by Alex; Ogg
Gillett actually encountered the man behind ‘She’s About A Mover’ on his travels. “Whereas JD Miller’s office was at the back of the hairdressing saloon, he himself had nothing to do with it, that was just something he owned. But Huey Meaux, the producer in Houston, that was his day to day profession. That’s how he made his living. By the time we met him, he wasn’t doing that any more, but he had done that for the first 20 years while producing records on the side, until he finally made it big.” ‘She’s About A Mover’ boasted a highly unusual pedigree. Legendarily, with the British Invasion in full swing, Meaux had taken a box of Beatles records into his hotel room for study purposes, ingested a large quantity of wine, then decided that the beats resembled old-style Cajun dance songs sufficiently that he might combine both traditions.
“It’s a very touch and go game,” Gillett continues. “You can have big hit records in America without ever really getting the money back from them. Because the distributors, shamelessly, only pay you back when they want your next record – i.e. when they think your record will be at least as big as the one they’ve just sold for you. Until then you’ve got this horrible problem of manufacturing records with the pressing plants demanding to be paid in 30 days – the best deal you can get is 60 days – and you don’t get paid by your distributor, at the earliest, until 90 days after the sale. So there’s this big gap, and the more successful the record, the greater your problem is. Cos you’re having to manufacture thousands of records without getting paid for them. That’s why so many of those indies went running to the bigger labels. All those companies down in Louisiana, when they had a hit, they always had to go to a bigger company to carry it to the charts, because they couldn’t deal with the problems I just described. If it was a hit in Texas or Louisiana they could manage it, but the minute it went national, they had to go to a bigger company.”
Another famous example of which was Phil Phillips’ ‘Sea Of Love’. Gillett: “That was recorded in the studio of the guy I described, Eddie Shuler, the TV repairman. His neighbour, who ran a little record shop, George Khoury, was the actual producer of ‘Sea Of Love’. But Eddie Shuler agreed to record the song in his studio in return for getting the publishing rights to the song. So Phil Phillips brought the song along, George Khoury was going to put it out. He claimed half the songwriting, which is where he added to his income. Shuler published it, and they put this record out – and it was barely taking off locally. Then they went to Mercury and a guy called Shelby Singleton, who was based in Nashville but was originally from Louisiana and had his ear to the ground there, picked up a number of hits from that region that went national on Mercury. That happened a lot in those days. There was an indie scene at one stage, then suddenly it would be on a major, and the majors tended to retain the rights ever after. They could afford to repress, and part of the original definition of a major label in the United States was that you owned your own pressing plants. Except King Records, which had James Brown, was an anomaly, because they owned their pressing plant, so they could be said to be a major, but they were never seen as that, they were an indie really, and their pressings were appalling. So there were a whole bunch of independent pressing plants all around the country, and all kinds of rackets went on in order to get your records pressed here and there. There were, I think, 13 regions, each with their own separate distributors, so if you were an indie label in Los Angeles, you had to place your record with a different distributor all across the country.”
The underworld played a key part in financing records and also reaping the rewards of hit singles. The corruption extended beyond the labels to the pressing plants, distributors and numerous DJs, leading to the great ‘payola’ scandal of May 1960 surrounding DJ Alan Freed. Payola – a contraction of the words pay and Victrola, a throwback to the record playing device – was nothing new to the entertainment industry. It has been rampant in the 20s and 30s in vaudeville and big bands. Indeed, Chairman Oren Harris’s House Oversight Subcommittee’s inquest into the recording industry was prompted largely by pressure from ASCAP (American Association of Composers, Authors and Publishers), who considered rock ‘n’ roll a fad, and the recent denouncement of corruption on rigged quiz shows. The immediacy of the evolving business and its lucrative potential, plus the dispersal of ‘shady’ money, meant ready temptation for a DJ willing to favour a particular artist or label. In the court case that led to a $2,500 fine for Freed, Dick Clark’s association with Jamie Records also came under scrutiny. A total of 25 DJs and programme directors were investigated by the committee, leading directly to the establishment of America’s anti-payola statute. Freed, the man who first popularised the term rock ‘n’ roll, would die a penniless alcoholic. Morris Levy, undoubtedly far further up the payola food chain, escaped any conviction and never appeared at the Congressional hearings.
