Friday, 22 August 2008
Music journalist turned record producer (10 January 1917 – 15 August 2008), one of the major record industry players in the American music industry through 1950s, 1960s and beyond.
There are subjects that, like it or not, you keep coming back to. In my case, one of those subjects is that, back in the pop culture equivalent of the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Tyrannosaurus Rex was master of all he surveyed, some record companies were run by music fans.
Or, if not actual fans, by people who knew a bit about music.
We’re talking about those dim distant days back before the CD and the iPod. Before the music video and YouTube. Seems strange to think that’s only, what, thirty? forty? years.
And, we lost another link to those halcyon days when congestive heart failure caused 91 year-old Jerry Wexler to depart this life at his Florida home on Friday 15 August.
Who, you may ask, was Jerry Wexler?
Hughesy’s reply?
Where would you want me to start?
How about back in the forties when the black popular music of the day appeared in the Race Music charts? There was a journalist writing for Billboard magazine who decided to rebrand the category, and labelled it Rhythm & Blues.
That was Jerry Wexler.
Or a bit later in 1953 when the sons of a Turkish diplomat who operated a small independent record label in downtown Manhattan, faced with the imminent departure of the third partner for the US Army needed a new partner.
Who did Ahmet and Neshui Ertegun turn to?
Jerry Wexler.
Or perhaps we could go to the aftermath of that invitation, as Atlantic Records morphed the newly labelled rhythm-and-blues into mainstream rock’n’roll, starting with Big Joe Turner's Shake, Rattle and Roll in 1954. That came just before Atlantic's deal with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, resulting in a string of hits by the Coasters, including Yakety Yak, Charlie Brown, Along Came Jones and Poison Ivy.
Who produced them?
You guessed it. Jerry Wexler.
And that’s just looking at a couple of obvious starting points without leaving the fifties. Over the next couple of decades Atlantic, with Wexler as a significant factor, has been a significant force in rhythm and blues, soul, jazz and rock.