Columbia’s fate was more complex. In Britain between 1929 and 1932, consumer spending on music halved, a mild plunge compared to the American record industry’s virtual wipeout in the same period. Under pressure from its major shareholder, the bank of J. P. Morgan, the English branch of Columbia joined forces with HMV, the English branch of Victor and became EMI in 1931.
It wasn’t a happy marriage. HMV executive Alfred Clark was appointed EMI chairman, while Louis Sterling served as managing director. The two men rarely spoke and instead communicated through letters. Learning from Victor’s mistakes in America, EMI began investing in the relatively tardy growth of British radio. The company refurbished a studio on Abbey Road for orchestral recordings. It also sold record players at a loss in order to flood the market with cheap machines, reasoning that consumers with new record players would buy records. Another of EMI’s clever tricks was to establish societies for the recondite works of composers, then market recordings of those works by mail to subscribers to these niche clubs, so the recording and pressing costs could be absorbed by a nucleus of die-hard record collectors. Amazingly, Britain exported more records during the Great Depression than America produced.
In another indication of Britain’s growing importance, in 1929, Decca Records was established by Edward Lewis, a former banker who had been advising a talking-machine manufacturer, Decca Gramophone Company, to diversify into record production. Lewis argued that “manufacturing gramophones but not records is rather like one selling razors but not consumable blades.” Having failed to convince his clients as a consultant, Lewis rounded up a consortium of investors and bought out the company.
Despite these positive movements in London, Louis Sterling was forced to withdraw into Europe and abandon his American acquisitions to a cruel fate. In 1930, Okeh closed down as an independent company; its catalog and trademarks were absorbed by Columbia, which in 1931 was sold to the Grigsby-Grunow Company, manufacturers of radio consoles and refrigerators.
The only healthy music company in America seemed to be Irving Mills’s publishing, management, and booking empire, then happily enjoying the top two success stories of the period, Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway. Representing sixteen orchestras, Mills took over an entire floor next to Brunswick’s head office at 799 Seventh Avenue. Knowing record companies had no budgets to produce jazz records, he underwrote their recording costs on the condition that his publishing catalog be used. With a few thousand sales per record, everybody walked away with a small profit. The records were calling cards for his bands and repertoire, and as songs like “Minnie the Moocher” amply illustrated, the occasional smash hit flew out of the salami machine.
Apart from Irving Mills, New York’s music industry fell deathly silent as the American economy hit rock bottom around 1932 and 1933. Yet it was from this dead sea that probably the greatest-ever record man landed some giant fish. Enter a young writer by the name of John Hammond.
While Irving Mills symbolized the caricature of the cigar-puffing entertainment impresario, Hammond was an entirely different breed of jazz adventurer, eloquent, bohemian, and fiercely principled. The names of the most respected jazz masters of the era—King Oliver, Earl Hines, and Duke Ellington—suggested a jazz aristocracy was forming, Hammond really was an aristocrat. His mother, Emily, was the great-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Dutch tycoon who built America’s railroads. As everyone knew, the Vanderbilts were among the richest, most powerful WASP dynasties in the land.
Although his father was the son of a Civil War general and a successful banker in his own right, the Hammonds were benefactors of Vanderbilt trust funds and property holdings. Summers were spent in the idyllic surroundings of Lenox, Massachusetts, which they visited in their very own train carriage. His parents had been given a luxurious five-story metropolitan palace on Ninety-first Street, just off Fifth Avenue and Central Park. It had a domestic staff of sixteen and contained marble staircases, elevators, a library, a squash court, and a ballroom big enough to comfortably seat two hundred.
Born in 1910, John Hammond was the only boy following four sisters, which may have explained his solitary tendencies. Classical music constantly poured through the mansion’s many oak-paneled rooms, decorated with all the opulence of European Baroque design. Virtuoso teachers regularly came to give lessons to the family, and the latest Victrolas played Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, and all the European masters.
