As anyone who’s recently attended a show by Foreigner or Lynyrd Skynyrd knows, it’s become as common as a guitar solo to see a classic rock & roll outfit without any original members in the lineup. But what few may realize is that the template for that concept may have started 80 years ago today — with the death of a big-band musician.
On Dec. 15, 1944, Glenn Miller, one of the kings of the big-band scene — the dance-pop of its time — stepped aboard a military plane to cross the English Channel from England to France. He was never seen again; both the plane and its three passengers vanished. A low-key, spectacled but hard-headed trombonist and bandleader, Miller had placed seven songs in the Number One slot on the Billboard singles chart. Days-of-yore bangers like “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” “In the Mood,” and “Pennsylvania Six-Five Thousand” and sonorous, smoothy arranged rhapsodies like “Moonlight Serenade” pulled excitable teenagers onto dance floors and moved millions of records in the process. (Miller was the recipient of the first gold record, in fact.) At the time of his disappearance, Miller had enlisted in the U.S. Army to lead the Army Air Forces Band in Europe during World War II and was flying to France to play a show there for American troops.
His death should have been the end of Millermania, especially since rock & roll would arrive a decade later and instantly vanquish big-band music to pop’s past. But not long after he went missing, Miller’s estate gave the go-ahead for a new Glenn Miller Orchestra, with a replacement bandleader, to resume touring — and despite a few hiccups and changes in bandleaders, it’s been that way ever since. As early as 1957, one writer said that “the survival of Glenn Miller’s popularity” was “a strange phenomenon in the music business.” This year alone, the GMO played more than 150 shows, recreating Miller’s songs and arrangements as if it were still 1940 and “String of Pearls” was topping the pop charts.
Could this template — legendary bands with nothing even close to an original member in the lineup — portend the future of classic-rock road shows? Decades from now, will there be a Grateful Dead or Rolling Stones with all-young musicians recreating the repertoire? Based on the Miller example, it’s entirely plausible. “Nowadays, people either know Glenn Miller by name or they recognize the songs, so the music has stood the test of time,” says Erik Stabnau, the 32-year-old tenor saxophonist and current bandleader of the GMO. “I have to imagine it’s going to be the same thing for rock bands from probably every decade. For our fans, and I’m sure for rock fans too, people just want to hear this music that’s famous and popular, and they want to hear it performed live.”
As classic rock enters a similar phase, Rolling Stone asked Stabnau and Charles DeStefano, president and CEO of Glenn Miller Productions, for lessons they learned and would pass along to the next generation of legacy (or ghost) bands. “It needs to be run like a business,” says DeStefano. “We come to work every day and we’re putting together tour schedules, contacting venues and buyers, and trying to make this happen. It’s a business plan.”
When possible, incorporate a mysterious death, and maybe a few conspiracy theories, into the band’s backstory.
Long before Buddy Holly, Otis Redding, Jim Croce, and members of Skynyrd died in plane crashes, Miller had his own fatal aviation misadventure. As recounted in Dennis M. Spragg’s book Glenn Miller Declassified, the crash was attributed to “pilot error, mechanical malfunction and weather,” particularly frozen fuel lines. That fact alone lent a heroic grace note to Miller’s life. “I don’t know too many people who might give up that sort of a career to join the Army and then have a tragic death on top of it,” says DeStefano. “It’s unbelievable.”
But even better for business is the mystery factor. For years after Miller’s death, theories ricocheted about what could have happened, including the plane being shot down by friendly fire or outlandish stories of Miller becoming a Nazi spy, dying of cancer in a British hospital or having a fatal heart attack in a brothel in Paris (the latter via a later-discredited German newspaper account). Although those stories have been discounted, Miller’s vanishing act has only added to the allure of the GMO. “Even nowadays, when we meet people after shows, at least one person will come up to me and say, ‘Hey, you want to know what really happened to Glenn’s plane?’” says Stabnau. “Some people think Glenn defected to Germany or wound up in Argentina.”
Film a biopic to cement the group’s legacy.
In 1946, two years after Miller’s death, the GMO was first revived partly as a way to fulfill obligations of Miller’s contract with RCA, reported Spragg. Complications with Miller saxophonist and singer Tex Beneke, who fronted the first ghost band, led to that lineup’s demise around 1950. DeStefano says Beneke “eventually rebelled against the strict managerial insistence on playing Miller’s music exactly” as Miller wanted it, and soon formed his own band with a mouthful of a moniker: “Tex Beneke and His Orchestra Playing the Music Made Famous by Glenn Miller.”
