Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  Most important and emblematic of this young wave of independents was Atlantic, founded by the son of a Turkish ambassador, Ahmet Ertegun, in 1947, alongside Herb Abramson, who had previously served as A&R head for National Records. With the aid of a loan from the family dentist, they rented a small office in Manhattan, with a business desk at one end and a make-do ‘recording studio’ at the other. With Jerry Wexler sprinkling the studio magic, Atlantic, under Ertegun’s stewardship, became one of the world’s largest and most revered record labels – and one of the few to treat its artists with a scintilla of respect. Ertegun scouted New Orleans for talent, but, unable to replicate the tonal quality of sessions with Professor Longhair etc, he created the ‘Atlantic sound’ as a by-product, a luminous mix of blues and jazz with New Orleans mambo, swing from Kansas City and the urbane arrangements favoured by New York.

  Routinely garlanded as “the world’s greatest independent label”, Ertegun’s love of black music led to huge success with Ray Charles and myriad others, before branching into jazz and developing the careers of Ornette Coleman,

  John Coltrane, Charles Mingus and others, and later ‘white’ rock ‘n’ roll, via Bobby Darin. Ertegun took the decision to sell the label to Warner Brothers in 1967 for $17 million in stock, sacrificing much of its independence in the process. Some of the proceeds saw them found the New York Cosmos soccer team. Throughout, however, Ertegun remained a friend to upstart record companies, helping to finance, among many others, David Geffen’s Asylum Records in 1970. Despite his initial love of black R&B, Ertegun also sensed the commercial potential of rock acts like Led Zeppelin, Cream and Crosby Stills & Nash. He also signed the Rolling Stones to a distribution deal, as Atlantic remained probably the only imprint from those glory 40s years to survive the merger-crazed 90s with its identity relatively intact.

  During the 50s a profusion of smaller indies like Bruce, Herald, Old Town, Tico and Whirlin’ Disc had sprung up to document the melting pot of black and Hispanic sounds on New York streets. They were powered by entrepreneurs such as Bobby Robinson, still active in Harlem to this day, George Golder and Hy Weiss (self-professed payola king of New York and inventor of the “fifty-dollar handshake” to encourage DJs to play his records). Grand, Gotham, Parkway et al provided a similar service to the residents of Philadelphia. Many of these were fly-by-night operations, set up by sharp-thinking businessmen with an eye not for the value of the music they released, but for the opportunity of a quick buck.

  But as Roger Armstrong of Ace Records points out, there were often more complicated relationships at work beyond the merely exploitative. “The key thing that ran through that – it was mainly white entrepreneurs, with some exceptions, and a lot of Jewish white people running independent record labels. What I boil it down to is this. The Jews and blacks in America were both under-classes. The Jews were white and could get credit. The blacks were black and couldn’t get credit. That was the bold truth in those days. You can’t run a business unless you get credit. Unless you’re born rich. Credit is what you live off. There are other views about Eastern European Jews who got into black music because of the minor chords and minor keys – there was a musical connection. But my old friend Hy Weiss, he ran Old Town Records. He had a lot of success with doo-wop, but he was a blues fan. He made some great blues records. There was some paternalism. And a very close relationship between the artists and the owners; they were really tight. I remember the horrible quote they used when Adam Sweeting wrote about Bo Diddley’s death [in The Guardian] – ‘I was never paid anything’. [The actual quote was sourced to Diddley himself: “I am owed… I’ve never got paid. A dude with a pencil is worse than a cat with a machine gun.”] “That makes Bo look really stupid,” Armstrong continues. “Why did he stay with Chess for 12 years if they never paid him anything? Of course they paid him. The interesting thing is not whether he got paid, it’s how he got paid, and how much. Leonard [Chess] once went on record when someone said he didn’t pay Bo enough. He said, ‘I don’t get any money out of his live gigs. He gets his live gigs cos we promoted his records.’ Talk about the 360 degree thing mentality [now advanced by the contemporary music industry as a salve to provide income in the download age by taking part of an artist’s merchandise and touring money]. It was always there. There was that close but sometimes contentious relationship.”

