Record Makers and Breakers: Voices of the Independent Rock 'n' Roll Pioneers
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Record Makers and Breakers: Voices of the Independent Rock 'n' Roll Pioneers
640Hardcover
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252032905 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 03/02/2009 |
| Series: | Music in American Life |
| Pages: | 640 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.20(w) x 10.10(h) x 2.00(d) |
| Age Range: | 3 Months |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Record Makers and Breakers
Voices of the Independent Rock 'n' Roll PioneersBy John Broven
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2009 John BrovenAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-03290-5
Chapter One
We're Rolling—Take One!
Cast of Characters Seymour Stein, Sire Records Irv Lichtman, Cash Box and Billboard Shelby Singleton, Mercury and SSS International–Sun Records Jerry Wexler, Atlantic Records Ahmet Ertegun, Atlantic Records Cosimo Matassa, jukebox operator's field service engineer Art Rupe, Specialty Records
"The first ballot of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was back in 1985," said industry leader Seymour Stein.
To qualify for induction, you had to have had a record released twenty-five years before. That meant we backtracked to activity before 1960. The final ballot had forty-one names on it, and thirty-nine of them started their careers on an independent label.
There were two exceptions: Gene Vincent on Capitol ... didn't get in the first year, but he was on the ballot. Then there was Buddy Holly, who was inducted and whose first solo effort was on Coral, a subsidiary of Decca. Buddy's records were produced independently by Norman Petty in Clovis, New Mexico. His recordings, and those by the Crickets as well, were either licensed or sold to Decca. So technically speaking, he was on a major label.
The other nine artists inducted the first year all started on independent labels: Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis on Sun, Chuck Berry on Chess, James Brown on King, Fats Domino on Imperial, Sam Cooke on Specialty and Keen, Little Richard also on Specialty, Ray Charles on Swing Time and Atlantic, and the Everly Brothers on Cadence. Most of the influential indies were represented in this list.
Stein, who was president of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, could not have put into better perspective the dramatic and colossal impact of the pioneering record makers and their labels (or indeed the abundant pool of talent on hand). Yet the stereotype of an "independent record man" is of a seedy, hustling, low-life character from a Damon Runyon story or, in a more modern time frame, The Sopranos. There were the "Tonys," hanging out after hours with guys in smoky New York bars, puffing giant cigars with glasses of bourbon whiskey in hand, chatting up and bedding dolls after cheating artists out of their royalties. The music was the money in the bank, not the music in the grooves.
Such a sweeping caricature, while true in part (particularly during the fighting 1940s and the fabulous 1950s), ignores the genuine entrepreneur, the educated and cerebral, the inventive, the music-minded, and the honest record men and women. So were the record makers, as a group, saints or sinners?
This was a diverse breed, certainly, that scouted, recorded, manufactured, published, promoted, sold, and (they hoped) collected at the same time. The record makers worked all hours because they had to, mostly on shoestring budgets with a barrage of external factors to overcome. Yet they gave hitherto unimagined opportunities to artists and musicians of every persuasion, talented and untalented. The record manufacturers, as they were also known, did it all.
Many record men were first- or second-generation Americans from Jewish immigrant families who had escaped the atrocities that erupted following a wave of anti-Semitic pogroms in the Russian Empire; other factors were the discrimination that barred Jews from key Russian cities and the coming of the Russian Revolution. These desperate people were the "new" Russian Jews in contrast to the established, "elitist" German Jews.
"The German Jews, who preceded the Russian Jews by many decades, did tend to look down on the Russian Jews," said Irv Lichtman, editor of Cash Box and later deputy editor at Billboard. "But they set up many charitable endeavors to help their poorer brethren. One of the reasons so many Jews entered the music business, as well as the motion-picture business, was partly the result of discrimination against both groups [of Jews] in the United States. Because it was difficult to break into various established businesses and professions, it was easier to join newly created businesses. The movie and music industries were born just as immigration of the Jews and Italians into the United States boomed."