His sisters often found their younger brother hiding downstairs in the servants’ quarters, legs dangling from a chair, listening to popular records on a battered Grafanola. Although young John was taught classical viola, he developed a fascination with black people and their reaction to music. The family servants would break into dances and sing along, and they were never afraid to cry over songs. He also observed with a sense of injustice how they stiffened as they walked upstairs. John devoured all of New York’s entertainment magazines, notably Variety, and avidly collected records. “In the grooves of those primitive early discs I found in my house, I discovered a new world,” he would write.
As was standard for a boy of Vanderbilt lineage, he was sent off to the respected boarding school Hotchkiss, where, under the guidance of a particularly inspirational English teacher, his communication skills were carefully groomed. After Sunday church, his English teacher would invite John and other promising students to his house, where they would lunch with his family, then adjourn to the drawing room to discuss poetry and books.
Taking the train in and out of New York, once old enough to get past the door, he began frequenting restaurants and speakeasies where he’d retreat into a quiet corner, order a nonalcoholic beverage, and diligently observe the musicians. In his young mind, jazz, politics, writing, and religion seemed to be interconnected in one all-encompassing destiny.
Typically, Vanderbilt sons were expected to study law at Yale and be groomed for a successful career in big business. John tried Yale for a while, then dropped out and began floating. In 1931, at the age of twenty-one, he set sail for a short vacation in London, where a chance meeting brought him into contact with the music publication Melody Maker. Invited to submit articles about the American jazz scene, Hammond returned to New York—using a pen as his divining rod.
His controversial articles, openly championing the supremacy of black jazz musicians, provided only pocket money. At a time of 30 percent unemployment, he was receiving $12,000 per year from the family trust fund—more than enough to pay for his new apartment in Greenwich Village and his car. Hammond wasn’t good at holding down a job, but then again, he didn’t have to be.
Duke Ellington recommended Hammond to Irving Mills, who called one day offering him a job on one of his house magazines. He went to Mills’s office to discuss it. “How much do you want to work for me, John?” asked Mills.
“One hundred dollars a week.”
“I’ll hire you half time for fifty dollars a week,” concluded the notoriously skinflint impresario. In the ensuing conversation, Mills asked, “You know what we’re going to put there?” He gestured with his cigar toward a space on the wall. “Muriels.”
In a pattern that would become familiar, the erudite journalist was quickly fired for not plugging the house catalog with adequate bias. He also lost an interesting job as a jazz deejay at a Jewish station on the top floor of the Claridge Hotel. Following complaints from the hotel management about black musicians walking through the lobby, Hammond refused to force his musicians to take the freight elevator.
Because his apartment on Sullivan Street was within walking distance of Columbia’s offices, he began running into Columbia’s musical director, Ben Selvin. One night in the Hofbrau House, Selvin explained that he’d been getting requests from England for jazz records and asked Hammond for an opinion. Realizing his articles for Melody Maker had earned him legitimacy, Hammond suggested Fletcher Henderson’s band and offered to produce four sides at union scale. To his delight, Selvin agreed.
On the morning of the
planned session, the musicians trudged into the studio almost three hours late. Feeling guilty, they banged out three numbers, but there was no time to record a fourth. Columbia was furious. Apparently, Henderson’s lateness was due to the poor deal he was getting. “Most Negro bandleaders were discouraged, if not defeated, by the Great Depression,” explained Hammond. “Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway were making it. No one else was.” Fortunately, that first record sold well enough for Columbia’s ill feelings to be quickly forgiven. Now welcome to drop by Columbia’s offices, Hammond caught the itch for producing.
At the beginning of 1933, he dropped into Monette Moore’s place to find a replacement, a pretty seventeen-year-old black girl by the name of Billie Holiday. Hearing her unusual rendition of “Wouldja for a Big Red Apple?” Hammond fell under a spell. “This was the kind of accident I’d dreamed of, the sort of reward I received every now and then, by traveling to every place where anyone performed. Most of the time I was disappointed, but every now and then it all became worthwhile.”
Hammond began following Billie around the Harlem speakeasies where she performed for tips. Her real name was Eleanora, he learned. She had arrived from Baltimore, got caught up in prostitution, and served a jail term. Beautiful, notoriously moody, and already a moderate marijuana smoker, she sang popular songs in a distinctive manner that made everything her own. Unable to play an instrument and often accompanied by a solo piano, Billie didn’t fit the description of jazz singer, but Hammond heard something unique in her voice. He dragged his jazz friends along to hear her. “All I could do was talk and write about her,” he would recall.
