My father saw I was good with money and still harbored hopes of my becoming a doctor or a lawyer; however, to his credit, he let me find my own path and just watched over my shoulder from a respectful distance. He befriended Tom Noonan, which was easy because although Tom wasn’t Jewish, he was a devout Irish Catholic whose extended family included a few nuns in Boston. My father showed his gratitude to Tom for taking me under his wing by inviting Mrs. Noonan to the garment center. In those days, Tom was probably earning as little as my father, so it was no small gesture to fit Mrs. Noonan out in a beautiful new suit and coat.
It was editor in chief Paul Ackerman, however, who made the biggest impression on my father. Ackerman wasn’t religious, but he was a fine specimen of the upright, Jewish intellectual mensch. He was educated, principled, and viewed Billboard’s daily work as serving a higher cause. Paul had personal interests, such as poetry and horticulture, but it was his crusade as a music writer and belief in editorial substance that made him a renaissance man of the twentieth century. There’s usually a rich businessman in every Jewish family, sometimes several; they’re common species in any synagogue. For religious Jews like my father, the highest rank of man was the outstanding rabbi or community leader who stood up to be counted. Paul Ackerman was clearly one of these.
My father respected Billboard and was proud of the connections I was making; what frightened him was that I’d gotten sucked into music so young and had all but abandoned school. Paul Ackerman had studied English literature at Columbia, so there was little chance of me turning out like the boss. Even by Brooklyn’s working-class standards in the late fifties, I was a freak. What my parents couldn’t have known was that Billboard’s charts were nonetheless providing me with a solid education for the career I was about to embark on. Among many things, I was learning how TV and radio concentrated public attention on big-name stars, whereas sales reports revealed how vast and diverse the marketplace really was. As well as compiling figures from all over the United States, Tom received European charts, too. Watching him figure it all out was like biblical class. Names, names, and more names. You had to remember as many names as you could—artists, song titles, labels, publishers, songwriters. But once you could piece together all the little references, interesting patterns appeared.
I’d noticed all the foreign songs when I copied Billboard’s archives backward into the forties. Every month, a surprising number of entries were records directly licensed from Italy, France, or Germany. Some were localized cover versions that had been translated or totally revamped on Tin Pan Alley. The same was happening abroad, where American hits were being translated or repackaged into foreign language mutations. So, the very first golden rule I learned about the music business was that good songs fly around the world just as easily as food recipes or fashions in the garment trade.
This came as no major revelation to a Brooklyn child. You’d be hard pressed to find a better symbol of the music business than Luna Park or the Steeplechase—a swarming, multicolored amusement park with its big rides that draw the crowds, and all its smaller curiosities and foreign-themed food stalls that added an element of wonder. At the end of the day, people don’t care where things originally come from. The fact that something might at first seem a bit strange is probably what hooks them. If it hits the spot, they’ll soon make it their own.
Billboard’s charts in those days were as accurate as they could be. There were three separate charts reflecting record store sales, jukebox plays, and airplay; there was also a separate chart for sheet music sales, which was quite important back then. There was also a chart that combined it all, called the “Honor Roll of Hits,” but as Top 40 radio started to really take hold all over the country, Tom came up with an idea of using the Top 40 charts, combined just with sales, to make a Top 100 chart. The Top 100 became an invaluable tool at a critical juncture when speed and timing became the essence for getting the news out with regard to hits.
Tom Noonan and Paul Ackerman were my first mentors, but of all the lucky breaks I got at Billboard, there was one freak encounter that changed my destiny like no other. I was sitting in a music review session one Wednesday evening when I first laid my eyes on this potbellied, buffalo-shouldered force of nature. His name was Syd Nathan, the owner of Cincinnati label King Records. He was about fifty-five, although he looked closer to seventy and was so borderline blind he had to wrap these Coke-bottle glasses around his head or risk bumping into every doorpost. I’d never seen glasses like his. Set in reinforced frames, the lenses were so heavy and bulbous, when he moved his head around, his eyes appeared to zoom in and out in different sizes.
