Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (11 page)

Hammond began following Billie around the Harlem speakeasies where she performed for tips. Her real name was Eleanora, he learned. She had arrived from Baltimore, got caught up in prostitution, and served a jail term. Beautiful, notoriously moody, and already a moderate marijuana smoker, she sang popular songs in a distinctive manner that made everything her own. Unable to play an instrument and often accompanied by a solo piano, Billie didn’t fit the description of jazz singer, but Hammond heard something unique in her voice. He dragged his jazz friends along to hear her. “All I could do was talk and write about her,” he would recall.

In the spring of 1933, as the Great Depression hit rock bottom, it was once again the London connection that opened new doors. When he arrived back in England, Hammond was pleasantly surprised to find that he was something of a celebrity among
Melody Maker
readers, thanks to his inspirational work as a jazz writer. Hanging out with editor Spike Hughes who had recently begun working as a recording director for the newly established Decca Records, Hammond asked for an introduction to Louis Sterling.

As well as managing EMI, Sterling was among Britain’s most committed supporters of culture. Victor’s well-respected music director, Fred Gaisberg, noted that Sunday evening dinners at the Sterlings’ grand home on Avenue Road “had become a regular feature of bohemian London … At the Sterlings’ one always met agreeable colleagues in the theatrical, film and musical worlds. On [one] occasion Schnabel and Kreisler were soon deeply engrossed in discussing the political situation in Germany and were joined by ex-Mayor Jimmy Walker and Lauritz Melchior, greatly to the discomfort of a bridge party in the next room, which included Chaliapin and Gigli.” The rise of Hitler was of particular concern to Louis Sterling, who over the coming years would sponsor the immigration of Jewish employees of his labels in Berlin. Supporting Charles Lahr and his Progressive Bookshop, he was also building one of Britain’s most valuable book collections.

In their brief meeting, Sterling explained that he needed someone to make American jazz records for the English market directly. The young Hammond pounced on the opportunity and secured his first contract, for a total of twenty-four recordings with four artists: Fletcher Henderson, Benny Carter, Joe Venuti, and Benny Goodman. As usual, in all the excitement Hammond forgot to negotiate any payment for himself.

He returned to New York on a new mission. His first port of call was Benny Goodman, who he knew often hung out at a speakeasy called the Onyx Club. At about ten thirty, sure enough, Goodman walked in. Tightening his gut, Hammond introduced himself and offered the clarinettist a Columbia recording contract.

“You’re a goddamn liar,” snapped Goodman, who the previous week had heard from Ben Selvin the label was bankrupt.

“But this isn’t American Columbia,” pleaded Hammond. “This is with English Columbia, which has money.”

Goodman presumed Hammond was a weirdo, but he was earning only $50 a week, so he forced himself to calm down. Hammond then explained his plan to recruit a band of master musicians capable of improvising free-flowing jazz.

Checking out Goodman’s band the next day, Hammond squirmed in his chair. “The English public will laugh us off the turntable,” he told the insulted but ambitious Goodman. Swing was not just a genre term for Hammond; it meant a certain rhythmic spirit. At the suggestion of hiring black musicians, Goodman put his foot down. “If it gets around that I recorded with colored guys I won’t get another job in this town.”

“It can’t be that bad.”

“John, you don’t know. It’s
that
bad.”

Fortunately, Benny Goodman was a born dancer who had spent many nights out in Hammond’s favorite clubs, and he would graciously accept that yes, black musicians were by far the best rhythm conjurers in the craft. For the time being, Hammond rounded up an all-whites band; Artie Bernstein, Dick McDonough, Joe Sullivan, Charlie Teagarden, and Manny Klein. He even drove to Boston to convince the master drummer Gene Krupa to join in. The musicians each earned a meager $20 for the three-hour session, but one of the three recordings, “Ain’tcha Glad,” caught the attention of Ben Selvin, who persuaded Hammond to sign it directly to American Columbia with a full artist contract for Benny Goodman. More than happy to do what was good for Benny’s career, Hammond altered his own plans. It sold 5,000 copies—a modest hit by the bleak standards of 1933. Eager for a Benny Goodman follow-up, Hammond got his chance to call in Billie Holiday as a guest vocalist. They were her first recordings, “Riffin’ the Scotch” and “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law.”

