Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  Oriole was, technically, even older, founded in 1927 by the Levy Company in London as a subsidiary, releasing American masters from Vocalion Records domestically. Though discontinued in 1935 it was revived in 1950 and enjoyed a few major hits including Maureen Evans’ ‘Like I Do’, Nancy Whiskey & Charlie McDevitt’s version of ‘Freight Train’ and Russ Hamilton’s ‘We Will Make Love’, which reached number two. Some of these records even made an impression on a pre-Beatles America, which was highly unusual in the 50s, as Seymour Stein acknowledges. “I always thought it was very strange. There were more hits in America coming from Italy, thanks to the San Remo festival, stuff like ‘Volare’, and from France, by way of the big French orchestras like Raymond Le Fevre and Paul Mauriat, who had a huge number one with ‘Love Is Blue’. Even German records; Bert Kampfert, who later wrote stuff for Sinatra, ‘Strangers In The Night’. There was hardly anything from the UK except oddball records, like ‘He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands’, by Laurie London, which was a one-hit wonder. Then [in 1957] Russ Hamilton had a big hit – not ‘We Will Make Love’, but the b-side, ‘Rainbow’.” In fact, Hamilton always attributed its success to the fact that American pressings had mistakenly swapped the two sides’ status. “These were the kinds of records that would break through,” Stein continues. “Oriole also had ‘Freight Train’ by Charlie McDevitt’s skiffle group. They had two big hits in America, and the others had none. So Oriole is very important.” Oriole also ran the subsidiary label Embassy, producing cut-price covers of chart hits directly for Woolworth’s. For a time it also licensed some of the early Motown hits, but was sold to CBS in September 1964 and transformed itself into the conglomerate’s English arm.

  Aside from Polygon, the most revealing domestic story from the post-war period was Ember Records. Jeffrey Kruger was the owner of legendary fifties jazz club Flamingo in London’s Wardour Street, and would work with everyone from Billie Holiday to the Rolling Stones. He founded Ember in 1957 as a direct challenge to the monopoly that existed in record distribution and promotion, largely succeeding by issuing ‘budget lines’ and targeting non-conventional outlets outside of established record stores, which were sewn up by the majors. The label began as a direct consequence of the 50s independent boom in the US. Kruger, on one of his frequent trips to New York met legendary talent spotter and producer Murray Kaufman, a promoter of the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Inspired by the acts he saw there, Kruger became determined to replicate the success of the American independents. “Albeit a comparatively small fish in a big pond, so far as my contemporaries in the USA were concerned,” he states, “but a bigger fish in a smaller pond back home so far as I was concerned.”

  Ember was envisaged as a joint venture with Al Silver (founder of Herald Records), who had already invoked that name in the US. Kruger’s Florida Music Company was to be represented by Silver and Doug Moody in America. Kruger would reciprocate by representing their Angel Music Company throughout Europe. Ember US was already exploiting the breakout of R&B (then still termed ‘race’ music), enjoying their first hit with Faye Adams’ ‘Shake A Hand’ followed by success with Lightnin’ Hopkins. “They had luck running for them and back to back they had at least six consecutive hit artists making the charts,” says Kruger, “often with records that were still in rough demo form. But because of the insatiable demand for the new music, records were rushed into the hands of powerful DJs who, to beat the competition, would put them on the air in acetate form.” In the end, however, delayed by a government licence necessary to complete transactions in foreign exchange, Kruger met EMI’s Len Wood and together they took the decision for Ember UK to sub-licence American chart hits to EMI Parlophone.

  Kruger then embarked on establishing the basic networking necessities of an independent label – manufacture, distribution and promotion. “None of the existing British record companies, who each had their own distribution outlets and owned their own record manufacturing plants, would even consider helping us. I felt every door in these vital areas close in my face so I worked backwards through the three basics. I went into what was then a chain of some two dozen record stores owned and operated under the street name Keith Prowse Stores. On Bond Street I met the man in charge, Walter Woyda. He listened to me – in fact he was the first man to give me a dispassionate hearing – and he said he was ready to help and he would order our stock, albeit in small quantities initially. He would see I was paid promptly to help me through my cash flow.”

