Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (54 page)

Our whole musical world is an ethnic melting pot containing just a few core ingredients. For the Irish-bred Dave Robinson, “England has always been odd because its music has always been theatrical. The indigenous music in England and Ireland is really folk music, but that’s not what the British public buys to a large extent. It buys a theatrical kind of pop. It’s very different from America, whose music has gone through several ethnic and urban filters.” As Robinson points out, country music, centered around East Tennessee, was heavily influenced by Scots-Irish traditional music—as was the folk scene of Greenwich Village. In fact, boiled down to its lowest common denominators, modern music has been built on three main waves: African blues, Irish folk, and English vaudeville. “If you mix all that together,” reasons Robinson, “that’s where the great songs are, that’s where the great rhythms and lyrics are. That’s where Jimi Hendrix was. And at the end of the day, that’s where most of rock ’n’ roll came from.”

However, Robinson suggests, “If you want to understand the business, you’re going to have to get into the whole Jewish side of things. The music business is very Jewish—always has been, still is.” Also admitting that he’s long wondered why, A&M’s former London boss, Derek Green, says with a laugh, “Sometimes you’d be in a negotiation and everyone in the room, on both sides of the table, would be Jewish.” The half-Jewish, half-Irish Green came to the conclusion that “Jewish people are good at taking risks. There is a saying in Israel that everyone thinks he should be the prime minister.” It’s a hunch Jac Holzman shares. “A lot of Jews came into this because it was stuff that serious money businessmen would not do. They would not take the risk.”

A&M founder Jerry Moss points out that in the old days, the most predominantly Jewish end of the record business was independent distribution, in contrast to, for example, radio, which had a relatively sparse Jewish contingent. “Stocking merchandise, ordering merchandise—it’s what Jews did,” reasons Moss, himself also Jewish. This phenomenon began, Seymour Stein believes, because of old WASP restrictions barring Jewish immigrants from certain colleges, professions, and influential social clubs. Because wide-open sectors like music publishing, record production, and movies didn’t require qualifications, “Jews gravitated to those new businesses,” notes Stein, speaking from personal experience.

Behind the stereotypes of Jewish stockists and traders hides a far more interesting psychological area. Jac Holzman, son of a wealthy Manhattan doctor of East European origins, conjures up bitter memories of how “my parents were WASPY Jews. I thought synagogue was a prison. I was there four to five days a week to get prepared for my bar mitzvah. I resented it.” He obsessively saw every new picture that came out; “the movies were where I truly lived,” he explains. Then, as a student cut off from New York’s movie theaters, he threw himself into folk music, which enabled him “to plant my own roots.” Branching out from American folklore into what we now call world music, Holzman eventually began seeing his own origins from a more humanist angle.

“I had no interest in the Jewish liturgies,” he says, “although some of it was really quite beautiful. I was moved by the constant sadness, which was a strain through Jewish life. Some of it’s genetic, having been inherited from people who had to escape Russia or live through pogroms in Poland. But coming out of Israel, there was a rich sense of hope and possibility. So I got interested in the middle of 1955 in recording Israeli songs. Actually, Israel was into singer-songwriters much earlier than we were in America, because of the whole kibbutz thing.” Now eighty, Holzman realizes that in escaping religion, music became his own, superior brand of prayer. “I’m an agnostic Jew, but a culturally sympathetic one. Not being a believer in God didn’t mean I didn’t believe in stuff. I believed in the music. And I have always sought to protect it and do it right. I’m a nut on the subject; always the music—it’s all that counts. The rest of it is business, and we figure that out so we can keep doing it.”

Holzman’s story is similar to Geoff Travis’s, another teenager who wandered off to find his own artistic promised land. “When I was very young I went through a phase when I took being Jewish quite seriously,” confesses Travis, whose family observed a traditional interpretation of Judaism. “I spent half my life in evening school, Hebrew classes, and all the rest of it, so they had plenty of chances to get their hooks into me. We used to have our lunches in different places to everyone else, so there was always a bit of separation going on. I just don’t really believe in religion, I have to say. Having been inculcated with it hugely since I was a young boy, I just think it’s a lot of nonsense really.” With age, however, Travis does recognize “you could definitely make an argument for the displacement of religion by music. I’d definitely much rather listen to the Velvet Underground than listen to a rabbi singing tunelessly.”

