Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (2 page)

In the movie business, it is often said that directors make better interviewees than film stars. The same, I believe, applies to the record business: Record men make more entertaining dinner guests than the stars they helped create. Being the key witnesses and catalysts, they know the real stories—who these stars really are, how the breakthroughs really happened. They saw the potential in its rawest form, negotiated the contracts, signed the royalty checks, and created the hype. Seen through their eyes, the game takes on a whole new perspective.

The strange thing is, pop stars don’t always see the bigger picture. The vocation of writing and performing requires total self-absorption. Most of the time, they’re under such pressure to stay on top, their best years are spent battling against themselves. In many ways, the label boss is the one concerned party actually enjoying the roller-coaster ride as it’s happening. Standing in the shadows, pulling strings, counting the shekels—he’s watching from the best vantage point possible.

There is a dangerous thrill to the vocation. It’s like holding a monster on a leash. There are tales of manipulation and megalomania in this book, yet at the same time, with each big new musical discovery the world does keep singing and dancing. One thing is for sure, financing records is a high-risk business that doesn’t make sense in purely financial terms. As any ringmaster will tell you, there have got to be easier ways of making a living.

As an intentionally panoramic voyage through the twentieth century, this book is also about migrations. The tradition of musical cross-pollination across the Atlantic and the North American plains has kept the record business constantly evolving since its very inception. Appropriately, many of the greatest record men in both America and England were themselves adventurers who crossed seas and continents in search of a new life in a big city. As the chapters unfold, various common denominators begin to emerge. This book’s final destination, “
Revelations
,” reaches the deeper truths about this tribal theater we call pop music.

Using all the great pioneers in an epic story about the record business, I set out to discover the secrets behind the curtain. To get to a high place where we can see the four horizons more clearly, let us now embark on an odyssey through all the musical crazes that drove successive generations wild with joy. In a pattern that would repeat itself several times over, it all began with a technological revolution.

1. TALKING MACHINES

The story begins in Paris. The tangled branches—producers, labels, and recording artists—that form the record industry’s genealogical tree can be traced back to one precise point. The year was 1853. In a little bookstore on rue Vivienne, a man was sitting in a chair, reading.

The man, a thirty-six-year-old typesetter named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, was proofreading a physics manuscript. He turned a page and was struck by a diagram of sound waves. Fascinated by these curling lines, he began dreaming of a machine.

After chewing over the question for years, he came to a simple but ingenious conclusion—just copy nature. His sound-writing machine would have to be a type of mechanical ear attached to a pen. A barrel-shaped receptor would capture incoming sounds, the way the outer ear directs sound into the eardrum. Two elastic membranes would reproduce the work of the eardrum; a system of levers would replicate the three minute bones in the middle ear that transmit vibrations from the air to the liquid interior. A boar’s hair attached to the end of this mechanical ear would engrave the vibrations on a glass surface blackened with soot.

On March 25, 1857, he deposited a design with the French Academy of Sciences. Later that year he was granted a patent for his
phonautograph
, or sound-writer, the earliest known sound-recording device.

Scott de Martinville lacked the skills to build a working prototype, so he found a craftsman, Rudolph Koenig. His atelier was located on Île Saint-Louis, the little island in the heart of Paris, within walking distance from Scott de Martinville’s bookshop. The two men met sporadically to assess progress, until on April 9, 1860, the earliest known recording of a human voice was engraved in soot on a glass surface. Prophetically, its inventor didn’t speak but sang “Au clair de la lune,” a traditional lullaby. “Under the moonlight, my dear friend, Pierrot, / Lend me your plume to write a word down. / My candle has died, I haven’t got a light. / Open your door, for the love of God.”

This was the golden age of science journals and exhibitions; ideas were circulating faster and over greater distances than ever before. In 1866, a telegraph cable was laid across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, bringing Europe and America into a new era of instantaneous communication. For young, inquisitive minds with the genius to tap into the hidden wonders of science, the Victorian period was a time of immense opportunity.

