King of the Queen City: The Story of King Records

King of the Queen City

University of Illinois Press

Chapter One

* * *

All you need to succeed in the record business is a telephone, a desk, and an attorney. —Sydney Nathan

The day had begun with such promise.

On this February Saturday in 1956, the twenty or so people crammed into the Cincinnati recording studio were ready to get down to business. The producer was enthusiastic, the featured artists—a young singing group out of Georgia called the Famous Flames—were excited, the studio musicians in place. Time to roll tape.

They hadn't even made it through the first song when the atmosphere was shattered by a loud voice shouting in the studio's control room. "Stop the tape. Stop the tape," yelled Syd Nathan, the founder and president of King Records. "This is the worst piece of shit I've ever heard in my life," spewed Nathan, turning on producer Ralph Bass. "Nobody wants to hear this crap. All he's doing is stuttering, just saying one damn word over and over."

The confrontation spilled out into the main studio. People watched in stunned silence. The out-of-towners had never seen Nathan and didn't know he was often like this in the studio, yelling and screaming, red in the face, seemingly out of control. The leader of the Famous Flames, a man named James Brown, was mortified. Though Nathan was blistering Bass, his problem was obviously with Brown's singing.

Brown was trying to keep his cool. His reign as "Soul Brother Number One" was still years in the future. In February 1956, Brown was a struggling, scuffling singer looking for a break. A chance to make records for King was an opportunity he couldn't afford to blow.

The song Nathan hated, "Please, Please, Please," had been written by Brown and fellow Flame Johnny Terry. The song seemed simple and pointless to Nathan, but Brown knew the song tore up audiences at the band's gigs and felt it could be a hit. So did Bass, who signed the group to the label. Nathan had given Bass hell for that decision, too.

This session was supposed to be the "big break" for James Brown and the Flames, but Brown couldn't help feeling that his recording career was over before it had even started. Nathan was not buying Bass's assurances that the song would be a hit, nor Brown's explanations that he was trying to do something new and that there was more to the song than Nathan was hearing. Nathan grew louder and more dismissive.

Nathan raged that he should fire Bass for starting this whole fiasco. That did it for Bass. "All right, old man," the producer fumed, "here's what you should do. Put the record out just in the Atlanta market. Test the water, you know. If it's not a hit, you won't have to fire me, because I quit." That wasn't enough for Nathan, who countered, "No, I'm going to put this out nationally to prove what a piece of shit it is. You'll be a laughingstock in the business."

With that, an uneasy calm settled over the studio. Brown, the Flames, and the King "house band" got back to their business. Four songs were recorded that day without further incident, including "Please, Please, Please." As they left the studio, Brown and the Flames were pretty low. Brown didn't know whether any of the songs would be released as records; after all, the owner of the company had called his best song "a piece of shit."

Despite Syd Nathan's disdain for the song, "Please, Please, Please" was released in March and gradually sold a million copies. The record wasn't really a national hit, but it made enough noise in enough places to crack the R&B chart in Billboard magazine, climbing to the number six position. It was a phenomenal debut for a new artist almost completely unknown outside Georgia.

"Please, Please, Please" launched the recording career of James Brown, an unschooled visionary who would change the sound of music over the next fifteen years. Not just black music and not even just American music: the records James Brown recorded for King changed the world, as musicians in Africa, Europe, South America, and the West Indies avidly devoured and studied those records, incorporating Brown's polyrhythmic innovations into their own music.

In time, Brown would learn that Syd Nathan was an artist whose medium was bullshit. He was a master of the form. As did most of the artists who recorded for King, Brown butted heads time and again with Nathan, sometimes quite violently. The two men also developed an improbably close personal relationship, almost a father-son bond. It was a deep friendship that ended only with Nathan's death.

* * *

Cincinnati businessman Sydney Nathan launched King Records in 1943 and built the company into one of the most important, successful, and influential record companies in history. During the almost twenty-five years Nathan was at the helm, King recorded—and introduced to the American public—a stunning array of musical giants, from country stars Merle Travis and Grandpa Jones and bluegrass greats Don Reno and Red Smiley to blues guitarist Freddie King and R&B and soul stars Hank Ballard and James Brown.

Hundreds of independent record companies sprouted like mushrooms in the 1940s and 1950s, but King Records stands at the top. Sun, Chess, Atlantic, and Specialty, among other labels, made huge contributions to our shared musical culture, but none can match King for variety, innovation, depth of catalog, or sheer moxie.

