Siren Song_My Life in Music

by Gareth Murphy

  As volumes increased and stars were born, Syd quickly understood the importance of songwriting and set up several publishing companies, always run by proven songwriters. He had Lois Music, named after an old flame, but the most successful was Jay & Cee, created for King’s talented A&R man, Henry Glover, a black songwriter. Giving Glover his big break as a producer as well, Syd promised, “I’m going to get you out of jail and put you in church,” hence the company’s initials. Henry Glover was one of the most talented music men I’ve ever met. Still to this day, I carry on the fight to get him inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. As well as feeding King’s own roster of R&B singers, Jay & Cee provided songs for competitors such as Ray Charles, Chubby Checker, and Aretha Franklin. Other A&R producers included Ralph Bass, Sonny Thompson, and most important of all, Henry Stone, who later went on to great success in Miami with TK Records.

  In less than ten years, Syd Nathan created a diverse and bustling marketplace around a community of talented music fanatics. King was by far the biggest indie in America, directly employing about four hundred staffers, providing services for many hundreds of affiliates, and covering every genre under the sun: country, bluegrass, hot jazz, western swing, Delta blues, bebop, boogie, jive, polka, spirituals, kids’ songs, even a few mambo and calypso records he picked up in Trinidad and Cuba. Curiously, Syd didn’t do that much pop. He stuck to the edges—both musically and geographically. He did try, however unsuccessfully, with Guy Mitchell, Rosemary’s sister, Betty Clooney, and finally Steve Lawrence.

  Over two summers, I was moved around the company to learn every aspect of the record-making business. Syd was particularly proud of his pressing facility, a luxury he often described as “milling our own biscuits.” One day, to my absolute horror, he ordered me into that back building, a stinking shithole of heavy machinery and barrels of acid, where a Nina Simone version of “I Loves You, Porgy” happened to be on the production line. A technician put me in front of a machine where a turd of melted vinyl slid down. My job was to firmly press the plate, lift it back open, and repeat the action all day. With my legendary butterfingers, I was terrified I’d weld a Nina Simone record onto my hand. I managed to press about ten copies and then ran out and begged Syd, “Please don’t send me back to New York, but I really don’t want to go the plating department again.” He didn’t fire me or even lose his temper, but whenever I hear that record, I always laugh at its line, “Don’t let him handle me with his hot hands.”

  I was usually given various assignments, but some days Syd let me follow him around. As a boss, he spent a lot of time working his magic down telephone lines, fixing problems, and motivating the troops with his trademark brand of bullshit-intolerant humor. He always seemed happiest in the studio, either watching or producing, sometimes picking up the drumsticks to rattle out a rhythm. Occasionally, he wrote songs, usually the lyrics, because he had a sharp wit for catchy slogans and striking imagery. My favorite of his was “Signed, Sealed, and Delivered,” a hit by Cowboy Copas. Syd was an entrepreneur, but you could see his love for music was the heartbeat of the enterprise.

  His greatest strength, however, was distribution. By about 1952, even major companies didn’t have the kind of regional operations Syd had—thirty-four branches coast to coast. In small cities like Birmingham, Alabama, just one staffer would cover an area from a store in a bad neighborhood. He’d take orders, pack boxes, and, once a week, fill his car with records and stop anywhere he saw an antenna by the side of the road. In bigger cities, there’d be two—an inside and an outside man. In New York, three. I don’t doubt they all slipped payola into the pockets of disc jockeys, but it wouldn’t have been big amounts. Most of these small-town jocks were music nuts living on scraps. In those days, nobody was doing it to get rich.

  Even Syd was no Rockefeller. He owned his nice house in Cincinnati, he had a condo in Miami, and he’d bought most of the buildings that King operated from. He was careful with cash and always invested his winnings into real estate or affiliate companies run by people he believed in. I remember him explaining on one road trip that although he could easily afford a Cadillac, a top Buick had the same standard of engine but was almost half the price. He was always plainly dressed in old suits and didn’t seem to care about gold watches, fancy restaurants, or any of the glittery trappings you’d associate with a record mogul.

