Present at the Creation

Chess Records released its first record fifty years ago. And while the legendary Chicago label achieved its greatest success in the supposedly somnolent decade of the 1950s, the popular music of the 1960s is almost inconceivable without Chess. For without the recordings of Chess artists — bluesmen Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, and pro-to-rockers Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley — who would the Rolling Stones and dozens of other pop groups have stolen from?

In her new book Spinning Blues Into Gold, Nadine Cohodas tells the story of brothers Leonard and Phil Chess, immigrant Jews from Poland, and the record company they built.

Inevitably, Cohodas covers some familiar ground. Who is not familiar with the story of how the acoustic Delta blues went electric after migrating to the industrial north? Or how the rise of rock ‘n’ roll swept aside racial barriers in popular music and, incidentally, relegated the blues to a vernacular corner of the record business?

But to this familiar material, Cohodas brings a fresh perspective. Her book is the story of the mid-century revolution in American popular music from the vantage point of the much maligned label owners: road-weary white entrepreneurs like the Chess brothers, with soup stains on their neckties and coffee rings on their copies of Cash Box.

The pragmatic, unglamorous (mostly Jewish) independent label owners of the time have not fared well in the histories. They have been depicted typically as cunning parasites who cheated artists of royalties — when, that is, they weren’t diluting the artistry of these natural geniuses in the crass pursuit of profits. The period did have its share of scoundrels (Morris Levy of Roulette Records and Nat Tarnopol of Brunswick Records come to mind). But more typical, one suspects, were men like Leonard Chess. In his famous attack on rock ‘n’ roll in The Closing of the American Mind, Alan Bloom asserted that the Left had hypocritically exempted rock from its otherwise comprehensive indictment of “late capitalism.” In fact, a belief in exploitative label owners has long been axiomatic. Under the sway of this dogma, wide credence was given to crackpot legends such as Rolling Stone Keith Richards’s baseless claim that on a visit to the Chess studio he saw Muddy Waters perched on a stepladder in workman’s overalls painting the ceiling.

Yes, Leonard Chess was a driven, unsentimental, penny-pinching philistine, goading and autocratic. But he was loyal to his musicians, a loyalty approaching familial tenderness toward the artists who carried the company in its heyday. He was honest — as he had to be, for a businessman working in a small and insular profession depended on mutual trust. In a nation still marked by segregation, he mixed easily with black artists and DJs, placed blacks in positions of authority in his company, and donated sizable sums to the black community in which he made his money.

Did he equitably share the proceeds with his artists? The relevant paper trail has long since vanished, but it is worth remembering an often overlooked fact of the record business. Records made artists into stars, and while the label made money off the records they released, it made none from concerts, club dates, and other venues of popular music stardom.

Bo Diddley, for example, appeared in the “Bo Knows” television ad campaign as late as the mid-1980s. But had it not been for Leonard Chess, Bo Diddley might still have been known by his real name of Ellas McDaniel, and his first hit would have been called not “Bo Diddley,” but “Uncle John.” And it is certain that “Uncle John” would not have received the airplay that lifted it onto the charts in 1955, had Chess not instructed McDaniel to clean up the original lyrics: “Uncle John got corn ain’t never been shucked / Uncle John got daughters ain’t never been . . . to school.”

Leonard and Phil Chess were born Lejzor and Fiszel Czyz in Motele, a desolate Jewish town in Poland. Leonard, the flinty and professionally dominant brother, was born in 1917. Phil, the more personable one, was born in 1921. With their mother and sister, they emigrated to America in 1928 to join their father, who had arrived in Chicago several years before.

The Chess catalogue is now a small part of a French company, Vivendi-Universal, which recently swallowed Edgar Bronfman’s booze and entertainment conglomerate, Seagram. Chess, too, had its origins in booze and entertainment, on Chicago’s South Side. Chicago’s black population surged from 278,000 to 492,000 in the 1940s, as sharecroppers made expendable by the mechanization of cotton harvesting fled north seeking work. They poured into the South Side, where Leonard Chess operated two liquor stores (whose jukeboxes attracted musicians) before buying a restaurant called the Congress Buffet in 1946. He installed a bar and booths and gave it a saucier name: the Macomba Lounge.

The Macomba Lounge featured live jazz, not the rougher blues which would become synonymous with Chess. Attracted by the quality of the music, musicians from neighboring clubs would converge on the Macomba after their own gigs to join all-night jam sessions. The Macomba was also a magnet for whores and drug dealers. Leonard carried a .44 pistol, which, he explained to his son, wasn’t much use if it wasn’t conspicuously displayed on his person.

The popularity of live music on the South Side, the abundant musical talent, and the growing prominence of black radio combined to suggest to Leonard commercial possibilities. When an acquaintance, Evelyn Aron, started Aristocrat Records (to record jazz, like the kind booked at the Macomba), Leonard saw his opportunity and joined the fledgling label’s sales staff in October 1947. The enterprising Leonard soon became Aron’s partner, and in December 1949 he bought her out to take over the company, which he renamed at the suggestion of Memphis record distributor Buster Williams.

One day in 1947, McKinley Morganfield, a Delta blues guitarist who had arrived in Chicago in 1943, fibbed to his boss to get off early from his job delivering venetian blinds. He had been invited to join his friend, veteran Delta blues pianist Sunnyland Slim, on a recording session at Aristocrat. Morganfield, known since his Mississippi childhood as Muddy Waters, took advantage of some unused time to record his own single. That first recording drew little notice on release, but his second would be historic, in the view of students of the blues. (The genre has no fans, only “students,” many of whom, especially the ones from places like Holland, find themselves compelled to film documentaries on the subject.)