The Jewish populace, with its ancient peddler tradition, in particular seemed to revel in the freedom and independence that America, the "land of milk and honey," offered. "Of course, you find Jewish people involved in every kind of business," said Nashville record man Shelby Singleton,
but it may be more predominant in the music business. They are very clannish in the fact [that] they will help each other; they may be competing in some ways, but a brother will help a brother, or a father will help a son, or a son will help a cousin. I think the music industry ... lends itself to the fact that they had that nose for making money. It was a fast way to make money if you had a hit record, and they were willing to put their dollars into it to make it happen. That's basically it: they were gamblers; that's what they were.
But all the record men are real characters, real strong, real different people. Some of them go broke, some of them come back, some of them go broke again, come back again. But, you know, we're all gamblers. That's where I'm going tomorrow, to the casinos in Mississippi—that's what life's about!
The record man was further analyzed, in stylistic terms, by Atlantic's Jerry Wexler, one of the most important of the fraternity. "You see, in the beginning nobody knew anything, but there were three styles involved. One was the documentary style; that was what Leonard [Chess] did. If you heard Muddy Waters perform something in a bar on the South Side [of Chicago] on a Tuesday night, he'd say in the studio, 'You play what you played in the bar yesterday.' Then there was the songwriter/producer like a Buck Ram. And then there were guys like me and Ahmet. We worked as fans; we had fans' knowledge of jazz and blues music which people like Leonard didn't have. He had a gut instinct."
Ahmet Ertegun was the last working first-generation record man. Until October 2006, when he was critically injured in a fall at a Rolling Stones concert, of all places, he was still making the daily commute to the Atlantic Records office at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York. To the end, which came six weeks later, he was instantly recognizable from those dusty photographs with his trademark spectacles, shiny pate, and dapper appearance. Two years earlier, he was in feisty form when asked about his fellow record men. "One of the very first meetings that I went to of independent record companies was in a hotel somewhere on Times Square around 1948," he said.
It was a big meeting room that had a huge table, around which were sitting some of these sixty or seventy owners of independent record labels. And most of those people were ex–jukebox operators or people who somehow had nightclubs, either in the hillbilly areas or rhythm and blues–type areas. Anyway, it was a rough bunch.
I was sitting there, and there was a very elegant gentleman sitting on my right who was Italian. He didn't speak English that well. So he and I were speaking in French, and there was a very rough and tough–looking guy on my left. He said, "What are you all talking about?" I said, "Well, I'm speaking French." So he looks at this Italian gentleman and says, "Are you new to the record business? What kind of records do you make?" He said, "Why? I just do opera recordings." So he says, "Opera recordings? Does that shit sell?" [hearty laugh]. So the man asks me, "What did he say?" And I hesitated to tell him in French what he had called the kind of music he made.
Of the early indie men, whom did Ertegun admire most? "I admired none of them!" he retorted.
As a matter of fact, the reason I went into the record business is because I met a lot of people who owned independent record labels in the '40s, during the war, which is when most of these labels came into being because of the shortage of shellac. There was a demand for certain kinds of records that the majors had stopped producing. So a lot of labels came into being in the early '40s.
I met a lot of these people; they were mostly crooks! And they didn't know a trumpet from a saxophone, and they knew nothing about music. They cared less; they just made records by accident. That's why I thought that I should be able to make a living making records. There were no admirable people in either the majors or the independents. I should reconsider that. There were a few gentlemen in the majors, but mostly they were just trash. They were crap.
A person like Alfred Lion [of Blue Note, the esteemed jazz label], you had a great deal of respect for. Herman Lubinsky [of Savoy Records] ran a record shop in New Jersey somewhere.... You know, the independent record people of those times unfortunately gave the independent record business the kind of reputation from which we at Atlantic suffered. We did not do any of the kind of things that they did. I never drove a truck in my life, but they all had trucks; they drove around the country and sold records for cash [at a discount to the prices of the appointed territorial distributors].
We came from basically a different background from most of these people. These people came from ... well, they grew up poor, and they never developed a respect for the artists until the artists became so big that then the artists had no respect for them. We had something bigger than that; we had bookkeepers, and we were people who went to universities. I'm talking about the partners in my company: Herb Abramson, Miriam Bienstock, who was then his wife, Jerry Wexler, and my brother Nesuhi. We all came from families where we were taught ethical values and morals, and we acted in the same way.
