I first heard Chuck Cecil's radio program while tooling around greater Los Angeles in my yellow and white '55 Chevy with my buddies.
In those days, we'd head out for a drive on one of the new freeways that seemed to open every other year as southern California expanded to accommodate it's every-growing population [we could sure use a few more of those, now].
It was fun to race across the newly laid surfaces at 65 mph with hardly another car in sight while grooving to the big band sounds of Charlie Barnet, or Stan Kenton or many of the others big bands which we as honor in the video tribute that closes this piece.
It's hard to believe that Chuck is still doing his radio program 67 years later.
At the age of ninety-one, he is as an inspiration to all of us to "do what you love and the rest will follow."
© -Steven Cerra . Copyright protected; all rights reserved.
"Chuck
Cecil, [now 90 years old] went to his first big band show in 1939, driving with
three high school friends in a Model A Ford to South Gate to see bandleader Jimmie
Lunceford at the Trianon Ballroom.
The
following year, he was at the opening of the Hollywood Palladium to see Tommy
Dorsey and a skinny singer named Frank Sinatra.
Nearly
three-quarters of a century later, Cecil is still swinging to the same music:
His weekly big band radio show, "Swingin' Years," has been on the air
almost continuously since it debuted in 1956.
It began
as filler for an empty Saturday morning slot on Hollywood 's KFI station and was later
syndicated to more than 300 stations nationwide and broadcast internationally,
on 240 ships and 170 military bases, by Armed Forces Radio Network. Though the
show is now heard only on Long Beach 's KKJZ and Long Island 's WPPB, it reaches an average of
46,000 listeners a week.
His
cheery Midwestern tones larded with corn-pone quips like "Let's split an
egg and fry a watermelon," Cecil intersperses big band music with factoids
about the songs and firsthand memories of the men and women who recorded them —
the Detroit Tigers, for instance, were winning the World Series the day Bing
Crosby recorded "Only Forever."
Now
almost 91, the host seems a little mystified by the show's longevity — but not
by the long-lived popularity of the music.
"It
was an emotional time, and a hardship time, but it was a survival time,"
said the slim, white-haired Cecil, dressed in denim jeans and a chambray shirt
that brought out the blue in his eyes. "That's why the music was so
treasured. It did lift people's spirits during the Depression and the
war."
Cecil was
born the day after Christmas 1922 to a rancher who lost hundreds of heads of
cattle and 650 acres of good Oklahoma land in the drought that brought
on the Dust Bowl and preceded the Great Depression.
When his
father couldn't feed his family of six anymore, he loaded them into a truck and
drove to California, installing them in an apartment in Hollywood while he
began building a house in what is now Sherman Oaks.
At Van
Nuys High, he double-dated with local girls Jane Russell and Norma Jean Baker
before they became movie stars (and Miss Baker changed her name to Marilyn
Monroe). A drama teacher told him he had a good voice for radio.
During
World War II, despite a childhood injury that left him with a lifelong limp,
Cecil left a note for his mother saying he was going to enlist and might be
late for dinner, and went off to join the Navy. He trained to fly Grumman
Wildcats, and had just qualified for combat duty when the war ended.
By then,
Cecil had already studied broadcasting at Los Angeles City College . Newly out of the service, he
landed a job at a new station in Klamath Falls , Ore. The gig included doing a
"remote broadcast" of a local performance by a 17-piece big band
accompanied by a 16-year-old female vocalist.
Her name
was Edna. When she turned 17, Cecil married her.
That was
1947. "Their" song was Perry Como's "They Say It's
Wonderful."
When
Cecil was hired by KFI in 1952, the big band years were already over.
"Swingin' Years" was an exercise in nostalgia, right from its debut
four years later.
"Big
band music was in decline," Cecil said. "The big bands themselves
were fading in popularity. It was vintage music."
But the
show was a hit and became a weekly feature.
Chuck and
Edna set up house in the San Fernando Valley , when it was still mostly orange
groves, and raised four children. Cecil, by now a local celebrity, was made
honorary mayor of Woodland Hills and asked to ride in open cars in local
parades.
