Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (14 page)

With the Petrillo Ban still a raw nerve, Ted Wallerstein had no time for trade unions or musicology. Between 1946 and 1947, record sales in America rocketed spectacularly from 275 million to 400 million. Capitol alone had sold 42 million records in its first four years of trade. Feeling this miraculous renaissance, in April 1948, Ted Wallerstein’s long-awaited secret project was prepared for launch—the 33
¹
/
₃
rpm 12-inch long player.

In a historical meeting in the CBS boardroom, on one side of the table sat the group chairman, Bill Paley, flanked by Ted Wallerstein, CBS president Frank Stanton, and their engineer, Peter Goldmark. The guest was David Sarnoff, accompanied by his eight engineers. For the demonstration, Stanton set up two turntables, a standard 78 and a prototype LP.

When Stanton touched down the stylus on the second turntable, the effect on the guests, according to Goldmark, “was electrifying, as we knew it would be. I never saw eight engineers look so much like carbon copies of tight lipped gloom.” Sarnoff pulled the cigar from his mouth and glared down his side of the table. “You sonsabitches got caught with your pants down again!” He could not “believe that little Columbia Graphophone invented this without my knowing.”

CBS chairman Bill Paley suggested he was open to a licensing deal to share the technology. Sarnoff courteously congratulated his hosts for their impressive work and replied he would consider their offer. Although, he added, there was probably no reason to do so because Columbia’s system utilized nothing patentable, just the tools at hand.

Sarnoff’s legal instincts were on the money. There was no intellectual property as such, except the name “
LP,
” which CBS-Columbia copyrighted. Symbolically, on the summer solstice of 1948, the LP was publicly showcased to forty journalists at the Waldorf Astoria. For visual effect, a wobbling tower of 78s was stacked alongside a squat pile of LPs containing the same amount of music.

As Columbia basked in the limelight, RCA Victor retaliated in February 1949 with its 45 rpm 7-inch—allowing up to eight minutes of audio space. With the birth of two new disc formats, the record business was truly back from the dead.

This miraculous renaissance was, of course, being fueled by the postwar spirit of rebuilding. With 70 million people dead and entire countries in ruins it was obvious—to young parents, at least—who would really inherit all that had been fought for. They say the Second World War marked the end of American innocence. The next age in American music would be a sort of adolescence.

9. SUNRISE

Then there was rock ’n’ roll. The location was Memphis, the very crossroads that for years had attracted blues kings and hunters alike: W. C. Handy, Harry Pace, Henry Speir, Robert Johnson. As far as music was concerned, this nineteenth-century city, named after the ancient capital of Egypt, seemed to be built along a cultural fault line, exactly where the redneck and Afro-American continental plates were precariously interlocked.

Memphis was a major port along the Mississippi and effectively the only big city for a hundred miles in every direction—attracting farmers, black and white, from the Delta and the Tennessee plains. Its famous black neighborhood was centered around Beale Street, a legendary stretch of bars, brothels, and pawn shops leading from the heart of the city all the way down to the river.

Although R&B had many key players throughout the late forties and early fifties—Atlantic, King, Chess, Specialty, RPM, Duke, Imperial, Excelsior, Liberty, VJ—there was one label at the very epicenter of the imminent explosion. Marking the dawn of a new musical age, even its name and logo couldn’t have been more appropriate: Sun Records.

The supposedly contradictory ingredients that went into early rock ’n’ roll make sense when viewed through the childhood of Sun’s founder. Sam Phillips was a poor white Southerner whose cotton-picking parents grew up on a 300-acre farm in Florence, Alabama. As a boy working in the blistering heat, Sam Phillips dragged heavy canvas sacks between the rows and filled them with the fibers plucked from the prickly twigs. “I was right in the middle of people who worked hard, black and white,” explained Phillips. “And even though I lived in the South, we didn’t see the color line like a lot of people. We weren’t better than anybody.

“There were two types of downtrodden people back then. There were the black field hands and the white sharecroppers. It was impossible in those days not to hear and grow to love all the music of oppression and the music that uplifted people—blues, country, gospel, all of it … The only hope they had was to sing the blues and to sing religious songs, and to hope and pray that times would be better … One man in particular, Uncle Silas Payne, an old black man, taught music to me. Not musical notes or reading, you understand, but real intuitive music … Did I feel sorry for them? In a way I did. But they could do things I couldn’t do. They could out-pick me. They could sing on pitch.”

