Mixtape: Jack and Bing
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Your voice and individual singing style. We've prepared this instructional tape so that you will be able to edit yourself and therefore sing with a more authentic voice. I'm Simon Adler. This is Mixtape, a mini-series about how the cassette tape changed the world. Oh.

Gotta admit, growing up, cassettes weren't a huge part of my family's life. But my family did have a giant VHS camcorder. Massive. My mom carried it around everywhere. So we ended up with a pile of tapes. Tell the camera how old you are.

And years later, she asked me to digitize those tapes. And I decided to make sort of like a one-hour highlight reel of our family. And I remember there was this moment where the weight of that hit me. Like, huh? Like, what do I put on this? Like, which vacations?

There's my family's road trip down to Alabama, which has my brother coming of age in it, so it'd be good to get him in there. But I don't know. Telmark, Wisconsin in 1991 just captures a more vibrant version of my parents. Speaking of my parents, like, my mom did all the filming, so how was I going to get her in front of the camera? And, like, my dad, he got sicker over the years. Do I show his body changing or just...

kind of skip over that. These aren't earth-shattering questions. Very ordinary, actually. It just made me think a lot about, like, what version of the past is true? Because I knew that no one was going to go back and watch the original raw tapes. So any choice that I made on the highlight reel, that was just going to become the de facto version of my family's history, which gave me pause. Okay, so why am I telling you this? Well, it turns out...

that this trap I'd found myself in, that we're all living in all the time, I would argue, it was created unintentionally by one man. A man who, oddly enough, you can hear singing in the background of many of my family movies. ♪

That song in the background. That guy right there. Mr. Bing Crosby. The voice of Christmas.

Now, I like Bing Crosby, but whether you do or don't, we are all living in his world. The world he created with a magical device in America's worst enemy. But just for context, in case you don't know who Bing Crosby is. I mean, it's very hard to think of a bigger star.

This is historian Mark Clark. Think Michael Jackson plus George Clooney. If you've never heard of Bing Crosby, you've probably had your head in a barrel for the last 25 years. Imagine one guy.

being the best-selling recording artist. ♪ Till the enchantment of Paris ♪ The number one movie star. ♪ And me starring in a picture with... ♪ And the highest-rated show on radio. And this is archivist Robert Bader. There is nobody who could compare today. I mean, according to one source, in 1948, if you turned on the radio, there was a 50% chance you'd hear Bing. It's amazing. ♪ Life ♪

Half the songs on the radio were him. So, who is the king of all media? It's Bing Crosby. So, that's the backdrop. Our specific story begins with his weekly radio show. The Kraft Music Hall with Bing Crosby, John Scott Trotter and his orchestra, Marilyn Maxwell, the music major... The Kraft Music Hall. And here's Bing Crosby.

Imagine you imagining that you love me and starting on a family tree. Okay, and Kraft Music Show, is that the same Kraft as Kraft Macaroni and Cheese? That's right. Kraft sponsored the whole thing. And so this is a live show...

He sings, he interacts with people. You know when we stopped to think that in every corner of the globe... Goodbye! Goodbye! They would do comedy skits. Goodbye! Goodbye. No, I'm not leaving. I'm just saying goodbye to a relative. Goodbye! Hey, wait, wait. Do you have to holler like that? Oh yeah, he's a distant relative. Goodbye! Long story short, this was a massively popular show.

50 million people a week were tuning into the Kraft musical. 50 million people in the 30s and 40s is a stunning, stunning percentage of the population. More than a third of America. It's just a crazy number to think about. But here was the big problem. While the audience was happy, and NBC, who was broadcasting the show, was definitely happy, Bing was not. His whole life was just wrapped around always working.

He had to perform two live radio shows a week, act in all these movies. Take two.

And on top of that, he's also got other stuff going on. Like a family. Hang on. Check if you want to switch to a different microphone. I do. Okay, click that. Okay, I'm clicking it. Okay, can you hear us? Can I what? You can hear us. Oh, I now hear you. This is Mary Crosby, who is a celebrity in her own right. But for the purpose of this story is Bing's daughter from his second marriage. Okay. Okay.

How old was your dad when you were born? I think he was like 54. Long after the Kraft Music Hall. Yeah. And he was semi-retired when we came along. So I was fortunate enough to actually have him be just dad.

He taught me how to hunt and fish and play baseball and ride horses. And he used to sing little songs. He would take songs and then make, rewrite lyrics to them. And then sing them at the dining room table. Like this never before released parody about a bird hunt he went on.