The show
grew in popularity. Disneyland hired Cecil to do a series of "Swingin' Years"
shows in 1961. Ronald Reagan did a "Swingin' Years" TV special in
1962. Cecil even hosted "Swingin' Years" cruises, sailing the Caribbean with bandleader Freddy Martin.
Cecil
hung out with Harry James, lunched with Artie Shaw and Bing Crosby, and
interviewed Peggy Lee in her boudoir. (He sat on the bed while the singer
reclined.) Cecil recorded and archived the interviews, using them to introduce
his listeners to the men and women behind the music.
Bandleader
Shaw, Cecil remembers, invited him to his Newbury Park house and then insisted on doing
the interview while driving to lunch. "It was the most terrifying drive of
my life," Cecil said. "He was a wild driver."
The
opportunity to interview Crosby arrived suddenly, when a record producer friend said,
"I can get you in to see him, but you have to come while he's eating
lunch." Cecil asked questions while Der Bingle ate a burger.
"This
music is the voice of America , and he has documented it,"
said veteran deejay Bubba Jackson, who hosts an evening KJazz blues show.
"Thanks to Chuck Cecil, that music will never disappear. He is one of the
great historians of American culture."
Crooner
Tony Bennett, who at 87 is three years younger than Cecil, called the radio
host "a great jazz historian."
"I
want to thank him for keeping the music alive," he said, "and for
playing my records all these years!"
Today,
the Cecils are spry and active, and walk a brisk three miles a day near their
tidy Spanish-style home on a quiet Ventura street, where they moved 11 years
ago.
"That's
one of the reasons we moved to Ventura — because we can walk to the
market, to the shops, to the doctor," Cecil said. "We can walk
everywhere but the cemetery."
On
Sunday, there's no walk. Instead, the Cecils attend church in the morning and
go dancing in the afternoon.
Now almost
91, Chuck Cecil says big band music brings back good memories.
Cecil
confessed he's no hoofer, though he and Edna did sign up for swing dance
lessons a few years back.
"Radio
announcers are like musicians," he said. "They generally can't
dance."
Nevertheless,
their Sunday ritual includes a circuit of big band-themed events at clubs in Ventura , Oxnard , Canoga Park and Simi Valley .
Each
week, Cecil and his wife assemble "Swingin' Years" manually, without
the aid of computers, for the Saturday and Sunday morning broadcasts. The
recording studio is a back room of their home filled with casual photographs of
the radio man sitting with jazz giants such as Woody Herman, Count Basie,
Lionel Hampton and Bennett.
Working
from a massive library of more than 30,000 78-, 45- and 33-rpm records, and his
own personal library of interviews with 356 band leaders, singers and sidemen,
Cecil mixes dance tunes, sentimental ballads, jazzy jumpers and novelty
records. Often you can hear the sizzle of the needle on the platter.
Cecil
said he sometimes tires of the 15 to 20 hours required to produce each week's
"Swingin' Years" broadcasts. "I've done more than 20,000 hours
of programming," he said. "Maybe that number has got my attention,
but I've lost a little of my zip for the show."
Despite
that, Cecil was planning to do a new "Swingin' Years" series on
bandleaders and their theme songs — Glenn Miller's "Moonlight
Serenade," Duke Ellington's "Take the 'A' Train" — and another
on the lesser-known sidemen who worked for the famous bandleaders.
Almost
none of the musicians Cecil admired or befriended are still alive.
"When
you get past 90, people really start corking off," said Edna Cecil, who
celebrates back-to-back birthdays with her husband, turning 84 on Christmas
Day. "But not us!"
The
Cecils' daughter Sherri recently returned to Ventura , moving in with her parents and
bringing modern technology with her: the Internet.
As a
result, Cecil was able to hear his own show for the first time since he moved
to Ventura , which doesn't have a radio
station that broadcasts "Swingin' Years."
A couple
of Saturdays back, he and his wife tuned in to a live stream from WPPB in Long Island .
"I
lit two candles and we sat there with sandwiches and wine and the music — for
four whole hours," Edna Cecil said. "It was heaven."
She said
her husband fails to appreciate his own contribution to the American music
scene.
"He
doesn't realize how important he has been," she said. "Many musicians
tell him that — 'You kept the music alive.' But he doesn't have a clue.""
I have been listening to Chuck Cecil's show for the last year. It is a treasure. I was not even alive when much of the music was written, but it is great music and deserves to be heard especially the way Chuck Cecil gives it a rich background and puts it in perspective in the times.
ReplyDeleteI would love to be able to have access to an archive of all his shows. it would be wonderful to be able to listen to many of the shows he has done over the years.