  Through Wayda, Kruger linked up with an independent distributor (of radios and televisions) Lugton & Co. Another distributor was found to cover the Midlands, while the north west was covered by NEMS, run by the Epstein family, whose son Brian would shortly shepherd the Beatles to success. That in turn led to Glasgow’s Wolfson company, then Ireland’s Solomon and Peres – Maurice Soloman having previously helped finance Edward Lewis’s efforts to fend off predators at Decca in the late 20s. Soloman’s son Mervyn, meanwhile, let Kruger licence country records (via his company Emerald Records), in order to establish an LP line.

  Distribution in place, at least theoretically, Kruger set about establishing a manufacturing base. In the end he alighted on a button manufacturing company in Edgware, London, called Orlake. “The same machine that was manufacturing buttons of all sizes was retooled to make vinyl records, and so I had my ability to press records. More importantly, they had storage space to hold some of the stock.” The final step was promotion. “I did manage to get an appointment at quite high level at the BBC and was told that they would be prepared to play my records. They were, after all, an impartial body. But the record industry, controlled by the then big boys, EMI, Decca, Philips and Pye, and to a lesser degree by Oriole/Embassy Records, had formed PPL (Phonographic Performance Limited). PPL had an agreement with the BBC. Only members of that trade body could have their records played on the BBC and share in the performance fees – of which I knew nothing at the time – that the BBC paid to the record industry for the right to air their records.”

  This body, a cartel in all but name, refused Kruger membership. But Kruger wasn’t taking the black-balling sitting down. He talked it through with his cousin, lawyer Norman Beech. Beech considered the matter, before informing Kruger that, in his view, the BBC’s impartiality would be compromised unless they were able to enter into a similar agreement with Kruger. “It was brilliant. And that’s what happened. Ember signed an independent deal with the BBC much to the chagrin of the PPL. I could now get my records played on the air.”

  By the mid-60s Ember was beginning to tick along nicely, though Kruger continued to be heavily involved with the Flamingo Club and arranging tours for visiting US jazz stars such as Carmen McRae, who later recorded for Ember. With the crucial support of the BBC, they scored a Top 40 hit with Jan & Kjeld. Other good sellers included Ray Ellington’s ‘Madison’, only their second release, and Michael Cox’s ‘Angela Jones’. Significantly, the latter was acquired from a fellow independent who lacked the resources that Kruger had built up for Ember.

  Ember was able to license US hits, though occasionally Kruger’s comparative lack of industrial muscle would show. The Five Royales’ original version of ‘Dedicated To The One I Love’ on King Records was eclipsed by a version from the Shirelles when the song was picked up by a major. He also secured terms to licence 20th Century Fox’s music catalogue via Norman Weiser, an association that raised a few eyebrows in the industry. The partnership was inaugurated by the release of ‘Little Drummer Boy’ by the Harry Simeone Chorale, which reached the Top 40 three times during 1961 and 1962. There were also solid selling album releases from Art Tatum, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and others under the same arrangement. “All these we issued at a price of 26 shillings (£1.30), that undercut most label’s prices. They were, in effect, the first mid-price LPs. Some older material we put out on our Famous Artists series at 9/9d (49p), making them the cheapest albums on the British market – very attractive at a time when a 45 rpm single cost 6/9d (34p
).”

  According to Kruger, it was bad enough being an upstart independent challenging the monopoly, but his pricing policy was viewed as outright sedition. “Some time later I attended one of the annual trade dinners organised by the Gramophone Record Retailers Association [GRRA] to make an after dinner speech. The room was packed to capacity with all the heads of the major record companies and their distribution arms, the buyers and key executives of all the major and minor record shops and of course the trade press. I decided I might never get a chance to speak before such an august body again so I thought I would aim straight at their jugular. I spoke from the heart and the reaction was forceful. I told them I was in the record business, which no longer was the privileged domain of four or five companies, and was there to stay. There would be more independents coming up fast behind me, and if stores still refused to stock our product, then I and they would find other outlets. If I had to sell records through supermarkets or bookshops or in food stores or photograph stores then I would not hesitate. Records could be, and would be, sold outside of conventional outlets and the stores would only have themselves to blame.” The audience was not impressed. “I said what worked in the American market would follow here in the European market and they were visibly shaken. It took five years before I was formally vindicated, on the occasion of Ember’s seventh anniversary. In an editorial in the trade magazine Record Retailer on 29 September 1966, the editor, also a record store owner, upheld exactly what I’d said at the GRRA Convention. Unless dealers recognised the independents, the day would come when independent product and budget records would be sold against them in bookshops and supermarkets.” A blow came when Weiser had to explain to him that studio politics at

