Tex Beneke Still Blows That Big Band Sound

‘I think my Los Angeles band right now is every bit as good as the old Miller band.’

--Tex Beneke

T he stainless steel music stands said GM with the letters intercut, and there was a derby hat perched on each stand. The 15 players were bunched together tightly on a raised platform flanked at stage left by half a dozen straight chairs for the singers when they weren’t performing. The air was electric, and so was the sound. The place was Meadowbrook, N. J., or Glen Island, N. Y., or Lorain, Ohio, or Lake Tippecanoe, Ind. or the Hollywood Palladium. Dancing was difficult because the dancers were massed around the bandstand, holding one another and swaying in tightly packed unison to the music, but mostly listening. The leader was a slim, owlish, unsmiling man holding a trombone like a scepter. And at extreme stage right was a tenor sax player with a face as open as the Texas prairie where he was raised and a voice like gravel being sluiced in a stream. When the singers came stage center, he’d usually join them, and at least once a night, he would sing “Chattanooga Choo Choo” or “Kalamazoo.” His name was Gordon, but his boss called him Tex, and it stuck. For a long, long time.

At 71 going on 35, Tex Beneke lives in Costa Mesa, still plays half a dozen gigs a month, still enjoys it “except for the traveling,” still has some leftover living habits (smoking, no exercise) that would do in most of us, and still--except for a belly more visible in a sports shirt at home than a tuxedo on stage--looks an astonishing lot like the way he did when he found his way through the Holland Tunnel to his first Glenn Miller rehearsal in April, 1938.

Tex makes a few concessions to age these days, mostly under the watchful eye of Sandra, his wife of two years, who doesn’t want to change her husband--just keep him healthy. She travels with him now, looks after his needs, tries--with little success--to get him to take walks with her and with more success to cut down on his bookings and enjoy some of the things he never had time to see and do before. But there is great pride in her eyes and her voice when she says, “Tex is the only one left who stands on a stage and blows every single number.”

He has watched a lot of his friends from the Big Band days go--Bob and Ray Eberle, the Dorsey brothers, Harry James. A few months ago, Tex and Sandra went to visit Count Basie. The old man was sick but was still being brought by wheelchair to his piano bench. He remembered a picture he’d had taken sitting at his piano with Tex 35 years earlier. He had lost the picture, and he and Tex posed for it again. Before a print could be sent to him, Count Basie died.

Tex tells stories like this without any sense of foreboding or melancholy. He talks easily and comfortably about the past, but he doesn’t live there. He lives in his music.

“I can get on that bandstand with a bellyache,” he says, “and once I find my audience is with me, it picks me right up. It’s still fun .”

Tex was 24 when Miller plucked him out of a band going nowhere in Detroit. Miller was organizing his second band; the first had never caught on. Tex admits that he accepted Miller’s offer of $52.50 a week (he actually offered $50; Tex insisted on the additional $2.50) mostly to “get to New York, where the action was.” Tex had never been there before, and he parked for an hour at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, trying to summon the courage to drive into “that big hole in the ground.”

That was in 1938, and Tex remembers the next four years as a kind of blur of taxis, buses, trains and back-alley entrances to theaters and dance halls. Miller found the sound that he was seeking soon after Tex joined him--not, Tex says, the way the movie “The Glenn Miller Story” depicted it, but gradually, as Miller experimented almost daily with different instrumental innovations.

Engagements at Frank Daley’s Meadowbrook and the Glen Island Casino got the Miller band on network radio, and his new sound swept the country. Tex remembers one period when the band played eight shows a day at the Paramount Theater in New York, rushed to NBC to do their nightly Chesterfield radio show, then jumped into waiting cabs to play far into the night at the Pennsylvania Hotel.

“The horns,” he says, “never got cold. We didn’t even have time to put them in cases. We’d just put them under our arms, roll the music we needed and shove it in the barrel--and go. It was the same way a couple of years later in Hollywood. We did two movies--”Orchestra Wives” and “Sun Valley Serenade”--back-to-back, and all that time we were playing at the Palladium. We’d get off about 1 in the morning and had to be in makeup at the studio by 7. I never made so much money in my life, but I wouldn’t want to do it again.”

Bits and pieces of recollection garnish these stories. Miller paid his early musicians in cash individually in the bathroom “so nobody would know who was making what. . . .” Tex began singing almost by accident. A tenor sax player he was replacing had a novelty vocal spot (he thinks it was “Ida, Sweet as Apple Cid-ah”), and Tex was routinely asked to do it. He was then worked more and more into vocal arrangements, especially after the Modernaires joined the Miller band. . . . During the one-night stands across the country, the band would go for weeks without seeing a bed, “but we all slept better in the bus anyway, because when we finally did get a bed, it didn’t vibrate.”

Tex remembers Miller respectfully but not warmly. “He was smart, very smart. In the beginning, he did all his own arrangements, and he just kept updating all the time until he got the full sound he wanted. But with his musicians, he could be tough and often cold. He’d put the fish eye on us, standing there in front of the band. He used to come and stand right in front of me while I played, staring at me from a couple of feet away. I’d finish a chorus, and he’d say: ‘Take another one, Texas.’ And sometimes he’d keep that up till I was about to drop. ‘Take another one, they’re small.’ You either did it, or else. The only person I remember him being close to was Hal McEntire, his lead alto man. Hal had been with Glenn’s first band.”