  “Hy was a notoriously wild character,” Armstrong continues. “Runyonesque isn’t in it, and he had every scam in the book going. He told me some of them, and some were brilliant. But every artist I ever met who was on his label said, ‘I love that man, he’s just fantastic. Never really paid me properly, but I love him!’ I remember the Solitaires. The guy was saying, ‘Hy, we always thought he wasn’t paying us properly. But he was so generous with his information and told us how to function.’ And that guy went on to be head of marketing at CBS in black music. He said, ‘I learned it all from Hy, if it hadn’t been for him, I wouldn’t have had my job.’ With the American indies, you lived in each other’s pocket. That’s how tight and close things were. You had an agent to put the band on the road and get the local gigs. Mary Love on Modern Records told us the company used to have a room for their artists with telephones in it. They didn’t charge for the telephone, and they could go in there and book their own gigs. And in our early days of being an independent record company, it was very intimate, in that sense, you knew your artists personally, you hung out with them and saw them at clubs. There was a big socialising thing and you had the feeling of all being in the same boat. That closeness maybe doesn’t quite exist with majors.”

  “It is, of course, always a mistake to make sweeping generalisations,” notes American R&B independents discographer Bob McGrather. “However, America revolves around the dollar. Making money as a priority is not frowned upon as it is perhaps elsewhere. Someone once asked me when I was interviewing for an advertising position if I wanted to be either rich or famous. It seemed odd to me at the time that these were considered the only options. Oftentimes a producer or artist would get the itch to start a new label and of course enlist partners outside the music business — perhaps the owners of a local beauty parlour or car dealership—the priorities are obvious here and rightly so just as with shareholders in a larger concern. It’s not hard to accept that to climb out of the ghetto (or improve one’s lot within it) was the prime motivator and to use one’s craft to do it was the obvious vehicle. Sports and music being the two most likely as in the early days most everything else was a closed (white) shop.”

  The ad hoc nature of some of the independents was something Charlie Gillett would experience first hand on his trips to the deep south in the early 70s, licensing tracks for what would become his Another Saturday Night compilation. He further endorses the view that equating the music of these times with ‘art’ leads to some dangerously wrong-headed conclusions. “I doubt if the attitude has ever really changed. The only thing that changed is people like you and me coming in and considering that this music can be cast as art and talked about as art. But it hardly ever has been made with that intention. Maybe Radiohead think that way – but I’m not even sure they do. I’m sure they chuckle at times at what everybody makes of what they do. It’s much more instinctive. The reason why people are musicians and become musicians – most musicians are inadequate, it’s all they can do, this is what they’re good at. It’s a bit like footballers. If you could have understood what they were talking about in your history or physics or chemistry lessons, you’d have gone along the track that everybody wanted you to. But you couldn’t get your head into that stuff. And the guys running the record labels are pretty similar people most of the time. For a lot of us, it’s the only thing we’re capable of doing. But a lot of it is doing what you want to do, what you feel is in you. Rather than trying to tailor what you’re doing towards what someone says will get played on the radio. There’s only a small proportion of all the people in the game, whether running record labels or as musicians, who have any incli
nation to do that.”

  Gillett found that few of the record labels he came across resembled anything he might have imagined. “One of the labels, Goldband Records – the guy running it, Eddie Shuler, was a TV repair man, literally. So the label was essentially a hobby. And at an earlier stage we went looking for a guy called JD Miller, a name I was familiar with as a producer of Slim Harpo and one or two quite big names in this blues/Cajun area. We’d been given his address and all we could see was that it was a women’s hairdresser’s. So we went out on the street and asked people where this address was, and they pointed me back to where I’d been. True enough, you went through the hairdresser’s and at the back, there’s JD Miller sitting at his desk in the classic kind of back room scene you’ve seen in so many mafia or gangster movies, like at the back of a restaurant in Brooklyn, or whatever. JD Miller was the sheriff of the town, he managed the local projects, so he had a multiple role in this town of Crowley, Louisiana.”