When Syd Nathan spoke, which he liked to do, it was best to focus on his mouth, where this fur-balled wheeze, a result of chronic asthma, emitted the most fabulous show business spiel I’d ever heard. His lungs and vocal chords were so shot, he had to strain at his highest register to get the words out. Syd talked and talked this high-voltage chaos of knowledge, gags, and anecdotes, stuff coming in from all angles. For every writer in Billboard, and especially Paul Ackerman, the old man was an American legend. He’d sold tens of millions of records in hard times to mostly country and black customers. He was the prototype record man whose crazy genius left me spellbound.
He’d dropped into Billboard to present some new releases, which, if reviewed favorably, would probably sell him about seventy-five thousand copies among jukebox operators alone. But unlike all the other label toppers who’d always talk up their dreck, Syd just played his records and hung around for hours to chat, pick up news, and hear to what the competition had to offer. “Load of crap” seemed to be his catchphrase for all the cheap talk the music business has always produced in vast quantities—back then, as today and always.
In that session, the reviewers were sifting through stacks of new releases when one writer muttered, “Oh, let’s not bother with these Jubilee records. I hear they’re going out of business.” Syd sat up straight and peered out of his Coke bottles. “Is that how you talk about me when I’m not here?” He had a way of silencing rooms. “Just listen to the records,” he told the reviewers. “Jubilee’s problems aren’t yours. There might be something on one of those records you might need to know.”
“Jerry Blaine must be a good friend of yours!” joked a writer, referring to Jubilee’s boss.
“No. I’m suing the son of a bitch,” said Syd, flat as a pancake. We played the Jubilee releases, and sure enough, one song shone out—“White Silver Sands” by Don Rondo, which went on to become a hit.
When the session wrapped up, I got my chance to flap away like a seal. “Oh, my God, what an honor, Mr. Nathan. I’ve bought some of your records.”
“Oh, yeah? Which ones?”
“Hank Ballard and James Brown, sir.”
I obviously made an impression, because every time Syd dropped into Billboard, he’d always stop by Tom’s office to say hello. One day, however, he began quizzing me with the look of a concerned father. Maybe he’d asked Paul Ackerman or Tom Noonan what I was doing hanging around, but whatever pathetic, orphaned figure I cut through his Coke bottles, the old man must have recognized something of himself decades earlier.
I wouldn’t know his story until years later, but sometime around 1910, when Syd Nathan was only five, he’d been given his uncle’s drum kit, which he whacked all through his unhappy childhood. It was probably what kept him sane, because he was so handicapped by his eyesight, he couldn’t see the blackboard and failed every exam. His asthma was so chronic, he could barely run around the playground from the kids teasing him about his glasses. By the time he was fifteen, he could take no more. He followed his ears straight through the school gate and drummed his heart out in jazz clubs, weddings, and events around the Midwest. That’s when Syd’s life began.
His dream in the 1920s was to become a star drummer with his Forest Bradford Orchestra, but in those turbulent times when radio blew up and sent the phonograph industry crashing into a fifteen-year crisis, onl
y the very best musicians could carve out a living. Poverty, recession, and disillusionment eventually pushed Syd onto the shadier side of life. He worked in a pawnshop. He got caught up in some political feud between Cincinnati clans. He bribed city workers to vote for some local kingpin in union elections, a “job experience” that almost put him in jail. Later, he ran a jewelry store that kept getting burgled, and he promoted wrestling matches and ran a shooting gallery that landed him in court for not paying prize winners. As a young man in the Great Depression, Syd Nathan had been what they call a colorful character, but once midlife hit, he returned to his passion. He began selling radios, phonographs, and secondhand records, until in 1943, he rolled all his life’s experiences into King Records, the pioneer label that produced many of the seminal country and R&B hybrids that led to rock and roll.