The case was undoubtedly linked to reservations about the growth of an independent music network that was answerable, if not to nobody, then certainly not to the major labels. Part of ASCAP’s motivation was their disapproval of rival organisation BMI (Broadcast Music Incorporated), who principally represented black musicians, and had become more amenable to the artists populating the emergent rock ‘n’ roll scene. ASCAP believed BMI was using payola to leverage its artists. Many others, however, believe that the organisation’s intention was retaliation over loss of market share, while others still contest that institutional racism was a motivating factor.
“One thing I didn’t really understand when I was writing Sound Of The City,” says Gillett, “was the fundamental role of payola of one kind or another, which was what enabled the little labels to get played on radio stations. The paradox being that the bigger labels like RCA and Colombia would not be seen dead in those days paying payola – they had shareholders. So I remember talking to the guy who produced Bill Haley – Milt Gabler – and he said it was incredibly frustrating. Because your records weren’t getting played on the stations that should have played them, and would have loved to have played them, because there was no payola. And the other thing was the role of publishing companies in those days. The role of publishing was very critical in America. By the time you get to 1976 in Britain, the role of a publishing company doesn’t feel so significant, and I don’t think it is. Publishing is more riding on the back of the energy of the record labels. But back in those days, publishers were very active, and were part of the promotion and by implication part of the payola as well, the means by which all that got dealt with. So Alan Freed, his manager was Morris Levy, who ran not only Roulette Records, but Ark Publishing – and Ark Publishing represented all of Chess, and Checker Records, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and all those guys. And part of the way those records would get on the radio in New York was through Ark Music having an interest, and making sure those records got played on the right radio shows, etc. Most of the people from that era got away scot-free – Alan Freed himself did do some time, which was always very unfair.”
In contrast to the largely enthusiastic if not necessarily altruistic spirit that would define the late 70s UK independent boom, there was a level of cynicism at work beyond payola. Many rock ‘n’ roll records were produced by house bands and session musicians, some clearly disinterested in their employment. Some of the arrangers and songwriters the labels retained shared their cynicism, resulting in bland ‘teenage-fodder’. Partially as a result of these creative frustrations, independent producers came to the fore. Often songwriters themselves, they would recruit musicians and singers to record, then pass the results on to a label to manufacture and distribute, before returning to the studio for their next venture. Music publisher Don Kirshner was one such creature, using writers Carole King and Gerry Goffin to produce recordings licensed to both majors and indies. The team dominated the pop charts of the early 60s. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were veterans of the R&B scene who founded Red Bird Records before selling it on. Kirshner also established his own imprint, Tomorrow, as did his associate Lou Adler, who started Ode
. Gamble And Huff wearied of writing bland pop hits for Cameo-Parkway and set up their own operation in Philadelphia, while a short-lived artists’ co-operative, AFO, was founded in New Orleans by veteran session musicians. In Memphis, Stax moved from its association with Atlantic to operate in its own right.
It was a fertile period for mavericks, entrepreneurs and square pegs. An illustrative case is that of Phil Spector and his Philles label, founded in 1961. At 21 Spector became America’s youngest label head. Already an industry veteran having assisted Leiber and Stoller in New York and produced hits for Ray Peterson and Curtis Lee for Dune Records, Spector grasped the importance of retaining control of his catalogue and the production process. That was all very well while the hits flowed from his Goldstar Studios in LA, beginning with the Crystals and continuing through smashes for Darlene Love and the Ronettes. But after Ike and Tina Turner’s ‘River Deep, Mountain High’ failed to do satisfactory business in the US, Philles closed in 1967. Which was heartening for the distributors who had become used to wielding near total control over the labels they worked with and didn’t like Spector’s feisty and outspoken style one iota.