In 1860, one such genius was a teenager in Scotland by the name of Alexander Graham Bell, Aleck to his family. He is remembered as the inventor of the telephone, but he also carried the work of the Paris pioneers across the Atlantic to the communications revolution about to explode in America. As a philanthropist and committed believer in sound innovation, he indirectly played midwife to Columbia Records, the industry’s oldest company and one of its most prolific. The sonic unit known as a bel, as in decibel, was named after him.

What makes Bell unusual is the role of deafness in motivating his tireless research. His grandfather was a respected speech therapist for deaf children. His father, Melville Bell, invented a system of phonetic notation called Visible Speech, which showed the position of lips, teeth, and tongue for each sound and was used in teaching the deaf to speak. His mother herself was deaf. From a young age, Aleck understood that deaf people suffered less from silence than from the crippling frustration of not being able to communicate. The disability landed many of them in prisons or mental asylums.

Aleck worked from the age of sixteen as an elocution teacher in London and Edinburgh. Meanwhile, Melville Bell began receiving invitations to demonstrate his Visible Speech in American universities. Increasingly intolerant of the cynicism in English scientific circles, Bell senior began to admire the spirit of curiosity and opportunity in the New World.

Then the hand of destiny struck the Bell family cruelly. In quick succession, both of Aleck’s brothers died of tuberculosis, a common illness in the Victorian era of coal furnaces and damp cities. When Aleck started to look ill from the exhausting demands of teaching and researching, his heartbroken mother and father made a fateful decision to take their last son out of Britain. In 1870, when Aleck was twenty-three, they sold their properties and sailed for the New World.

Choked with bereavement, the depleted Bell family bought a farm by the banks of the Grand River in Ontario. Aleck spent his first Canadian summer in a numbed state, lying on a pillow in the middle of a field, reading vacantly, for days at a time. His slow return began with curiosity about a nearby Mohawk reservation. He approached their chief, requested permission to study the Mohawk language, and was allowed to observe their school. The children’s playful company lightened his heavy heart.

Seeing that his son was in need of a fresh start, in 1874, Melville Bell used his university connections to get Aleck a job in Boston as an elocution specialist. Arriving at Boston’s train station, Aleck instantly fell in love with the city and returned to his routine of teaching and researching. It was during a school vacation back in Ontario that Bell built his own copy of Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph and began to contemplate sound machines.

Curiosity opens eyes, but there is nothing like chance encounters to open doors. As an inspirational therapist, Bell quickly made a name for himself among Boston’s deaf community. One day after a lecture, he was approached by a wealthy businessman, Gardiner Hubbard, who asked him to give private tutoring to his deaf daughter, Mabel.

While teaching Mabel Hubbard to speak, Bell began to make a lasting impression on the educated Hubbard family. A natural gentleman with impeccable manners, he measured six foot four, had greased-back jet black hair, and always dressed in a striking manner. He was also an excellent self-taught pianist who entertained his hosts with Highland ballads, Victorian waltzes, and even some Chopin sonatas he had learned by ear.

Very quickly the Hubbards adopted Bell as a member of the family. It just so happened that Gardiner Hubbard’s commercial and political energies at the time were focused on the telegraph industry. The telegraph had been the biggest communications revolution since the railway in the 1840s but had become an abusive monopoly thanks to one of America’s largest companies, Western Union. In America’s business and political lobbies, Gardiner Hubbard was a vocal campaigner for opening up the sector to competition.

While listening to Gardiner Hubbard’s views on the telegraph, Bell confessed he was developing theories about sound transmission. He felt he was close to an important breakthrough but was concerned he didn’t have a patent, or even the right to obtain an American patent, being a British citizen. Hubbard, who was an intellectual property lawyer, listened attentively and offered Bell his legal and financial support.

Hubbard wasn’t the only supporter. Thanks to his father’s connections, Bell befriended a professor in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who kept him up to date on innovations being debated in the scientific community. Bell’s new landlady, Mrs. Sanders, treated him as an adopted son and secretly redecorated an entire room in the house. For his twenty-seventh birthday, she organized a surprise party; surrounded by his deaf pupils, and weeping with happiness, Bell was given his very own laboratory.