By the time he laid his goggle eyes on me, Syd Nathan had done it all. He was wise enough, rich enough, don’t-give-a-damn enough to spot a dropout who had no place in civilian society and point him to the nearest circus. “Kid,” he said one afternoon in 1959, “I love Billboard. Paul Ackerman is the most honest man in the music business. I can tell him anything and know it’ll be kept a secret. But look, do you want to be in the game, or do you want to be a spectator? Because that’s what Billboard is, a spectator. You’ll be reporting what other people are doing. You’ll be discovering records after someone else has signed them. And maybe you’ll be participating in helping them become hits. But don’t you want to do it yourself?”
“Yes, I do,” I replied in what was to be the only marriage pledge I ever stuck to.
“Well, come to work with me.” He smiled. “Come to Cincinnati.”
I didn’t know it then, but the single-biggest tragedy of the record-producing vocation is that the biological sons of label founders usually don’t have the ears or gut force to carry on Daddy’s adventure. The entire history of the record industry is littered with disaster sons who never should have been handed the keys to the castle. Syd was the oldest and the most successful of all the independent barons, but he didn’t have any heirs, not even a spoiled brat to waste his hopes on. His only child, Nat, was what he always described as “almost spastic”—probably autistic, not that doctors even knew such terms in those days.
I was also too young to suspect that my real father might be hostile to this unexpected twist in the plot. When I brought home the amazing news about Syd Nathan’s invitation to Cincinnati, Dad didn’t look so happy and insisted on calling into Billboard to ask Paul Ackerman questions.
“Syd Nathan has a branch office in New York,” Paul Ackerman told my father. “Why don’t you meet him yourself?” To my horror, father telephoned King Records but had to wait months for Syd’s next trip to New York. I was so embarrassed, I wouldn’t talk to either of my parents for weeks.
When the big day came, my father and I arrived at King’s New York branch on West Fifty-Fourth Street, where Syd was standing on the stoop. Syd must have seen my father tossing his cigar into the gutter or, considering his eyesight, only had to smell the cheapness. Syd pulled a fat Cuban from his pocket. “Here, have one of mine,” he told my father, whose face lit up like a candle.
“I know you’re a busy man just in from Cincinnati,” began Father. “I don’t want to take up much of your time. I have only two questions.”
“Mr. Steinbigle,” interrupted Syd. “I have only one question. Can I ask it first?”
“Yes, of course.”
“How much money do you have?”
I almost shriveled into the nearest manhole, seeing my poor father’s face turn beetroot. As if this whole meeting wasn’t humiliating enough, Syd knew I was a poor kid. “I don’t own a business,” choked Father, trying to get the words off his parched tongue. “I work in the garment center. I’ve worked there all my life, and I’ve worked my way up. Seymour and his sister never wanted for anything … always went to summer camp.”
“Mr. Steinbigle,” interrupted Syd again, “all I wanted to know is if you have enough money to buy Seymour a newspaper route.”
“A newspaper route?” My father was now totally confused. “But Seymour’s never done anything like that.”
“Listen, your son has shellac in his veins. All he wants to do is be is in the music business. I know him well enough by now to know that if he can’t be in the music business, it’s going to ruin his life. He’ll wind up doing nothing and will have to deliver newspapers. But I can get him into the music business.”
My dear father took a severe beating that day. Fortunately, he was a sensible, religious man who believed that his son’s welfare must always come before his own pride. While he was looking out the window lost in thought, I was glowing like a Christmas tree on that train back to Brooklyn. I’d just been given the ultimate compliment from an old master; the legendary Syd Nathan thought I had the signs of a record man. Back on Dahill Road that evening, my parents began packing my bags to leave home at the end of June. Urgent behavior considering it was still only April.
2. SYD AND THE KID
It was summer, and I was fifteen and aching for adventure. I took the plane to Cincinnati, where Syd was waiting at arrivals. “Welcome to Kentucky!” He smiled, because the airport was in Covington, just over the state line.
Syd squeezed behind the wheel of his Buick and drove us down the highway, squinting ominously out of his porthole glasses. This I hadn’t been expecting. A man this blind never should have been given a license, or knowing Syd, he’d probably bribed a cop to get one. I’d later learn that he’d had been in so many car wrecks, he was once sued by a friend. Whenever Syd drove, which he loved doing, it was best to look sideways at the scenery and focus on the radio.
