came out.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_02: When that song came out, it was like nothing that nobody had ever heard.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_02: It was completely original.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_02: So by definition, AI can't write anything original because by definition, it's not original, it's being trained on things from before.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_03: And it can't but so are humans.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, humans are trained on things from before, right?
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_03: Irving Berlin heard songs growing up and heard old old whatever songs from the motherland and heard songs, you know, Americana songs from the early 1900s.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_03: You know what I mean?
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_03: We're always we're all trained on things before, and then occasionally we'll say, Oh, let's try this different thing.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_03: Or even more often, I think it's a mistake.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_03: I think somebody makes a mistake when they're doing something, and it turns out to be a good mistake, and it's like, oh wow, I put the tape, I I put I loaded the tape up backwards, and I got this cool weird noise that works really well right here.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_03: Let's use that, you know, and that's I think a lot of the way the Beatles and like pet sounds from the Beach Boys came to be was through experimentation.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_02: You know, in Roxanne, you know the police song Roxanne.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, sure.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_02: You know the beginning where there's that like ha ha ha ha little laugh.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_02: No, the the there's like a weird piano.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_03: Um yeah, I heard the first few seconds Sting sat on the piano or something.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think somebody else sat on the piano in the background and they just kept it in.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know why.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_02: But to me, that song, like if you hear it without that part, it's missing that.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_03: 100%.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_03: That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_03: So those weird little things.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_03: And and if you know the story of it, it's even better.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's uh yeah, no, that's that's really cool.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_03: But I do think you're right.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_03: I think Irving Berlin hit the timing of that job and that career.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_03: He was around before it existed, he kind of saw it come into fruition and he owned it.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_03: He did it for years and years, and then he got out right as things changed enough that he probably couldn't do it anymore.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, he he and he didn't do a lot of interviews, so he was kind of there's a mystique about him.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um he ended up super wealthy.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_02: Like he was making over a million dollars in the 1920s.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, which is like the equivalent of like 20 million bucks today.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_02: And that was just from sheet music.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_02: Then later, when he got into writing songs for Broadway and writing some writing movies, that's where the big money came.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_02: He got 200 million in royalties just from White Christmas.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_02: So take that dad who didn't think he was good enough for your daughter, right?
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, that's amazing.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_02: You know what though?
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_02: That he donated 100% of uh every penny that came in royalties from God Bless America, he donated to the Boy Scouts and to the Girl Scouts.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_02: He never took a single he didn't have to, he was super wealthy, but he never made a dime off of God Bless America.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um he um he was nearly blind uh later in life.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um and like I said, and he didn't really perform.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_02: Like you can find a few YouTube videos of him, but he's not really performing, he's just like demonstrating his piano, or he's he's you know, showing how he does something, but he's never really performing not since the song plugging days.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_02: He never really got out there, he didn't have a great voice and didn't like to sing.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_02: He liked to be kind of behind the scenes um and um and have other people like Ben Crosby and Frank Sinatra sing his uh his songs and and do them in different uh versions.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um I would have figured so Willie Nelson recorded an album in 1978 called uh Stardust Memories, and it was just like Willie, it was not a country um record, it was just him singing standards like these kind of songs that we're talking about.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I would have thought for sure that they would have met, but uh apparently they never really met.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_02: I think Irving Berlin might have been aware of the record, but he probably was a little scared of Willie Nelson too.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's yeah, he didn't like rock, he didn't like rock music at all.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_02: He thought it was noise, um, he didn't understand it.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, he and Frank Sinatra had that in common.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_02: He um he made fun of it all the time.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_02: He didn't really like the MTV.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um I mean, that had clearly passed him by, and he was a hundred years old when all that was going on, but um but he definitely lived like into our um adulthood.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_02: Isn't that crazy?
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_02: And we'd remember it.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_02: And we didn't meet him, yeah.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_02: That's is that one of your regrets?
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_02: Where did where did he die?
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_03: New York City?
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_02: So Poor went out for Irving, Berlin, and um this holiday season, when you hear about when you hear white Christmas, um think of our our guy, Israel Bailin.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_01: And children listen to the snow Christmas every Christmas, may you be merry and may all your Christmas before.