It was time for Andrew Loog Oldham to walk away. “You can’t fight a witch hunt,” warned his worldly-wise film star friend Laurence Harvey. “It’s the nature of the beast. The artist has to rise and shine and dismiss his maker—it’s as true as Adam and Eve.” In the high times of 1967, ideas of revolution, self-discovery, and corporate independence were on every pop star’s tongue. Of course, with habitual drug use came delusions of grandeur. Seeing how the Rolling Stones were breaking free from their former master, that other Adam and Eve combination, Lennon and McCartney, wanted their own taste of the tree of knowledge.
The Beatles’ will to break free coincided with the official release of Sgt. Pepper, their most critically acclaimed record to date, which sold 2.5 million copies in the first three months. Although a flood of reviews hailed it as their masterpiece, many raised the issue of George Martin’s giant contribution. When Martin was questioned by journalists, he aroused the seething resentment of Lennon and McCartney by admitting, “It’s true to say they must depend on me a lot. They know many things—but they don’t know detail.”
Their other worry was Brian Epstein’s management. Between 1963 and 1966, EMI, its Capitol subsidiary, and its overseas licensees had sold an incredible 200 million Beatles records worldwide. Brian Epstein, enjoying a 25 percent commission on all Beatles revenue, was also the proud owner of the Saville Theatre, one of London’s trendiest venues, where he had his own royal box and side-stage bar to entertain friends and business contacts. Paul McCartney and John Lennon, however, knew they were on a shit deal with EMI—an embarrassing fact further emphasized when Allen Klein renegotiated a fantastic deal for the Stones with Decca. There was also the serious problem of Britain’s tax laws in a period dominated by Labour governments. In early 1967, the Beatles’ accountant warned that if they didn’t invest profits in business ventures, the tax man would skim off a shocking 86 percent of their personal earnings.
Feeling the Beatles pushing him aside—in particular Paul McCartney, who appeared to be the chief instigator of the revolt—Brian Epstein had spent his last months wrestling with demons. While he was undergoing professional treatment for his pill addiction, his father passed away. Spending time with his bereaved mother kept him out of trouble, but despite his best efforts, Epstein kept lapsing back to his bad old ways, popping too many pills and prowling the streets of London for young men. Friends noticed his sweating and incessant jaw grinding as tensions with business partner Robert Stigwood were poised to end in litigation. That August, in a moment of insomniac carelessness, Epstein topped up on too many sleeping pills and expired in his sleep.
The Beatles were in Wales on a mediation retreat with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi when news of Epstein’s death arrived. “We’ve fuckin’ had it,” Lennon thought to himself. Publicly, after spiritual counsel with the Maharishi, he repeated the guru’s convoluted mumbo jumbo to a posse of journalists. “Brian is just passing into the next phase. His spirit is still around and always will be. It’s a physical memory we have of him, and as men we will build on that memory.”
A band meeting was convened in McCartney’s house that Friday afternoon. The news was daunting: Epstein hadn’t left a will; so ownership of his management agency, NEMS, would probably pass over to his brother, Clive Epstein, who had no experience of the music business. The Beatles had no paperwork of their own; all their record and film contracts were filed away somewhere in Epstein’s office. They didn’t even know where their money was banked. As their assistant Neil Aspinal explained, “It didn’t make them vulnerable, but it did make them realize that they had to get it together … They needed an office and an organization of their own.”
So they formed Apple—a multimedia corporation containing seven alphabetically progressive botanical subsidiaries: Apricot, Blackberry, Cornflower, Daffodil, Edelweiss, Foxglove, and Greengage. With a £1 million treasure chest of accumulated royalties, Lennon enthusiastically announced to his friends, “We’re just going to do—everything!… We’ll have electronics, we’ll have clothes, we’ll have publishing, we’ll have music. We’re going to be talent spotters.”
At exactly the same time, the BBC launched Radio 1, whose first broadcast, on September 30, 1967, was “Theme One,” a baroque-pop jingle composed by George Martin. The North Sea pirate-radio ships, active from 1964 to 1967, had proved instrumental in making Britain arguably the world’s most fertile habitat for cutting-edge pop. Radio Caroline came first in early 1964, quickly followed by Radio Atlanta and then the most successful offshore station, Radio London, a former U.S. minesweeper anchored off the southeast coast. As the total number of pirate-radio ships rose to twenty-one, some 15 million listeners were tuning in every day.