Hammond questioned Ben Selvin about Bessie Smith, who had been left adrift during the early thirties. Columbia’s defeated staff didn’t believe Bessie had a future. With persistence, Hammond succeeded in getting their approval to try out a cheap experiment. He tracked her down to a club in Philadelphia where she was working as a hostess. When he arrived, she was drunk and appeared depressed. “What would it pay?” asked Bessie. All Hammond could offer her was a deal with almost-bust Columbia to make a 35-cent record on the Okeh label. Hammond did, however, offer to pay for her trip to New York out of his own pocket. Bessie agreed without enthusiasm, concluding, “Nobody wants to hear blues no more. Times is hard. They want to hear novelty songs.”

As feared, the record didn’t go anywhere. Bessie Smith, once hailed as “the Queen of the Blues,” took the train back to Philadelphia with $37.50 in her pocket. What the young, enthusiastic Hammond had failed to understand was the wider economic picture. Bessie Smith’s core audience was rural blacks—the hardest hit by the Great Depression.

The only person recording rural blues at the time was a Texan song hunter by the name of John Lomax, whose motivations were anything but commercial. More of a musicologist, Lomax was a sixty-year-old professor of English literature and author of an anthology called
Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads.
His mission was to “gather a body of folklore before it disappeared and to preserve it for the analysis of later scholars.”

Still grieving his wife’s death, throughout 1933 Lomax set off with various briefs from the Library of Congress, Macmillan Publishing, and the American Council of Learned Societies. His eldest son Alan, accompanied him in a car equipped with a 315-pound acetate-disc recording machine in the trunk, they toured the South in search of work songs, blues, ballads, and reels. Lomax was particularly interested in prisoners because “thrown on their own resources for entertainment, they still sing, especially the long-term prisoners who have been confined for years and who have not yet been influenced by jazz and the radio, the distinctive old-time Negro melodies.” That year, Lomax discovered the likes of Lightnin’ Washington and Lead Belly.

The very day Bessie Smith was in the studio with Hammond, American Columbia’s new owners, Grigsby-Grunow, went into equity receivership, and in April 1934 the record company was declared bankrupt. With another fire sale announced, Edward Lewis, head of Decca in London, sailed to New York to jointly buy American Columbia with ARC owner Herbert Yates. While Lewis was at sea, however, Yates made a solo run—scooping up American Columbia, its offices, studios, catalogs, artist contracts, trademarks, and Bridgeport, Connecticut, factory for the laughable sum of $75,500.

When Lewis docked in New York and heard the devastating news, he called Jack Kapp, an experienced record man running one of Yates’s labels, Brunswick, and they shared ideas about how to do business in such hard times. Lewis had the money, while Kapp had excellent credentials as a producer. Best of all, Kapp had been careful to place a top-man clause in his biggest artist contracts, including Brunswick’s new hopeful, Bing Crosby. Screwing Yates royally, Kapp and Lewis moved everything over to an American branch of Decca, poaching Columbia’s sales and promotion chiefs. As a result of all the buyouts, mergers, and licenses, by 1934, only four small majors—RCA, ARC, EMI, and Decca—controlled virtually every label, master, and artist contract in a pitifully diminished market.

The most unexpected market development of all came as an indirect result of Prohibition being lifted in 1933. Although America had never really stopped drinking during its fourteen years of statutory abstinence, speakeasies turned into legitimate bars and were officially allowed to make noise again. Wurlitzer spotted an opportunity and in 1933 launched its ten-disc
Debutante
jukebox. By the end of 1934, some 25,000 jukeboxes were in operation all over America. Decca fought its way aggressively into this new market head-on with ARC, both its archenemy and its direct competitor in 35-cent records.

One other important development came in 1934 courtesy of Victor’s imaginative new president, Edward Wallerstein. Like Louis Sterling in London, Wallerstein understood that the obstacle to recovery was the obsolete status of record players. With 20 million American households now using the radio as their main source of entertainment, anecdotal evidence suggested that record players had long been relegated to the attic. His audacious plan was to commercialize a cheap adapter to play records through a radio’s amplifier. Called the
Duo Jr.
, it was an electrically powered turntable with a magnetic pickup encased in a compact wooden box. It retailed at just $16.50, but special offers gave away a
Duo Jr
. free with the purchase of several RCA Victor records.

