Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry

by Gareth Murphy

  In September 1934, just as Roosevelt’s New Deal began injecting some urgently needed capital into the economy, Wallerstein announced to his demoralized troops, “We’ll grant you, that back when depression was hitting rock bottom, phonograph records were perhaps a dead item. Them days are gone forever … It’s time we told the world what’s happening in the record business—that sales of phonograph records jumped up 100 per cent last year—and that they’re still going up.”

  Hard times were also forcing musicians to take risks. Benny Goodman’s metamorphosis happened when Hammond introduced him to an inventive black pianist, Teddy Wilson. The result of their jamming was a strange but hypnotic sort of chamber jazz. Their harmonic virtuosity turned into pure magic when Gene Krupa joined in on drums. A veritable milestone, this racially mixed touring trio was later widened to a quartet with another Hammond discovery, black vibraphonist Lionel Hampton.

  In 1935, when Hammond returned to London, his suitcase was packed with the interesting jazz treasures he had produced over the previous year. Among them, on the Brunswick label, were two test pressings of an as yet unreleased experiment by Teddy Wilson’s Orchestra featuring Billie Holiday. As illustrated by catchy tunes like “What a Little Moonlight Can Do” and “Miss Brown to You,” the chemistry between Wilson and Holiday marked the beginning of a long adventure—in total, ninety-one songs recorded together, including most of her finest, early performances.

  Hammond left London with a new contract, but rather than return to New York directly, he decided to fulfill a lifelong dream to visit Moscow. Through his family connections, Hammond met filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, who was in the process of making a film about kulaks—rich farmers opposed to collective farming. Visiting the giant film set, Hammond was stunned to find that an entire farm and wheat field had been built inside a brightly lit hangar. Eisenstein showed Hammond around Moscow and admitted, in a loud restaurant, he was no longer convinced by communism. Just as Hammond was leaving for America, Stalin decided to relax his propaganda war against kulaks and shut down the film. Hammond sailed back to New York with diarrhea, smallpox, and no illusions about the socialist experiment in Russia.

  Upon his return, Hammond joined the NAACP board of directors and stumbled upon his next big discovery. While probing through the frequencies in his car radio, he chanced upon an experimental station broadcast out of Kansas City. Live from some ballroom, the crackly station featured Count Basie and his band. Every night for weeks, Hammond sat in his car in awe of how modern this jazz sounded. He even began writing about Basie’s style in the jazz magazine Down Beat.

  When his curiosity became too great, he drove down to Kansas City and walked into the Reno Club, a seedy dump that operated what it called spook dances—all-night music, 5-cent beer, 10-cent hot dogs, homemade whiskey (a “spook” was a poor tipper). Behind Basie’s band, some kind of transaction, presumably marijuana dealing, was going on through a window. The place was unreal, and so was the music. Hammond was particularly struck by the ever-smiling drummer, Jo Jones, who had a witty technique of playing the high hats half open. There were important spaces in the music, creating a sense of excitement that sent the solos into free flow. Within this sound, Hammond saw another glimpse of the future.

  When Hammond introduced himself to Basie, the bad news hit. Jack Kapp, having read Hammond’s articles in Down Beat, had just talked Basie into signing an extortionist deal: an exclusive three-year term requiring Basie to record twenty-four recordings per year for an annual flat fee of $750—an average of $31 per side to be shared among all nine musicians. Basie hadn’t realized the contract offered no royalties whatsoever.

  The next day, Hammond filed a complaint with the musicians union but only managed to get Basie’s contract amended so that all session work would be paid on union scale. He did, however, persuade Benny Goodman’s promoter, Willard Alexander, to get Basie out of Kansas and making better money in big hotels around the country.

  On record, Count Basie was an instant sensation, in large part thanks to the jukebox market, which, being oriented toward bars, was perfect for jubilant swing. As jukeboxes continued spreading, ARC began using its Vocalion imprint to job low-quality 19-cent records to jukebox dealers. With fierce competition from Decca, Vocalion moved to a porous shellac compound to undercut Decca with 10-cent records, which in the case of regularly played hits wore out after just three days.

