Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry
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CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PREFACE
1 TALKING MACHINES
2 JUDGMENTS
3 HIS MASTER’S VOICE
4 EXODUS
5 THE INVISIBLE WAVE
6 SURVIVORS
7 DEAD SEA CROSSING
8 HOMESICK MEDICINE
9 SUNRISE
10 LUCKY CHILDREN
11 NUMBERS
12 THE INVASION
13 ACTS
14 A SLOW ECLIPSE
15 TERRA NOVA
16 ON BLACK CANVAS
17 FORBIDDEN FRUIT
18 TAURUS
19 KINGS
20 PSALMS
21 THE ISLAND
22 HIGH TIDE
23 SOURCES
24 SODOM & GOMORRAH
25 SHADOWS
26 CYCLOPS
27 LEGENDS
28 ROMANS
29 LAMENTATIONS
30 BUBBLEGUM FOREST
31 REVELATIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
PHOTOGRAPHS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Profound thanks to the following record men for all their tales, confessions, and insights:
Martin Mills (Beggars Banquet, Founder)
Jac Holzman (Elektra, Founder)
Jerry Moss (A&M, Founder)
Seymour Stein (Sire, Founder)
Andrew Loog Oldham (Rolling Stones / Immediate, Founder)
Daniel Miller (Mute, Founder)
Geoff Travis (Rough Trade, Founder)
Chris Wright (Chrysalis, Cofounder)
Terry Ellis (Chrysalis, Cofounder)
Simon Draper (Virgin Records, A&R / Cofounder)
Dave Robinson (Stiff, Founder)
Ivo Watts-Russell (4AD, Founder)
Derek Green (A&M, London MD)
Laurence Bell (Domino, Founder)
Stan Cornyn (Warner Bros Records, Creative Services)
Larry Harris (Casablanca, VP)
David Enthoven (EG Management)
Tim Clark (Island, MD)
David Betteridge (Island / CBS, MD)
Andrew Lauder (United Artists / Radar / Island, A&R)
Bruce Pavitt (Sub Pop, Founder)
Craig Kallman (Atlantic Records, CEO)
Tom Silverman (Tommy Boy, Founder)
Rick Rubin (Def Jam, Founder)
Other sources:
John P. Hammond, Charly Prevost, Tom Hayes, Danny Krivit, Trevor Wyatt, Derek Birkett, Patrick Zelnik, Bob Garcia, Harold Childs, Lionel Conway, Art Jaeger, Ray Cooper, John Heyman, Tony Pye, Thomas H. White, Patrick Feaster, Rick Bleiweiss, Steve Knopper, David Ritz, Nigel House, Kathy Kenyon, Howard Thompson, Steve Lispon, Martin Kirkup, Bill Halverson, and Tom Vickers.
Special thanks to:
Jeff Capshew, Rob Kirkpatrick, India Cooper, Jennifer Letwack, Nicole Sohl, Françoise Cruz, Judith Azoulay, Andre Azoulay, Rosita Sarnoff, Peter Pace, Sara Clarson, Lora-Jean Oliver, Pat Rowley, Paul Babin, Cassie Williams, Alison Wenham, Kevin Conroy Scott, Peter Simon, Antoine Giacomoni, Denis Stass, Tom Zito, Kristan Crossley, Bob Kaus, Grayson Dantzic, Thomas Tierney, Gudrun Shea, Heidi Robinson-Fitzgerald, Simon Duke, Robert Hogan, Mark Doyle, Tara Murphy, and James Azoulay-Murphy.
Extra special thanks to my rock ’n’ roll parents, Pat and Marie, without whom this book could never have been written.
PREFACE
Love, they say, is like the wind—you don’t know where it’ll come from next. The same is true of music.
To begin at the beginning, the craft of discovering and selling music isn’t really an industry. It’s a game. It’s a way of life. It’s solitary hunters chasing their muse through the wilderness. It’s a marketplace of sellers. It’s preachers and fanatics. It’s collectors, browsers, and Saturday strollers. There’s plenty in this book about gambling and hustling, but the focus is on the musically literate prospectors—the indies, the midwives, the wave catchers—who source the raw material and ride it into town.
The writing of this book took some twists and turns as three years of digging threw up some surprises—in particular, a stock phrase veterans kept repeating as they described the legends in the trade. “He was a real record man,” they’d say. The respectful tone in which record man was always evoked pointed the way to subtle distinctions inside the music business. Although deceptively simple, record man is an old term, somewhat ambiguous but nonetheless an honor reserved for a certain caliber of entrepreneur who knows his music.
In a game largely populated by bullshitters, being a real record man means getting lucky more than just once or twice. It means picking the winning ticket lots of times, often in different eras. This book maps out the life and times of the fifty or so pioneers who form the branches of the record industry’s genealogical tree.
When you consider how all the major musical discoveries of the last 130 years inspired the genres that enabled clusters of record companies to finance thousands of other records, it’s easy to understand the importance of record men in the greater scheme of things. All it takes is one big find—sometimes even just a three-minute song—to spark a cultural explosion that in turn opens up a billion-dollar gold mine.
