Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (6 page)

With Victor’s total dominance and the laterally cut disc now the industry standard, the talking-machine business had stabilized. A weary Eldridge Johnson, by now one of the richest men in America, observed, “Improvements come hard now-a-days. The field is no longer a virgin one. Great chunks of free gold are no longer lying around to be picked up by lucky hunter. The old-fashioned prospector is out of the race.”

Fittingly, the two creative visionaries behind Victor’s success, Emile Berliner and Leon Douglass, had become the record business’s first semiretired eccentrics. Enjoying a leisurely life, Berliner undertook one last great project as an inventor. It was another spinning machine—the helicopter. Leonardo da Vinci had imagined the principle, but not until 1907 was the first flight recorded. By 1909, Berliner and his son Henry had built a prototype that succeeded in lifting them six feet into the air.

Leon Douglass never really recovered from his nervous breakdown, but even though he was half mad, Eldridge Johnson refused to let him resign from his nominal position as chairman of the board. With money flowing in every month, Douglass also found himself in the unusual position of being able to pursue his passions in life. Moving his family into a fifty-two-bedroom mansion in California, he built an underground cinema laboratory with a giant window looking into a swimming pool. In 1916, he patented a technique for color film processing, effectively the forerunner of
Technicolor
, which he sold to Cecil B. DeMille. He then turned his attentions to underwater filming and once took his instruments to Hawaii to film tropical fish. He wrote a surrealist book,
Ajax Defied the Lightning,
and made the first American color film,
Cupid Angling
.

The founding fathers of the record industry were now old enough to look back and recognize what they had contributed to modern culture. Being a classically trained musician, Emile Berliner gave Eldridge Johnson’s company a European dimension that Columbia and Edison could never match. Leon Douglass understood how to present an iconic package to the public, making high culture accessible to the masses. Johnson, for his part, was the strongest boss in the business: fatherly, loyal, disciplined, and adventurous.

Thanks to their collective work, the world adopted the disc record, the most enduring of all formats. Even Douglass and Berliner’s later years daydreaming around beautiful mansions seemed to foreshadow modern-day record producers. These were the founding fathers. Almost everything they pioneered has simply been reinvented over and over again.

4. EXODUS

Every epoch dreams of the next one. As the new century strode toward the Roaring Twenties, the fruits of the Victorian imagination were everywhere to be seen. Young adults inherited a world very different from the austere age of horses and corsets their parents had known. Now there were electric lights, shop signs, telephones, elevators, and automobiles. Cities had suddenly become a lot noisier, flashier, denser, and faster.

The Victorians had dreamed of changing the world, but nobody had imagined the Great War. As doughboys returned home with maimed limbs and shattered minds, young Americans began to reject older, European values that companies such as Victor Talking Machine had so brilliantly symbolized.

Too big, too old, too distracted by wartime obligations, Victor had become a giant corporation out of touch with the younger generation. The Victorian preference for classical music, marching bands, and vaudeville was being supplanted by a newfound fascination with dancing and home-grown street culture. Not surprisingly, some record producers were quicker than others to see it coming.

As early as 1911, the novelty song “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” blew up into the world’s first truly global smash hit. Various versions by different performers and record labels sold over 1 million records. Although “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” kept to a somewhat traditional marching-band beat, the song’s bouncy, jubilant feel made it a real foot-tapper that physically excited audiences in a way that hadn’t been seen before. Victor’s recording staff knew the public wanted danceable records, but being from the classical world, the best they could come up with was tango and foxtrot.

After 1914, the combined effects of reduced shipping and the enlistment of millions of young men into Europe’s warring armies had slowed down American immigration. A growing isolationist feeling culminated in the controversial Immigration Act of 1917. However, with the American economy continuing to expand, businesses were beginning to feel labor shortages. These developments coincided with another upheaval happening in the Southern countryside as racism and rural poverty pushed blacks into the Northern economic pull.

