From: "Doug Bright" <75366.2463@compuserve.com> To: Subject: Article: March, 2005 Date: Saturday, March 05, 2005 7:55 PM PATIENCE AND PRUDENCE: A SISTER ACT REMEMBERED By Doug Bright Some time during the summer of 1956, pianist/bandleader Mark McIntyre brought his two daughters, 14-year-old Patience and 11-year-old Prudence, to Gold Star Studios in Hollywood to cut a bouncy update of a sentimental waltztime ballad that had scored a hit for crooner Gene Austin in 1927. By October, the new rendition of "Tonight You Belong To Me" had been picked up by Liberty Records and had rocketed to Number 4 on Billboard magazine's national record charts, making instant stars of the unassuming young girls. Today, thanks to the interest of Brian Gari, a veteran singer/songwriter and record producer, the sister act of Patience and Prudence is being celebrated in a well researched CD compilation from Collectors' Choice. Gari's discovery of Patience and Prudence came indirectly when he heard a 1969 remake of "Tonight You Belong To Me" recorded by a California surfer-girl group called the Honeys and produced by one of his lifelong heroes, Beach Boy Brian Wilson. Fascinated by the old-style quality of the song and the vocal countermelody that characterized the arrangement, Gari investigated further. "When I researched the song and heard the Patience and Prudence version," he explains in his liner notes, "I realized where Brian Wilson got the basic arrangement." The deeper Gari's research went, the more fascinated with Patience and Prudence he became. When he asked Gordon Anderson at Collectors' Choice if the company had any interest in compiling the young sister act's recorded works on CD, Anderson offered him the job. As Gari discovered through hours of online frustration, information on his subject wasn't readily available. It was only by poring through old newspaper clippings and interviewing key participants that he gradually pieced together the story of Patience and Prudence. Their father, Mark McIntyre, had been raised in Texas and had started on piano at age five. At twelve he was playing with local dance bands, and three years later he was on the radio in Houston. He was eventually discovered by Frank Sinatra, and from 1942 to 1948 he backed the legendary vocalist regularly on West Coast appearances and recorded about 136 sides with him. Consequently, McIntyre was well established in the southern California music scene by the time his daughter Patience reached adolescence. "He was an arranger, composer, and conductor," she explains. "He did orchestrations for everybody! My dad was a first-call musician, and sometimes we would go to sessions when we were kids." Not surprisingly, the two McIntyre girls displayed artistic talent early in life. They studied dance and piano and could play by ear as well as from the printed page. "Since Dad was a Chopinist, we heard Chopin," Patience elaborates. Mom liked to play the Gershwin preludes and "Stompin' At The Savoy". Having grown up on the Arizona-Sonora border, she knew a lot of Mexican songs. The music was all over the map, including French songs, East Texas down-and-dirty, all kinds of jazz. We must have played "Rock Around The Clock" a hundred times." One day in April 1956, while the family was driving home from a visit to friends in Malibu, the girls sang a song they had learned at camp the previous summer. The song, written and recorded as a waltz in 1927, was "Tonight You Belong To Me". Recalling her first exposure to the song, Patience McIntyre explains, ""Tonight" was an around-the-campfire tune that was already in 4/4 when we picked it up. It was Mom's idea to record it for the grandparents." The opportunity for the recording session came while Mark McIntyre was at Gold Star Studios in Hollywood working on a song he had written with Robert Wells, who had composed the lyrics for Mel Torm`e's "The Christmas Song". The piece, entitled "A Smile and A Ribbon", was intended for Wells' wife's cabaret act. Since the song had a "little girl" feel to it, McIntyre recruited his daughter Prudence, now 11, to record a demo. Thanks to Patience McIntyre and the family archive, that demo, with Prudence confidently fronting a rhythm section featuring her father as pianist, appears on the Collectors' Choice compilation, THE BEST OF PATIENCE AND PRUDENCE. The sisters' gift version of "Tonight You Belong To Me", sung the way they had learned it at camp, is also included. As planned, "A Smile and A Ribbon" went to Lisa Kirk and "Tonight You Belong To Me" went to Mark McIntyre's parents back in Texas. In addition, however, McIntyre gave a copy of "Tonight" to one of his collaborators, Ross Bagdasarian who, in turn, presented it to Si Waronker