Syd Nathan faced several major obstacles as he prepared to start his record company in 1943. The first was a world at war. By the fall of 1943, the United States had been at war with Germany, Japan, and Italy for almost two years. That created a serious problem for the recording industry: shellac, an essential ingredient in the manufacturing of the era's thick 78-rpm records, came primarily from southeast Asia, and the supply was largely cut off by the war in the Pacific.

Desperate record companies and pressing plants tried many substitutes for shellac, including such unlikely candidates as sawdust and ground-up asbestos. Some tried grinding up old records and reusing the powder. But nothing worked quite as well as shellac mixed with fine clay.

Some shellac was making it to this country, and although the War Production Board limited its nonmilitary use, a certain amount made its way to record companies. The three major labels of the day, RCA Victor, Decca, and Columbia, had first crack at the available shellac, but even so, the Big Three drastically reduced production, limiting releases to the most popular artists.

The second serious obstacle facing all record companies in 1943 was a ban on recording imposed by the American Federation of Musicians, the national musicians' union. Union boss James C. Petrillo had called for the recording ban, essentially a musicians' strike, because of his belief that radio stations that used records instead of live musicians (and, to a lesser degree, jukeboxes) were taking jobs away from the members of his union.

Those union members were used to the high-rolling days of the 1920s and 1930s when radio was king and every radio station in the land employed musicians to perform "live" all the music broadcast by the station. The bigger stations had staff orchestras and arrangers, vocal ensembles, solo singers, and a variety of musical groups.

That situation was threatened by the recording industry, in the union's view, in two different ways. The first was that records made jukeboxes possible, and the jukebox in the early 1940s was a growing cultural force that had begun to nibble away at radio's musical hegemony and taste-making monopoly. As widespread and relatively inexpensive as records, record players, and radios had become by this time, they were still beyond the means of millions of Americans. But now, thanks to the jukebox, anybody with a nickel could step into a restaurant, roadhouse, honky-tonk, or tumble-down joint and hear music from the world outside the local community, music by "real" musicians, often for the first time.

The recording industry also cut into the income of radio musicians in a more direct way. As records became increasingly widespread and popular in the 1930s and 1940s, cost-conscious radio executives realized they could fill radio airtime much cheaper by hiring someone to play records than by hiring an entire orchestra to perform. These new radio record-spinners came to be called "disc jockeys," and audiences seemed to like them just fine. That was the beginning of the end as far as live radio was concerned.

So Petrillo had legitimate reasons for his beef with the record companies. He demanded that they—again, essentially RCA Victor, Decca, and Columbia—establish a fund for unemployed musicians. The record companies refused, and the musicians stopped recording on August 1, 1942. With the exception of a few records by a cappella vocal groups, there would be no recording until the companies settled with the union.

The big labels hung tough, as each had stockpiled a sizable backlog of material to release and felt confident they could wait out any kind of strike a bunch of musicians could put together. The major record companies were wrong, though, and their mistake opened a door through which dozens of entrepreneurs, hustlers, and visionary "record men" managed to squeeze. The recording industry would change immeasurably before the major labels realized their mistake and came to terms with the union.

Decca was the first, settling with the union in September 1943. Columbia and RCA Victor resisted until November 1944, but they finally capitulated, realizing that the public was demanding fresher music than the labels were able to deliver.

The musician's strike was not that much of a problem for a new label like the one Syd Nathan was planning. Fighting for the status quo simply wasn't an issue for a brash outsider like Nathan, or his numerous counterparts across the country planning their own record companies. If all you had to do to make records was to sign a piece of paper agreeing with the union, where's the pen? Let's get started.

The first of the great modern record companies, the Victor Talking Machine Company, was founded in 1901. The segment of the record industry that Nathan hoped to join had essentially begun in 1920. Prior to that year, most record company executives believed that black and rural white audiences simply had no interest in (or money to purchase) phonograph records. That changed in 1920 with "Crazy Blues," recorded by Mamie Smith, the first record made by a black performer and aimed at a black audience. A vaudeville singer from Ohio, Smith was not really a blues singer, but "Crazy Blues" was a huge hit for the OKeh Record Company and helped prove the commercial viability of recorded black music. Its success prompted the recording of numerous other black artists and created the market for what were called "race records." Soon several labels were turning out records for this new market.

The birth of the country music recording industry came three years later, with the release of a record by Fiddlin' John Carson, an old-time fiddler and singer from Georgia. Carson's OKeh recording of "The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane" and "The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster's Going to Crow" is usually considered the first country record to be commercially distributed.

The recording of country music was actually an inadvertent result of the search for black talent. In the wake of Mamie Smith's hit, record company talent scouts went out looking for singers and musicians to record. Enterprising record men such as Ralph Peer fanned out across the south in an unprecedented search for native talent. It was on one such trip to Atlanta that Peer was persuaded to record Fiddlin' John Carson.