Everything was green in Kentucky, and the air tasted different—warmer, stickier, filled with pollen and bugs. “This is WCKY,” said the voice on the radio, “broadcasting from Covington, Kentucky, just six minutes over the L&N Bridge to Fountain Square, Cincinnati, Ohio, your Queen City.” And just like the radioman described, we passed over the Ohio River, and there she was on the opposite bank, “Cincinnatah” as Syd liked to pronounce his beloved hometown.
This was to be my first of two summer internships, working at King and staying at the Nathan house for about four weeks each. I soon sensed that Syd’s wife, Zella, wasn’t too keen on me being there, which I could understand, because I hated sleeping in the same room as Nat, who was just too weird for comfort. Nat was my age, hugely overweight, and he babbled like a child. He actually came from Syd’s first marriage, and I knew he was being teased to death at school for being a “retard.” Of course, Nat was hoping I’d be his best buddy and stuck to me like shit to a blanket.
Fortunately, King and the actual city of Cincinnati felt far more welcoming. Although Cincinnati was nearer the Canadian border than I’d ever been, there was something almost Huckleberry Finn about the riverfront. Old steamboats sailed to Louisville, and barges carrying heavy materials went down all the way down into the Mississippi. It made sense that King Records would be here, tapped into America’s old river network where so much great music came from. Syd was just a few hours’ drive to Nashville, Detroit, and Chicago, where King had been a major player since the war.
In the forties, King Records had started out as a country label and quickly built up an impressive catalog of country stars, such as Cowboy Copas, the Delmore Brothers, Grandpa Jones, the Stanley Brothers, Wayne Raney, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Hank Penny, Bonnie Lou, the duo Don Reno and Red Smiley, and Moon Mullican, a honky-tonk singer-songwriter who mixed up black and country music a few years before Bill Haley. Throughout the fifties, however, R&B began taking over as King’s main specialty. Syd’s newest star was James Brown, but he also had Hank Ballard, Little Willie John, Joe Tex, Bill Doggett, Bull Moose Jackson, Ivory Joe Hunter, Earl Bostic, Lonnie Johnson, Freddie King, Otis Williams and the Charms, and many others.
The whole operation was actually several interrelated companies spread out over a yard of neighbori
ng buildings. Along an old train line at the back was the pressing plant called Royal Plastics, where Syd had first launched King in 1943. At the time, barely any record pressers or rural distributors had survived the Depression, so, from day one, Syd’s crazy dream was to help rebuild the industry he’d loved so much as a young man. Talk about the blind leading the blind; the label’s first-ever record was “Filipino Baby” by Cowboy Copas, and Syd stood by as the first turd of shellac glooped down onto the plate. An employee in a white coat lowered the presser but couldn’t lift the thing back open. It was then they looked at each other and realized they’d forgotten to fit the machinery with pullback springs. They grabbed a six-foot crowbar and managed to clunk the press back open. Syd then prized the disc off the plate with a pocketknife. Like a Catholic priest preparing Holy Communion, he held the charred and chipped mess aloft and declared to his staff “This … record … cost $65,000!” Thus began King Records.
As early as 1947, Syd announced to Business Weekly that his mission was to “create a market,” which is exactly what he succeeded in doing. Around that factory, various offices, workshops, warehouses, and a recording studio were added. Everything was done in-house; recording, mastering, sleeve artwork, printing, pressing. Trucks arrived with chemicals and paper and then drove back out with neatly packaged boxes of records. He recruited a sales network and began opening wholesale distribution depots, city by city. He then diversified his first-party operations with sub-labels, Queen and Federal, bought out indies such as De Luxe, Bethlehem, and Four Star, and provided distribution and sometimes manufacturing services for a whole host of third-party labels, such as Bel-Tone, Willow, Miracle, Sensation, 4 Star, Fairlane, New Disc, Starday, Huron, and Cadence.
Siren Song_My Life in Music Page 4