  Gillett encountered numerous other small label owners on the trip. “We went to a place called Ville Platte, Louisiana, where the guy who ran the label, Swallow – his name was Floyd Soileau, but his label was the bird swallow – to his father’s great disappointment, he told us! His was the only one of all those little Louisiana operations that looked like what you might expect to find. The main building was a record shop, or the front half of it, and the back half was a warehouse with stacks and rows of metal frames with records on. Some of which were the stock for the shop, and others were his own records, in multiples of 25 a box. And to the side of that was the studio where he recorded all his records, so that’s what felt like a proper record label. And he was just a fantastic man. I’d never be able to express my appreciation of how well he treated us, what a reasonable deal we got – the guy at the back of the hairdresser’s said, ‘Boys, you can have anything you like – $100 a song.’ $100 in 1972 was a lot of money. That would be $1,200 to put an album together, and that was more than we could imagine. Whereas Floyd went $20 a track – that was more like it.”

  There were undoubtedly good eggs of Floyd’s ilk, but the buccaneering 50s was also boom time for a collection of spivs, criminals and hustlers, and ties with mobsters were evident from the outset. These links had been established through the pre-radio dominance of jukeboxes as principal outlets for dispersal and promotion of recorded music. A case in point would be notorious music industry legend Morris Levy, proprietor of Roulette Records (formed in 1956), a man described as an “octopus” by Variety magazine in 1957. A perennially shady and intimidating character, thrown out of school for assaulting one of his teachers, he moved from nightclub photography to club and restaurant ownership and thence a record company and publishing. He would build a multi-million pound fortune and become a father figure to CBS head Walter Yetnikoff. Levy continued to deny Mafia links all the way up to his indictment by the FBI for conspiracy to commit extortion in 1988. He died of cancer before serving a single day of his ten-year sentence. But his past enterprises were indeed funded by mob money (rumoured to have come from Tommy Eboli and Vincent ‘Chin’ Gigante, later head of the Genovese family). He was also brighter and more business-savvy than other early independent operators – swapping the promise of a quick buck for a sustainable income. To this end, he was one of the first to recognise the importance of rights ownership – having started out with staples such as ‘The Yellow Rose Of Texas’, his Big Seven company went on to hold 30,000 copyrights. He was none too averse to the practice of removing an artist’s name from a record label and substituting his own to ensure writer’s as well as publishing royalties, nor to settling scores and disputes, either in business or with his artists, with a baseball bat. Present at the meeting at a Broadway Diner with Alan Freed (whom he would manage briefly) when the term ‘rock and roll’ was first suggested to describe the younger music beginning to filter through, he clearly recognised the ramifications quicker than most.

  Tico owner George Goldner could talk with authority about Levy as the ‘octopus’. One of the most revered talent spotters in the early R&B boom, he discovered and nurtured artists including Tito Puente – whom Levy enticed away to RCA – and then Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Imperials, among many others. However, the multitude of labels he started – beginning with Tico in 1948 and continuing through Rama, Gee, Red Bird (where he fostered the talents of songwriters Leiber and Stoller, and Andrew Loog Oldham and Seymour Stein first met) and others – was a result of his gambling addiction. When the need for fast cash arose, he would simply sell the labels to Levy to reconcile his debts. Stein knew Leiber and Stoller but principally worked alongside Goldner. “I really worked on the other side of things. But I met Andrew Oldham when he came up to the offices of Red Bird. Jerry Leiber didn’t see him. Mike Stoller wasn’t around. I chased him out to the elevator and caught him. We were both in our early 20s. They [the Rolling Stones] were not known in America, but I knew who they were. So I said come up and listen to some songs. So I played him a load of songs, and they recorded ‘Down Home Girl’.”