Another Jewish rebel is Rick Rubin. “I’m not religious, but I am very spiritual. I was lucky to have learned Transcendental Meditation at the age of fourteen,” he explains. “That and my interest in Dao are probably what have kept me grounded throughout this roller-coaster ride.” As someone who has long contemplated the subject of creativity, Rubin instinctively wonders if the puzzle of why so many major players in the record business came from Jewish families should not be widened to that other conspicuously well-represented ethnic group. “In the same way there are a lot of really talented black musicians,” muses Rubin. “Both cultures share a strong past of suffering. And maybe both used music as an escape from that genetic suffering. Maybe there’s a deeper understanding of music, a deeper insight, because of suffering?”

The cornerstone of Jewish culture is the powerful story of the flight from slavery, as told in the Book of Exodus and celebrated by Passover, one of the holiest of Jewish rituals—possibly why so many humanist record men from Jewish backgrounds identify so strongly with the uplifing music passed down from African slaves. “[Chris Blackwell] always told me the Rastas related to Judaism because of the thirteenth tribe that disappeared,” confesses Lionel Conway, a Jewish friend and Island lifer. “He was very proud of that relationship … He always told me they were Jews.”

The founding father of rock ’n’ roll, Sam Phillips, a former cotton picker himself, was another who felt a profound identification with black people. What has perhaps intrigued generations ever since Elvis is that beneath all its carefree energy, rock ’n’ roll was steeped in black evangelism. “Even the most religious [white] Southern people would have an hour or hour-and-fifteen-minute service,” he observed, “but the blacks, their services would go on four hours or even all day. That kind of fascinated me. These people never seemed to be really down in the dumps. And I wondered why. I guess their solace came from their belief in God, and it’s gonna be all right somehow.”

Nearly every new genre of modern music has evolved from these ancient forms of theater and religion, and the men at the top know it. “I’ve always thought what we do is to evangelize, to crusade,” says Beggars boss Martin Mills, citing his favorite quote from black punk Don Letts—“If music is a religion, then Rough Trade has always been my church.” Chasing the muse, the indie hunter, hearing our Top 40 airwaves as an injustice, plays midwife to ignored, downtrodden genius. Since his retirement to northeastern New Mexico, 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell spends one day every week taking impounded dogs from his local animal shelter out for a run in the desert wilderness. “Poor things,” he sighs. “While waiting for a Forever Home, they don’t really see much of their beautiful surroundings unless volunteers go and walk them. I never had kids, but I went from nurturing musicians to rescuing dogs. There are similarities to all three responsibilities, I would imagine.”

As an older man contemplating the historical importance of African American music, Sam Phillips believed “we’ve now learned so much from some of these people we thought were ignorant, who never had any responsibility other than chopping cotton, feeding the mules, or making sorghum molasses. When people come back to this music in a hundred years, they’ll see these were master painters. They may be illiterate. They can’t write a book about it. But they can make a song, and in three verses you’ll hear the greatest damn story you’ll ever hear in your life.”

For centuries, folk and blues was accumulated wisdom passed ever downward. “Think about the complexity, yet simplicity, of music we have gained from hard times,” says Phillips, “from the sky, the wind, and the earth. If you don’t have a foundation, you won’t know what the hell I’m talking about.” His proudest discovery was not Elvis, or even Johnny Cash, but blues shaman Howlin’ Wolf.

Whether it’s in dense cities or across open country plains, the search for the divine comedy is a timeless art that just adapts to different environments. In the big city, cut off from the elements, records have become our folklore, our spiritual medicine, our last sacred connection to the tribal godhead. In a game populated by snake-oil salesmen, the real record man is the one selling the magic potions that actually work.

Music is one of several domains—sports, politics, movies, books, and fashion included—that will always remain governed by tribal genes inherited from the campfire. Thousands of years of technological progress and where are we? Still huddling up at night around the glow, trying to make sense of it all—dreaming our lives into the stars.

Seek and ye shall find.

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