Education, they say, begins at the kitchen table. “I was raised to respect black people,” continued Phillips. “My father and mother made us understand who was Uncle Silas and who was Aunt Minnie, and how they were to be treated with respect. I never for one time—and I think this had great influence on me—I never heard my father ever abuse a black person. That, to me, showed a sense of kinship. It ensconced in me a type of feeling for the South; although we had all sorts of segregation, we also had a great amount of integration in spirit and common problems.”

Phillips had caught his first glimpse of Memphis in 1939 when his father took his five sons in their Dodge coupe to see a Baptist preacher in Texas. When they passed through Memphis it was four o’clock in the morning and raining. Cruising down Beale Street with the roof down, the sixteen-year-old Sam watched bug-eyed as the storied Negro thoroughfare moved past—crowds pouring out of bars, hotel signs flashing, hookers, people walking in the middle of the street. Although he didn’t know it yet, the dreamlike passage would replay through his mind for years, eventually drawing him back as a young man.

Thanks to his older brother Jud, he secured a hobby-job, presenting a religious radio show,
Hymn Time,
mixing up white quartets and black spirituals. He was also fascinated with justice and spent afternoons at the local courthouse admiring the “almost evangelical” style of lawyers. “A lot of the time it didn’t matter what the facts were,” thought Phillips watching from the gallery. “All you had to do was sway the jury.”

When his father suddenly died in 1942, he dropped out of school to support his mother and deaf-mute aunt. Working at a mortuary, he learned how to handle the bereaved and how to respect silences. In December 1943, he headed to Nashville in the hope of landing a job at the famous station WSM, which broadcast
The Grand Ole Opry
. He didn’t get the job, but was told that a presenter at a smaller Nashville station had just been drafted; they needed an urgent replacement. Here he spent eighteen formative months working as a full-time deejay, until he learned of a job vacancy in Memphis. Without a moment’s hesitation, he drove to Memphis and walked into the WREC radio studio in the Peabody Hotel. “Just down the block was Beale Street, and I thought, Wow.”

Working as a spotter at the Peabody Hotel, Phillips had to relay technical information to the radio control room where live performances from the opulent Skyway Ballroom were fed to the nationwide CBS network. At age twenty-two, he was given his own show,
Saturday Afternoon Tea Dance,
on which he played eclectic rarities, usually with a rawer sound than was popular in the late forties.

By 1949, he began dreaming of his own recording studio. Phillips had a family of six to support, so his motivation was partly financial. Many of his radio colleagues predicted failure, citing a previous Memphis studio that opened and closed within a year. The one person to believe in his dream, however, was a talk-show host, Marion Keisker, the divorced mother of a nine-year-old son. Like so many, she was hypnotized by something magical in Sam Phillips’s eyes—“swirling pools of insanity” as another associate described them.

He leased a store at the corner of Union and Marshall avenues and named his business the
Memphis Recording Service.
With a budget of just $1,000, both Phillips and Keisker refitted the old store, while a third WREC employee lent them the money for two domestic standard reel-to-reel tape machines, a four-channel mixing table, and his prized possession, a portable Presto PT 900 tape machine. The studio opened for business on January 3, 1950. Its motto read “we record anything—anywhere—any time.” So Phillips got to work chasing down odd jobs, recording bar mitzvahs, weddings, funerals, political speeches, civic functions, anything that paid.

Phillips was struggling to pay the $150 rent and Keisker’s $25 salary, but his luck began to roll thanks to an R&B label based in Los Angeles, RPM. Its owners, the Bihari brothers, sent down their latest R&B hopeful, B. B. King. When King described his sessions in Memphis to a disc jockey in Clarksdale, Mississippi, by the name of Ike Turner, Phillips got another fateful call. An audition was arranged for which Turner’s band wrote an energetic number called “Rocket 88.” However, along the road to Memphis on March 5, 1951, the band’s amplifier fell off the roof of the car, breaking the speaker cone on impact. When the musicians arrived, Phillips couldn’t fix it, but stuffing it with paper, reduced the rattling to a tolerable fuzz. In the end, Phillips judged that the electric guitar played through a broken amplifier sounded a little like a saxophone.