In September 1934, just as Roosevelt’s New Deal began injecting some urgently needed capital into the economy, Wallerstein announced to his demoralized troops, “We’ll grant you, that back when depression was hitting rock bottom, phonograph records were perhaps a dead item. Them days are gone forever … It’s time we told the world what’s happening in the record business—that sales of phonograph records jumped up 100 per cent last year—and that they’re still going up.”

Hard times were also forcing musicians to take risks. Benny Goodman’s metamorphosis happened when Hammond introduced him to an inventive black pianist, Teddy Wilson. The result of their jamming was a strange but hypnotic sort of chamber jazz. Their harmonic virtuosity turned into pure magic when Gene Krupa joined in on drums. A veritable milestone, this racially mixed touring trio was later widened to a quartet with another Hammond discovery, black vibraphonist Lionel Hampton.

In 1935, when Hammond returned to London, his suitcase was packed with the interesting jazz treasures he had produced over the previous year. Among them, on the Brunswick label, were two test pressings of an as yet unreleased experiment by Teddy Wilson’s Orchestra featuring Billie Holiday. As illustrated by catchy tunes like “What a Little Moonlight Can Do” and “Miss Brown to You,” the chemistry between Wilson and Holiday marked the beginning of a long adventure—in total, ninety-one songs recorded together, including most of her finest, early performances.

Hammond left London with a new contract, but rather than return to New York directly, he decided to fulfill a lifelong dream to visit Moscow. Through his family connections, Hammond met filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, who was in the process of making a film about
kulaks
—rich farmers opposed to collective farming. Visiting the giant film set, Hammond was stunned to find that an entire farm and wheat field had been built inside a brightly lit hangar. Eisenstein showed Hammond around Moscow and admitted, in a loud restaurant, he was no longer convinced by communism. Just as Hammond was leaving for America, Stalin decided to relax his propaganda war against
kulaks
and shut down the film. Hammond sailed back to New York with diarrhea, smallpox, and no illusions about the socialist experiment in Russia.

Upon his return, Hammond joined the NAACP board of directors and stumbled upon his next big discovery. While probing through the frequencies in his car radio, he chanced upon an experimental station broadcast out of Kansas City. Live from some ballroom, the crackly station featured Count Basie and his band. Every night for weeks, Hammond sat in his car in awe of how modern this jazz sounded. He even began writing about Basie’s style in the jazz magazine
Down Beat.

When his curiosity became too great, he drove down to Kansas City and walked into the Reno Club, a seedy dump that operated what it called
spook dances
—all-night music, 5-cent beer, 10-cent hot dogs, homemade whiskey (a “spook” was a poor tipper). Behind Basie’s band, some kind of transaction, presumably marijuana dealing, was going on through a window. The place was unreal, and so was the music. Hammond was particularly struck by the ever-smiling drummer, Jo Jones, who had a witty technique of playing the high hats half open. There were important spaces in the music, creating a sense of excitement that sent the solos into free flow. Within this sound, Hammond saw another glimpse of the future.

When Hammond introduced himself to Basie, the bad news hit. Jack Kapp, having read Hammond’s articles in
Down Beat,
had just talked Basie into signing an extortionist deal: an exclusive three-year term requiring Basie to record twenty-four recordings per year for an annual flat fee of $750—an average of $31 per side to be shared among all nine musicians. Basie hadn’t realized the contract offered no royalties whatsoever.

The next day, Hammond filed a complaint with the musicians union but only managed to get Basie’s contract amended so that all session work would be paid on union scale. He did, however, persuade Benny Goodman’s promoter, Willard Alexander, to get Basie out of Kansas and making better money in big hotels around the country.

On record, Count Basie was an instant sensation, in large part thanks to the jukebox market, which, being oriented toward bars, was perfect for jubilant swing. As jukeboxes continued spreading, ARC began using its Vocalion imprint to job low-quality 19-cent records to jukebox dealers. With fierce competition from Decca, Vocalion moved to a porous shellac compound to undercut Decca with 10-cent records, which in the case of regularly played hits wore out after just three days.