  Shocked by these standards, Hammond wrote a damning article in 1937 about Decca’s shadier practices. Written under the pseudonym of Henry Johnson, it was published by the Communist magazine New Masses. In it he exposed how Jack Kapp’s privately owned State Street Music Publishing acquired other people’s compositions at a flat fee and even copyrighted the term boogie woogie to collect on other composer’s titles. With the threat of a $100,000 lawsuit, Hammond visited Decca’s office armed with a copy of Basie’s contract and other irrefutable evidence. “Jack, you have a lot to answer for, and your suit will never stand up in court,” asserted Hammond. Hearing the shouting from a nearby office, Edward Lewis barged in and began quizzing Hammond. In a fateful exchange, Lewis turned his head to Kapp. “Jack, if you want to sue on your own, it’s perfectly all right with me, but I will not permit Decca Records to be party to the action.”

  Hammond then wrote an exposé on the deplorable conditions in the major companies’ factories, notably the ARC labels, which then included Columbia’s crumbling Bridgeport factory. Describing a torrid, soot-covered hellhole where he could barely breathe, Hammond revealed that Bridgeport workers earned just $16 a week and endured fourteen violations of the state’s sanitary code. “Obvious why the pressed records sounded so much worse than the masters made in the studio,” he concluded. In the bitter end, even the union-hating Herbert Yates was forced to improve sanitary conditions and quality control.

  John Hammond’s giant contribution to the music scene culminated in a crowning moment. In Carnegie Hall on December 23, 1938, his From Spirituals to Swing concert documented the story of Negro music in America. To find acts, Hammond had been driving around the South accompanied by a hilarious young Englishman with a giant destiny in the record industry, Goddard Lieberson. His archive research even brought him to some fascinating records by a then unknown Delta blues singer called Robert Johnson. Hoping to book him for the show, Hammond learned the singer had been murdered just months previously.

  Hammond pieced together the mysterious story and wrote about Robert Johnson in Down Beat. In 1936, the young blues singer walked into Henry Speir’s store in Jackson, Mississippi. Speir liked what he heard, sent off some demos, and got Johnson a date with Brunswick’s Ernie Oertle. In a hotel room in San Antonio, Texas, over three days, Johnson recorded sixteen songs, facing a wall with his back to the engineer. The songs included “Come On in My Kitchen,” “Cross Road Blues,” and “Terraplane Blues”—a Texan hit selling 5,000 copies, mainly on jukeboxes. Five months later, Johnson was invited to Dallas for another session in which he recorded his more introspective compositions.

  Hammond’s show opened with African drums recorded in West Africa. Live acts then featured blues shouter Big Bill Broonzy, harmonica player Sanford Terry, gospel singer Rosetta Tharpe, boogie-woogie pianists Albert Ammons and Meade “Lux” Lewis, and Dixieland clarinettist Sidney Bechet, and finished with a stomping swing number courtesy of Count Basie and his gang. The New York Times and the Herald Tribune hailed the event as nothing they’d seen or heard before.

  Hammond’s big night also inspired a legendary Greenwich Village club, Café Society, built inside the basement of a century-old building on Sheridan Square. Its owner, Barney Josephson, watched Hammond’s rehearsals, exclaiming, “I don’t have to look anywhere for talent, it’s all here!” As the club’s unofficial music director, Hammond invited Billie Holiday to headline the opening night. Josephson wanted “a club where blacks and whites worked together behind the footlights and sat together out front, a club whose stated advertised policy would be just that.
” He launched his venture with the motto “The wrong place for the right people.”

  It was right here where Billie Holiday first performed “Strange Fruit” to a stunned audience. The song was always her closing number, and she asked that lights be dimmed, waiters stop serving, and patrons refrain from making noise. Just one spotlight illuminated Billie’s face as she sang in the breathless silence. All lights went out on her final note. When the lights came back on, Billie was gone.

