Playback and Payback series; (Part 1) How the record business drowned in its own success

This series and subsequent ones will seek to lay out in very specific terms, how the system that turned music into a commodity ultimately failed, trivialising its product and the user of that product (that would be us, the music fans). Once done, the reader will have a better idea of why today’s popular music sucks, and maybe even a reason or two to hope that things will improve.

We’ll be picking points in history when certain practices became paradigms, showing how they became part of the popular music mindset. The precarious tightrope team of art and commerce play few more dangerous venues than popular music. For music to stay healthy, for musicians to both thrive and have the time to create, money must grease the wheels.

However, when the money becomes hidebound, can the other side of the equation avoid getting affected? Will the music business pull an ouroboros, swallowing its own tail and threatening to consume itself until it simply disappears? Or will it emulate the phoenix, growing old and burning itself out, only to arise, better and more beautiful, from the ashes?

Who’s in charge here? You’re kidding!

In 1955, English EMI purchased Capitol Records, a 12-year-old company that had been founded in the midst of World War II. Getting the raw materials for the manufacture of records had verged on impossible then, due to wartime restrictions on purchasing the lacquer used to hold the grooves on the 78 rpm record, and the copper used to cut the masters from which the glass-and-lacquer records were made.

These obstacles didn’t stop songwriter Johnny Mercer, lyricist-turned-movie mogul Buddy DeSylva, and some associates from forming the company, which they started with two major hits, Mercer’s own “Strip Polka” and Ella Mae Morse’s version of “Cow Cow Boogie.” In the record business, the most successful businesspeople are often the most contrarian.

Yet a dozen years after starting, Capitol submitted to foreign domination. Not that EMI was the first multinational record company – not by a long shot. In 1902, as the craze for sound recording spread beyond America, the Victor Talking Machine Company made the first international alliance, joining forces with British Gramophone Company. Victor had already pulled a contrarian move, switching from the wax cylinder sold by Edison and Columbia, and selling the new (at the time) glass-and-lacquer disc and the hardware to play it. British Gramophone became disc based, and Victor started to use British Gramophone’s logo, a little terrier with its ear cocked toward the horn, listening to “His Master’s Voice.”

What EMI knew from experience dawned on the rest of the business world by observation: the record business, as it stood in the early 1960’s, lacked schooling. The people running the business possessed a lot of native smarts, but very few had formal business training – guy like Artie Ripp, who hadn’t even finished high school, were running record companies and making a fortune. By 1967, record company revenues topped the billion-dollar mark, spiking that year on the crest of EMI’s wave of Beatlemania and the subsequent invasion of the musical redcoats that segued into the Summer of Love – youth culture beginning to reach its full economic flower.

Now, by the tail end of the 1960’s, the thinking in the corporate suites went something like this: if these uneducated guys, often working just this side of the law, could rake in all this big money, imagine what we, with our MBAs and JDs, could do if we brought some standard business practices to the party. It was pretty easy to see their point of view when you looked at some of the people in charge of many of the big hits of the mid-1960s: Artie Ripp had ripped up the market with his own Karma Sutra label and his big act, the Loving Spoonful. Ripp had worked his way up after dropping out of high school:

“I started walking around Broadway and I’d see this kids who were making records and not getting paid. They could have a number one record on the charts and end up owing the record company a half a million dollars… I thought, “This business has some system.” …Every party was charged to the artist. ‘I’ve got a hundred hookers. Charge them to the artist.’”

Phil Spector, together with Lester Sill, ran the Philles label, home of the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin Feelin’.” Even before he left high school, Spector had enjoyed a rapid rise to chart success with his group the Teddy Bears and their hit “To Know Him Is To Love Him,” which topped the charts, sold millions of copies, and earned the group about $3,000 in total. He had one year of college (working toward a degree as a court stenographer) before he headed to New York for a job as an interpreter.

He never made the interview, falling in with a bunch of other musicians and doing studio work for songwriters Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller. Having worked with Sill during his days as an artist, Spector rejoined him as a partner some four years later, after working his way up in the Lieber/Stoller organisation to become a prodigious producer of hit records for artists like Ben E. King and Gene Pittney. With the Philles label, he and Sill helped introduce the world to the girl-group sound that dominated pop music before the British invasion took hold.

Simon Waronker had started out as a violin prodigy, a first-call violinist in Hollywood. He founded Liberty Records in 1955, at the age of 40, with the help of 20th Century Fox. Beginning with orchestral pop like Julie London, he moved into novelty records by Ross (Dave Seville) Bagdasarian, scion of the Chipmunks dynasty; rock and roll with Eddie Cochran; and R&B with Billy Ward and the Dominoes. He even signed a very young Willie Nelson.

Berry Gordy started Motown in 1958, and his story has come to be Horatio Alger-style folklore, especially in the African American community. After dropping out of high school to box, Gordy was drafted to fight in Korea. On his demobilisation, he opened a record shop to support his songwriting. When neither made him enough money, he went to work on one of Detroit’s many auto-mobile assembly lines.

His luck began to change when a family friend introduced him to Jackie Wilson, who took one of the songs Gordy wrote, “Reet Petite,” into the Billboard Hot 100 Singles chart. Wilson recorded four more Gordy songs over the next few years. This gave Gordy the latitude to get off the assembly line and begin to produce music instead. He started a record label to put out the music he produced. He had early, influential hits like Barrett Strong’s version of Gordy’s song “Money” and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ “Shop around.” The Temptations’ “My Girl,” the Supremes’ “Stop in the Name of Love,” and a number of other hits from Motown made Gordy a major force in the music business. At the height of the British invasion, he gave the English acts a run for the pop music dollar.