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.
Jerry Wexler
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.
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.
Wexler’s focus shifted to the South, where gospel-trained singers and musicians with a background in country and rhythm-and-blues in Memphis and Muscle Shoals were creating the new blend of influences that came to be known as soul music. Part of the process was the distribution deal he set up for the Memphis-based Stax label which resulted in hits by Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Rufus and Carla Thomas, and Booker T and the MGs, but resulted in Stax losing the rights to their own master recordings.
In the studio Wexler’s approach was simple - give the artists freedom to be themselves and follow their instincts in a sympathetic environment.
After supervising the sessions that produced the Drifters' Money Honey, Big Joe Turner's original version of Shake, Rattle and Roll and LaVern Baker's Tweedlee Dee, Wexler hit the real big time with a 23-year-old singer and pianist from Florida named Ray Charles and a stream of hits that included It Should Have Been Me, This Little Girl of Mine, Lonely Avenue, I Got a Woman and What'd I Say. Wexler later stated the best thing he had done for Charles was to let him do as he pleased.
After Charles left Atlantic, in 1959, Wexler produced Solomon Burke, another singer coming from gospel music, resulting in Everybody Needs Somebody to Love and a magnificent version of He'll Have to Go.
Sessions with Wilson Pickett and Percy Sledge produced Midnight Hour and When A Man Loves A Woman but Wexler’s greatest success came with Aretha Franklin, although the Muscle Shoals session that produced her first Atlantic single, I Never Loved a Man, ended in an almighty and near-catastrophic row between the session musicians and Aretha's manager-husband, Ted White.
The decision to sign Aretha to Atlantic came after seven years at Columbia Records, where one of the great voices had been submerged in a sea of strings and show tunes. After I Never Loved a Man Wexler produced sixteen albums and numerous hit singles for Franklin, including Do Right Woman - Do Right Man, Respect, Chain of Fools, and I Say a Little Prayer.
Thinking they’d reached as high as they were going to get, Wexler persuaded his partners to sell Atlantic to Warner Brothers for a $17.5 million in 1967. Although they stayed on to run the company, Ertegun and Wexler continued moving in different directions.
Ertegun, who’d started off resisting the takeover, eventually thrived in the corporate environment, thanks largely to his diplomatic pedigree. Wexler, freed from concerns with the company's bottom line, focused on the music he wanted to hear including Duane Allman, Dr. John, and Delaney & Bonnie. Some productions sold well. Others, including Dr. John's Gumbo and Doug Sahm and Band were among Atlantic's worst sellers.
Hughesy, on the other hand, loved them...
Wexler also produced Dusty Springfield's Dusty in Memphis and the hit single, Son of a Preacher Man, a benchmark of blue-eyed soul, although Springfield chose to record her vocals over backing tracks in New York, rather than live in the Stax studio. He was active behind-the-scenes, encouraging songwriter Carole King to embark on the solo career that resulted in Tapestry, although the production credit on the album went to Lou Adler rather than Jerry Wexler.
In 1974, he tried to establish a Nashville branch of the label, which resulted in two albums by Willie Nelson and not much else, and by the end of 1975, Wexler had left Atlantic and, apart from a brief spell as the East Coast A&R man for Warner Bros. went freelance for the rest of his career.
Over the next two decades he produced albums for Bob Dylan (Slow Train Coming and Saved), Cher (3614 Jackson Highway), Dire Straits (Communiqué), Etta James (Deep in the Night and The Right Time), Allen Toussaint, the Staple Singers, George Michael, Jose Feliciano, Linda Ronstadt (What’s New, a collection of Sinatraesque standards) and Carlos Santana (Havana Moon), as well as soundtracks for films by Louis Malle and Richard Pryor.
After Wexler retired shortly after his 80th birthday someone asked him what he’d like written on his tombstone.
The response?
More bass.
And so, with his passing, we’ve lost the last of the triumvirate that gave us Atlantic Records. For a great view of the Atlantic story, may I recommend two DVDs: Atlantic Records: The House That Ahmet Built, released after Ahmet Ertegun left us, and the wonderful Tom Dowd & The Language of Music.
Twenty Essential Jerry Wexler Productions (his ratings, according to Rolling Stone).
1. Professor Longhair Tipitina (1953)
2. Ray Charles I Got a Woman (1954)
3. Big Joe Turner Shake, Rattle and Roll (1954)
4. LaVern Baker Tweedlee Dee (1954)
5. Champion Jack Dupree Junker's Blues (1958)
6. The Drifters There Goes My Baby (1959)
7. Ray Charles What I'd Say (1959)
8. Solomon Burke If You Need Me (1963)
9. Booker T. & the MG's Green Onions (1962)
10. Wilson Pickett In the Midnight Hour (1965)
11. Aretha Franklin Respect (1967)
12. Dusty Springfield Son of a Preacher Man (1969)
13. Dr. John Iko Iko (1972)
14. Doug Sahm (Is Anybody Going to) San Antone (1973)
15. Willie Nelson Bloody Mary Morning (1974)
16. The Sanford/Townsend Band Smoke From a Distant Fire (1977)
17. James Booker Winin' Boy Blues (1978)
18. Etta James Take It to the Limit (1978)
19. Dire Straits Lady Writer (1979)
20. Bob Dylan Gotta Serve Somebody (1979)
