Bing crosby biography imdbpro

He could do four shows a week, if he chose, and then take a month off. But the networks and sponsors were adamantly opposed. The public wouldn't stand for 'canned' radio, the networks argued. There was something magic for listeners in the fact that what they were hearing was being performed, and heard live everywhere, at that precise instant.

Some of the best moments in comedy came when a line was blown and the star had to rely on wit to rescue a bad situation. Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Phil Harris, and, yes, Crosby were masters at this, and the networks weren't about to give it up easily. Crosby left the network and remained off the air for seven months, creating a legal battle with his sponsor Kraft that was settled out of court.

Crosby returned to broadcasting for the last 13 weeks of the — season. The Mutual Network, on the other hand, pre-recorded some of its programs as early as for The Shadow with Orson Welles. Murdo MacKenzie of Bing Crosby Enterprises had seen a demonstration of the German Magnetophon in June —the same device that Jack Mullin had brought back from Radio Frankfurt with 50 reels of tape, at the end of the war.

The 6. Alexander M. Poniatoff ordered Ampexwhich he founded into manufacture an improved version of the Magnetophone. Crosby hired Mullin to start recording his Philco Radio Time show on his German-made machine in August using the same 50 reels of I. Farben magnetic tape that Mullin had found at a radio station at Bad Nauheim near Frankfurt while working for the U.

Army Signal Corps. The advantage was editing. As Crosby wrote in his autobiography: By using tape, I could do a thirty-five- or forty-minute show, then bing crosby biography imdbpro it down to the twenty-six or twenty-seven minutes the program ran. In that way, we could take out jokes, gags, or situations that didn't play well and finish with only the prime meat of the show; the solid stuff that played big.

We could also take out the songs that didn't sound good. It gave us a chance to first try a recording of the songs in the afternoon without an audience, then another one in front of a studio audience. We'd dub the one that came off best into the final transcription. It gave us a chance to ad-lib as much as we wanted, knowing that excess ad-libbing could be sliced from the final product.

If I made a mistake in singing a song or in the script, I could have some fun with it, then retain any of the fun that sounded amusing. Mullin's memoir of these early days of experimental recording agrees with Crosby's account: In the evening, Crosby did the whole show before an audience. If he muffed a song then, the audience loved it—thought it was very funny—but we would have to take out the show version and put in one of the rehearsal takes.

Sometimes, if Crosby was having fun with a song and not really working at it, we had to make it up out of two or three parts. This ad-lib way of working is commonplace in the recording studios today, but it was all new to us. Today they wouldn't seem very off-color, but things were different on radio then. They got enormous laughs, which just went on and on.

We couldn't use the jokes, but Bill asked us to save the laughs. A couple of weeks later he had a show that wasn't very funny, and he insisted that we put in the salvaged laughs. Thus the laugh-track was born. Crosby started the tape recorder revolution in America. In his film Mr. MusicCrosby is seen singing into an Ampex tape recorder that reproduced his voice better than anything else.

Bing crosby biography imdbpro

Also inthe Music Digest estimated that Crosby recordings filled more than half of the 80, weekly hours allocated to recorded radio music. Crosby exerted an important influence on the development of the postwar recording industry. He worked for NBC at the time and wanted to record his shows; however, most broadcast networks did not allow recording.

This was primarily because the quality of recording at the time was not as good as live broadcast sound quality. All four sons continued to collect monies from that fund until their deaths. As a young adult he enjoyed carousing and drinking and actually received another nickname: "Binge" Crosby. He once spent two months in jail weekends only for DUI after a minor car accident, and surprised and shocked interviewers by advocating that pot be decriminalized.

Crosby's biggest musical hit was his recording of the Irving Berlin classic ' White Christmas '. He first sang the song inand it became one of the best-selling recordings of all time. In he became the first recipient of the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. His popularity as a singer was matched by his success as an actor. He appeared in dozens of movies from the s — sand received the Academy Award for Best Actor in Crosby also had regular radio shows from the s — sduring the s he recorded many songs with the Andrews Sistershe starred in a network television sitcom in —, and made numerous short films and television appearances.

Crosby's desire to pre-record his radio shows was a significant factor in the development, and in the radio industry's adoption, of magnetic tape recording.