On October 4, 2006—just three and a half weeks before his cruel accident—Ahmet Ertegun was charm personified. This lifelong socialite, lover of fine arts, and keen soccer fan had mellowed somewhat in his views of the original record men, citing more favorably in dispatches the names of Leonard and Phil Chess (Chess), Lew Chudd (Imperial), the Bihari brothers (Modern), Bobby Robinson (Fire-Fury), and the Messners (Aladdin), "who were very good, I thought; they had a jazz feel." But Ertegun couldn't resist another jab: "Most of these guys did it for just a quick buck; that's why they were in it."
As the most successful of all record men in terms of prestige and longevity and an early record collector, Ertegun displayed the expected keen awareness of stylistic trends through the decades. "Music was diffused around the world starting with the advent of radio and the phonograph," he said. "Aside [from] the first popular music and classical recordings, the music that transcended in all countries was black American music, or the imitations thereof. Now in 1917, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band made a recording ["Livery Stable Blues," Victor] that took over the whole world, and the world became jazz crazy. Everyone danced in the '20s; it was called the Jazz Age, and the Jazz Age was people dancing to black music. That continued into the swing era in the '30s and the '40s; into the R&B era of the late '40s, '50s, and '60s; to rock 'n' roll of the late '50s, '60s, and '70s. And rap, which is now everywhere. It's a continuation of the black tradition."
The Perfect Storm
In the early 1940s, the record industry was dominated by RCA Victor, Decca, and a reemergent Columbia. These organizations, known as major labels, were vertical in structure and necessarily bureaucratic in nature. They controlled every facet of the business, from a record's inception to manufacturing, distribution, and points of sale. Big numbers were sought from the homogenous popular market just as the modern consumer society was taking root. It is often overlooked that the parent company of RCA Victor was NBC and that of Columbia was CBS, the powerful national radio (and then TV) networks that were headed respectively by those combative titans General David Sarnoff and William Paley.
The postwar independent record era was kick-started by a serendipitous confluence of events that may be described, without understatement or originality, as the perfect storm. There was the launch of BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) in 1940, America's dramatic entry into World War II in 1941, and the union strike by the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) in 1942.
With the formation of BMI, the monopoly of the New York–based elitist Tin Pan Alley popular music publishers and writers would be broken. From the teeming cities to the rural outposts, doors were opened to independent publishing companies and a classless society of songwriters throughout the United States. The ugly battle between BMI and ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) had erupted when the broadcasters (the investors in BMI) felt it was necessary to compete in the performing rights song royalty collection business. With apparently unlimited resources, BMI was able to massage its growth with generous advances and guarantees to its members, old and new. The internecine BMI/ASCAP rivalry, involving constant legal sparring and government lobbying, was to persist throughout the rock 'n' roll era. But, hallelujah, American music was emancipated.
"BMI is really a great story for what would eventually turn into rock 'n' roll," said music journalist and song publisher Irv Lichtman.
Now, ASCAP was this 1914–formed, somewhat staid organization of the Broadway writers and the great Tin Pan Alley writers that was in dispute with broadcasting. The broadcasters formed BMI, and to this day it's a broadcast-owned entity. Now what do you do when you're a new licensing organization and your old competitor has got everything locked up? Well, you turn to other kinds of music. I would say the fact that BMI established itself and had to dig into blues and R&B and country was one way in which it began to help expose all that music to a more general public. It was a very significant move. Of course, ASCAP eventually caught on, but it was late in the game. In fact, stories are replete of how ASCAP writers and executives would say, "Garbage music, terrible music, how can you foist this on us?" Well, later on it was rock 'n' roll. Then, of course, ASCAP today competes easily with BMI in all areas, while BMI has built up a major catalog of Broadway, movie, and classical works. But BMI's formation really, I think, gets deserved credit for, through necessity, ... forcing itself to sign country artists, to sign blues artists, and [to] create what would eventually be a major, major part of the business.