So we were a very connected family. It wasn't big Hollywood parties and none of that. Yes, ma'am.

But back when he was doing the Kraft show... What I know about his first family is that they had a very different life because he was working nonstop. So he wanted to scale that back and he wanted to try and be better for his kids, for his personal life. And so he decided the simplest and easiest way to do that was to pre-record the Kraft radio show. That way he'd only have to perform it once, not twice, once for each coast,

And because it wouldn't be live, the pressure would be weighed out. Yeah, something like that. Got it. Okay, well, and like Bing walks into, I don't know, the corner office in LA where the head of NBC Studios is and says, dude, I need to be able to record this. What does the NBC exec say back to him? Well, if you want to know the truth, and it's much less dramatic, Bing didn't go have that conversation. He sent his lawyer. Yeah.

Fair enough. What did they say back to the suit representing Bing? They all look at him like he's crazy. You can't not go on the radio live. You're Bing Crosby. You have to be there live. At this point, pretty much all radio was live.

Almost nobody pre-taped, or should I say pre-recorded to vinyl or shellac records. Remember, this is back in the days of 78 RPM. Now, why don't we give the folks first? And so the sound quality was not as good as a live performance. Oh, listen to the tale of a stalwart male who lost his well-known nanny. I mean, here's a recording on a 16-inch transcription disc, the type they would have been using at the time.

You would hear clicks and pops. And now here. The same when she starts on her travel. Lazily flows from her soul. Is what Bing would have sounded like live. Slowly her length she unraveled. I mean, it's just better. It sounds like Bing is right in front of you. Deep in the country she'll tarry.

Not knowing which way to go. Whispering sweet nothings into your ear. Till the enchantment of Paris. And so NBC was freaked out. There was this fear that if they record these shows, nobody would listen. And so the network simply said, NBC simply says, no, we're not going to do that. So Kraft said no.

And dad was totally frustrated. And so he walked out of the NBC show over the recording dispute. Took his talent and relocated to this small, scrappy media startup. ♪

ABC. ABC was perfectly happy to have Bing Crosby prerecorded. They were just perfectly happy to get any stars on that network at that time. Well, Bing, here we are on a brand new program with Philco. What kind of show are we gonna have? Well, I figure on something evanescent. Charming, gay, carefree, bright, sparkling, scintillating, ebullient. It was the exact same show. Uh, no dull spots, sir? Well, there may be a lull tonight. Bob Hope's coming over a little later. Only difference was it was prerecorded.

But when it aired... The ratings are considerably less. And they go down during the season. And interviewing people, the sort of Nielsen ratings at the time, said, you know, the sound... Who's your guest next week? Next week, Peggy Robert Taylor. He just doesn't sound as good. Hey, I may come back myself. You're always welcome, Peg. Good night, folks. He sounded far away. This was a problem. After you've gone.

And this could have been the beginning of the end. But then, Bing gets a lucky break, courtesy of America's greatest enemy.

And one of the world's greatest audio engineers. Working late at night, we used to listen to the radio. This is BBC One. BBC. The next program now on BBC Two is The Virginian. It was my favorite program. This is Jack Mullen. He was an audio engineer. And this is him speaking to a room full of audio engineers back in the 1980s. I was still active in the signal car. In 1943, as he explained to the room.

An FM communications set. During World War II, he was stationed in the UK working for the Signal Corps. Well, we found that the receivers were interfered with very greatly by radar. Doing some kind of technical work involving radio transmissions. One day he's soldering some cables or something and he's listening to the radio. I always liked classical music. ♪

And that went off earlier than the others, actually. The thing was, is that the BBC went off the air at midnight. And he and his colleagues, they wanted to continue to listen. And so what he would do is he would tune through the dial. You fish around and...

We generally landed on Germany because they were putting out good strong signal and lots of classical music. Big orchestras playing and the music would go on all night long. And he says he was always amazed at just how clear the sound was. These programs from Germany sounded amazing. They sounded live. You wondered if they weren't just using live orchestras and Hitler said, okay, you will play all night, you know. So that's, that was the way it was.

But we found out later, of course, what it was. Fast forward two years. The Allies are slowly marching across Europe. And Jack is there with them. Whenever they took a new town, he'd swoop in and collect whatever machinery or devices that the Nazis had left behind. Our function was to study this stuff and to write reports on it. And one day, just outside of Frankfurt...