When Parliament began legislating to ban pirate-radio ships, with admirable pragmatism, the BBC began studying the hugely popular Radio London, whose Top 40 format copied American radio. By hiring the best deejays from the ships, the psychedelic underground was given a giant vent into national broadcasting service—which in England’s tax-funded system was intended to both entertain and spread culture.
Feeding these young, daring deejays was a new generation of independent labels. The Who’s managers, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, had launched the Jimi Hendrix Experience on their own Track label. Robert Stigwood released Cream’s debut on his own indie, Reaction Records. Denny Cordell had his Deram label, which produced Procol Harum. In 1968, Fleetwood Mac, then fronted by the brilliant blues guitarist Peter Green, released their debut album on Mike Vernon’s blues label, Blue Horizon. Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate Records broke the Small Faces, whose landmark 1968 album Ogdens’ Nutgone Flake stands as a monument to the London spirit.
Of all the new independents, there was one record man with a unique past and future: Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records. In addition to breaking acts such as Traffic, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Free, Nick Drake, Cat Stevens, Roxy Music, Bob Marley, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer Island incubated two world-conquering labels, Chrysalis and Virgin. In the geology of British rock, Island Records formed around the psychedelic volcano and changed the British musical landscape forever after. Accordingly, Chris Blackwell stands as probably the most important record man in the history of British music.
Having started out importing Caribbean records into England, he had taken an unorthodox route into the rock ’n’ roll business. He was a white Jamaican, athletic, handsome, and well spoken, who despite being somewhat reserved stood out among his contemporaries. His unusual accent, speckled with colonial nuances, echoed a distant world that few Londoners even knew of.
Born in 1937, Chris Blackwell was a few years older than the majority of characters who made the sixties swing. He was also a rare kind of ethnic mixture, even by Caribbean standards. His father, Middleton Joseph Blackwell, was a Protestant Irishman of military stock who hailed from Westport in County Mayo. His mother, Blanche Lindo, was the beautiful daughter of a wealthy Jamaican merchant dynasty whose Sephardic Jewish origins stretched back to Portugal in the seventeenth century.
As with so many great record men, it was a bittersweet childhood that forged Chris Blackwell’s personality and career. Despite his privileged, sunny, multicultural horizons, he was an only child who was dealt some unlucky cards. As a result of severe bronchial asthma, he was kept at home with the house servants, meaning he could not read or write at the age of eight. He also witnessed more than his fair share of domestic drama; both of his parents were socialites who entertained the likes of Errol Flynn, Noël Coward, and James Bond author Ian Fleming, in what Blackwell described as “great dinner parties where [my father] used to play Wagner and Strauss very loud.”
When he was twelve and struggling at school, his parents divorced in unpleasant circumstances, causing both an emotional and geographical upheaval for their son. Chris was shipped off to Harrow, a prestigious English boarding school—both thousands of miles from his estranged parents and far behind his classmates academically. His father relocated to a town ne
ar Chicago, meaning Blackwell’s teenaged years were spent migrating between England, Jamaica, and Illinois. While visiting his father in the early fifties, he traveled the forty miles into Chicago to see his first jazz club.
In these formative years, Blackwell learned to be independent, but academically, he remained easily distracted, lagging through Harrow for five years until his education was cut short at the age of seventeen when he was caught peddling alcohol and cigarettes to fellow boarders. He was flogged in front of the pupils and expelled. “Christopher might be happier elsewhere,” his headmaster wrote to his mother. Floating without any qualifications, the young man briefly tried accountancy and even professional gambling but eventually returned to Jamaica in 1958, where he found a job as a water-skiing teacher at the luxurious Half Moon Hotel in Montego Bay.
