The Same Old Way

By February 1928 the little nine-piece band had made a big hit with dance fans, and was all set to make an even bigger one. For their first appearance on a vaudeville bill in Chicago's Palace Theater, they had a wow comic-hat routine to go with I Wish I Was In Peoria and a noisy harness gag for Thanks for the Buggy Ride. But they put their new act on only once. Stormed the theater manager: "For the $4,000 a week we're paying you, we can get a good comedian for every man in the band. Cut out the monkey business. Just give the people what they paid to hear."

In the second show, the band went back to the sweet and swoony, and it was lucky they did. The Chicago Herald & Examiner's redoubtable Critic Ashton Stevens covered the performance, closed his review with the line that, for dancers, has identified Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians through two decades: "The sweetest music this side of heaven." Probably because Guy has kept it the same old sweet and danceable way ever since, he has survived--while ripplers, swingsters, hoppers and scoffers who called him the "King of Corn" fell by the wayside. And because he survived, and earned a reputation as a "sweet guy" at the same time, Tin Pan Alley and Radio Row were helping him celebrate three anniversaries last week.

The Bulwark. It had been just 25 years since Guy with his fiddle, brother Carmen with his saxophone and brother Lebert with his trumpet had crossed over from London, Ont. to Cleveland, fired by Paul Whiteman's records, to get their own band into the big time. It had been 20 years since the band began its first season at Manhattan's Roosevelt Hotel; last week, when they began their 20th straight season at the Roosevelt, eight of the original nine members of the Royal Canadians were still there. And finally it was just 15 years since Guy had started making a fortune for Decca and himself by selling close to 50 million copies (Guy's estimate) of some 800 sides.

The Royal Canadians' record was pretty hard to beat. Consistently, since 1931, radio editors had ranked them among the top dance bands on the air. For 20 years their gross had been near $1,000,000 a year. They had introduced more than 300 hits, such as Little White Lies, You're Driving Me Crazy, Boo-Hoo--and were still playing all of them the same old way. This year, the American Society of Teachers of Dancing thanked them with a Distinguished Service Scroll for consistently acting as a bulwark against "invasions by hordes of cynical jive extremists."

A Family Affair. A confident but unpretentious and modest man of 47 who goes in for motorboat cup-racing (TIME, Aug. 18, 1947), Big Brother Guy gives most of the credit to brother "Carm," 46, whose distinctive singing, saxophone and phrasing have always set the tone of the band. Lebert's trumpet playing Guy rates almost as high. He puts his own talents at the bottom: "My fiddle never did anything." In fact, it's been years since he played it.

The band has always been a family affair: Guy, Carmen and Lebert own it. Sister Rose Marie (now Mrs. Henry Becker) once sang, but, says Guy, "never took it seriously." He doesn't exactly say so, but he gives the impression that the defection of kid brother Victor, who quit playing saxophone with the Royal Canadians three years ago to get up his own band, was just about the most disturbing thing since the secession of the South. In a way, all of the band members are in the family. If one musician dislikes a new song, out it goes, even if Tunesmith Carm (Coquette, Boo-Hoo) wrote it.

The Royal Canadians' favorite fan is Mama Lombardo, who now lives in Connecticut and never misses a broadcast or a record. Papa Lombardo, who once sang at church socials in Ontario, has never yet really come around. Once, after a broadcast, Guy phoned and asked him how he liked it. Papa muttered noncommittally. When Guy pressed him, he finally snapped : "If you're looking for compliments, I'll put your mother on."

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