It was a tough, demanding business, both physically and emotionally. “If Glenn heard somebody he thought was better than one of his own musicians, he’d just give the boy two weeks’ notice. It was as simple as that.”

When the United States got into World War II, the big bands were decimated. By the end of 1942, Miller had lost so many of his musicians to the military draft that he had to break up the band. Although Miller was over draft age, he enlisted in the Army Air Force, urging his remaining musicians to hang tight as long as they could while he tried to persuade the Air Force to re-form his old band under the military. “But he didn’t get enough clout soon enough,” Tex recalls, “and most of the rest of us were drafted.”

Tex joined the Navy, ending up as an aircraft maintenance chief petty officer in Norman, Okla. He was on leave in New York, visiting with another Miller band member when the news came of Glenn’s disappearance in an Air Force plane over the English Channel. “We couldn’t believe it for a long time,” he says, “but when the war ended and the big bands came back as strong as ever, Glenn’s wife, Helen, knew that some decisions had to be made about her husband’s band.

“In the early ‘40s,” Tex recalls, “Glenn had backed Charley Spivak and Hal McEntire when they started their bands, and just before the war, he said to me, ‘Tex, I think you’re about ready for a band.’ I told him I didn’t feel ready, that I wanted to learn more. But Helen knew that Glenn was going to give me a band, so when the Miller band was re-formed after the war, she asked me to take over as leader.”

To millions of discharged servicemen, big bands symbolized home and peace and all the good things they had fantasized during the war years, so the Big Band Era picked up precisely where it had left off in 1942. Miller had been thinking about adding strings, and did have a string section in his Air Force band. So when his former musicians got together Jan. 1, 1946, for their first post-war rehearsal, a large string section was added to play the Air Force arrangements. There were 36 pieces then, and it required two railroad cars to move them around the country.

With the addition of strings, the Miller band moved away from even the fringes of the swing band label. “We won a lot of polls,” recalls Tex, “but always under the ‘sweet band’ category. We played good, danceable tunes that swung sometimes, but we were never looked on as a swing band--even when we didn’t have strings. Almost every musician in the band who could play jazz dreamed once in a while about playing with Charley Barnett or Benny Goodman or Gene Krupa, but then we’d always back away because we knew what a good thing we had with the Miller band.”

The big-band high lasted for about six years after World War II. Then the young people whose enthusiasm fed it got older, and no one came along to take their place. By 1950, bookings were down enough that Tex had to cut loose the string section. And that’s when he also decided it was time for him to move out from under the Miller umbrella and become the Tex Beneke Band, instead of the Glenn Miller Band Directed by Tex Beneke.

According to Tex, the Miller estate reacted quickly. As Tex remembers it, the band had just finished an evening at the Palladium and the musicians were packing up their instruments when the stage and dressing rooms were suddenly aswarm with plainclothes officers who impounded all the music and other Miller material.

Tex says he never missed a beat, playing the next night under his own banner with the same band, mostly using arrangements copied earlier by several of his musicians. That evening marked a rift with Helen Miller that still had not healed when she died two decades later. “That’s why I never appeared in ‘The Glenn Miller Story,’ the movie in which James Stewart played Glenn,” Tex says. It also explains, he said, why there has been a Glenn Miller Band (under half a dozen different directors) since 1950 that has no connection with Tex Beneke or his band. Tex has been legally enjoined from using the Miller name in his bookings or promotion, a restriction he has observed a lot more carefully than some of the organizations that have booked him.

Tex has worked constantly in the postwar years, but there have been frequent fallow periods when he had to learn to accommodate to a totally new social environment. The two main sources of big-band bookings--vaudeville houses and ballrooms--disappeared almost entirely. In their place, at a much lower level of intensity, came concerts and private dances. All that took a lot of adjusting--and it didn’t really change very much with the resurgence of the big bands in the 1980s. Interest and bookings perked up, but the lack of places to play made the economics of traveling the country with a band virtually impossible.

“We will never,” Tex says matter-of-factly, “see another era like the ‘30s and ‘40s. The young kids made the big bands, and for a few years, it was the greatest thing that ever happened to all of us. The kids who are discovering big-band music today are a very different breed. But at least they’re finding out that their moms and pops aren’t quite the squares the kids thought they were.”

Time after time, when Tex plays a dance these days, couples in their 60s come forward to tell him about how they related the music he was playing to some pivotal event in their lives. This makes a deep impression on Sandra, who was an infant during the postwar big-band days. “I remember so many couples with tears in their eyes telling the most wonderful stories,” she says. “How they got engaged after a Miller dance or how this music was the last thing they shared before he went off to war.”

Does Tex make any concessions to younger tastes today?

“Sure. We have a few rock charts in the book--listenable, not acid rock. We play them if we get requests from the kids, and they find out we do them pretty well. But if we play a couple of rock numbers, people start coming to the bandstand and saying: ‘We like that, but you’re getting away from your music. How about doing “String of Pearls”?’ I have to play all those standards, or I wouldn’t get any bookings at all.”

