by Jeff Horton
Sam used to favor Hohner Marine Band harmonicas, but in recent
years he’s switched to the Hohner Meisterklasse. Right now he’s got a full set of those, and when the reed plates go, he gets the Big River harps and takes the reed plates out of those and puts them in the Meisterklasse because they’re a little bit cheaper. The Marine Bands don’t have the quality that they used to. Plus the wood combs on the Marine Bands would shrink and swell and sometimes cut his mouth, so he switched to the Meisterklasse, which has an alloy comb. He also plays a Super 64
Chromonica for his chromatic work.
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C H A P T E R 1 1
THE MUSICIANS’ UNION
Organized labor unions for musicians have been in existence for almost a hundred years. Today’s American Federation of Musicians seems to be oriented mostly towards providing its members, especially those in symphonic orchestras, with insurance and retirement benefits. But back during World War II, James C. Petrillo ruled the union with an iron fist.
Interestingly, his middle name was Caesar, and he was the undisputed emperor of the musicians’ union for decades. Petrillo was president of his Chicago local from 1918 until 1940 when he ascended to the national presidency, which he held until 1958. He was so powerful that he was able to single-handedly bring the recording industry to a near standstill during what became known as “Petrillo’s War.” He became embroiled in a dispute with the few major record companies of the time over royalties that he wanted paid to members for every record pressed. To drive his point home, Petrillo banned all commercial recordings by union members from 1942 to 1944 and again in 1948, when the record companies and the union finally reached a settlement.
He may have put a few more dollars in his members’ pockets, but an unfortunate casualty of Petrillo’s War was the nascent modern jazz era.
Few, if any, recordings were made of the earliest developments of the bebop style, although its most important proponents eventually went
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on to record. But it remains unknown how much of that rich musical heritage was lost.
No doubt a few individuals at the top levels of the union enjoyed prosperity no matter what happened to the music industry, but whether or not the musicians’ union was always beneficial to individual members is a matter of opinion.
The musicians’ union had some good things that they would do.
When you joined the union, you paid your dues, and when you played
a union house you got the scale. The house would book bands that
had a union contract, and then they automatically would become a
union club and would share some of the profits with the union. What
they would do, the union had a number of clubs that they would book
for you. In the early days of the union, to use the word “musician” you had to be put through a test to become a union musician. There was
an audition, and if you could pass that test, automatically you would become a member. Then you paid your dues and you were in. They
had a field man that went around with a big book, and if you was sitting in with a band that wasn’t union, and it wasn’t a union club, they warned you about it. If they caught you playing and your name wasn’t on the chart, you’d be the topic of the evening at the union house. If you wasn’t a union member, they’d pull you off the stage. Then they’d go talk with the bandleader. The bandleader would have to promise
them, if you were going to be working with them, you’d just have to go down to the local and get a permit. It didn’t cost much back then for the person to work. Then you’d get union scale, because that’s the way the rest of them did it. When you became a unionized musician, they
gave you a permit to work until you got your card.
When I took the test, it was over the instruments that I could play.
You were supposed to be able to master three. Singing wouldn’t neces-sarily have to be a part of it, but it usually was. But if you were going
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on as a singer and a musician, you had to be able to play so many different instruments and you had to be able to sing so many different
styles. For the test, there would be a whole band there. They’d put a chart in front of you, and then everybody played along with you. You’d be playing different stuff, and then before that song is over you might go through about two or three different instruments. Then you’d do
the same way about singing. If you only did blues, they wouldn’t call you a musician. Or if you was only a vocalist doing blues, they’d say you was only a blues vocalist. But if you was a musician and a vocalist, you had to do about four or five different styles. So I started out playing trumpet, then I went to do a gospel thing. The guy said, “Well, so much for that,” and I said, “Yeah. How far back do you want me to go?” He said, “No, you’ve gone back far enough.”
With James C. Petrillo, a lot of that stuff was going on. He came
from New York, and he was the head of the American Federation of
Musicians, Local 208. He had another guy in charge if he wasn’t there, a Mr. Cooks. He was head of the branch in Chicago. But he was originally from a branch of Local 802 out of New York that used to handle off-Broadway, the Broadway musicals and jazz. They would give you a
booklet on what you’re supposed to do and what you’re not supposed
to do. A lot of times it would work, because some guy might come
into town and have everything in his band but one certain instrument.
If your name was on that bulletin board, then you’d get a gig if you wasn’t working. They had such musicians as would stay around the
union hall just in case. If a session come up, they would use them on that. A lot of guys made a living doing that, and a lot of them messed their living up by doing it, abusing their privileges, like Elmore James.