Jack bumps into this British officer who's all excited about this tape recorder he's just seen. This man had been down to the Radio Frankfurt operation.

And he said he had seen this machine down there that used this tape and it sounded great. Well, I thought he must have had a tin ear. Because again, Jack was an engineer. He knew that tape recorders sounded terrible. And so I didn't think much of it. Says Cheerio hops in his Jeep. And as we left the top of the hill and came down the mountain, of course, I had every intention of just going back home because it was late in the afternoon. But...

Those late-night German radio broadcasts were ringing in his ears. So we went. So he ends up at this improvised radio studio. Just a house, really. So he comes into this living room. I asked officer in charge if I could hear this machine that they had that used tape. And he said, oh, yeah, sure, okay. And he shows Jack this big tape player. It was called a magnetophone.

And it looked like one of those reel-to-reel tape machines you see in studios sometimes. Didn't really look that different from other tape recorders he'd seen. A guy went out in the back room and got a roll of tape and brought it in, put it on the machine, turned it on. And that's when I flipped. Never, ever had I heard anything like that.

He is utterly amazed at the quality of what he's hearing. He literally cannot distinguish it from a live performance. There was something very magical about them. And when the war finally ended...

He managed to get back to the United States with two of these machines. Again, Robert Bader. This pair of two machines as a souvenir of war. How did you manage to get them? Well, they were laying around in the lab, sending some samples. We can stop the tape. No, nobody was that interested. And about 50 pieces of tape. 50 of these rolls. That was my supply of tape. Now, as for what made the magnetophone sound so good...

It's a little bit technical, but basically what the Nazi engineers had done was taken all of the different advances in recording technology from around the world...

and put them into one box. For example, they had something called AC bias, where they would insert these super high frequencies into the recording to smooth out the sound. They had these reliable motors on the reels, which produced a more consistent sound.

And Jack wanted to understand all this stuff. So Mullen comes to Hollywood and he wants to get some research and development funds and really work this thing out. So the first place he went was the movie studios. And he did some demos. October of 1946, he gets a bunch of Hollywood execs into an auditorium. And there on stage is the MGM Symphony Orchestra and Jack along with his magnetophone. The orchestra starts to play.

Jack records them as they're playing on his magnetophone. And then, he drops the curtain. So now the execs can't see what's happening on stage. Then the music stops. From behind the curtain, the execs hear Jack or someone say to the orchestra, Okay, boys, that's fine. Let's do another take. One, two, three, four. They start playing again. And this time, in the middle of the playing, they raise the curtain. And it's not the musicians playing. No. No.

Musicians were all walking around smoking cigarettes and shaking hands and talking to each other while the magnetophone is playing back what they had just recorded. And everyone's jaw hits the floor. That was the night when it hit.

Bing's radio producer witnessed that demo and said, I got to bring you to meet my boss because he's going to want to be in on this. And that is how Jack Mullen met Bing Crosby. Dad was given a demonstration and he immediately saw the huge potential of these new machines. Bing famously said, what do you need to make this thing work? Jack says, $50,000. And

you know, I'm doing the movie version of this and Bing turns to some guy and says, "Hey, write him a check." But basically that's what happened.

So, Bing started recording Philco Radio Time with Jack. On the two magnetophone machines that he had, using the stack of tapes he brought back from Germany. Yeah, this was all these 50 rolls that I brought. So they just got rolling right off the bat. And season two, the ratings shoot back up. Bing was back.

But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Yeah, it just, like, the whole world changed. I mean, you could point to this moment, this collaboration between Jack and Bing and the Nazis, as really the beginning of modern media making, as well as, I don't know, the turning upside down of what is real, which for a moment at least would send Jack and Bing in very different directions. That's after the break.

Collegiate, collegiate, yes we are collegiate. Nothing intermediate. Webcore stereophonic sound, wonderful reality.

Now that you've reached the end of the reel, just turn it over. You have another complete recording. ♪ The gardens are the things we never wear ♪ ♪ And we're having any use for red-hot flannels ♪ This is Ronia from Ypsilanti, Michigan. Mixtape, a special series from Radiolab, is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, the Shanahan Family Charitable Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. ♪

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Hello. Before we continue, let's just consider home movies editing. Cheese! No! Elliot! Similar to cutting tape. To produce better sound programs. You can use a cut-in shot to guide the viewer to the relevant feeling that you wish to emphasize. For example... Stand by the thing, Al. Your neck will be in the pictures. Hey, stop it! Daddy got the camera? Sure!