While Tex was adjusting to the changing world of pop music, he was also making some drastic personal adjustments. He lived for three decades in a suburb of St. Louis “because it was close to the center of everything.” But when his wife of 10 years died in 1978, he wanted out of the Midwest because of its snow and ice and memories. Tex has no children, but his mother was then living in Costa Mesa. Early in 1979, he bought a house there, and his mother and aunt moved in with him. They stayed with him until he remarried; now they live in Leisure World in Laguna Hills.

Tex met Sandra in a Costa Mesa coffee shop where he used to drop by for breakfast. Recently divorced, she worked in a bank next door and used to come in regularly for coffee. The proprietor introduced them one morning, and from that moment Tex pursued her vigorously and enthusiastically. “Sure, I knew who he was and I knew his music,” says Sandra, a slim, dark-haired, vibrant woman. “But you don’t expect to run into someone like that in a coffee shop, and besides, I wasn’t at all interested in a new relationship, not even with him.”

But Tex was both persistent and persuasive, and they were married a year later. Tex had lived in near-anonymity for five years in the country club district of Costa Mesa, and that didn’t change when Sandra moved in. She phoned one of her neighbors the first week and asked the protocol for newcomers. Was it customary for them to call on the neighbors or to wait for the neighbors to make the first move? Neither, she was told--and thus it has remained. “This is a neighborhood of professional people,” Tex says. “Nice people. Super people. But they have their own things going, and the neighbors pretty much leave one another alone.”

The sprawling, ranch-style house is divided into two distinct parts: the living area, which Sandra manages, and two rooms in the rear that have been turned over to Tex’s prodigious supply of memorabilia and a ham radio set that is his only avocation. There’s also a pool table, cabinets full of scrapbooks (Sandra has taken over this chore from his mother), stacks of priceless audio tapes of his performances over the years, an old Philco console radio that belonged to his parents and hundreds of photos of Tex with big-name entertainers of his day.

He loves this area and hangs out there when he’s home--which is more frequently now than ever before in his life. “I drag him to a baseball game once in a while,” Sandra says, “but that’s about all. He’s been around crowds all his life, and when he isn’t working, he likes peace and solitude. I love to entertain, and we’re beginning to have a social life. But it’s hard because normal people socialize on weekends, and that’s when we work.”

Last summer, the Benekes threw a bash for all the Miller alumni they could find, and about 40 of them spent an afternoon and evening together in the Beneke backyard, reliving past glories. Was there an old-fashioned jam session? “Naw,” Tex answers. “When musicians get together like that, they don’t play. We just ate and drank and let our hair down and talked.”

His work these days goes in spurts. After a slack January, he was headed for New Orleans, then St. Louis. “A week on the road is about my limit now,” says Tex, then adds almost apologetically, “I don’t have to work every night any longer.”

He enjoys having Sandra travel with him. “A couple of months ago, she took me to see the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. I’ve been there hundreds of times and never looked at it before. We would just check in, clean up, play our job and leave. Now, I’m seeing the country through Sandy’s eyes--and feeling her enthusiasm.”

Tex’s regular band includes 15 musicians, but the days of traveling in band buses are long over. The economics of the band business today dictate that on long trips, Tex takes only a nucleus--usually a drummer, lead sax and trumpet player and singer--and picks up the rest of the musicians at his destination. (“I have contractors in all major cities for musicians I know well. I’ve played with almost all of them at one time or another.”)

Are the arrangements the end-all of the big-band business? Would other bands made up of musicians playing Miller arrangements duplicate the Miller sound?

“Not really--mostly because of the phrasing. Glenn had a lot of novel ideas about phrasing. The sax players had to match their vibratos and breathe together; we had breather marks on the music. It gave the band a distinctive sound, especially with the sax section and lead clarinet playing melody. He also started the plunger-type brass”--Tex demonstrated with a series of gravelly boo-wa, boo-wa’s-- “and the derbies over the bells.

“But I think my Los Angeles band right now is every bit as good as the old Miller band, and I like to take them with me intact whenever I can. There’s a little different feel to the music today. It was tight--maybe a little up-tight--then. Everything had to be right on the beat, solid and perfect. Now it’s a little more relaxed, flows a little more. I’m sure that’s what Glenn would have done. I think he’d love the band I have now.”

Sandra loves it, too. She never misses a number at any of Tex’s performances, and she describes sitting through an entire engagement at Disneyland, listening to Tex’s music and watching couples come to the bandstand to request a number, then return to thank him with tears streaming.

She says: “When the players want to jam, Tex won’t do it. He says he isn’t good enough any more, but that just isn’t true--even though I guess he believes it. I don’t want him to retire. When he’s up on that bandstand, the adrenaline is flowing, and he’s really in heaven. I know he’s going to be around for a long time, but when he has to go, I hope it happens up there.”

How much longer does Tex see himself working?

“As long as I can carry the horn around and still blow. It’s been a few weeks, now, since I worked, and I’m already getting cabin fever. I’m ready to go.”