  Integrated and artistically daring, thanks largely to John Hammond, jazz had acquired a bohemian, left-wing dimension. The evolution from entertainment to art also mirrored what field-recording musicologist John Lomax set out to achieve in academic circles. Slowly replacing pejorative terms like race records and hillbilly, a precise nomenclature began creeping into journalistic language: bluegrass, cowboy songs, reels, work songs, field hollers, gospel, string bands, jug bands, spirituals, hot jazz, Dixieland, swing.

  As confirmation that a thaw was under way, 33 million records were sold in America that year, three-quarters of them by Decca and Victor. In an indication of how important the jukebox had become, there were approximately 225,000 jukeboxes in operation across America, consuming 13 million discs annually. Within just five years of trading, Decca had become the biggest record company in America, producing 19 million records annually, a spectacular success story considering the desolate industrial conditions.

  In the corporate sphere, 1938 also witnessed the welcome departure of Hollywood autocrat Herbert Yates and his bargain-basement ARC operation. Thoroughly outmaneuvered by Jack Kapp, Herbert Yates sold up, retreated into Hollywood, and was never missed. He at least made a juicy profit off-loading his catalog for $750,000 to media giant CBS, at the time the third-largest American broadcaster and the one pursuing the most cultural editorial line. Under the capable leadership of its founder, Bill Paley, CBS aggressively hit the ground running by poaching RCA Victor boss Ted Wallerstein to resurrect America’s sleeping beauty, Columbia.

  Although he had just suffered a heart attack, Wallerstein moved Columbia’s headquarters to Brunswick’s former offices on Seventh Avenue, a happening center of musical activity next to Irving Mills’s offices. Rightly sensing middlebrow classical music was the next big thing, he leased two new recording studios from NBC and CBS, big enough for recording orchestras. He then slashed the retail price of Columbia’s classical Masterworks series to $1, about half the price of Victor’s Red Seal records.

  Wallerstein’s most clairvoyant gamble was to invest in technology. Convinced that records were too short, he hired two engineers to experiment with longer-playing discs. In another bold move, he hired John Hammond as Columbia’s popular-music recording director. Hammond in turn convinced Wallerstein to hire Goddard Lieberson as a junior assistant in the classical department—another fateful choice.

  Hammond’s first test as recording director came when Billie Holiday asked to record “Strange Fruit.” Wallerstein was busy trying to rebuild Columbia’s distribution networks and knew there would be resistance to the song’s shocking imagery, particularly in the South. Hammond had his own musical reservations. Although he recognized the power of the original poem graphically depicting a lynched black man’s corpse hanging from a tree, he felt the song adaptation had no melody. He even found Billie’s rendition somewhat pretentious. For Hammond, who loved Billie’s swinging side, her snarls, sultry silences, and wailing finale on “Strange Fruit” seemed like a detour into melodrama.

  There was also a background saga straining relations. Billie’s drug problem was an open secret in the jazz fraternity. Hammond, who tolerated marijuana but drew the line at heroin, eventually made the mistake of discussing the issue with her manager, whose family his family knew well. Fearing that Billie’s association with dealers, addicts, and criminal gangs might lead to embarrassing problems or even blackmail, the manager eventually abandoned her and she never forgave Hammond for having interfered.

  Approaching thirty and a little more career conscious than in his early twenties, Hammond chose to reason like an insider and went along with Wallerstein. They did at least allow Billie a once-off contractual exemption to release “Strange Fruit” on another small label, Commodore Records.

  The episode signaled a milestone in his own career. Like Billie Holiday, John Hammond was about to spend a number of years in his own private wilderness. Although demand for records was clearly picking up, Hammond found it difficult to adapt to life as an employee in a large, multigenre company. “To be called upon to work with artists for whom I had little enthusiasm, many of whose previous records I had blasted in my reviews, was not easy for them or for me,” explained Hammond. “It was no longer possible to be candid; to be dishonest was painful; still, I had accepted a full time job in the commercial world of recorded music. I could no longer record only my favorites.”