  20th Century had led to them assigning a licence for the soundtrack to the company’s blockbuster Cleopatra to EMI. There were also reversals in obtaining licences from American labels who overestimated the potential of their records in what remained a thriving but niche market. “Betty Chapita of Vee-Jay Records made it quite clear that she thought I was trying to con her and she was interested only in serious money up front. She never made any attempt to speak to anyone who knew the UK market who could corroborate my account of that market. Many fine records were unreleased in Britain at the time, in my view, solely because of her greed.”

  Similar problems overcame attempts to liase with Herman Lubinsky’s Savoy and Don Robey of Duke/Peacock Records. Kruger did, however, fare better with Saul and Jules Bihari’s west coast independent umbrella group, comprising Kent, Modern and Crown, leading to a fine catalogue of blues and jazz albums by BB King, Elmore James, Howlin’ Wolf et al. He was also able to work Syd Nathan’s King Records – although their initial meeting had to be convened around Cincinnati’s appearance in the baseball world series. “I love America and I love my native England, but I’m afraid that their respective summer games, baseball and cricket, do not hold me in their thrall,” notes Kruger. Despite this, he managed to convince an initially sceptical Nathan to allow him to licence a small trickle of records without an advance. Eventually, these resulted in the first UK releases by a young artist Nathan had introduced to him in his studio in 1965, James Brown. Eventually, Nathan gave Kruger access to his album releases, beginning with Billy Ward’s Dominoes (featuring Clyde McPhatter and Jackie Wilson). It was the first release on Ember’s full-price flagship album range. He also released dozens of rock ‘n’ roll classics by Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison and others via an agreement with Sam Phillips of Sun Records.

  Ember released the Dave Clark Five’s debut, ‘Chaquita’, in June 1962, alongside domestic talents such as Lita Roza, the Dale Sisters, Grant Tracy & The Sunsets, Lewis & The Southerners (pre-The Ivy League/Flowerpot Men) and a pre-EMI Matt Monro. Composer John Barry also joined the label in 1963, as a refugee from politicking at EMI. “We were like chalk and cheese,” notes Kruger. “I was disciplined and businesslike and watched every penny – at times I had to. John, on the other hand, was a truly talented artist, a man of flair and confidence but not a student of budget control. If he came up with an idea, he wanted to go straight into the studio with a 40-piece orchestra and get on with it.” Barry was signed to the label (on a higher than normal royalty) and also became in-house producer. He would provide soundtracks to Bond film From Russia With Love and Zulu, also bringing the label his proteges, folk singers Chad Stuart and Jeremy Clyde, who eventually found success after being licensed to Pittsburgh’s World Artists imprint. Both ‘Yesterday’s Gone’ and ‘Summer Song’ were substantial American hits.

  However, the relationship with Barry hit rocky waters when Kruger queried the escalating recording costs afforded an Annie Ross album, then soured further over Barry’s insistence he release any record he liked at any point, even if that stretched Ember’s still puny promotional resources. So in the end Barry’s contract was handed over to Marty Erlichman, Barbra Streisand’s manager. In the meantime, 19-year-old David Jones (later Bowie) signed to Ember’s publishing arm Sparta Music, while the record label also helped to turn Swinging Sixties model Twiggy into a recording artist.

