Playback and Payback series; (part 10) How many A&R guys does it take to screw in a lightbulb (continued)

What has changed over the years is the role of the A&R department. In the early days, they still went out and found talent, but, as the acronym would have it, they took that talent – the A stands for Artist – and put it together with songs – the R stands for Repertoire. They even booked the studio time and hired the musicians and arrangers (although some of the era’s A&R people, like Mitch Miller or Goddard Lieberson, were quite capable of writing the arrangements themselves).

“In the days of direct to disc,” noted Miller, the renowned anti-rock head of A&R for Columbia Records during the waning heyday of the “great American songbook,” “you went into the studio and people had to know their business. if you didn’t get it on the take you were doing, you had to throw it all out and do it again.” Jerry Wexler, the legendary head of A&R for Atlantic Records a generation after Miller, concurred, tongue firmly in cheek:

“Nobody really knew how to make a record when I started. You simply went into the studio, turned on the mic and said, ‘Play.’”

Most of the people who said “Play” worked for the record company until rock and roll came along. Even after that, Sam Phillips owned Sun when he started producing Elvis. George Martin was an EMI employee when he went to work with the Beatles. Ahmet Ertegun and Tom Dowd were both on the Atlantic payroll (Ahmet, of course, as the boss) when they made all the great early Ray Charles sides. Maxwell Davis ran seminal L.A. blues and R&B companies Aladdin and Modern, in addition to bringing in most of the artists and making most of the records.

“Maxwell Davis is an unsung hero of early rhythm and blues,” noted Mike Stoller. “He produced, in effect, all of the record sessions for Aladdin Records, Modern Records, all the local independent rhythm and blues companies in the early ‘50s, late ‘40s in Los Angeles.”

Ertegun pretty much created the idea of the independent producer with his relationship with Jerry Lieber, Mike Stoller, and the Coasters,” said the Atlantic founder.

They were called the Robins at the time they were recording for Jerry and Mike’s label. We wanted to sign that group, and we also wanted them to continue producing them. So we signed the group, and we made a production deal with Lieber and Stoller. I guess they were the first so-called independent producers. We had a long series of hits with them.

“We figured we knew how to make records,” adds Stoller, “because we had watched people make records, good people like Maxwell Davis, and so on. We learned a lot by watching him, because he was on a lot of the sessions where our songs were being done.”

As record company owners during the 1950s who actually signed the artists and then went into the recording studio to make the actual records, Davis, and even to an extent Ertegun, expanded the definition of A&R even as they contracted the role. As respected “ears,” if they didn’t hear it, they didn’t sign it. That was true when they were the point men as it was later when they appointed other people to bring in the talent. Even as time went by, people they hired to do A&R often were little more than the boss’s talent hounds and retrievers, bringing home the music for the boss’s decision, a more positive spin on what went on with Anthony and Caplan.

The Lieber and Stoller deal opened the floodgates to the point that today most recording is done by independent producers. Of course, the recording process has become much more involved; whereas Miller would record single takes onto a transcription disc; effectively recording a three-minute song in three minutes, now producers capture hundreds of digital tracks per recording in a process that might take weeks or months per song to finish. While we’ll explore the economic upshot of that change in technology later, for our current purposes let’s just say that, under these circumstances, if an A&R person had to produce records, that A&R person wouldn’t be able to do anything but record.

Sometimes the contemporary A&R person does have studio chops. Some, like Paul Atkinson, did time in bands before they started signing them. But for the most part, major label A&R has become the domain of glorified, hamstrung talent scouts. Now more than ever, A&R people are limited largely to the flavour of the week.

Sometimes, someone will get lucky, find an artist mining a new vein of the same old same old, and pique first radio and then the public’s interest. Suddenly all the other groups on the scene, all the other artists that sound like this, have a chance of finding themselves and their managers in the crosshairs of at least one A&R department and embroiled in a strange, Byzantine courtship ritual with the record industry. While they have become fewer and further between, a bidding war between companies is what managers live for; being able to predict the next big thing is what keeps them in business.

Take, for example, when Nirvana broke, selling 10 million copies of their sophomore album. Suddenly, all you needed was to be from the Seattle area and play the guitar and you could at least get an audience with A&R people. Groups like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden (who’d had some indie success even before Nirvana), and Stone Temple Pilots all scored on Nirvana’s coattails.

Similarly, for a while there has been what amounts to a boy-band farm down in Orlando, which produced certain teen girl singers as well. Likewise, during the short reign of funk, George Clinton had placed variations on essentially the same band with every major record label. During the late 1950’s, the Philly scene, thanks to American Bandstand, burgeoned. During the early 1960s, when Bandstand moved to Los Angeles, the show performed the same service for surf music.

The main thing that has changed is just how risk-averse record companies have become. Polly Anthony’s distaste of jam bands was just the tip of the iceberg. The stakes have become so high, the stockholders so demanding, that there is no longer time to develop artists, cultivate sounds, or even create trends. It has all become very reactive. Between this and the regular personnel bloodbaths used to keep the bottom line down, the glamour of A&R has waned considerably.

A former A&R guy who moved on to better things put it this way:

Budgets all over are much less than they’ve been in the past, which affects all areas of an A&R guy’s life and work, meaning that the salaries are much lower (as much as 50+ percent) than they were five years ago, expense accounts have been massively scaled back (no perks like in the past), and bands aren’t generally getting anything close to what they used to from labels in their contracts. It’s only gotten worse since I left.

Yet the A&R department still performs a service, feeding the hungry maw of the record company with equally hungry artists ready to be eaten. They keep the distribution wheels greased, keep the records coming out. For the major record companies to retain that element that makes them “major,” the ability to distribute their own product, they need to keep these channels open.