Written with car radio in mind, the song described cruising for women in a big steely V8 Cadillac and made a cryptic reference to amphetamines. Phillips sent a copy to Chess Records in Chicago, whose owner, Leonard Chess, released it in April 1951. By June, it was No. 1 on the R&B charts; by December, it was the second-biggest-selling R&B record of the year. Phillips had produced his first hit. It was a major confidence boost, but Sam Phillips was working eighteen hours a day, holding down two jobs. Exhausted, broke, and the object of racist jibes from radio colleagues, Phillips experienced a nervous breakdown and was administered electroshock treatment while hospitalized.

Phillips slammed the door on his radio job to concentrate on the record trade. Unfortunately, he was about to taste its cruel side. Noticing the buzz in Memphis, both Leonard Chess and the Bihari brothers began poaching his best artists—first Ike Turner and then, saddest of all, his most treasured discovery, blues shouter Howlin’ Wolf. Measuring “six foot six with the biggest feet I have ever seen on a human being,” the Wolf was a Delta farmer whom Phillips noticed singing on a local radio station. “He had no voice in the sense of a pretty voice, but he had command of every word he spoke,” observed Phillips of this shamanistic blues man. “When the beat got going in the studio, he would sit there and sing, hypnotizing himself. Wolf was one of those raw people … God, to see the fervor in that man’s face when he sang. His eyes would light up, you’d see the veins in his neck and, buddy, there was nothing on his mind but that song.”

Phillips realized he had no choice but to set up a proper label of his own with exclusive contracts and direct sales channels. He admitted, “If I’d had my way, I’d rather have done only the creative end and left the business to other people, but once you set up in business you have to carry it through.” It was time to start anew and do everything better. “I had chosen the name Sun right at the beginning of 1952 when I had determined to try to start issuing my own recordings. The sun to me—even as a kid back on the farm—was a universal kind of thing. A new day, a new opportunity.”

Getting Sun off the ground would prove a monumental task. Marion Keisker was dipping into her savings to feed the company with cash flow when, just in time, an experienced record business entrepreneur from Nashville, Jim Bulleit, offered guidance. “He gave me most of the early insight into what I was confronted with—and that was frightening,” Phillips said of his business crash course. Introduced to forty regional independent distributors, Sun scored its first hit in March 1953 with “Bear Cat” by Rufus Thomas. It sold 100,000 copies, and Sun had a seat at the R&B table.

At the time, Atlantic, having to move 60,000 records every month to break even, was probably the hottest of the pack. Unlike the competition, it was staffed with well-connected New Yorkers with a hotline to the national media. Atlantic’s founder, Ahmet Ertegun, was the son of a high-ranking Turkish diplomat whose family had moved between embassies in Paris, London, and Washington. His background provided the cosmopolitan spirit that imbued Atlantic’s epic life.

His love affair with black music began at the age of ten watching Duke Ellington perform at the London Palladium. “This was my first encounter with black people,” recalled Ertegun. “I was overwhelmed by the elegance of their tuxedos, their gleaming instruments, and their sense of style … I fell under the spell of black music.” When his father was transferred to an influential post in Washington, D.C., young Ahmet began hanging out at a local record store, Waxie Maxie Silverman’s. While studying philosophy in college, he also made himself into an authority on jazz. With the help of a fellow jazz lover, Herb Abramson, and funding from his family dentist, he set up Atlantic Records in 1947.

By 1953, Ertegun had recruited a formidable new partner, Jerry Wexler, the
Billboard
journalist who coined the “
rhythm and blues
” moniker. “The hip of my generation, who were teenagers in the thirties, had always been drawn to Afro-American culture,” the Bronx-born Wexler explained. “In fact, I had always known
White Negroes
, not pretenders or voyeurs but guys who had opted to leave the white world, married black women, and made Harlem or Watts their habitat. These guys
converted
.”

Eloquent and crusading, the hulky Jerry Wexler believed his chief editor at
Billboard,
Paul Ackerman, was one of the great unsung heroes of these renaissance years. Thanks to Ackerman’s ethic,
Billboard
offered more than just charts, trade pulp, and advertising space; its editorial line actively supported independents exploring the margins. “In Jewish lore, in every generation the hope of the world rests on ten pure souls—
tzaddikim
—without whom the universe would fragment. Paul was one such soul,” claimed Wexler with due solemnity. “Nothing would offend Paul more than to be asked to print verbatim the handouts of the record companies. He drew a hard line between puffery and news. Not that he was averse to helping a friend with a harmless plug, but his kindness was leavened with righteous intolerance. Ackerman believed in true editorial content.”