  The one thing he did love was traveling. As well as driving all over the Midwest and regularly visiting New York, he’d fly off on extended business trips to meet key partners, in particular his main man in London, L. G. Wood, the managing director of EMI, which handled King’s overseas distribution. From London, Syd would usually travel onward to Paris, Hamburg, Milan, and elsewhere to meet his publishers. A popular destination was the Sanremo Music Festival in Italy, which was Europe’s biggest music fair, albeit geared more toward publishers than record companies.

  One of my favorite Sanremo stories involves my friend, Kuni Murai, who had a label I brought into Warner Music Japan that had, among other artists, Yellow Magic Orchestra. I had decided to go to Sanremo at the last minute, and asked Warner’s to get me tickets. They told me that the tickets were sold out, but that if I didn’t care about going the first day (which I didn’t) they could give me Paul Simon’s and Rod Stewart’s passes, since they were performing the first night. I invited Kuni, and we were backstage having a ball, when one of the guards came up to me and said “Rod Stewart? You don’t look like Rod Stewart.” Without skipping a beat I said to him, “If you don’t believe who I am, just ask my friend Paul Simon over here,” and that was Kuni Murai. Syd taught me a lot about the importance of international and reinforced something I had believed as a young boy: that hits could come from anywhere. “Volare (Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu)” was only one of many great worldwide hit songs to emerge from Sanremo. He was so good at making friends in all the right places, he somehow schmoozed his way into Cincinnati’s WASP club, which was amazing considering how much the Midwest aristocracy was genetically allergic to loud Jews. Their private society was a grand old house on Garfield Street—the Cuvier Press Club—members only, wooden décor, big leather armchairs everywhere. Syd got Al Rogoff, his lawyer, to join, and puff away on Cuban cigars they mightily did as judges and city hall bigwigs sipped whiskies in nearby armchairs. Syd and Rogoff almost looked the part, except that when he first took me to the Cuvier Press Club, Zella roped him into taking Nat, who couldn’t sit still or stop babbling. None of the old Dutch boys looked up from behind their newspapers at the Jewish riot in the corner, but you could smell two centuries of distilled racism in the air—not that Syd seemed to care.

  The funny thing about Syd is that every side at some point or another accused him of bad manners. When neighbors realized who was behind much of the R&B (they called it “nigger music”) on the radio, Syd’s front windows got mysteriously smashed by unidentified flying bottles. When the government launched its anti-payola crusade, they picked on the white bosses behind R&B like Syd, whose offices were the first to be raided by the FBI. Although investigators found no incriminating evidence, Syd then pissed off his peers by publicly admitting that yes, payola was deejay extortion personally costing him $2,000 a month. After Syd was dead, music historians would accuse him and all his competitors of exploiting black musicians.

  Who do you believe? I don’t doubt that when it came to contracts, Syd took some advantage of black musicians, but you can bet he screwed the hillbillies just as hard. At least Syd actually signed contracts, issued royalty statements, and paid his artists what they were owed at a time when most of his competitors got away with doing none of the above. As one of his R&B competitors, the notorious Morris Levy, joked to one black artist who came in looking for royalties, “Royalties? If you want royalties, go to fucking England!”

  Cheating one-hit wonders was a slob’s business. Syd Nathan, on the other hand, had built a much larger company and was interested in careers; he needed long-term career artists to keep it all ticking
over. He did everything in-house to keep costs to a minimum, knowing that most releases would lose money. If he didn’t pay large advances, or just paid small advances as tokens, it was because the risk was all his. Most first-time recording artists were amateurs or touring musicians, happy to just make a record to show their friends and help get gigs. But make no mistake, when a record hit, even the most clueless rookies figured out damn quick how to move up the food chain. Syd was always standing by to mentor the cream of the crop to sustained success. He always looked after his best people and entered into new types of partnerships as their careers grew.