The success of Carson's record launched the "hillbilly" record industry just as Mamie Smith's hit had started the race record industry. By 1925, the game was fully afoot, and dozens of labels had entered the hunt, actively scouting the country, especially the southern states, looking for anybody—black, white, young, old, man, woman, or child—who might be able to sell records.

From its sales peak of $121 million in 1921, the recording industry spiraled downward throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. The bottom finally fell out, with sales plummeting to a low of $6 million in 1933. Companies went out of business, careers ended, musicians faded into oblivion. Artists who had once sold thousands of each new release now sold hundreds. It was obvious that the recording industry would not survive the Depression without a massive shake-up.

Only Victor came through the Depression more or less unscathed, though even Victor started a low-priced subsidiary label, Bluebird Records, for jazz, blues, and country recordings. Numerous record companies had gone under, never to return. Several other companies changed ownership or otherwise restructured. The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) also entered the industry in 1938 with a label built from the remnants of Brunswick, American Record Corporation, Columbia, and OKeh. CBS gave its new label an old name—Columbia.

The most prominent newcomer was Decca Records, a subsidiary of a major British company of the same name. Established in America in 1934, Decca had a sure-fire gimmick: its records cost only thirty-five cents at a time when most other records sold for seventy-five cents. And because of Decca's aggressive pursuit of successful recording artists on other labels, Decca soon boasted a roster of top sellers headed by superstar Bing Crosby.

When the dust had settled, by around 1940, basically three major record companies were still standing in America: Victor, Columbia, and Decca. Not only were there fewer labels than just a few years before, but the three surviving companies had little interest in anything beyond the top-selling pop acts. Most country and blues artists were dropped from the companies' rosters or reassigned to cheaper and less prestigious subsidiary labels.

* * *

Sydney Nathan was born April 27, 1903, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Frieda and Nathaniel Nathan. Sydney was never blessed with good health. In fact, he had a number of serious problems in his youth, from respiratory ailments to weak eyes. He had terrible vision—so bad that he dropped out of school after the ninth grade, explaining later with perfect logic, "I couldn't see, so why bother?" As an adult, he wore the proverbial "pop-bottle glasses."

Nathan had asthma and, as an adult, spoke with a loud, raspy voice that carried remarkably well. Cincinnati writer Randy McNutt describes it nicely: "He always sounded as if he were on the verge of losing the last bit of his roar as he verbally battered some unlucky human obstacle who was standing between Syd Nathan and Success. He always found the breath to keep shouting." By the early 1940s, Nathan also suffered from high blood pressure, obesity, cataracts, and respiratory problems no doubt worsened by his fondness for big, stinky cigars.

Nathan was quite a character. He could be obscene, loud, greedy, and crude—the very essence of a money-grubbing vulgarian. He often displayed an abrasive, obnoxious, confrontational, bullying, and coarse personality that drove more than a few King artists and staff members to the brink of serious mayhem.

On the other hand, Nathan was an expansive, fun-loving, joke-telling, charismatic guy usually found at the center of a laughing group of people. Jethro Burns called him "one of the most fun guys" he ever met. Nathan loved holding court at some neighborhood bar or coffee shop when taking a break from the frenzy at King. It was almost impossible to stay mad at Syd Nathan, although quite a few people tried.

Nathan was an intelligent, complex, and unusual man, a guy who could get teary-eyed over a sappy old sentimental song and an hour later expound to his sales staff on the subtle differences between French and English hookers. He was perhaps the perfect specimen of the cigar-chomping record man of the mid-twentieth century who changed American music and, in turn, changed the world.

* * *

One thing on Nathan's side as he prepared to launch King Records was that he had already tasted failure more than once and was not averse to taking risks. Since leaving school, he had spent a year in Arizona for his asthma and worked at a variety of off-beat occupations. He worked in a pawnshop, bussed tables in a men's club, ran a chain of shooting galleries, played drums in pick-up bands, operated an elevator, sold jewelry, and promoted professional wrestlers and their matches. His most successful wrestler was known as the Big Swede, who was billed by Nathan as the "Midwestern Champion."

Nathan's lowest point as a businessman came in August 1938, when he was arrested in connection with operating a string of what were called jackpot shooting galleries, a popular Depression-era diversion. All a marksman had to do to win cash prizes in these games of chance was shoot out the outline of a heart (or spade or whatever) on a playing card mounted on a target several feet away.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from King of the Queen City by Jon Hartley Fox Copyright © 2009 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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