Working with the likes of Joe Turner, Ray Charles, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, Willie Nelson, Doug Sahm, Bob Dylan and Dire Straits over a career lasting nearly half a century, Wexler left an indelible mark on the music of the late 20th century. In 1987, he was one of the first non-performers to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
So who was Jerry Wexler?
Born in New York on 10 January 1917, Gerald Wexler was the son of a Polish window washer and a left-wing mother who sold the Daily Worker on the streets of Harlem had hoped that her son would develop into a literary figure.
Despite his mother’s ambitions, Wexler wasn’t a great scholar, preferring to frequent pool halls when he wasn’t hanging out at the Commodore Record Shop, or searching junk shops for second-hand 78s by Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins or Fats Waller. Nights found him drinking McSorley's Ale, sneaking off to hear Fletcher Henderson at the Savoy ballroom and maybe smoking the odd cigarette without any name on it.
Such activities probably didn’t fit in too well with Elsa Wexler’s expectations of her wayward son. As a result 1936 found him enrolled at Kansas State College of Agriculture and Applied Science in Manhattan, Kansas, studying journalism. The choice of institution may have been intended to keep Jerry away from distractive influences, but it seems that a distance of a mere hundred miles wasn’t enough to keep the student out of the musical fleshpots of Kansas City.
After dropping out of college, he returned to New York and a variety of short term jobs, including washing windows for his father, before he was drafted into the Army in 1942. At the end of the war, he went back to Kansas to complete his degree.
After graduation, predictably, he was back in New York, working as a song-plugger and writing for Billboard before he was invited to join Atlantic Records in 1953. Wexler’s investment of $2,000 resulted in a salary of $300 a week and 13% of the company, a stake that eventually rose to 30% as other shareholders left. Wexler’s stake money paid for a green Cadillac which became his company car.
The invitation may or may not have been linked to an incident in 1950, when Wexler suggested The Tennessee Waltz might do well for Patti Page. Three million copies in eight months could be classed as doing well.
A glance through Atlantic’s catalogue shows a company at the forefront of the musical styles that would merge into what we now know as rock & roll. It was a natural fit for Wexler who was, in his own words simmered in a slow-cooking gumbo of New Orleans jazz, small Harlem combos, big bands, Western swing, country, jukebox race music, pop schmaltz.
In many ways the partnership running the label was a study in contrasts. Ahmet Ertegun, the cultured and literate younger son of Turkey's Ambassador to the United States, the sophisticated side of the operation. Wexler did the day-to-day dirty work, working the phones to promote Atlantic's artists to disk jockeys and distributors, battling other labels for a share of a developing market.
That promotion, in line with the business practices of the day, was accompanied by payola (bribing disc jockeys to play a company’s records) which provoked considerable controversy at the time. Left to their own devices most radio stations would have been content to keep playing Perry Como and Doris Day rather than the latest Atlantic singles so, if payola hadn’t existed would we ever have heard those classic cuts by the Drifters, the Clovers, Joe Turner, Ruth Brown, the Coasters and much of the output of songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller?
The contrasts continued as the partners headed in different musical directions. Ertegun increasingly moved towards pop and rock, signing the Young Rascals in New York, the Buffalo Springfield and Sonny and Cher in Los Angeles, and adding Cream and the Rolling Stones to the mix in the late sixties.