  Take James Brown. When Syd heard the first record, “Please, Please, Please,” he pulled one of his comical faces. “Son, do you really have to ask please one hundred times? Haven’t you got nothing else to say for yourself?” James Brown was too young and too terrified to fire a smart answer back at the boss, but he’d eventually learn. To everyone’s delight, that first record blew up and sold a million copies. Had the same jackpot fallen into the laps of one of the dirtier labels, James Brown might have been a one-hit blunder. Syd, however, took James Brown under his wing, got him touring, got songwriters writing and collaborating with him on hot new material. Syd made sure James Brown was earning and working on a career. James Brown was a country boy with little education, but he learned how to take care of business; years later, he was flying around in his own jet, performing at dictators’ private parties for huge fees. And when James Brown was his own king, believe me, he was no saint to his own musicians, writers, or employees. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.

  Syd enjoyed being crude and irreverent and was easily misunderstood. He was always teetering on the edge of rudeness and obscenity, but I think that’s what talented people trusted about him. He’d be yapping away in his animated way when he’d suddenly call out, “Put that on a hard six!” and then rip a loud fart and continue on his spiel like nothing happened. It was mile-a-minute madness, but his extreme behavior had a way of sorting the men from the boys. The fainthearted couldn’t handle Syd Nathan, and the true characters loved him and played him at his own game. And he was very witty. On one road trip, we stopped off at a public toilet where I heard a giant crack from inside Syd’s stall. He was so fat, he’d snapped the toilet seat clean in two. He stepped out proudly holding up the two pieces. “I’m keeping these for my half-assed friends!”

  The black and country musicians had all grown up on tour buses, but there was something about Syd’s fearlessness that I think resonated with the serious intellectuals like Paul Ackerman. Syd cut straight through all the bullshit—the dumbness, the racism, the political correctness, the fear of failing, everything. Once, we were stopped at traffic lights in a poor neighborhood in Louisville when Nat suddenly shouted in full earshot of all the pedestrians, “Daddy, there sure are a lot of niggers here!”

  Syd turned around to the back seat with his little grin. “Niggers? Nigg-errs? Son, are you trying to get us killed? This isn’t Cincinnati where I can protect you. This is Dixie. You gotta call them nigg-aaahz.” The lights turned green, and Syd hit the gas, which really wasn’t wise, because on that very road trip, he nearly drove us straight into the Nashville train.

  Oh, yes, Syd Nathan used the N-word as well as every other profanity you’d expect from a former jazz drummer and wrestling promoter. Everything was fair game inside Syd’s wild world, but he was not racist, unlike most people in border towns like Cincinnati or Baltimore, which were arguably worse than down South. In the Cuvier Press Club, I witnessed one revealing incident. The black opera singer Leontyne Price appeared on TV and a tableful of drunken men started throwing fruit at the screen. Syd turned around and shouted at them to crawl back into their cages at the zoo. It got him so angry he got up and left. I don’t think Syd was politically committed to the cause of black people in the way that Paul Ackerman was. Talent was Syd’s obsession. I just think he was too blind and too ugly to judge anyone on physical criteria. If you could sing, play, write, tell a good story, or even just engage with his humor, he didn’t care what you looked like or where you came from. And the proof was King, half of which was black, not that I ever once heard him brag about being an equal opportunities employer for the socially disadvantaged.

  I should know; I was bouncing around with all the multicolored oddballs he’d collected along the way, which is how I had my first-ever sexual experience. Syd had pressed up about a thousand special order records of old New Orleans King artists for two busy stores, one in the heart of New Orleans, the other at their airport. The guy they sent up to check the product was about my age and, like me, ate records for breakfast. Syd pulled a bill from his wallet and told me, “Why don’t you take Monte out for a nice dinner tonight.” He then jotted down an address and explained in his flat logic, “What I like about the Mills Cafeteria is that you see the food and you put it on your plate.” I followed Syd’s directions, but his beloved diner was one of those canteens where food sits around sweating all day. Instead, I found a Chinese restaurant nearby, which was what I missed most about Brooklyn.

  Over the best meal I’d had in weeks, I began really feeling something with Monte, this handsome guy from New Orleans. He, of course, had a lilting Southern drawl that I found as exotic as he probably found my Brooklynese twang. By the time we were finishing our coffees, we both knew what was about to happen. We headed straight back to his hotel room.

