Previously in the book: Nebraskan Hal Neely tells in his own words how he played in Midwest dance bands in the 30s, served in WWII and began his career in the record business. Now begins his biographer’s research into Neely’s life.

Hal Neely was a tall man. According to his Army enlistment records from Nov. 11, 1942, he was six foot eight and weighed 198 pounds. No wonder the basketball fans in his hometown of Lyons, Nebraska were upset when he decided to forego playing hoops his senior year in high school for trumpet lessons in Omaha. He had completed one year of studies at University of Southern California while making a nice living as a society band leader playing the Statler and Hilton chains up and down the West Coast.1 His enlistment was for the duration of the war plus six months subject to the discretion of the President. After the war he returned to Los Angeles and put out the word he was back in town and ready to make music.
Jack McVea heard that Hal Neely was back in Hollywood, and, wasting no time, he called Neely to play trumpet at a recording session of his band for Black and White Records in October of 1946.
McVea was a well-known musician with many bands in the Los Angeles area during the 1930s and 40s, performing with Lionel Hampton, Nat King Cole, Les Paul, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker.2 He was the baritone saxophonist on Hampton’s 1941 recording of “Flying Home,” which has been noted as the first rhythm and blues hit. By 1946 McVea led his own group and recorded for Black and White Records. Black and White Records originally operated in Brooklyn, New York, in 1943; but, Paul Reiner and his wife Lillian bought it and moved operations to the West Coast, specializing in recordings of black musicians, what was called at that time “race music.”
The October 1946 session took place at Radio Recorders studio on Santa Monica Boulevard, which was acknowledged to be the best recording facility in Los Angeles.3 Among the artists who recorded there were Charlie Parker, Jimmie Rodgers, and Louis Armstrong. During this same time Radio Recorders recorded many radio shows for delayed broadcast.
Neely said in his memoirs that Black and White Records employee Ralph Bass was supposed to produce the session but Bass was not there. However, Bass was credited as producer.4 Neely claimed Reiner had picked out the song to be recorded, and only four minutes were left in the session for the last song. He said he suggested replacing the last song with a number he had heard the group perform in nightclubs called “Open the Door, Richard.” Since they had such a short period of time, Neely said he told the musicians they had one take, as they were familiar with the piece, one take should be enough, and he would use a fade out at the end of music.
The original recording of this song was the first time a fadeout was used on a commercial record.5 All other records up to this time had used a “cold” or final note. This comment independently corroborates Neely’s claim that he was the actual producer of the record. The McVea recording made Billboard’s bestseller chart in February of 1947, reaching the No. 7 spot.
“Open the Door, Richard” made the charts in 1947 by other artists including Count Basie, the Three Flames, Louis Jordan, the Charioteers, the Pied Pipers, and Dusty Fletcher, who originated the song as a vaudeville routine in black theaters. It was not unusual for a song to be recorded in many different versions in the late 1940s because fans cared about the song more than the performer.6 Writing credit was divided among Fletcher and John Mason for words and McVea and Don Howell for music. Howell, incidentally, was entirely made up, so that an unnamed (and fabricated) businessman could take some of the royalties away from McVea.
McVea recorded several other songs but none were as popular as “Open the Door, Richard.” In 1962 he began playing clarinet in a strolling Dixieland band at Disneyland where he stayed until he retired in the early 1990s.
Neely’s next producing project in 1946 was with Slim Gaillard of Capitol Records. Gaillard was also a well-known performer during the 1930s and 40s in swing music, though never as famous as Duke Ellington, Count Basie or Cab Calloway. Gaillard was mostly celebrated for creating his own musical language called “Vout-O-Reenie.”7 From this Neely session came Gaillard’s biggest hit “Cement Mixer Putti Putti.”
“We were recording on Sunset Boulevard, across from a television studio. After we did three sides, the A & R (artist and repetoire) man sent us out for some air. I was glad to get out because I didn’t have a fourth song and figured we’d improvise something,” Gaillard said. “Just outside the studio, they were repairing the street and one of those cement machines was going putt-putt-putt. When we were back in the studio the A & R man ask for the fourth side. I said Cement Mixer Putti Putti. Everybody in the place broke up. I started to sing “putt-ti, putti-hootie, putti-vooty, macaroonie, that’s all.”
Once again Neely did not receive record credit for the recording, but one might assume he was the A & R man to which Gaillard referred in his statement. Gaillard continued a successful career with his own small ensemble and on rare occasions with larger groups. At the time of his death in 1991 he was performing in London, England.
Neely also said in his memoirs he produced a record for a “Little Esher;” however, the only performer from that time period was “Little Esther Phillips.” Her first record came out in 1950, which is slightly out of the timeframe mentioned by Neely. Herman Lubinsky signed Little Esther who grew up in Galveston, Texas, to a contract with Savoy Records of Newark, New Jersey, in 1949. In January of 1950 the California Superior Court ruled Esther’s mother to be her legal guardian, upholding her new contract with King Records. Perhaps Neely produced one of her records during her time at King. Esther enjoyed a 25-year career with honors from Rolling Stone and Ebony magazines and receiving an Image Award from the NAACP in 1975.8