at Liberty records. "It's a certain infectious little sound they get," Waronker apparently said after hearing it. "Whenever I hear them sing, I smile." As a result of Waronker's interest, Mark McIntyre and his daughters returned to Gold Star Studios to recut "Tonight You Belong To Me" with a rhythm section that included the now-legendary jazz guitarist Barney Kessel. "Dad wrote an arrangement that added melodic interest to both the chorus and the bridge and expanded the counterpoint," Patience elaborates. To compensate for the relatively thin sound of the girls' voices, they each added a unison vocal track. For the record's flip side, Prudence and the rhythm section recut "A Smile and A Ribbon" without an extra vocal track. After the session, Si Waronker and his Liberty record label took possession of the master tapes, and the McIntyres left town for a two-week summer vacation to Yosemite. They were completely unprepared for the surprise that greeted them when they returned home. Thanks to a Boston disc jockey who had played the record fourteen times in one day, "Tonight You Belong To Me" had broken wide open, generating orders from local retailers amounting to four thousand copies. By September it was on Billboard magazine's national pop record chart, peaking at Number 4 on October 6th and generating a sales figure of 2000,000 copies. So great was the demand, in fact, that the relatively small Liberty label couldn't keep up with it, and as a result, the company probably lost some market share to cover versions of the song, including one by Lawrence Welk's Lennon Sisters which reached Number 14 in early November. Nevertheless, the Patience and Prudence version proved to be Liberty's first Top Ten hit, earning a gold record and saving the company from impending bankruptcy. Consequently, ready or not, Patience and Prudence McIntyre had become overnight stars through a turn of events which the family still characterizes as "the accident". "We were extremely surprised," Patience remembers, "but it didn't throw us off too much because my folks were pretty square, middle-of-the-road people, and we lived in a part of L.A. where all the studio people are. We just kept doing everything the same. We went to the Girl Scout meetings, we went to the Sunday-school choir things, we went to the Y, we went to summer camp, and if somebody down the block wanted a babysitter, I would do the babysitting. The whole time, I think we missed three days of school." As offers poured in from TV variety shows, movie studios, and ad agencies, the streetwise McIntyres screened them carefully to protect their daughters from exploitation and maintain the stability of family life. "The stuff we turned down was probably more interesting than the stuff that we did," Patience suggests. "We turned down "An Affair To Remember"--the kids singing in the hospital to Deborah Kerr. We turned down a bunch of commercials, too, because my folks didn't want us to be commercialized." Nevertheless, the one television offer that the McIntyres accepted was the Perry Como Show, recorded in New York at a theater owned by Billy Rose, who had written the lyrics to the song that had brought them there. "Right before we went on," Patience recalls, "I looked at my dad and I said, "Dad, what are we doing here?" We knew we were just a passing thing." Liberty, however, was eager for a follow-up record, and on October 5th, just after returning home to Los Angeles, the girls went into Studio B at Capitol Recording Studios to put it on tape. The A-side was a smartly arranged and richly orchestrated McIntyre rewrite of an earlier Teresa Brewer hit, "Gonna Get Along Without You Now". The flip, McIntyre's "The Money Tree", was a whimsical piece with a bright, wholesome sound due to the girls' confident vocals, a bouncy arrangement, and lush orchestration. By December the new release had climbed to Number 12 on the charts, and the industry magazine CASH BOX cited the new sister act as "The Most Promising Vocal Combination of 1956." Patience and Prudence began the year 1957 with a song co-written by their father which combined good-natured humor with shrewd market positioning. In "We Can't Sing Rhythm and Blues", backed by a light, Sinatra-style big-band swing arrangement, the girls confessed, "We are up a tree and can't ignore it. You see, we haven't got the voices for it." The attempt to turn weakness into strength in the age of rock and roll was a brilliant strategy that should have worked, but the record didn't chart. Not even "Dreamer's Bay", a flip side with the gently swinging sentimentality of "Tonight You Belong To Me", succeeded in getting this disc the attention it deserved. Nevertheless, Mark and Audrey