  “This is my first time,” he said, “and I feel very strange about it.”

  “It’s my first time, too.”

  We both knew what to do, but neither of us had a clue what to say afterward. Fortunately, Monte broke the stunned silence with a nice idea. “I think we should go see some burlesque. They have it in New Orleans, and they must have it here.” It was late, but the receptionist pointed us to a club, where I sank into my seat and watched my first burlesque show, practically glowing in the dark. Now I knew what sex was like. I hadn’t chickened out, and the way the guy’s eyes were twinkling in the stage light, he didn’t seem to be regretting it either.

  My summers in Cincinnati confirmed what I always knew; I belonged in the music business. Aged seventeen and just out of high school, I enrolled on a journalism course at Long Island University, the plan being to improve my writing and editing skills and then stroll into a well-paid job at Billboard. Unfortunately, my internships at King had thrown up doubts. Having seen the excitement and wealth and satisfaction of Syd’s life, I wasn’t so sure anymore if I was cut out for journalism, and when term started, I didn’t turn up for classes. As any young floater who’s been in a similar position will tell you, my first September out of high school was frightening. I hadn’t felt any pressure throughout summer, but it suddenly hit me that I needed to get my act together. Luckily, Tom Noonan took me back into Billboard’s chart department full-time for eighty dollars a week.

  The sixties were dawning, and the charts were starting to really matter. Since the birth of the Hot 100, the phone was hopping with all kinds of sweet-talking label bosses and promotions men. Tom was too Catholic to countenance anyone accepting bribery, but he sometimes turned a blind eye to the rest of us enjoying other forms of human kindness.

  Motown boss Berry Gordy, who hadn’t scored a number one yet, called into the office regularly with his chief salesman, Barney Ales, and of course I was only too happy to talk music with them. One day, Gordy rang up from Detroit all excited. “I’ve got a number one!”

  “Where? I didn’t see it.”

  “It’s not recorded yet. We’ve written it, and it’s definitely gonna be a number one. The reason I’m calling you, Seymour, is because I’d like you to come up to Detroit when we record it.”

  “What? But why me?”

  “Because you’ve got good ears.”

  “That’s nice of you to think so, Berry, but listen, there’s this promotions man you’ve got to meet. His name is Pete Bennett, and he works on Tenth Avenue in a distributor called Cambridge. I see all these g
uys, and he’s absolutely the best.”

  “Both of you come up. Bring him with you. Talk to this guy and call me back.”

  When Pete Bennett and I got to Detroit, we were treated royally. The song in question turned out to be “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes, which Berry’s people duly recorded as we hung around watching. We went home to New York feeling like number ones ourselves, but the record took surprisingly long to smash. It hung on the airwaves for six months, climbing ever steadily up the charts until it reached number one, Motown’s first of many, the week before Christmas.

  I’d love to tell you that it was me who twisted Tom Noonan’s arm to give Berry Gordy his elusive number one, but I’m sure it was a legitimate winner, and anyway, I’d moved back down to Cincinnati by then. But you get the picture. You needed a great song to begin with, but everything else—airplay, press, TV, distribution, store visibility, jukeboxes, and, of course, net sales—the whole hit system ran on people making other people happy.

  It was impossible not to love all the fun happening around Billboard, which had entered a golden age of influence. But I knew my prospects at Billboard would always be limited. The chart department was Tom’s baby, and all he needed was one or two juniors. When it came to writing, I happily spent days poring over the liner notes of, say, a Champion Jack Dupree compilation that King released in 1961. If I had a few nights, I could spin a good yarn, but to make it as a music reporter, you had to bang out two thousand words every day and still find the time to ring scores of people for quotes, insights, and scoops. That just wasn’t me. I knew I was more of a Syd Nathan than a Paul Ackerman, and I suspect both men discussed that very issue, because in October 1961, I got invited by Syd back down to Cincinnati to work as one of King’s A&R and publicity trainees.