  The R&B independent boom inexorably led to the fusion of white (country or hillbilly) and black (blues, R&B) styles that would birth rock ‘n’ roll, signified by the arrival of Elvis Presley. And, initially at least, it was independents that nurtured the hybrid. Sun, established by farmer’s son Sam Phillips, was one of the few labels borne out of a genuine love of the music it documented. Founded in March 1952, the initial intention was to market ‘black’ music beyond racial barriers, scoring its first hit with Rufus Thomas’s ‘Bear Cat’ – an answer record to Big Mama Thornton’s ‘Hound Dog’ whose copyright, it was later ruled, the record infringed. Other artists included Junior Parker and Little Milton. But Sun underwent a radical change of direction in 1954 when Phillips first encountered Presley. He recorded him in various styles – ballads, country and R&B – until he stumbled upon the ‘Sun Sound’. He would ultimately sell Presley’s contract to RCA for $35,000 in 1955 and focus his efforts on turning first Carl Perkins, then Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis, into superstars. Phillips eventually sold the label to Mercury producer Shelby Singleton in 1969.

  The field was open for such businessmen, who could sense profit in documenting what surrounded them, capitalising on local knowledge and contacts. There was also, at a corporate level, a reluctance to embrace either R&B and rock ‘n’ roll as anything more than a faddish diversion. Rather, they would attempt to ‘clone’ breakout hits from the indies (Fats Domino, Little Richard etc) with artists like Pat Boone. The initial surge in independent R&B labels in the 40s was thus replicated by the rock ‘n’ roll boom years, as TV’s American Bandstand and increasingly radio) came to accept the music as something other than a coarse and ignominious assault on the nation’s morals. The independents responded, predictably, much quicker. The first independent regional distributors allowed them to do so, liasing with local radio stations to furnish listeners with the latest sounds. Suddenly, established lines of protocol were smashed as independent labels, promoters and artists found themselves able to have their records heard by audiences hungry for them.

  Greg Shaw estimated in his 1982 essay on the music industry for The History Of Rock that between 1956 and a decade later, some 150,000 independent records were released, on not less than 500 separate imprints. This ‘golden age’ was made possible by regional hits reaching a far wider audience. Sun prospered with Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins et al, Specialty with Little Richard, Chess with Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, Vee-Jay with John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed and Imperial with Fats Domino. Dozens of new labels sprang up, including Swan, Bell, Gone, Carlton, Cadence, Big Top etc. The level playing field promised by the R&B boom came to fruition in a tangible and lucrative fashion in the rock ‘n’ roll years.

  The success of the independents was in part an indictment of major label sloth and inefficiency, in particular, its distribution methods, aggravated by America’s intimidating geography. The majors opted for branch distribution, shifting reco
rds from large industrial units serving huge territories that could contain massive demographic differences. That, to an extent, dictated their A&R policies. As Shaw would write: “The advantage of branch distribution was that a company could deliver hit products anywhere in the country with speed and co-ordination. The disadvantage was that this national scope tended to dictate a concentration on artists with all-round, mainstream appeal. For decades the majors had taken great pains to groom young singers and then transform them into seasoned stars, matching them up with songs, arrangers and orchestras as they saw fit. The A&R men in charge of all this may have been aware that a vital new music was emerging. But their usual response was to wait until a hit song appeared in the ‘race music’ charts and then dish up whitewashed versions of the same tunes with their own singers.”

  Armstrong believes that the consequent stratification is vital to any understanding of the way the American music industry operated. “One of the reasons records didn’t move outside borders that much in America, apart from the odd crossover, was because someone in Detroit wasn’t going to ‘get’ a Texan record. The proof of the pudding is in the exceptions, like ‘She’s About A Mover’ by the Sir Douglas Quintet in ’65. That was a pure Tex-Mex record that was a smash hit. In 1965 you could have bought 2,000 pure Tex-Mex records that weren’t smash hits, and that no-one in Detroit bought. I first discovered the blues through the Yardbirds – and then suddenly you find ‘Smokestack Lightning’ by Howling Wolf on a Pye single – you heard it and it blew your socks off completely. Then you find Muddy Waters and Little Walter, and you think you’ve discovered the blues. But that was Chicago blues. That wasn’t T-Bone Walker and the Texas scene; that wasn’t Johnny Guitar Watson on the coast. That wasn’t BB King down in Memphis, etc.”