  As an older and wiser man, the great John Hammond would discover a skyline full of stars, but for the time being, as war broke out in Europe again, his happiest years were in the rearview mirror. For Hammond and many other jazz musicians in his circle, world events were about to intrude.

  8. HOMESICK MEDICINE

  This time around, people knew what was coming. Another war was poised to plunge the world into years of darkness and upheaval. Separating entire populations of women and men. The scale would be biblical. Across four continents, 100 million military personnel were sucked into a killing system sustained by entire economies.

  In the year of Pearl Harbor, some 127 million records were sold in America—levels not seen since the twenties. After fifteen years in which records seemed to be obsolete, music was becoming important again. However, not even the wildest optimists could have expected what lay just around the corner. Wartime solitude was about to spectacularly resuscitate demand for disc records—to a level that only the First World War had seen.

  What made the renaissance in demands even more astonishing was the peculiar industrial context. From 1941 to 1944, America’s music business experienced its first general strike, significantly reducing the supply of new recordings, but so psychologically unsettling was the war that any music, even old records, became a vital daily medicine. Just as hunger is the best sauce, in music there is no ear as receptive as a broken heart.

  The music industry’s own war began brewing throughout the thirties. As radical ideology stirred through the surrounding political world, impoverished musicians began taking a greater interest in their own trade unions. An industrial census in 1933 calculated that revenues from radio advertising in the United States represented about $60 million, a figure that was rising annually. This tidy treasure chest allowed the broadcasting industry to employ some 12,000 people.

  Since its creation in 1914, the composers and publishers union, ASCAP, had grown into a powerful lobby. On the other side of the battlefield, radio stations grouped together under the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) lobby. In 1937, ASCAP announced that it would be seeking a review of its license agreement with radio stations once it expired in 1940. As the deadline loomed, ASCAP was pressing for radio stations to pay airplay royalties relative to their audience size. NAB retorted that no radio station in the land could accurately quantify its audience size.

  In 1940, the U.S. federal courts finally ruled that radio stations were entitled to broadcast records they had purchased. The precedent cleared the way for the modern radio format, disc jockeys playing records. ASCAP responded by boycotting the airwaves in January 1941. For ten long months, all stations in the NBC and CBS networks were formally denied the right to play any records containing any of the 1 million compositions registered with ASCAP.

  In 1942, a union representing session musicians, the American Federation of Musicians, led by James Petrillo, unleashed a second strike against record companies, which at the time were synonymous with radio corporations like RCA and CBS. By a unanimous vote at its annual convention, musicians agreed to shut down recording studios until record compani
es agreed to pay royalties into a union trust fund for out-of-work musicians. As war plunged the world into its biggest crisis in modern history, music production in America ground to a halt.

  At first, radio stations remained defiant, while record companies began releasing back catalog. The plot thickened as another rights organization, Broadcast Music, Inc., (BMI), set up in 1939 by radio executives to weaken ASCAP’s monopoly, stepped up its market presence to provide stations with non-ASCAP-affiliated material. Because ASCAP was dominated by the bigger Tin Pan Alley publishers, the outsiders of the publishing industry, particularly those centered around Nashville, spotted an opportunity to get more airplay.

  Not only did ASCAP’s strike prove to be a disastrous failure, it was forced to accept an even worse deal. The recording studio strike, known colloquially as the Petrillo Ban, proved more successful. With studios paralyzed and musicians drafted into military service, the period would be a quiet one for most record companies.

  The one record man with his finger firmly on the pulse of popular demand was Jack Kapp. In 1937, he had spotted the Andrews Sisters, a trio of country girls who had developed their own style of three-part vocal harmonies. Their early body of recordings, including the international smash hit “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen,” continued selling like hotcakes throughout the Petrillo Ban. Recruited as Uncle Sam’s lady mascots, they traveled tirelessly through America and the Pacific, performing nonstop in camps, hospitals, munitions factories, and military bases. They were dubbed “the Sweethearts of the Armed Forces,” and part of their morale-boosting show was to invite three lucky soldiers to dine with them.