Oh, I'm yelling at them. Okay, guys. Elliot, please. Perfect.

I'm Simon Adler. This is Mixtape. Okay, the Magnetophone, this device, allows Bing Crosby to pre-record his show in such high quality that when he broadcasts it out to millions of Americans... It'll sound just like it's live. But that sleight of hand, according to historian Mark Clark there, was only the beginning of what this tape made possible. Because you can edit it. And so suddenly now, you don't have to...

be so constrained. Wait, so was there no editing before the magnetophone? Film, of course, does this long before that, right? You know, this whole notion of editing and cuts and so forth, that all was pioneered well before this in film. But what's new is you can do it with sound and not just images. Which is a deceptively huge shift. Whereas with film, you can literally see the jump cuts happening in front of your eyes.

With audio, that was all invisible. You can cut those pieces of tape and splice them together. Any way you want. And no one was the wiser. Here's a very nice ballad written by two of the best writers. And Bing Crosby started taking advantage of it. This is some raw tape from Bing's family archive that I don't think has ever been publicly played before. Heart and soul I fell in love with you Heart and soul

The way a fool would do madly Because you held me tight And stole a kiss in the night He would do a rehearsal run-through, and then he would then do another performance, and both of those were recorded. And so if something like this happened...

Look at me. Wait a minute, time. Wrong words. Go back a little, John. I lost the place here. It was no big deal. I got carried away listening to my own voice.

They'd just grab the take of this song from the rehearsal and splice it onto that authentic-feeling introduction from the version we just heard. They were able to combine that, and so you could make the best possible show out of two different shows. But ultimately, Bing wanted even more flexibility. Are you rolling back? One more, one more.

And so, before long... They hardly ever did it in front of a live audience. I mean, listening to it, you'd swear there's an audience there. But believe me, it's a fake live show. They were just really, really good at making them. Almost always the audience was spliced in later, which made for some awkward moments. Oh, thanks for the memory. Like in this New York show broadcast in June of 1948. Well?

Well, good evening, Bing. Good evening, Fred. Where Bing has a comedian on, Fred Allen. Say, that applause, that applause had a lot of life to it. Did you sense it as I walked on? The electric quality? Did you have it transcribed out in sunny California for release here in the gloom of West 48th Street? No.

I mean, Fred Allen is trying to make a joke about how there isn't actually an audience there, and Bing sort of bats it down. No, Fred, that applause came from those lovely people sitting out there in the audience. I mean, there was no audience. And yet, you hear an audience that isn't there laughing at a joke about an audience that isn't there. No.

I mean, to be fair, while they were recording, there might have been a few people standing around, so maybe there was a tiny audience. But that's kind of the point, that then, as well as now, some 70 years later, there's no way to know what was actually happening. That's right. It could create, essentially, a lie. All those... All those things... All those things I've never... All those... What the hell are you playing? That ain't the melody.

All those things you've always pined for, gee, I'd like to see you look and swell.

I think he didn't see a conflict between live and on tape in terms of authenticity. Again, Mary Crosby. In terms of him making jokes, he only saw the freedom and the reach and the possibilities. Tip for the last note, isn't it? Now, I can't really hold this against Bing. Here at Radiolab, we do stuff like this all the time. But Jack Mullen...

in at least one moment, felt differently. Good morning, this is Eve. Hi, Eve. Simon here from Radiolab. Hey, Simon, how are you? I'm okay. How are you doing? I'm doing fine, thanks. So this is Eve Mullen Collier, and you are, among many things, the daughter of... Yeah, of Jack Mullen. Yeah.

And I'm sitting in one of his chairs, and I just said a little Hail Mary to calm me, which is something he would have done. According to Eve, a huge appeal of the magnetophone to Jack wasn't just the flexibility, but how it could capture the sounds of real life. She says her dad was always really obsessed with recording things. You know, as an elementary school kid, he made his own records.

You could buy blanks, apparently, at the store and record your own discs. And he was super interested in photography. He started producing documentaries on film. Like this travelogue from 1928. Returning one of California's lesser-traveled routes through the Sierra. Accompanied by records for sound, which included himself narrating. One of the most impressive sights is Cathedral Peak.

towering above Lake Banea. This is some super early documentary footage. You see the Bay Bridge being built. Although a relatively difficult course, altitude is gained quite rapidly on this... Yellowstone when it only had a dirt road. And talking with Eve and watching some of these clips, the sense I came away with is that he was trying to capture something real and true. Like,

what it was actually like to walk through a bombed-out city or stand on the bank of a mountain lake. Gray granite, blue sky, green trees, emerald water. And that the magnetophone to him, well...