In the spring of 1933, as the Great Depression hit rock bottom, it was once again the London connection that opened new doors. When he arrived back in England, Hammond was pleasantly surprised to find that he was something of a celebrity among Melody Maker readers, thanks to his inspirational work as a jazz writer. Hanging out with editor Spike Hughes who had recently begun working as a recording director for the newly established Decca Records, Hammond asked for an introduction to Louis Sterling.
As well as managing EMI, Sterling was among Britain’s most committed supporters of culture. Victor’s well-respected music director, Fred Gaisberg, noted that Sunday evening dinners at the Sterlings’ grand home on Avenue Road “had become a regular feature of bohemian London … At the Sterlings’ one always met agreeable colleagues in the theatrical, film and musical worlds. On [one] occasion Schnabel and Kreisler were soon deeply engrossed in discussing the political situation in Germany and were joined by ex-Mayor Jimmy Walker and Lauritz Melchior, greatly to the discomfort of a bridge party in the next room, which included Chaliapin and Gigli.” The rise of Hitler was of particular concern to Louis Sterling, who over the coming years would sponsor the immigration of Jewish employees of his labels in Berlin. Supporting Charles Lahr and his Progressive Bookshop, he was also building one of Britain’s most valuable book collections.
In their brief meeting, Sterling explained that he needed someone to make American jazz records for the English market directly. The young Hammond pounced on the opportunity and secured his first contract, for a total of twenty-four recordings with four artists: Fletcher Henderson, Benny Carter, Joe Venuti, and Benny Goodman. As usual, in all the excitement Hammond forgot to negotiate any payment for himself.
He returned to New York on a new mission. His first port of call was Benny Goodman, who he knew often hung out at a speakeasy called the Onyx Club. At about ten thirty, sure enough, Goodman walked in. Tightening his gut, Hammond introduced himself and offered the clarinettist a Columbia recording contract.
“You’re a goddamn liar,” snapped Goodman, who the previous week had heard from Ben Selvin the label was bankrupt.
“But this isn’t American Columbia,” pleaded Hammond. “This is with English Columbia, which has money.”
Goodman presumed Hammond was a weirdo, but he was earning only $50 a week, so he forced himself to calm down. Hammond then explained his plan to recruit a band of master musicians capable of improvising free-flowing jazz.
Checking out Goodman’s band the next day, Hammond squirmed in his chair. “The English public will laugh us off the turntable,” he told the insulted but ambitious Goodman. Swing was not just a genre term for Hammond; it meant a certain rhythmic spirit. At the suggestion of hiring black musicians, Goodman put his foot down. “If it gets around that I recorded with colored guys I won’t get another job in this town.”
“It can’t be that bad.”
“John, you don’t know. It’s that bad.”
Fortunately, Benny Goodman was a born dancer who had spent many nights out in Hammond’s favorite clubs, and he would graciously accept that yes, black musicians were by far the best rhythm conjurers in the craft. For the time being, Hammond rounded up an all-whites band; Artie Bernstein, Dick McDonough, Joe Sullivan, Charlie Teagarden, and Manny Klein. He even drove to Boston to convince the master drummer Gene Krupa to join in. The musicians each earned a meager $20 for the three-hour session, but one of the three recordings, “Ain’tcha Glad,” caught the attention of Ben Selvin, who persuaded Hammond to sign it directly to American Columbia with a full artist contract for Benny Goodman. More than happy to do what was good for Benny’s career, Hammond altered his own plans. It sold 5,000 copies—a modest hit by the bleak standards of 1933. Eager for a Benny Goodman follow-up, Hammond got his chance to call in Billie Holiday as a guest vocalist. They were her first recordings, “Riffin’ the Scotch” and “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law.”