  The role that Decca’s London American operation played in the 50s and 60s is important to note, in so much as, while a major, it helped spread the independent gospel as the primary outlet for rock ‘n’ roll’s first generation. “My sense is that the blueprint for the golden age of UK indie labels came from their US counterparts some three decades beforehand,” says John Broven, author of Record Makers And Breakers: Voices of the Independent Rock ‘n’ Roll Pioneers. “There was a similar ethos of giving the public the good music it wanted and not what the major labels decreed. The pioneering US independent companies began springing up throughout the United States in the immediate post-World War II era, when the majors ignored the full impact of emergent rhythm and blues – a stylistic precursor of rock ‘n’ roll. The names of the leading R&B indie labels resonate with familiarity, especially Atlantic, Chess, Imperial, King, Modern, Specialty and Sun. Other important indie labels such as Cadence, Dot and Liberty were more pop-slanted. In varying degrees, these innovators licensed their masters – hits and non-hits – to London American, part of the Decca Records group, for global distribution during an epic period from 1955 through 1965.”

  “Accordingly,” Broven continues, “the fabled London label introduced teens everywhere to a long line of now classic artists, including Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Eddie Cochran, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Everly Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and Ricky Nelson – and, crucially, to the independent spirit. Only major label signings Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Gene Vincent seemed to be missing. Among the eager young record collectors would be impressionable future UK indie artists, shopkeepers and label owners. Just as their US forebears had done, the vibrant UK indie labels injected much-needed life into a moribund musical scene. Then the establishment started to retaliate, in an action replay of the earlier US scenario. It was great while it lasted.”

  Joe Meek cuts unarguably the most tragi-comic figure in the story of independent UK pop in the late fifties and early sixties. His name has become part of an iconography of ‘swinging London’ that includes Kenneth Williams and Joe Orton (and also, Brian Epstein). All were gay men in an era, despite the increasingly libertarian climate, that remained almost unremittingly hostile to the notion. His career and life are well documented elsewhere, notably in John Repsch’s book The Legendary Joe Meek. The lurid tales surrounding his home studio in a flat above 304 Holloway Road continue to enthral as much as the sonic alchemy he produced there. Marshalling household items alongside wholly invented or customised electronic gadgetry for recording sessions that saw musicians perform on stairwells and the bathroom, Meek went to extraordinary lengths to replicate the sounds he heard in his head. Always a notoriously difficult and exacting man, his descent into drug-fuelled paranoia eventually spiralled into murder and suicide, and remains one of the most compelling stories in British post-war history.

  Mee
k was responsible for more than 300 records between 1956 and 1967, among them some of the treasures of our pop culture – notably the science fiction-themed instrumental ‘Telstar’ and the definitive ‘death disc’ ‘Johnny Remember Me’. Notoriously temperamental and violent, disparaging of the Beatles initially (and much else), Meek’s work has latterly been recognised as the output of a kind of idiot savant. The fact that he was mentally incapacitated as he faced the final curtain is indisputable. At which point his decline began is open to conjecture. Biographer John Repsch is as well placed as any to comment. “I interviewed about 120 people, and I would always ask each one of them at the end, if I can’t find out what made him tick, the story is inadequate. And they would say, ‘What made him tick was that he loved his music,’ or ‘he was so lonely as a person’. And no-one came up with this, but it dawned on me that it was all there in his childhood and upbringing. This desire to overcome his complexes, that he felt inadequate in himself, and he was desperate to prove to the world he was a force to be reckoned with.”

  Meek grew up in the quiet village of Newent in Gloucestershire, where he was remorselessly teased by his siblings for his theatrical interests and mannerisms, exacerbated by the fact that his mother, who had hoped for a daughter, dressed him in girl’s clothing. It inculcated in him a lifelong pursuit for acceptance. “Always he wanted to prove himself,” states Repsch. “You have to go back to his childhood, and the fact that he had a tough upbringing in that he was an outsider, and he couldn’t bear being teased, and he had a rotten time of it. And he discovered this talent for electronics, and that gave him a way to prove himself as something other than a little wimp that liked wearing girl’s dresses, and to prove he had a brain in his head. And the attitude to him in the small village he lived in drove him out. He might well have stayed there had he been accepted. But he went through mental turmoil, and that drove him to London. He thought he would be better accepted there and things would be different. Homosexuality was very frowned upon in those days. It’s said in the music business, music is the great leveller. It doesn’t matter if you were queer, black, Jewish, two-headed or three-legged, if you could produce good music, you were in, and an equal. But he proved that was not the case at all, as he still had tremendous difficulties. But then he made a rod for his own back, because he was so temperamental. It possibly wasn’t always due to that prejudice.”