Meanwhile, the record industry had to overcome a grievous double whammy: shellac rationing and the AFM recording ban. Shellac was the crucial binding agent for the compounds in the manufacture of 78–rpm records and was imported primarily from the forests of India and Siam (now Thailand). Following the United States' entry into the war, the supply line was endangered to such an extent by Japanese action that the shellac stocks were placed under the control of the War Production Board from April 1942. The country's diminishing shellac mountain was diverted from the manufacture of records (and other products) to wartime munitions, leading to the evocative term "from ballads to bullets." The major labels had no option but to prioritize their releases and to prune their artist rosters in order of popularity. Ethnic regional music, including "old familiar tunes" and "race records," was a poor also-ran.
The musicians' union strike, involving some 140,000 members, began on August 1, 1942. A run-up news story in Billboard noted that "ever since the broadcasters gave ASCAP such a thumping in their now historic battle, it has been known that some radio factions have been looking forward to a showdown with the AFM. Some observers think this is it, and that when the full force of the radio station plus mounting anti-AFM newspaper opinion is brought to bear against the AFM, [union president James C.] Petrillo will have a face-saving job on his hands that will make Hirohito's explanations of the Midway battle look like child's play."
It didn't quite work out that way, and for a while the astonishingly brazen Petrillo was the empowered dictator of American music. The 1942 recording ban had at its heart the desire for the protection of live music for union members (many of whom were on radio station payrolls) at the expense of cancerous "canned" music. There were visions not only of better job security and improved conditions for the musicians but also of increased revenue for the union's coffers. Petrillo's sights, therefore, were set firmly at the rapidly evolving "sound carriers," that is, the phonograph record and electrical transcription companies, the radio stations, and the jukebox industry.
Memories of the flare-up have been dimmed by the passage of time, but Arthur Shimkin, of Golden Records, had a strong recall of AFM's president, a Chicago-born son of an Italian sewer digger: "Petrillo was crazy, a total absolute egomaniac; he thought he was a czar. He would never shake hands with you, afraid of germs.... He was bombastic, declaratory, and he chewed out a lot of people. That was his technique. He was irascible; that's the best term I can think of."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Record Makers and Breakers by John Broven Copyright © 2009 by John Broven. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface....................ixAcknowledgments....................xiii
Introduction....................1
1. We're Rolling—Take One!....................9
2. The Super Indies....................21
3. California Booming....................33
4. New York: Big City and Little Tiffany....................53
5. The Battle of the Speeds and Golden Records' Seeds....................73
6. Riding the Nashville Airwaves....................93
7. The Chess Game....................116
8. King of Them All....................131
9. Behind the Southern Sun....................149
10. Louisiana Gumbo....................166
11. Billboard and Cash Box: Stars and Bullets....................187
12. A-Hustle and A-Scuffle at Old Town....................208
13. Mercury Rising and the Roulette Wheel....................231
14. Tin Pan Alley and Beyond....................254
15. Hillbilly Boogie....................277
16. West Coast Rockin' and Rollin'....................297
17. From Motown to Manhattan: In Almost Perfect Harmony....................319
18. Harlem Hotshots and the Black Experience....................341
19. On and Off Broadway....................358
20. Gold Coast Platters and Stock Matters....................379
21. The London American Group: Rockin' around the World....................397
22. Teen Scene....................415
23. Corporate Takeover and Talent Makeover....................439
24. The Payola Scandal and Changing Times....................454
25. End of Session: Art Rupe's New Rules at Specialty Records....................472
Appendix A: U.S. Record Sales, 1921–69....................483
Appendix B: Independent Record Distributors' Network: 1946–48, 1954, 1960....................487
Appendix C: Pressing Plants, 1946....................491
Appendix D: Original Postwar Record Labels: Locations, Launch Dates, and Current Owners....................493
Appendix E: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Record Men Inductees, 1986–2008....................496
Appendix F: Record Makers: Biographical Data (Selective)....................498
Appendix G: Oral History....................504
Notes....................509
Bibliography....................545
Index....................557