In the process these labels, predominantly working with black singers and artists, committed some of the great American songs to posterity, and were able to assert their claims by dint of talent and personal industry. Others came out of the majors to strike out on their own, notably Berry Gordy Jr, who had piloted Marv Johnson’s career at United Artists and started Tamla and Motown, just as R&B gave way to a new generation of soul artists. Alongside Philadelphia International, Motown rose to become the definitive independent of the early 70s, retaining its own masters until its sale to MCA in 1988 for $61 million.
From 1961 to 1971, Motown had 110 Top 10 hits. Key to this was the fact that, unlike some competitors who released singles in a piecemeal fashion, Gordy believed in artist development and a co-ordinated, highly drilled back room operation. In the process he fostered probably the most impressive roster of talent ever to be assembled under the auspices of a single label – from Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye to Diana Ross, the Jackson 5, The Temptations and the Supremes. Each was in receipt of fastidious grooming; the maintenance of a dignified image helped make the label appeal to white Americans as well as black. Gordy prized elegance and deportment highly, and refined the manners and speech – even to the extent of elocution lessons – of performers he rescued from backgrounds in impoverished urban projects. They were choreographed and rehearsed relentlessly, and most took part in the Motown Revue tours of the chitlin circuit to hone their performances.
A similar methodology was applied to crafting hits at the label’s Hitsville USA recording studio. Every Friday, Gordy would chair quality control meetings, rejecting any recordings that didn’t fit the style of the top selling discs that week. The ‘Motown Sound’ was created around a nucleus of fantastically able musicians known collectively as the Funk Brothers, while the dominant songwriting team was Holland-Dozier-Holland (brothers Brian and Eddie Holland with Lamont Dozier), as well as Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong. At least until the loss of Holland-Dozier-Holland due to a royalties dispute in 1967, Motown operated in a fashion akin to battery farming, rotating acts in the studio with those on tour, while the studio was open up to 22 hours a day. Visionary and driven, Gordy accepted no compromise in keeping the hits coming, though there have been several who dispute the equanimity of the wealth distribution. Kim Weston, best known for her duets with Gaye, took an action against Gordy in 1994 for non-accounting (her original royalties all having been offset against production costs, she claimed). Teena Marie famously sued Berry over her contract – leading to the Brockert Initiative or ‘Teena Marie Law’, which acted as a benchmark for limiting the length of recording contracts. Further, she was signed without the use of an attorney, aside from the one appointed to her by the label – the common-law wife of Gordy’s brother. Other instances abound, but it’s hard to begrudge Gordy his success. Studio musicians were paid relatively good wages for the time ($5 to $10 per session – or until “everything was right”) to staff the cramped Studio A they nicknamed the Snakepit. Though $10 was, of course, a long way short of what they could have earned had they retained any of their copyright.
But what of the UK? Here, notable exceptions like Topic apart, there was no such tradition of independent labels. The geography of the British Isles meant that the economics of national distribution were far easier for major labels to navigate, leaving less room for niche outlets. Additionally, the majors had affiliates in America who could farm out American hits to them, giving them an innate advantage. Hence the market dominance of EMI, Decca, CBS, Pye and Phonogram by the 60s.
Formed by Alan Freeman, Polygon was arguably the first documented attempt by a British independent to operate within mainstream popular music. In 1949, armed with a small inheritance, and a promise from a contact in Australia that he could export ‘pop’ records there, Freeman alighted on the former child film star Petula Clark, who had been performing with the Rank Organisation. Freeman had spotted a gap in the market. EMI and Decca were not prepared to sign Clark as an adult singer, while Freeman could see her potential in that role. He approached her father and business manager, Leslie Clark, who was taken by the idea to the extent that he also invested in what would become Polygon Records.