But Miller’s renaissance truly kicked in with the 1954 biopic The Glenn Miller Story, starring Jimmy Stewart in the title role. The Bohemian Rhapsody of its day, it was the third highest-grossing film of the year, right behind the Bogart classic The Caine Mutiny. As with just about every subsequent biopic of any musician, it was picked apart for historical inaccuracies, yet its success opened the door to a full-fledged ongoing tribute band. “Nineteen fifty-six came along, and they were like, ‘You know what? Maybe we can get a couple of years out of this,’” says DeStefano. Another new Miller Orchestra, this time led by its drummer, Ray McKinley, started up and has been in place ever since (that’s the one now fronted by Stabnau). Currently, according to DeStefano, the Miller estate controls “some of the music and merchandise and the publishing.” Glenn Miller Productions, a separate company, has licensed the GMO name from the family since 1956.
Go after copycats!
Presaging the time when rock, R&B, and doo-wop groups of the Fifties and Sixties would be dogged by fake or semi-legit bands, the GMO has had its share of headaches and legal issues. In the early Seventies, Miller’s family sued a British bandleader who was copying Miller’s sound without the estate’s permission. In 1975, the GMO had to publicly announce it would not be appearing as advertised on a cruise ship devoted to big-band music — and that the “Glenn Miller Orchestra, Ted Beneke Conducting,” who were on the voyage, were not authorized by the estate.
“There were some different situations with the misuse of the name ‘Glenn Miller’ to sell a ticket,” says DeStefano of those days. “We never tried to stop, say, the John Smith Orchestra doing a tribute to Glenn Miller. But when it was the Glen Miller Memorial Orchestra or the Glenn Miller Tribute Orchestra, or words of that nature with no mention of John Smith — we went after those people, and successfully, and stopped the misuse of the name. You have to protect the name.” DeStefano says that trademarks registered in the Eighties finally put an end to the fakes.
Give the people what they want: the hits.
The current GMO adheres to the tightly rehearsed arrangements Miller conceived more than 80 years ago, as per the fans. “They want to hear the big hits,” says Stabnau. “They want to hear ‘In the Mood’ and ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo,’ and they expect it to sound like it does on the recordings.”
In that regard, Stabnau has advice for those future classic rockers. “Some bands might think, ‘Hey, let’s invent new ways to play our big hits,’ but I don’t think that’s necessary,” he says. “Play this music the way it was recorded. There are some improvised solos here and there, but that’s really not the point of this music. People come to hear the songs and melodies that they know.”
And when it comes to recording remakes or even tweaking the arrangements, DeStefano says to be careful — as the Miller team learned firsthand with albums like In the Mod, which tried to introduce big-band music to the counterculture in 1967. “Some definitely different material there, right?” he says. “Some great arrangements, of course. But they were not as well received as we would have liked to have seen them.” In the Eighties, when DeStefano was a musician in the band, the trumpet section briefly included…flugelhorns? “I wasn’t too fond of that,” he says. “That was something where I said [when he switched to operations], ‘No, let’s get rid of those.’ I understand wanting to modernize a little bit, but it changed the style of the music.”
Don’t be a re-enactor — or sexist.
Should a ghost band recreate the precise wardrobe of the originals or modernize for the times? In an approach that way-way-in-the-future members of, say, Guns N’ Roses or Pearl Jam might want to consider, the GMO opts for a bit of each. The musicians wear same-colored jackets and ties, and the “Glenn Miller Orchestra” logo adorns the music stands. Stabnau also serves as emcee, sharing background info on the music and history.
But the GMO is committed to not being stuck in the past. “We don’t necessarily go strictly for a Forties hairstyle,” says Stabnau. “We have more of a modern look. Not every single detail is Forties-themed.” Adds DeStefano, “When you look at the band today, we’re a bit freer when it comes to hairstyles — beards on the band, stuff like that. We now have women in the band. We think that’s important too.”
Get ready to hear from the music geeks in the audience.
Although the “greatest generation” that constituted Miller’s original following are largely no longer with us, the boomers who inherited a love of big-band music might be in the house — and may have questions about the lineup. “Every year, there might have been slightly different instrumentation in Glenn’s band,” says Stabnau. “The band started small and then got bigger. He added a vocal group eventually. So it depends what year you’re looking at. Right now, we’re traveling with what would have been the 1939 instrumentation. So sometimes the fans will say, ‘Oh, I thought Glenn played with another trombone or trumpet player.’ Well, sometimes he did and sometimes he didn’t.”
Try to ignore the cynics.
When it comes to fans of boomer-rock bands with replacement members, Stabnau is well-versed in skepticism. “That’s going to be inevitable,” he says. “In our experience, the reviews are overwhelmingly positive versus occasionally negative reviews, and I’m sure it will be the same for any rock band in a similar situation. There are always going to be naysayers, which is unfortunate, but one thing this group can provide, I hope, is giving the audience that kind of energetic concert experience they would have gotten 80 years ago.”
DeStefano echoes that sentiment: “Orchestras that go back hundreds of years are still playing all that beautiful Brahms and Beethoven and Chopin, and you don’t take those arrangements and change them up too much and go too far, right? Nobody wants to hear some great classical piece of music turned upside down, where they all walk away and say, ‘That’s not how I expected Beethoven’s Fifth to sound.’ Same thing with us, and I think with others who perform in classic rock.”
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