Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (10 page)

As well as organizing live broadcasts from the Cotton Club, Mills masterminded a record blitzkrieg. Between 1927 and 1930, Ellington’s band made over two hundred recordings under eleven different names for twenty record companies. Duke Ellington became America’s greatest jazz star as Irving Mills’s publishing company ballooned into a multiartist powerhouse complete with magazines and a booking agency. The jazz equivalent of a salami machine, Mills was slicing cuts off every side—even writing lyrics for his biggest hits or, depending on who you believe, registering other people’s creations in his own name.

As the curtain descended on the Roaring Twenties, the splintered remains of the phonograph industry had been utterly transformed. The new generation of record man, unlike his predecessor in the classical era, was a wheeling, dealing song hunter. As radio and music publishing became the growth areas, a new age of autobiographical music was being born.

A nationwide survey conducted by the American government in 1929 concluded that the radio had been the single biggest boom of the decade. The hardware alone was generating $842 million annually. About 41 percent of American homes were equipped with a radio.

The inventor of the Gramophone, Emile Berliner, died on August 3, 1929, with an estate estimated at $1.5 million. The founding father of the disc left a note for his grieving family. “When I go I do not want an expensive funeral,” he wrote. “Elaborate funerals are almost a criminal waste of money. I should like Alice to play the first part of the ‘Moonlight Sonata’ and at the close maybe Josephine will play Chopin’s ‘Funeral March.’ Give some money to some poor mothers with babies and bury me about sunset. I am grateful for having lived in the United States and I say to my children and grandchildren that peace of mind is what they should strive for.”

7. DEAD SEA CROSSING

As if the arrival of radio hadn’t been painful enough, within a few months of the stock market’s collapse on October 24, 1929, only a few crooked structures were left standing in the dust. While film and radio corporations experienced continued growth throughout the Great Depression, public demand for records simply evaporated into a puddle.

In America, record sales were decimated from 104 million units in 1927 to 10 million in 1930, the worst collapse in the industry’s forty-year history. By 1932, the entire production of records in America slid farther downward to just 6 million. With the sale of record players plummeting from 987,000 to 40,000, in those five years, the entire American record industry, both hardware and records, shrank to about 5 percent of its former size. Even by the cruel norms of the Great Depression, few industries have ever experienced such a catastrophe. It was as if the record industry had keeled over and died.

In the so-called Dirty Thirties, it was no longer enough to be a foxy survivor. From here on in, the last remains would have to rely on the charity of strangers. Whether motivated by philanthropy, vanity, or misguided investment strategy, a number of wealthy outsiders, mainly eccentrics and tycoons from neighboring industries, turned up at various fire sales to salvage what they could from all these old brand names and catalogs. Amalgamated, downsized, restructured, and renamed, the new landscape was desolate and unrecognizable.

The long-declining Edison Phonograph Company understood the crash had sounded its death knell. Edison duly closed its doors for business. “From the very first, Mr. Edison himself regarded the phonograph as merely a machine,” concluded a damning epitaph in
The Phonograph Monthly Review.
“Has he ever had any understanding of music: how could he hope to succeed in a musical venture?”

Before the crash, in January 1929, Seligman & Speyer had sold Victor for just $160 million to its nemesis, RCA, which in September 1930 held a ceremony rechristening Victor’s headquarters as “the
Radio Center of the World
.” As Eldridge Johnson writhed in his sleep, his son Fenimore, unable to stomach the new regime, decided to take a trip into the interior of Africa.

Talkies booming and television looming, RCA emperor David Sarnoff hailed a new era of “electrical entertainment in the home and in the theater.” Following his lead, Hollywood giants saw the record industry’s collapse as an opportunity to expand into sound. One such entrepreneur, Herbert Yates, owner of Consolidated Film, bought out Pathé’s American division and merged it with a collection of bankrupt independents—Cameo Records, Lincoln Records, Emerson Records, and Plaza Music—to form the American Record Corporation, better known by its abbreviation, ARC.

Then, in April 1930, Warner Bros. bought Brunswick for $10 million. As better sound technology arrived in Hollywood, Warner licensed the Brunswick back catalog and brand name to ARC and kissed $8 million good-bye.

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.”