It could reproduce real life better than anything. This is the machine I brought back from Germany, but this back here, the electronics, is made up of American components. It was authenticity through the fidelity of the recording. Oh, there's a thread. Here's the machine, and I'm going to play it now. Oh!

They were, in fact, the only sound recorders in the whole United States that performed with such fidelity. There wasn't anything that sounded as good as my two little German machines. And according to Eve, he loved that machine. It was on multiple times a week. He was playing something on that particular machine. And at a certain point, working with Bing Crosby...

he became uncomfortable with how his machines were being used. I remember him telling me about when this was all really new. There was a comedian that came on the show and told a joke, and the crowd just cracked up. They just laughed their heads off. But they couldn't play that joke on the air. The joke was a little too blue. But the producer came in and said, I want that laugh. Save that laugh. That was a great joke.

a glorious laugh. Pretty soon, the producer was asking Jack to keep a whole library of laughs. Like 12 laughs, you know, one through 12. That they could use whenever they wanted. They would think, oh, well, that's good for a laugh number three.

And this all came to a head in 1947. I kind of, I sort of hesitate to mention this one, but one day... She says Jack was there recording the show. A comedian comes in and tells a joke that's just not funny. And the producer came in and said, hey, I want you to use laugh number three after this joke. And it didn't warrant, he thought the joke didn't warrant that voice to receive a laugh.

He thought that that was wrong. That was the wrong thing. She says she's not exactly sure why that particular moment stopped him in his tracks. But maybe it was a question of degrees. I mean, it's one thing to take a chuckle and turn it into a belly laugh, but to completely invent a laugh when there was no laugh before... You know, it was leading the audience, and it wasn't honest. He was big on, you know, he had high regard for purity and authenticity.

in sound, of course, but in joy. She says, as an example, There's John and Eve having fun, at least, with a little sled. He wouldn't touch the family movies that he'd shot of her and her siblings. There's Eve making angels. Those were off-limits. There you go. Yeah, those were all just raw. All the home movies were just raw things. John had never been on skates before. Old-time Swedish lady. There was always some project on skates.

It's interesting to me that the family footage that your dad took, he never edited. I don't know. I think it was important to him. He did, you know, once a month or so, he'd pull them out and we'd watch like when we were babies. And he'd tell stories. That's how he grew up. Everybody sat on the front porch telling stories. That still is kind of what spoke to his heart.

So it was a good day's fun. And so in that moment when the producer told him to put in that laugh, Eve says Jack would have pushed back and said no.

And while, yes, this moment's small, it was the start of something massive. Some distorted videos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on social media. Super realistic videos that use artificial intelligence. This pseudo-reality we inhabit today. Now we have fake voices. I'm having a very lovely pregnancy so far. I mean, every time we pull up Facebook or Instagram to post something, we find ourselves torn.

between, I guess you could say, Jack and Bing. You know, between wanting something real and true, and then on the other hand, wanting the freedom, the flexibility, to edit ourselves into whatever version we want. And what we often end up with then is this cut-up, overdubbed mixtape of an identity, where even we forget where the manipulation ends and the real begins. Where the blue of the night

Oh, good job. Okay, here you go. Okay, bye-bye. Next week... I remember him, like, exclaiming, you know, being super excited about cassette tapes. Oh, really? Thinking, oh my God, this is like the perfection of all of this. We fast forward to the cassette with the story of what happens when this identity manipulation gets weaponized. ♪♪

Mixtape is reported, produced, scored, and sound designed by me, Simon Adler, with original music throughout by me.

Incalculable reporting and production assistance was provided by Eli Cohen. I'd like to give a special thanks to Michelle Helms, Pete Hammer, Rich Flores, Mara Mills, Jonathan Stern, and Claudia Muse. Though their voices weren't in this piece, their input certainly was. And to Mary Crosby and Robert Bader for opening up Bing's archive for us and enabling us to fill this episode with so much of Bing's music.

I'm Simon Adler, and we'll have another tape for you next week. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latef Nasser are our co-hosts. Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer, and Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Niyanasambandham, Matt

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