For an heir of almost aristocratic lineage, Chris Blackwell was off to a disappointing start in life, but his destiny was about to change thanks to a series of freak incidents. One hot Jamaican afternoon in 1958, he headed out to sea on a motorboat excursion with some friends. Departing from the former pirate haven of Port Royal, they headed down Jamaica’s southern coast. Carelessness got the boat stranded in a swamp. With no other options, the athletic Blackwell headed for help. After four hours struggling through swamps in the tropical heat, he arrived at a beach and fell down, gasping from thirst and exhaustion. Weak and dizzy, he heard a voice overhead; dreadlocks were hanging down over him. The Rastafarian pulled Blackwell to his feet and helped him to an encampment. He drank the water they gave him and collapsed into sleep.
When he woke up sometime later, the Rastas were reading from the Bible. They fed him traditional Ital food and continued their prayers until he came to his senses. Although Blackwell was too confused to understand what was happening, the memory would stay with him for life. This was the late 1950s, a time when even the tough characters in downtown Kingston steered clear of these strange-looking tribal creatures, then called “beard-men.”
Shortly after his potentially fatal experience, Blackwell set up Island Records, which within a year scored a string of Jamaican hits. In 1961, when scenes of the first James Bond film, Dr. No, were shot in Jamaica, he briefly worked as a production assistant. The movie producer offered him a permanent job, prompting the twenty-three-year-old to consult a fortune-teller, who confidently advised him to stay in the music business.
In 1962, a new wave began dominating the Jamaican charts. Termed Sound System, these were producers of Jamaican R&B who deejayed their records through the streets of Kingston on the back of trucks. Rather than compete, Blackwell wisely moved to London, where he set up an import business distributing Sound System hit records from Sir Coxsone Dodd, Duke Reid, and King Edwards. He simply drove his Mini Cooper to shops and market stalls, selling records out of the trunk. The move proved quickly lucrative; big sellers like Jimmy Cliff’s “Miss Jamaica” and Derrick Morgan’s “Forward March” sold 30,000 copies each.
Much to Blackwell’s surprise, among London mods, the step from R&B to Jamaican rhythms wasn’t all that difficult. In clubs such as the Ram Jam in Brixton, Blackwell noticed mixed crowds, all dressed alike, moving in the same manner to the infectious beats of ska. London’s most happening mod club at the time was the Scene, a small basement club in Soho run by Ronan O’Rahilly, the Irish entrepreneur behind the first pirate ship, Radio Caroline. There, Blackwell noticed the in-house deejay Guy Stevens, who was such a brilliant researcher of obscure R&B records that the Rolling Stones and the Who were visiting his apartment to rummage through his collection.
In April 1964, while the Beatles were invading America, Blackwell began delivering Jamaican records to fashionable record stores in Soho. He also persuaded Guy Stevens to augment Island’s catalog with an R&B imprint, Sue Records, which quickly scored a string of British hits: “Mockingbird” by Inez & Charlie Foxx; “Land of a Thousand Dances” by Chris Kenner; “Harlem Shuffle” by Bob & Earl; “Night Train” by James Brown; and “Shotgun Wedding” by Roy C. “Guy Stevens took us out of West Indian reggae music with Sue Records,” attested Island’s first employee, David Betteridge. “He was buying in tracks from America, and that gave us the knowledge of how to break bands into the mainstream.”
Blackwell’s first major hit as a producer was the international smash “My Boy Lollipop” by Jamaican teenager Millie Small. While accompanying Millie to an appearance in Birmingham, Blackwell checked out a local band called the Spencer Davis Group, led by a fourteen-year-old prodigy, Steve Winwood. Repeating the same recipe, he signed a management deal with the band and persuaded them to rework a Jamaican song, “Keep On Running,” with a pop beat and fuzzy guitar reminiscent of “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.”
He pitched the recording to Fontana, a Philips sublabel whose clueless but cocky A&R man advised Blackwell to improve various aspects of the mix. In an indication of how charmingly devious Chris Blackwell could be, he waited two weeks and returned to Fontana with the exact same master. With elegance, he thanked the A&R man for such great advice. “Listen to how good it sounds now!” The flattered A&R man fell for Blackwell’s trick and arranged a release. By January 1966, the smash-hit record knocked the Beatles “Day Tripper” out of Britain’s No. 1 spot. Chris Blackwell, approaching thirty, was entering the big time.