Drawing from dead men’s letters, trade journals, archives, correspondence, and a hundred hours of exclusive interviews, this book has dug up thousands of things you probably don’t know about music. I set out on a mission to write what I hoped would be the record business bible, the type of book I wish somebody had given me when I was seventeen years old. I imagined a living, wide-screen history book—written in the form of a road map through the decades, visiting all the important happenings and characters of the record industry’s life.
The itinerary starts in Paris in 1860 and follows a time line through Washington, D.C., New York, London, Berlin, Memphis, Detroit, Los Angeles, Jamaica, South Africa, and various other locations where each record man’s destiny was forged. Along that winding storyboard, musical genres come and go in a never-ending process of cross-fertilization—vaudeville, opera, blues, jazz, hillbilly, R&B, rock ’n’ roll, folk, psychedelia, progressive rock, reggae, disco, New Wave, postpunk, synth-pop, hip-hop, electronica …
Needless to say, this book was written at a time when the majority of media observers were confidently predicting the imminent death of the record-buying trade—the conventional wisdom being that nothing like the digital revolution has been experienced before. Imagine my shock to look up one day as I sifted through archives of early music-business history and find a proverbial elephant standing in the library: The record business of the twenties and thirties experienced a crash even more devastating than the recent one. Curiously, in my various interviews with today’s record moguls, nobody really knew.
That forgotten crash, which began with the arrival of radio, culminated in a near-death experience in which the forty-year-old phonograph industry shrank to just 5 percent of its former size. Left for dead by banks, a number of die-hard record men in the Great Depression tilled the desert with swing, blues, and folk records. With a little help from jukeboxes, things began to pick up in the late thirties and forties. After a twenty-year dark age, a suppos
edly obsolete format rose from its coma and charged out of the hospital all guns blazing.
It’s arguable that much of today’s doom and gloom about the Internet supposedly driving the record industry into extinction is little more than a consequence of our limited knowledge of the musical world before Elvis. In this new century of rebuilding, isn’t it time we take a step back, see the bigger picture?
Fact is, rock ’n’ roll inherited everything from that forgotten infancy: the majors, the contracts, music publishing, the collection societies, radio stations, distribution networks, equipment, jargon. As a musical experiment, it mixed up all the records of the twenties and thirties—rather like a bohemian rummaging in a secondhand clothing store. Most of the great star spotters of the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties learned the game in the Jazz Age. Their heightened sense of judgment was firmly rooted in musical culture. Neither futurists nor fashion victims, they possessed an innate sense of history and timelessness.
As the bigger picture illustrates beyond any doubt, the record business is inherently cyclical. Fallow periods tend to follow bumper harvests. Today’s predicament, in which an ever-dwindling generation of rock ’n’ roll impresarios finds itself tiptoeing into the terrifying crosscurrents of the digital age, can only make sense when viewed within a complete time frame. Difficult as market conditions are today, our struggling record business has not become extinct; a tribe of indie diehards is currently trudging through the desert—surviving on weeds, puddles, and their undying belief in music. In fact, today’s open field is probably a place of immense opportunity. When the rivers flow again, the elected will build viaducts, hanging gardens, new temples, and new marketplaces.
In a domain being constantly inherited by youngsters craving exciting new sounds and ideas, the one thing that will never change is the need for these record men. They keep the campfires burning brighter.
One thing I noticed while studying many of these characters, especially the independents, was their deep-rooted belief. Unlike the foot soldiers of the music business, who are notorious for their name-dropping and embellished anecdotes, the indie founders are serious, secretive, sober, immune to stargazing, wary of money, and motivated by something higher. Behind every emblematic record label lies a hidden story—usually deep within the boy. These patrons of contemporary music are the A-students of the music business, who view their role as judge and guardian.
The community is diverse, and the typical cliché of “majors versus indies” is overly simplistic. Plenty of important record men worked for majors. There are two sides, however, and all record men instinctively choose one: the music or the money. Hence the book’s title, Cowboys and Indies. Rather like tribal chieftains, the enlightened braves of the musical world are on a life mission—not simply to defend the village but to save a culture from extinction. In contrast, generally among the larger companies but some indies also, the cowboys run wild. Gamblers, double-dealers, or bounty hunters, they are the game players who seek money as reward. Some characters, the complex ones, are half-bloods, torn between the faith and the game.
In the movie business, it is often said that directors make better interviewees than film stars. The same, I believe, applies to the record business: Record men make more entertaining dinner guests than the stars they helped create. Being the key witnesses and catalysts, they know the real stories—who these stars really are, how the breakthroughs really happened. They saw the potential in its rawest form, negotiated the contracts, signed the royalty checks, and created the hype. Seen through their eyes, the game takes on a whole new perspective.
The strange thing is, pop stars don’t always see the bigger picture. The vocation of writing and performing requires total self-absorption. Most of the time, they’re under such pressure to stay on top, their best years are spent battling against themselves. In many ways, the label boss is the one concerned party actually enjoying the roller-coaster ride as it’s happening. Standing in the shadows, pulling strings, counting the shekels—he’s watching from the best vantage point possible.
