Before Seattle Rocked: A City and Its Music

5. Easing Depression

121 Chapter 5 easing depression i n October 1929 the twenties boom went bust in an implosion of overextended credit and falling market confidence. The aftermath, twelve years of misery wrapped in the singularly apt description “the Great Depression,” was the worst social and economic disaster America has ever seen. Three million Americans lost their jobs in 1930, and within three years they were joined by twelve million more. Mortgage and rent money evaporated, construction and manufacturing stopped, and Hoovervilles sprouted in cities across the country. Though diverse, Seattle’s economy was dominated by interdependent industries—fishing, logging, shipbuilding, light manufacturing, and retailing—that were acutely sensitive to seasonal and market fluctuations. They languished, and as the Dirty Thirties shuffled on, unemployment hit 26 percent, breadlines lengthened, and labor organizers clashed with police. There were heartening distractions: The soaring new Exchange Building was Art Deco proof that Seattle was becoming a “world city”; the papers were proclaiming that local banks were “liquid”; and even at a stiff $222 ($3.75 per month on the installment plan), Victor’s Radio-Electrola Phonograph was finding buyers. But on the rain-sloshed sidewalks of Pioneer Square, lines of men stood waiting at soup kitchens and relief shelters, their gray suits matching skies that had never looked grayer. For musicians, the Depression was a time of feast and famine, and every good gig was too often followed by weeks of scuffling. Saxophonist Andy Piatt got lucky: armbruster-4p.indd 121 8/4/11 11:25 AM 122 § eaSing depreSSion I was a pretty average musician, but good enough that I could always find a job playing music when I couldn’t do anything else. When I was in my last year in high school, I started playing the saxophone, and after graduation a bunch of us went over to Yakima to pick apples. One night I went into a tavern; they had a three-piece combo, so I asked if I could sit in and play a tune—“Sure, kid, come on.” When I finished, the owner came over and asked if I wanted a job. You bet I did—playing music beat picking fruit! I worked in that little tavern band for a while, then went over to Coulee Dam and played two and a half years at Whitey Channin’s and Jack Lewis’s Silver Dollar—six nights a week for a dollar an hour. Those Coulee Dam joints ran twenty-four hours a day and would hire anybody carrying a musical instrument. The dam workers would come in and throw silver dollars in my horn. Then I came over to Seattle, and there was plenty of dance band work here.1 hard timeS Work there was, but a musician had to be versatile. Those accustomed to the security and sheet music of legitimate music found the going tough, and former theater musicians had the worst time of anyone. The beginning of the Depression coincided cruelly with the end of the Silent Era, and by 1929 only 5,000 of the nation’s 22,000 theater musicians employed in 1926 still had their jobs. As if that weren’t enough, more technological innovations intruded: Jukeboxes and prerecorded “piped-in” music bumped bands from restaurants, and electrically recorded transcription discs allowed radio stations to dispense with staff orchestras. The American Federation of Musicians signed collective bargaining agreements with film studios, radio networks, and record companies, but this covered only a tiny fraction of professional musicians. For millions more, the new decade dawned bleak.2 Seattle’s theater musicians fared better than others, because the transition to sound movies was slow. Virtually all downtown theaters were in the midst of five-year contracts with Local 76, and operators themselves were hedging their bets; early sound technology was by no means perfected (Variety magazine was full of tales of embarrassing synchronization failures ), and as late as 1932 studios were issuing films in both sound and silent prints. Under these circumstances, retaining live music and letting the sound transition take a deliberate course was seen as good business. Organarmbruster -4p.indd 122 8/4/11 11:25 AM eaSing depreSSion § 123 ists, too, had long been a popular draw, and theaters were loath to move too far ahead of public taste. Moreover, pipe organs had been very expensive investments, and many operators preferred to see them earn their keep as long as the public...