When the Spencer Davis Group broke up after two albums, Island Records was big enough for Blackwell to sign Steve Winwood’s new group, Traffic. Released in 1967 with the recently redesigned pink label, Traffic’s first album, Mr. Fantasy, was a jazzy, psychedelic hit, complete with elaborate sleeve artwork. Another key sign of Island’s growing legitimacy arose from Blackwell’s belief that “a proper label has to have a studio,” which he duly built on Basing Street.
Of all the unique features that made Island boom, Blackwell’s knack of attracting artist magnets was spectacular. He recruited Joe Boyd, the American émigré formerly connected to Elektra, who had been running the seminal UFO club parties where Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, and Procol Harum first got noticed. Through Boyd, Island picked up Fairport Convention, whose Liege & Lief probably represents the very pinnacle of English folk. Better still, Boyd discovered and produced for Island the genius Nick Drake, whose superlative debut album, Five Leaves Left, included several priceless gems, most notably “River Man” and “Way to Blue.”
To lure the highly solicited Jethro Tull to Island, Blackwell set its ambitious managers, Chris Wright and Terry Ellis, an irresistible challenge. “When you have made ten hits which go top thirty, I’ll switch everything over to your own label.” Chris Wright later surmised, “I would imagine at the time, Blackwell being pretty smart, as he is, would have said to himself ‘They won’t have ten top-ten singles anyway, so I can easily agree to that,’ and he also would have said, ‘But if they do, I’m gonna be making lots of money out of it as well.’ It was a win-win situation for him.” Wright and Ellis fulfilled the bargain and set up Chrysalis in 1969.
Blackwell’s deft touch was getting noticed by the foxiest players in the game. Because Island was licensing Traffic’s North American rights to Atlantic, it was Ahmet Ertegun who gave Chris Blackwell his legendary nickname, the baby-faced killer. As Terry Ellis explained, “Chris would arrive from Jamaica to New York, there could be a foot of snow, and Chris would be in jeans and flip flops, a big shock of blond hair. The fresh-faced island boy! And if you’re a businessman like Ahmet Ertegun, you’d think, ‘This guy’s easy meat, I’ll deal with him.’ But then when Chris gets to the bargaining table, he’s tough and very smart.”
Another important mover in Chris Blackwell’s inner circle was manager David Enthoven, who brought the pioneering progressive rock group King Crimson to Island. “Blackwell allowed you to have a vision and you stood or fell by your vision,” said Enthoven. “I have an undying gratitude for the man, I think he’s a genius. He’s a good people’s person. He was very skilled in tact. He was a leader. And I unashamedly followed him.” Enthoven also pointed out that “without
Guy Stevens, Island would have been a very different place … It was Guy Stevens really that found King Crimson and then took them to Chris. Guy Stevens set the palate really, he was a music maniac … He actually allowed—along with Chris, to be fair—musical freedom for the artists. That’s what no other record company was allowing at the time.”
Chris Wright also emphasized the role of Guy Stevens in Island’s early success. “Blackwell was the overall creative presence there, but he had a great aspiring partner in Guy Stevens, who moved them into areas that even Blackwell wouldn’t have gone into. Guy was obviously a bit nutty like sometimes talented people can be. He had this wildish mop of frizzy hair, a little intense, wild in a way, but he was good fun.” Island’s managing director at the time, David Betteridge, concurred. “Guy had a very high-intensity personality; hard and driven. Very nice man, possibly bordering on the edge of madness. He saw things before anyone else. He was really an absolute genius.” Having foreseen the rising tide of progressive rock, in 1969 Guy Stevens also spotted and named the glam rock group Mott the Hoople—another scoop pointing Island toward the sound and spirit of the future.
Fittingly, the dream transatlantic alliance formed between Island and the rapidly booming A&M, which had moved into Charlie Chaplin’s former film studios. “That was the beginning of a great time for me,” recalled A&M boss Jerry Moss. “I met Denny Cordell, I met Chris Blackwell. I would go to England every six weeks and put my bags down in Chris’s house and just start going to clubs. It was perfect: They had records they wanted distributed in America and I was looking for bands. Through Denny, I got Joe Cocker, I got Procol Harum, and through Chris, I got Free, Cat Stevens, Spooky Tooth—some great English rock ’n’ roll.”
Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry Page 22