There is a dangerous thrill to the vocation. It’s like holding a monster on a leash. There are tales of manipulation and megalomania in this book, yet at the same time, with each big new musical discovery the world does keep singing and dancing. One thing is for sure, financing records is a high-risk business that doesn’t make sense in purely financial terms. As any ringmaster will tell you, there have got to be easier ways of making a living.
As an intentionally panoramic voyage through the twentieth century, this book is also about migrations. The tradition of musical cross-pollination across the Atlantic and the North American plains has kept the record business constantly evolving since its very inception. Appropriately, many of the greatest record men in both America and England were themselves adventurers who crossed seas and continents in search of a new life in a big city. As the chapters unfold, various common denominators begin to emerge. This book’s final destination, “Revelations,” reaches the deeper truths about this tribal theater we call pop music.
Using all the great pioneers in an epic story about the record business, I set out to discover the secrets behind the curtain. To get to a high place where we can see the four horizons more clearly, let us now embark on an odyssey through all the musical crazes that drove successive generations wild with joy. In a pattern that would repeat itself several times over, it all began with a technological revolution.
1. TALKING MACHINES
The story begins in Paris. The tangled branches—producers, labels, and recording artists—that form the record industry’s genealogical tree can be traced back to one precise point. The year was 1853. In a little bookstore on rue Vivienne, a man was sitting in a chair, reading.
The man, a thirty-six-year-old typesetter named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, was proofreading a physics manuscript. He turned a page and was struck by a diagram of sound waves. Fascinated by these curling lines, he began dreaming of a machine.
After chewing over the question for years, he came to a simple but ingenious conclusion—just copy nature. His sound-writing machine would have to be a type of mechanical ear attached to a pen. A barrel-shaped receptor would capture incoming sounds, the way the outer ear directs sound into the eardrum. Two elastic membranes would reproduce the work of the eardrum; a system of levers would replicate the three minute bones in the middle ear that transmit vibrations from the air to the liquid interior. A boar’s hair attached to the end of this mechanical ear would engrave the vibrations on a glass surface blackened with soot.
On March 25, 1857, he deposited a design with the French Academy of Sciences. Later that year he was granted a patent for his phonautograph, or sound-writer, the earliest known sound-recording device.
Scott de Martinville lacked the skills to build a working prototype, so he found a craftsman, Rudolph Koenig. His atelier was located on Île Saint-Louis, the little island in the heart of Paris, within walking distance from Scott de Martinville’s bookshop. The two men met sporadically to assess progress, until on April 9, 1860, the earliest known recording of a human voice was engraved in soot on a glass surface. Prophetically, its inventor didn’t speak but sang “Au clair de la lune,” a traditional lullaby. “Under the moonlight, my dear friend, Pierrot, / Lend me your plume to write a word down. / My candle has died, I haven’t got a light. / Open your door, for the love of God.”
This was the golden age of science journals and exhibitions; ideas were circulating faster and over greater distances than ever before. In 1866, a telegraph cable was laid across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, bringing Europe and America into a new era of instantaneous communication. For young, inquisitive minds with the genius to tap into the hidden wonders of science, the Victorian period was a time of immense opportunity.
In 1860, one such genius was a teenager in Scotland by the name of Alexander Graham Bell, Aleck to his family. He is remembered as the inventor of the telephone, but he also carried the work o
f the Paris pioneers across the Atlantic to the communications revolution about to explode in America. As a philanthropist and committed believer in sound innovation, he indirectly played midwife to Columbia Records, the industry’s oldest company and one of its most prolific. The sonic unit known as a bel, as in decibel, was named after him.
What makes Bell unusual is the role of deafness in motivating his tireless research. His grandfather was a respected speech therapist for deaf children. His father, Melville Bell, invented a system of phonetic notation called Visible Speech, which showed the position of lips, teeth, and tongue for each sound and was used in teaching the deaf to speak. His mother herself was deaf. From a young age, Aleck understood that deaf people suffered less from silence than from the crippling frustration of not being able to communicate. The disability landed many of them in prisons or mental asylums.
Aleck worked from the age of sixteen as an elocution teacher in London and Edinburgh. Meanwhile, Melville Bell began receiving invitations to demonstrate his Visible Speech in American universities. Increasingly intolerant of the cynicism in English scientific circles, Bell senior began to admire the spirit of curiosity and opportunity in the New World.
Then the hand of destiny struck the Bell family cruelly. In quick succession, both of Aleck’s brothers died of tuberculosis, a common illness in the Victorian era of coal furnaces and damp cities. When Aleck started to look ill from the exhausting demands of teaching and researching, his heartbroken mother and father made a fateful decision to take their last son out of Britain. In 1870, when Aleck was twenty-three, they sold their properties and sailed for the New World.
Choked with bereavement, the depleted Bell family bought a farm by the banks of the Grand River in Ontario. Aleck spent his first Canadian summer in a numbed state, lying on a pillow in the middle of a field, reading vacantly, for days at a time. His slow return began with curiosity about a nearby Mohawk reservation. He approached their chief, requested permission to study the Mohawk language, and was allowed to observe their school. The children’s playful company lightened his heavy heart.