Hammond questioned Ben Selvin about Bessie Smith, who had been left adrift during the early thirties. Columbia’s defeated staff didn’t believe Bessie had a future. With persistence, Hammond succeeded in getting their approval to try out a cheap experiment. He tracked her down to a club in Philadelphia where she was working as a hostess. When he arrived, she was drunk and appeared depressed. “What would it pay?” asked Bessie. All Hammond could offer her was a deal with almost-bust Columbia to make a 35-cent record on the Okeh label. Hammond did, however, offer to pay for her trip to New York out of his own pocket. Bessie agreed without enthusiasm, concluding, “Nobody wants to hear blues no more. Times is hard. They want to hear novelty songs.”
As feared, the record didn’t go anywhere. Bessie Smith, once hailed as “the Queen of the Blues,” took the train back to Philadelphia with $37.50 in her pocket. What the young, enthusiastic Hammond had failed to understand was the wider economic picture. Bessie Smith’s core audience was rural blacks—the hardest hit by the Great Depression.
The only person recording rural blues at the time was a Texan song hunter by the name of John Lomax, whose motivations were anything but commercial. More of a musicologist, Lomax was a sixty-year-old professor of English literature and author of an anthology called Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. His mission was to “gather a body of folklore before it disappeared and to preserve it for the analysis of later scholars.”
Still grieving his wife’s death, throughout 1933 Lomax set off with various briefs from the Library of Congress, Macmillan Publishing, and the American Council of Learned Societies. His eldest son Alan, accompanied him in a car equipped with a 315-pound acetate-disc recording machine in the trunk, they toured the South in search of work songs, blues, ballads, and reels. Lomax was particularly interested in prisoners because “thrown on their own resources for entertainment, they still sing, especially the long-term prisoners who have been confined for years and who have not yet been influenced by jazz and the radio, the distinctive old-time Negro melodies.” That year, Lomax discovered the likes of Lightnin’ Washington and Lead Belly.
The very day Bessie Smith was in the studio with Hammond, American Columbia’s new owners, Grigsby-Grunow, went into equity receivership, and in April 1934 the record company was declared bankrupt. With another fire sale announced, Edward Lewis, head of Decca in London, sailed to New York to jointly buy American Columbia with ARC owner Herbert Yates. While Lewis was a
t sea, however, Yates made a solo run—scooping up American Columbia, its offices, studios, catalogs, artist contracts, trademarks, and Bridgeport, Connecticut, factory for the laughable sum of $75,500.
When Lewis docked in New York and heard the devastating news, he called Jack Kapp, an experienced record man running one of Yates’s labels, Brunswick, and they shared ideas about how to do business in such hard times. Lewis had the money, while Kapp had excellent credentials as a producer. Best of all, Kapp had been careful to place a top-man clause in his biggest artist contracts, including Brunswick’s new hopeful, Bing Crosby. Screwing Yates royally, Kapp and Lewis moved everything over to an American branch of Decca, poaching Columbia’s sales and promotion chiefs. As a result of all the buyouts, mergers, and licenses, by 1934, only four small majors—RCA, ARC, EMI, and Decca—controlled virtually every label, master, and artist contract in a pitifully diminished market.
The most unexpected market development of all came as an indirect result of Prohibition being lifted in 1933. Although America had never really stopped drinking during its fourteen years of statutory abstinence, speakeasies turned into legitimate bars and were officially allowed to make noise again. Wurlitzer spotted an opportunity and in 1933 launched its ten-disc Debutante jukebox. By the end of 1934, some 25,000 jukeboxes were in operation all over America. Decca fought its way aggressively into this new market head-on with ARC, both its archenemy and its direct competitor in 35-cent records.
One other important development came in 1934 courtesy of Victor’s imaginative new president, Edward Wallerstein. Like Louis Sterling in London, Wallerstein understood that the obstacle to recovery was the obsolete status of record players. With 20 million American households now using the radio as their main source of entertainment, anecdotal evidence suggested that record players had long been relegated to the attic. His audacious plan was to commercialize a cheap adapter to play records through a radio’s amplifier. Called the Duo Jr., it was an electrically powered turntable with a magnetic pickup encased in a compact wooden box. It retailed at just $16.50, but special offers gave away a Duo Jr. free with the purchase of several RCA Victor records.
Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry Page 8