So the war accelerated a century-long process known as
the Great Migration,
in which Southern rural blacks moved to Northern cities in search of a better life. In 1910, three out of every four blacks lived on farms, and nine out of ten lived in the South. Over the following decade, some 2 million blacks moved north—400,000 of them between 1916 and 1918 alone. The largest concentration of Southern black migrants was in Harlem, where about 200,000 Southern blacks moved into a neighborhood that had been virtually all white fifteen years previously.

Chicago was the second-most-popular destination, thanks mainly to
The Chicago Defender,
a Northern newspaper distributed primarily in Mississippi, Virginia, New Orleans, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Georgia. The other new development raising Chicago’s national profile was
Prohibition
. With so much alcohol flowing over the Canadian border into the black-market economy, Chicago was the new boom town, synonymous with speakeasies and gangsters.

The warm tones and perfumed imagery of the South found a streetwise swagger in the bright lights of Chicago and Harlem. From this meeting point, lots of interesting music began pouring out.

Black music from the South was creeping into dance halls and music publishing houses. The first important pioneer bringing Southern black music to the big cities of the North was W. C. Handy, a black composer and bandleader who had been working in the music business for a decade.

In Handy’s youth, early blues was generally played by brass orchestras, a legacy of the Victorian tradition of marching-band music that had caught on in black communities. In the late nineteenth century most towns, and even many businesses, had their own brass bands for festivals, weddings, and funerals. The new
rag
style evolved as cheap surplus instruments, decommissioned in New Orleans after the 1898 Spanish-American War, entered civilian circulation. Because black marching bands learned pieces by ear and played offbeat rhythms passed down from their African tradition, the upright
um-pah
of Victorian marching bands took on a woozier, four-legged groove. The term
ragtime
evolved from this loose, unwritten,
ragged
style.

Handy was the first to study the mechanics of this “three-chord basic harmonic structure.” He realized that a warbling effect later referred to as the
blue note
was the hallmark of “Negro roustabouts, honky-tonk piano players, wanderers and others of the underprivileged but undaunted class … The primitive Southern Negro, as he sang, was sure to bear down on the third and seventh tone of the scale, slurring between major and minor. Whether in the cotton field of the Delta or on the Levee up St. Louis way, it was always the same.”

In 1912, Handy wrote his first hit for the sheet-music market, a tune called “Memphis Blues”—the first widely distributed 12-bar blues, credited as the inspiration for the invention of the foxtrot in 1914 by a New York dance duo, Vernon and Irene Castle. Handy was a bandleader in the big city in the summer of 1914, when “the tango was in vogue,” and he recalled that one night “I tricked the dancers by arranging a tango introduction, breaking abruptly into a low-down blues. My eyes swept the floor anxiously, then suddenly I saw lightning strike. The dancers seemed electrified. Something within them came suddenly to life. An instinct that wanted so much to live, to fling its arms to spread joy, took them by the heels.”

As the old expression goes, it takes two to tango. Change wasn’t limited to Southern blacks pouring into the Northern cities. Marking the waning of Victorian ideals of femininity, the period also brought seismic sociological shifts for women. Although the term
flapper
has become synonymous with the Roaring Twenties, the process of women’s liberation took a giant leap during the war.

The wave was strongest in Britain’s four-year war effort, where an estimated 2 million women replaced men in factories. When America joined the war in 1917, Teddy Roosevelt endorsed American writer Harriot Stanton Blatch’s public appeal to “mobilize woman-power.” Voicing a stirring tribute, Blatch claimed the British war effort had made women “capable … bright-eyed, happy.” The political world was stirring also. Between 1913 and 1920 women won the right to vote in Norway, Denmark, Australia, Russia, Poland, Germany, Britain, Holland, and America.

All these migrations and upheavals in black and female culture explain why suddenly in 1917, the year America joined the war, a new dance craze exploded in Chicago and New York—jazz, the first organically grown musical wave to rise from the street and change the face of the record business.

