Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry

425 Pages·2014·3.11 MB·English

by  Gareth Murphy

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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 diehard
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 supposedly 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