The first fruits of this liaison arrived with the 1950 cover version of ‘Music, Music, Music’, which became a major success for Esquire in Australia (whereas in the UK the Teresa Brewer version of the song was a hit in 1950). The first British Polygon releases, meanwhile, were a Louis Prima recording licensed from America, a series of three singles from Clark and future DJ Jimmy Young’s ‘Too Young’, which became the label’s first substantial UK hit in the summer of 1951 and sold a quoted 130,000 copies. However, the label wasn’t equipped for that success, mirroring the difficulties American independents often faced when scoring a runaway hit. Young would subsequently join Decca and informed the NME that the label was unable to press copies fast enough. He further commented: “Basically I wanted to stay with Polygon, partly on sentimental grounds and partly because I had great personal admiration for Alan Freeman, who was running it. However, my advisers felt that I ought to be on a major label with distribution all over the world”.
For Petula Clark, speaking in 2007, there are nothing but good memories of Polygon. “I don’t think we realised at the time we were making history. Alan was great. I think it was his dad who was financing it. I was a young woman, I didn’t know any of the ins and outs of any of this stuff. I just went in and sang. I was only interested in singing. I’m still only interested in singing. Any of the rest of it doesn’t really interest me that much. I adored Alan, we had lots of fun together, and it was all on a shoestring. There was nothing glamorous about it at all. He had this funny old car, and he used to go round distributing the records himself, with the records in the back. He would actually physically load the car with records, and I remember the car was scraping the road because there were so many records in the boot and back seat. But he took all that on. Certainly in those days independent really did mean that – you’ve got to get out there, you don’t have the help of the big houses. And of course, getting them pressed too is something else, the whole business is a struggle. If I think about it now, I’m sure it was a struggle for Alan, but he was just spurred on by his own enthusiasm and determination.” John Repsch, who interviewed Freeman before his death, casts a slightly different light on Freeman’s diligence. “He was in love with Petula. Absolutely.”
The main thing Clark can recall, however, is how much fun they were having. “We laughed all the time. He loved music, don’t get me wrong, he had a great sense of music. I don’t know if he was commercially very savvy, but none of us were really. It was just a joy being in the studio with him. The business was much smaller and the world was very different, so you can’t compare it with the record business of today, or even the 60s. It was all very ‘artisan�
��. Having said that, we used huge orchestras. I remember recording with Laurie Johnson [another Polygon artist who collaborated with Clark on songs such as ‘How Are Things With You?’) in a church, because that was the only place we could get all the musicians in! It was such a huge orchestra and difficult because the acoustics were terrible. But it was because Alan wanted this huge sound.” Indeed, several renowned orchestra leaders started out on Polygon, including Johnson, Frank Chacksfield and Ron Goodwin.
Although still succoured by the idea of an entirely independent company, Freeman was aware that Jimmy Young’s concerns, or at least those of his advisors, were legitimate. Eventually, this led to talks with Pye about using Polygon as their bridge to the pop market. Negotiations began in 1954 with a view to Freeman being installed as the A&R head of the new venture. Delayed by a bout of illness, the move was finalised in February 1955 when Polygon moved into the offices of Nixa (run by New Zealand-born entrepreneur Hilton Nixon), an earlier Pye acquisition. But the development of (Pye) Nixa meant the end for Polygon, whose final release came in October, after which all the label’s assets, masters and artists were transferred to the new label. The catalogue of 78rpm singles, nearly two hundred in total and some 23 by Clark, all produced by Freeman, were deleted. Or, in some cases, accidentally destroyed (towards the end of Polygon, Freeman had exacerbated the confusion by storing releases in garages in pressings of exactly 999 – to avoid VAT charges). As writer Theo Morgan observes, “After the move, the masters were stored in two Nissen huts, one of which Nixa decided was surplus to requirements. So they had it demolished without the contents being removed first. Thus, half the Polygon masters were lost.” Which is why subsequent compilations of this material, such as those Morgan has overseen for labels including Redline, have had to be remastered from original 78s. The carelessness with which the music industry has treated some of its prize assets evidently began early.