Before the war, the word
jazz
, meaning
spirit
or
fizziness
, was popular in California, where, according to one dubious theory, it had sexual connotations derived from the nineteenth-century word
jism
. A more plausible explanation is that the word originated from a Gaelic word, spelled “teas” but pronounced “
tchass
,” meaning heat, excitement, vigor, or the passion of spirit. It was also the name of an Irish superstitious cult surrounding St. Bridget’s tomb, where a fire was kept burning, and as such it had long been invoked by gamblers. The Irish imported the term into American gambling halls, from whence it spread to other domains, first sport, then music. The fact that Gaelic is an ancient language whose artificial spelling in Latin letters differs greatly from its true pronunciation might explain why at least four spellings of the Americanized word—jass, jas, jazz, and jaz—appeared between 1913 and 1918.

In 1913, an Irish American sports journalist, Scoop Gleeson, used the word
jass
to describe the spirit and pep of baseball players. The word was already on the street; Gleeson’s newspaper, the
San Francisco Bulletin,
ran a piece in April 1913 entitled “In Praise of Jazz, a Futurist Word Which Has Just Joined the Language.” Its author, Ernest J. Hopkins, explained that “a new word, like a new muscle, only comes into being when it has long been needed. This remarkable and satisfactory-sounding word … means something like life, vigor, energy, effervescence of spirit, joy, pep, magnetism, verve, virility ebullience, courage, happiness—oh, what’s the use?—Jazz. Nothing else can express it.”

In Chicago, the popular new word was pinned onto an older yet increasingly popular flavor of Southern brass band music. The
Chicago Daily Tribune
’s editor, Fred Shapiro, wrote an excited piece in the summer of 1915 explaining, “Blues is jazz and jazz is blues … The blues are never written into music, but are interpolated by the piano player or other players. They aren’t new. They are just reborn into popularity. They started in the South half a century ago and are the interpolations of darkies originally. The trade name for them is
jazz
.”

Ironically, the word arrived in the South last. In November 1916, the New Orleans
Times-Picayune,
previewing a parade, noted, “Theatrical journals have taken cognizance of the
jas bands
and at first these organizations of syncopation were credited with having originated in Chicago, but anyone ever having frequented the
tango belt
of New Orleans knows that the real home of the
jas bands
is right here … Just where and when these bands, until this winter known only to New Orleans, originated, is a disputed question. It is claimed they are the outgrowth of the so-called
fish bands
of the lake front camps, Saturday and Sunday night affairs. However, the fact remains that their popularity has already reached Chicago, and that New York probably will be invaded next.”

The first jazz record “Livery Stable Blues” and “Dixie Jass Band One Step,” was released on Victor in February 1917. The performers were a white group called the Original Dixieland Jass Band—Southern musicians playing in the Chicago dance halls. Three months later, Columbia invited them to record two more tunes, “Darktown Strutters Ball” and “Back Home Again in Indiana.” Even Edison jumped on the bandwagon with “Everybody Loves a Jass Band” by Arthur Fields. By the end of 1917, there appeared to be a consensus that the spelling “
jazz
” carried a nicer ring.

In 1919, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band took London by storm and was commissioned by Columbia’s British company to record no less than thirty sides. In a private concert at Buckingham Palace, the bandleader recalled Marshal Philippe Pétain peered ominously through his opera glasses, “as though there were bugs on us.” When King George V began clapping excitedly, his motionless guests let go and began enjoying themselves. After four rapturous months, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band was forced to leave England abruptly. According to rumors, they were chased to the Southampton docks by a furious Lord Harrington. One of the musicians had romanced his daughter.

Feeling the generational chasms opening up between youngsters and their Victorian parents, Victor’s senior managers were urgently rethinking their entire image and product line. Highbrow values were becoming unfashionable, which meant unprofitable. Victor’s contract man, Calvin Child, was assigned the delicate task of convincing all the company’s operatic and classical artists to accept new terms whereby, instead of exorbitant flat fees, they would receive a percentage of net profits, with a guaranteed minimum annual income. Caruso, of course, obtained the most generous deal, with a minimum guarantee of $100,000 per year for a term of ten years. Less lucrative names obtained minimum guarantees of around $15,000 per year. The age of percentage-based royalties had tentatively begun.