McIntyre, their daughters, and Liberty Records persevered. Their next record, "You Tattletale", kept the vintage-pop strategy going with an up-tempo number graced by honky-tonk piano. The hauntingly wistful "(if there were) Witchcraft" was an Audrey McIntyre rewrite of a song written in 1937 for a YWCA camp. While the horn section riffed gently under a luxuriant string section, the girls convincingly delivered the number in three-part harmony, with Patience overdubbing the third part. It was an artistic masterpiece that should have succeeded in the mainstream pop market, but nothing came of it. In 1958 Liberty tried a new strategy with Patience and Prudence, replacing their orchestral backing with a stripped-down rock-and-roll combo fronted by guitar and saxophones. The year's opener, "Heavenly Angel", was a sentimental ballad written by the authors of the Jesse Belvin hit "Goodnight My Love", and the girls delivered it in three-part harmony that foreshadowed the Poni-tails' "Born Too Late". The follow-up, written by Mark McIntyre and Ross Bagdasarian, was an infectiously rhythmic rocker called "Your Careless Love" which the two sisters delivered in gently simple unison. After all, by their own admission, they couldn't sing rhythm and blues. Meanwhile Bagdasarian, known on record as David Seville, was to conjure some voice-altering studio magic later in the year with his rock novelty classic "The Witch Doctor" and a string of hits by the now-legendary Chipmunks. It had been two years since Patience and Prudence had come up with a hit, but Liberty made a last valiant effort by teaming them with a young singer named Mike Clifford, whose voice Patience McIntyre describes as "a very good instrument". "Dad knew his parents and respected Mike's talent," she explains. "He was between Pru and me in age and very easy to work with." On the resulting record, "Should I", the two sisters harmonized effectively, switching between an accompaniment role and call-and-response interplay with Clifford. But despite the mightily rocking rhythm section and the creativity of the arrangement, the song itself, a banal novelty on the subject of teen fashion, was a proverbial sow's ear from which no silk purse could be expected. The flip side, a ballad called "Whisper Whisper", was a much better song. It balanced the three teenage voices so masterfully that it might have had a reasonable shot at success, but given the fact that it constituted the B-side of the record, it probably went unpromoted. It was Patience and Prudence's last stand on Liberty Records, but to the two Southern California sisters who never wanted anything but a normal middle-class life, the commercial failure of their later releases was no great loss and, in fact, inevitable. In explanation of the Liberty executives' perseverance, Patience confides, "They treated us differently because we kind-of saved Liberty. We knew it was all just because of "the accident": it didn't have anything to do with us." For the next five years, Patience and Prudence stayed out of the studio and the spotlight, but Stan Ross, who had engineered their first demos at his Gold Star Studios, never forgot about them. It was 1964, and Ross had just cut a Top Ten hit called "Popsicles and Icicles" for the Los Angeles-based Chattahoochee label with another sister-based act, the Murmaids. the record's sweet sentimentality reminded him of Patience and Prudence, and since the label was obviously on a roll with the girl-group sound, he thought they would make a good addition. Chattahoochee CEO Ruth Conte agreed, and the result was a pop-rocker called "Didn't I". Despite the fact that it was played on American Bandstand, it didn't chart. The follow-up, a rocking update of "Tonight You Belong To Me" was the best of the four sides cut for Chattahoochee, but it failed to garner the attention it deserved. Although Mark McIntyre remained active in the industry until his untimely death in 1972, his daughters' musical career officially ended with the Chattahoochee experiment. With the exception of a Dick Clark TV special in 1978, they never performed again, finding fulfillment instead in other pursuits. Although the new Collectors' Choice CD has brought their music back to public attention, Patience McIntyre is humble to the point of dismissiveness about her moment of stardom. "There's a few collectors, including some musicians, who happen to like the stuff for their own reasons," she observes, "and there are some people who like it because it captures a moment of their past." If THE BEST OF PATIENCE AND PRUDENCE isn't in stock at your favorite store, it can be ordered online from Collectors' Choice at www.ccmusic.com. ----------------------------------------