Wax War

Tin Pan Alley was making a lot of noise last week, and trying to be quiet about it.

Dinah Shore, said the reports, had just finished eight solid days of recording. The Andrews Sisters, who normally record 24 sides a year, would make nearly that many in the next six weeks. Crosby and Sinatra master platters were stacked ceiling-high. RCA-Victor had enough classical masters to last 25 years. Popular bandleaders were canceling fat dance dates to squeeze in recording dates. Everyone was getting set for the ban on record-making that James Caesar Petrillo, boss of the Musicians' Union, had ordered for Jan. 1.

The tunes that the U.S. would be whistling, not only next month, but six months from now, were being put away. Music publishers and recording companies were getting together on "plug schedules" to ration out the hits, a few at a time. By waxing tunes from unreleased movies and upcoming Broadway musicals, there were plenty of songs to go around. At least half a dozen singers and orchestras are scheduled to make recordings of Stravinsky's Summer Moon (TIME, Nov. 3). Popular-music fans might miss a few flash novelties like Open the Door, Richard!, which come from nowhere, but they would hear many a new version of "standards" like Stardust.

Record companies decided that it was smarter not to boast about their backlogs. Said one record man: "We don't want the public to get too complacent about this thing." They wanted public pressure to build against Petrillo. Actually, he hadn't asked for a thing yet. Most of them, to stay in business, would have willingly continued to pay Petrillo's AFM $2,000,000 a year in record royalties--but the Taft-Hartley Act outlaws royalties paid to a union. Petrillo is leaving it up to the record companies to find some other way of paying his union off. He has another target too: the disc jockeys who coin fortunes by playing records all day long without paying royalties to either performers or the union. Some record executives like to think that Petrillo is really after the broadcasters, and that the recording ban is only a bluff.

Said Czar Jimmy: "I've never been called a bluffer. We're either right or we're wrong, and I think we're right. And don't be quoting me as saying all I want to do is love."-

*All he wanted to do was live. He was misquoted (TIME, Jan. 7, 1946).

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