Among his other jobs he took to finance his college education, Neely produced a NBC radio religious program. His announcer was Oral Roberts who went on to dominate the evangelical air ways and establish a self-named Tulsa, Oklahoma, university. Neely also wrote scripts for the program. In his future career as a record producer Neely would write liner notes for albums. One of his scripted ideas for Roberts was to tell his listeners to put their hands on the radio during a prayer.9 Listeners would feel an actual vibration coming through the speakers because Roberts was blessed with a very deep voice which created the pulsation.10
Neely also originated the line, “The family that prays together stays together.” He also came up with the product of Jordan River water in a bottle for $2-$4. The water came out of Neely’s own tap at home. Who knows how many relatives going through the personal effects of deceased loved ones would find a tiny bottle of water glued on a cardboard picture of the Jordan River and would wonder what it was and why their family member would even buy it.11 He considered but rejected the merchandising concept of “healing cloths,” which were bits of 2 x 4 inch strips of material which were placed on any part of the body that hurt, and a miracle was supposed to occur. His short radio stint gave him a good education on how payola worked—a tactic he used when he was promoting James Brown and other acts.12
During his studies at the University of Southern California, Neely met nuclear physicist Albert Einstein when he was chosen to participate in a series of lectures conducted during a three to six week period. While the students sat around the professor for informal chats, Einstein once said, “When I am dying,” and he paused to point up, “I hope I see friends.”
Neely said Einstein asked him if he believed in God to which Neely replied that he did not know, but he thought he believed there might be a God.
“I don’t care what you believe, Hal,” Einstein replied, “as long as you believe in something.”13
Neely also became involved with the development of the tape recorder in the United States by Bing Crosby and the company Ampex, according to Roland Hanneman who had spent many hours listening to Neely’s stories about his early career.
Neely first met Crosby during his pre-war days as a band performer in Hollywood. They became friends and often played golf together. Neely did the first pressing of a stereo recording which was classical music. Because no one in the record industry understood stereo very well, records were released with Mono on one side and stereo on the other, which canceled the sound through any compatibility of musical waiver lines.
Fritz Pfleumer invented the tape recorder in the late 1920s in Germany where it was marketed under the name “Magnetophon.” He used paper strips that he coated with carbonyl iron particles suspended in lacquer. In 1938 German radio stations replaced relatively high-quality wax and lacquer discs with the magnetic tapes adding flexibility to broadcasting. During World War II the story began circulating that the Nazis ordered engineers to create the tape recording system so that Allies would not be able to locate where live-sounding speeches by Adolph Hitler were being made. Reality was that the technology had been developed more than ten years before and that Hitler preferred using the tape recordings so his live-sounding speeches could be aired without interrupting his odd sleeping habits.
Major John Mullin of the U.S. Army Signal Corps discovered the Magnetophons at the Radio Frankfurt substation at Bad Nauheim in 1945 and sent them back to his home in San Francisco broken down into 35 small packages. After he left the military he joined with audio engineer W.A. Palmer to reassemble them in a new configuration to create an American version of the machines. The first musical artist to be recorded on Mullins’ redesigned recorder was Merv Griffin in 1946. By 1947 Mullin and Palmer had created the small company of Ampex and introduced the system to Bing Crosby who used it for his ABC-sponsored radio program “Philco Radio Time.” The broadcast was such a success that Crosby talked ABC into buying all their tape recorders from Ampex and invested $50,000 of his own money in the small company.14
Neely made a major step crossing over into the business side of the music industry when he joined Allied Record Company after graduating from the University of Southern California in 1948. The president of Allied was Dakin K. Broadhead, a distinguished businessman who was a member of the War Food Administration during World War II and later served as an assistant to Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson from 1953-55. Broadhead began his career as a manager with Safeway stores. He was president and principal owner of Allied Records from 1945 to 1986.15
Allied was the largest independent record pressing plant in Los Angeles.16 In the 1940s customers were limited to the manufacture of just 200 records a week in accordance with rationing policies. Because Allied wanted to keep its record-pressing methods secret, no one was allowed inside the plant. Allied did not have any advanced technology, and its method was comparatively simple, being the reproduction of a surface, similar to that used to emboss leather.17
Neely was, of course, introduced to this new world of record manufacturing after college graduation. The exposure to the technology served him well when he met the volatile president of King Records, Syd Nathan, in 1949.

Footnotes

1Billboard Magazine, May 5, 1958.
2de Heer, Dik, rockabilly.nl
3radio_recorders historic.php
4Talevski, Nick, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: Rock Obituaries, Omnibus Press, London, 2010, 22.
5Snow, Arnold, Honkers and Shouters, The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues, MacMillan Publishing Company, New York City, 1986, 226-227.
6 Weisbard, Eric, This Is Pop, In Search of the Elusive at Experience Music Project, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.,2004, 75-89.
7Purl Roadhouse 1940s Music and Dance, yuku.com
8Home.earthlink.net/~jaymar41/Lesther.html.200.
9 Roland Hanneman Interview.
10Buddy Winsett Interview, July 2012.
11Janet Cowling Interview.
12 Roland Hanneman Interview.
13Buddy Winsett Interview, July 2012.
14Hamman, Peter, The Birth of Tape Recording in the U.S., historyofrecording.com.
15findagrave.com
16Broven, John, Record Makers and Breakers, Voices of the Independent Rock ‘n’ Roll Pioneers, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2010, 37.
17 Ibid.