Working eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, the pale, exhausted Bell often suffered acute migraines. He grasped the general principle for a telephone but dared not even share his ideas, rightly sensing that other inventors were on the same trail. One night while playing piano in the Hubbard drawing room, Bell stopped dead and stood up. He had realized the significance of a game he often played on his old piano in Scotland: singing any note into the piano’s sound box made its corresponding piano string vibrate harmonically. Two voices singing two different notes would vibrate the two corresponding strings. Therefore, if multiple harmonic signals could be transmitted and received through the air, they could also pass through a single wire.

Gardiner Hubbard convinced Bell to focus his efforts on a “harmonic telegraph” and used his connections to get Bell a demonstration with Western Union boss William Orton.

Two years previously, Orton had bought the patents for a system invented by a young telegraph operator, Thomas Edison, who had devised a method for four-way telegraph traffic by means of differences in current strength and polarity. Unfortunately, he had just bought the patent for a harmonic telegraph invented by a certain Elisha Gray. Smiling knowingly, the powerful telegraph mogul showed no enthusiasm for Bell’s prototype.

Although the demonstration was a disappointment, it at least showed Bell and Hubbard what the competition was doing. Bell turned his attentions to the telephone. Hubbard began combing through the Patent Office to see if Bell’s revolutionary idea had already been claimed. Seemingly it hadn’t, but Hubbard—also sensing other inventors heading the same way—began compiling all of Bell’s letters and notes in which he had mentioned a telephone.

It was a time of intense stress for Bell, who was being tugged in different directions by everyone around him. His father was pressuring him to concentrate on his day jobs tutoring deaf children and teaching Visible Speech at Boston University. As a financial investor, Gardiner Hubbard had lost patience with the little time Bell was spending in his laboratory. To complicate matters, Bell had fallen in love with Mabel Hubbard.

Ironically, Bell’s lectures about deafness gave him vital clues. Using the phonautograph as a tool to illustrate the malfunctions that cause deafness, he became obsessed with its mechanical membrane. Realizing that his weakness was electricity, he recruited a talented electrician, Thomas Watson, and together they stumbled on the sound-transmission possibilities of electromagnetics.

Bell’s first important breakthrough was the transmitter, a sort of proto-microphone transforming audio sounds into an electrical signal. Eventually, by 1876, Bell’s telephone was officially patented, in large part thanks to Gardiner Hubbard’s legal prowess. Bell’s crowning moment, however, was winning a gold medal at the U.S. Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. Soon everyone in the scientific and industrial community was talking about the telephone.

Destiny or coincidence? At the Philadelphia exhibition that launched the telephone, one passing visitor viewing Bell’s contraption was Emile Berliner, the man who would later invent the disc record. Although just another face in the crowd, Berliner immediately saw the Achilles’ heel in Bell’s contraption. The mouthpiece lacked transmission power, meaning the speaker had to shout to be heard at the other end.

Emile Berliner was the least likely candidate to even attempt improving Bell’s technology. He was a poor German immigrant of Jewish origin who six years previously had arrived in America to escape enlistment in the Franco-Prussian War. Working as a janitor in a chemistry laboratory, he had no scientific education whatsoever; he had worked at various odd jobs and as a shopkeeper and traveling salesman. Since the day his ship docked in America, however, Berliner had been determined to improve his station. Not only was he attending night school, he had been carefully observing how the scientists conducted their research as he cleaned up around them.

In his rented room, Berliner began his own clumsy experiments. He eventually constructed a loose-contact transmitter, which increased the volume coming through the mouthpiece. Bell bought the patent and hired Berliner into his research unit.

There was a third man watching—Thomas Edison. Now that Bell’s telephone was poised to bring upheaval to the telegraph industry, Edison reasoned that there might be a new market for vocal telegrams, replacing the old system of textual telegrams. He tried to build a keyboard telephone, a sort of typewriter capable of playing recordings.