He had been in and out of the union so many times, been black-
balled so many times. I never will forget, most of the gigs that he did was on his own. If they found out he was playing a club, they’d call the manager and say, “If you book this guy, if he plays your club, you’ll
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never play nobody else.” The union was just that strong at the time.
But so many people came along who abused their privileges, until now all the union wants is your money. They’ll get you a little something to do every now and then but not like they used to. They used to be very strict. But it was the musicians that abused the privileges that they had. It’s a very bad thing.
Nowadays, they have insurance for their members. If your instru-
ments got messed up or stolen, they can take care of that for you. But you’ve got to list your instruments, just like a car, through the union.
Like a car can become a total loss, if you’re a standing member of the union, you’ve got the same type of insurance, and they get you new
ones. They have health insurance and retirement for you, too, just like a regular job. I don’t understand why Texas is a right-to-work state, where you don’t have to be in the union to work. Back in the Don
Robey days, when I was in and out of Houston, if you wasn’t union,
you wasn’t recognized. Nowadays nobody seems to care if you’re
union or not.
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C H A P T E R 1 2
THE RECORD BUSINESS
Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1876 and began selling it in 1887. It wasn’t long before the recording industry took off, and the various sharks, con men, and rip-off artists that already plagued the world of live entertainment came right along behind. History does not give us the name of the first recorded musician to be cheated out of what royalties should have accrued to him or her, but the first one started a long chain that
continues unbroken to this day. This cheating takes two basic forms. One way is to persuade a musician to sign a disadvanta-geous contract that would pay some small up-front cash or provide some other gain such as a car, but no royalties thereafter. This was an easy thing for the postwar record companies to do, as many of the older blues artists were limited in their ability to read and understand contracts and were often misled by aggressive recording company officials.
The other way would be to promise royalties or even put them into the contract and then simply not pay them. Most musicians who found
themselves in this predicament had little or no recourse, because they lacked the money or knowledge of how to fight for their legal rights. The cruelest irony for a musician is to write a song and perform it for a while, lose the rights to that song, and then watch as other artists come along, take the material to record, and reap a handsome payday.
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Sam Myers has been mulling over his own experience with this for almost fifty years.
Making a record back in the old days was a lot different than it is now.
I liked recording in Chicago or New York better than I did anywhere
in the South. For one reason, I never did like it if I had written a song and somebody were to tell me how to sing it, and they can’t carry a
tune in a bucket. The next thing is, if you got your music set to a song the way you want it to go, you’re not supposed to let nobody in the
studio change your format around. If you want to add instruments
and they’re playing the right thing, that’s fine. But, man, don’t take away anything. I don’t like that.
The engineerman was the one calling the shots, or it would be
between him and the guy who was handling the record. He would tell
you to play it until it sounded right, then you’d go to your next one and you’d do it the same. It may be that something might stand out a little stronger than what you would put into it. That would be good, but don’t change the whole thing around unless you know the music.
Now, all that was fine, but I do not like a lot of today’s sessions, the way people do them. They even got to where, instead of doing stuff raw and clear in the studio, they’ve gotten into this computer-type thing, computer horns and synthesizers. Now the reason why that is, there used to be a time when you could still find a good engineer. Now, you might want it done this certain way, but the producer has got the money.
During the early days, the musicians would tell the producer to get the hell away with his money. But now the producers want something done
the way they want it done, and they don’t respect the music. Like when Elmore recorded, they never did tell him how to play it. They would
say, “Well, what you played, you played too much.” Or, “You didn’t play it strong enough.” Or, “You was a little off the mic when you was singing it.” But other than that, he would just run it off. Bam! Do it!
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One of the worst things they did back in the early days of record-
ing was to record so much stuff until they had enough material to last them until the musician should happen to die. So if they’d be dead
and gone there’d be about three or four more records to come out
after that. They would just cut, cut, cut until they’d get something good, and then they’d just put a lot of stuff back on the shelf. You wouldn’t hear about it until later, after they’re gone. But what they did, they tried to be near right about it as possible, no computer saxophones or stuff like that. No, no. That’s where it was so much different back then. Most of the stuff we did, like what Elmore did, you just run it down on one take and then, if that sounded like it was pretty much right, we’d say, “So why don’t we hold this one?” Then you do another one, and they’d tell you, “Look, put a little bit more groove into it.”
Then when you did that, boom! That’s it. Two takes and you got it.
