Benny Goodman: Let's Dance - Live!

BENNY GOODMAN Let's Dance liner notes

The minutiae of the memory are fuzzed, like the second hundredth replay of one of those heavy vinyl LPs from the early fifties, sans filter; but the important parts are as fresh as the sounds that came through the wall that day. Since it was just before I got drafted, it had to be some time in 1956. We're talking here about an apartment on West 82nd Street between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues in New York, during the first full year of my writing career as a professional; an apartment in which I spent most of every day, hammering away on a typewriter: at a penny a word, one could not grow weary. Being a pulp writer in those days was, I always think, the equivalent of doing endless one-nighters with the big bands in the thirties and forties. Different beat, same end result: lots of product turned out. On that afternoon in 1956 I was having a hard time working. Not for lack of inspiration -the rent was due and I'd taken to swiping bottles of milk from in front of a neighbor's door two floors below-but because the guy in the next apartment kept playing the same damned tune on the piano. Hour after hour, never really running through the number completely, but stopping, starting, playing a series of chords again and again. And I knew that song. Finally, less out of annoyance than curiosity, I went next door and rousted him out. "Don't for a moment let the fact that my career is going down the drain because I can't concentrate on what I'm writing because you're driving me up a wall [bother you]," I said cheerily, "but what's the name of that piece you've been eviscerating?" He grinned at me, and said, "Stealin' Apples." So I grinned back. "Benny Goodman." And we stood there grinning 'at each other like a pair of lemurs. After a moment he invited me in, and I learned he was doing some rescoring for a gig Goodman was soon to play out in New Jersey. We chatted a while, he ran through the number in its entirety, just to make me smile, and I went back to work. And since I always write to music, I removed the Scarlatti from the turntable and put on the Goodman 1938 Carnegie Hall Concert. Funny how fast and how easily the writing went.