The best studios I worked at back then were J&M in New Orleans
and Chess in Chicago. What made them special was that the vocalist
was separated from the band. You had headphones on, and the vocal-
ist would be closed off from the band in a little booth. Everybody had headphones so you could hear what’s going on. That way, you didn’t
have any bleed-over tracks in that soundproof booth. Everybody could hear one another, and the engineer would just turn up his mic and his headphones to where he could hear himself along with the band. In a
case like Elmore’s, when he was singing and playing guitar, they had him either of two ways. They could have him out with the band. They
had these things they’d put around his head, kind of like baffles, where the other instruments wouldn’t bleed into him. Course, they wouldn’t be right up under one another, they’d be spread out. But with everybody wearing headphones, they could hear what the next man was
doing. And then the other way, Elmore might be in an isolation booth.
When I was playing drums over at Chess I had a booth. They couldn’t
fit nothing in there but me and my drums. They’d close the door and
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mic everything. Like, “The Sky Is Crying” and stuff like that, they had it mic’d real good. On “Set a Date” and “Can’t Hold Out,” they had a little echo thing going. It was really nice.
I remember one time in New Orleans, though. Cosimo Matassa,
he had just built a new studio. He was one of the best engineers in the south, he taught a lot of people. His studio was at Governor Nicholls and Decatur Street in New Orleans. Before that he had one on Camp
Street. They recorded everybody there. He used to be with Sea-Saint, the studio run by Marshall Sehorn and Allen Toussaint, before he got into some trouble with the feds. Cosimo had built a new addition to
his studio, and he owed the federal government in back taxes. I’ll tell you how he did that. A lot of his sessions he did was what they called
“lamplight sessions.” That means there wasn’t no lights burning in
the studio, just like it’s closed at night. They just had lamps, so if the union man drove by accidentally, he wouldn’t see no lights and he’d go on. It’d be on a night when ain’t nothing was supposed to be happening. Not even posted on the union books. Well, somehow they caught
that son of a gun, back in 1959. They had a guy to come in who was
supposed to be a hell of a musician. But sometimes, if you are really into captivating what’s on a person’s mind, you can see if something’s strange. He came in like everything looked real funny to him. He kept asking, “What’s this? What’re you doing with this? How do you do
this?” Then he would throw it on the guys like, “I can play the music to a lot of songs, but all these different instruments, what are they for?”
Actually he was a federal guy. He worked for the FBI, and he came in posing as a musician to get the low-down on the lamplight sessions.
That’s how Elmore did a lot of his sessions, but this particular session wasn’t Elmore. It was some guys out of Jackson, Mississippi, who they were recording, and they was also recording Lee Dorsey. He got a big hit record out of that session called “Get Out of My Life, Woman.”
That was a big one for him. He also recorded “Ya Ya,” the one that
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goes, “Sittin’ on my la la, waitin’ on my Ya Ya.” That was a cut from a lamplight session. He also did some records for Bobby Robinson on
Fury.
So, what the FBI guy did, he just wandered around the studio, say-
ing things like, “Oh, I like that part,” and he called Cosimo “Cos,” just like he had been knowing him all the time. He didn’t say the kind of things a musician would, l
ike, “Hey, would you play that back for me?
Let me hear what I did, so I know how to balance the rest of it out.”
I was pretty skeptical about stuff like that. Now here comes this guy, new in town, don’t know anybody, actin’ stupid like there wasn’t nothing going on, he didn’t know nothing, but how did he happen to know
Cos by name? Nobody had introduced nobody to nobody; we all just
came in and started recording.
So, he was talking with Cos and he said, “Well, Cos, that sounded
good,” and we kept on until we got that part right. And then he said,
“Well, it’s a done deal,” you know, like everything was over with. He said, “Yep, everything is done, it looks like it’s going to be done for a long time.” And then everybody laughed, like, “What the heck is this guy talking about?” He had this little thing in a horn case. He reached in and hit a button and all of a sudden, these guys start knocking on the door. Cos said, “Well, heck, don’t nobody know that we’re here,
but I’m still going to go see who it is,” and he walked to the door to open it and tell them they wasn’t open for business. When he opened
the door, the guys just pushed it wide and came on in. And this FBI
musician said, “Yep, just like I said, looks like it’s going to be a long time before there’s going to be another one.” Then everybody was
surprised. I thought there was something funny going on, but I didn’t ever speak right out; that’d be a dead giveaway. So I was right in what I thought, because he gave us all a break. He said, “Well, you guys
are not the ones that we want.” He named ’em off: Marshall Sehorn,
Bobby Robinson, and Cosimo Matassa. Cos was the main one, that’s
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who they wanted. The FBI man asked us all to leave. Well, naturally, we didn’t want to go to jail, so we just got the heck out of there.
Back in the old days at Chess, Willie Dixon ran the show in the