For a company still specializing in silky, citified swing, Waters’s swampy slide guitar and vocals took some getting used to. “What’s he saying?” demanded a skeptical Leonard Chess at one early session. But Waters’s second Aristocrat session produced a two-sided hit, “I Feel Like Going Home” and “I Can’t Be Satisfied” (later recorded by the Rolling Stones) that made Billboard’s R&B chart, the label’s first hit. Waters would go on to chart nine songs over the next few years, peaking in 1954 with two Willie Dixon songs, “I Just Want to Make Love to You” (another early Rolling Stones hit) and the classic “Hoochie Coochie Man.” In Waters’s wake, Chess shifted its emphasis. The rough-hewn Chicago blues found a ready market among nostalgic migrants from the Delta, and Chess became the only blues label that mattered in the only city that mattered for the blues.

At the beginning of the 1950s the Chess brothers (the Macomba had by then burned down, and Phil had joined the record company full-time) enjoyed a brief but fruitful collaboration with Memphis record-producer Sam Phillips, an ardent and rare white champion of unrefined country blues. One of the Phillips-produced songs the brothers acquired was “Rocket 88,” sung by Jackie Brenston. Written by Ike Turner, the song is widely cited as the first rock ‘n’ roll number. It is not clear why this piano-based boogie-woogie number merits the designation, even if it is about a car. In any case, it became, in May 1951, the first Chess release to reach number one on the R&B charts.

Musician, composer, and talent scout, the young Ike Turner was a ubiquitous figure in the early 1950s, long before attaining notoriety for his substance abuse and violence against women (both, be it noted, recurring themes in the R&B songs of that era). In addition to his role in “Rocket 88,” the pre-Tina Ike brought in the blues singer Chester Burnett, a large and moody man who sang like he was “gargling with Drano.” Phillips sold the resulting single — “Moanin’ at Midnight” and “How Many More Years” — to Chess, and after both sides made the R&B charts, the Chesses wrested control of the singer from a rival label. As Howlin’ Wolf, Burnett would go on to vie with Waters for preeminence through the remainder of their careers, recording “Smokestack Lightning” and “Little Red Rooster” (a number one hit for — sense a pattern? — the Rolling Stones), among other recognized standards.

The Chess brothers fell out with Phillips in 1952 over who had to foot the bill for the bus in which Jackie Brenston had toured. They should have paid, because just two years later Phillips would find the elusive “white man who sang like a black man,” Elvis Presley. The brothers would chide themselves in later years that they might have had Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the other Phillips stars. It was not their only near-miss. In the late 1950s, Leonard sent a contract to a dynamic young R&B shouter in Macon, Georgia, but bad weather in Chicago prevented him from flying down to close the deal before a representative of Syd Nathan’s King Records beat him to the punch. The young soul singer, James Brown, would dominate black music in the 1960s and 1970s. If Chess had ended up with Elvis Presley and James Brown, then perhaps Chess, not the French, would be swallowing Edgar Bronfman’s entertainment empire.

But if the king of rock ‘n’ roll and the godfather of soul eluded their grasp, Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry were nothing to sneeze at. The underage Diddley used to sneak into clubs to watch Muddy Waters — careful always to sit near an exit, should he need to flee the manager. Like many blues musicians, he got his start busking for change on Chicago’s Maxwell Street. He was a tinkerer, building his own guitars (his squared off guitar bodies would become a trademark) and amplifiers. By the time he had added rattling maracas, syncopated tom-tom rhythms, tremulous guitar, and slyly funny, self-dramatizing lyrics to his sound, it didn’t sound like blues anymore — or like anything else being recorded at the time. His first single, “Bo Diddley” and “I’m a Man,” was released in 1955 and reached number one and two on the Billboard retail and jukebox charts.

Bo Diddley also made Billboard’s new R&B radio chart, which tallied the airplay that records received. The new chart reflected the transformation of the pop-music market in 1954. That was the year that disc jockey Alan Freed came to WINS in New York. He expanded the market for black R&B to white teenagers and in the process contributed to a 42 percent jump in his station’s ad sales. The term “rock ‘n’ roll,” popularized by Freed, entered the lexicon, helping to dissolve the taboo that had previously limited the racially connotative “R&B.”

And, perhaps most important, 1954 was also the year that Elvis Presley recorded an accelerated version of an old country blues song, “That’s Alright, Mama,” for Sam Phillips. Presley’s astonishing string of hits in the next few years broke sales records across racial and demographic lines. The single with “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel” went to number one on the pop chart, the R&B chart, and the country chart. In Presley’s wake, musical styles converged, spawning hybrid forms like rockabilly, and niche markets expanded into mass markets.

Few artists better personified the new confluence than Chess’s Chuck Berry. “Maybellene,” Berry’s first single for the label, was released forty-five years ago on July 30. A skilled blues guitarist, he had been steered to Chess by Muddy Waters, whom he had approached at a Chicago club date on a visit from his native St. Louis. But Berry had also left club audiences back home marveling at the “black hillbilly” with a flair for showmanship.

“Maybellene” was originally a hillbilly song called “Ida Red.” (Because there was an existing song of the same name, Leonard renamed it after his gaze fell on a secretary’s make-up box.) While the recorded song retains underlying traces of country (especially in the alternating harmonic fourths plucked on the guitar), it unites, probably for the first time, all the main elements of what would come to be recognized as rock ‘n’ roll.

Compared with the era’s prevailing R&B sound, guitar and piano exchange places; Instead of hammered piano chords with a soft trimming of electric guitar in the background, “Maybellene” ornaments its driving guitar foundation with soft piano runs. A big snare drum backbeat replaces the ricky-ticky milk carton sound of the early Sun records of Presley, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash. (Leonard’s repetitive demands for louder drum beats were a source of running amusement at the label.) Berry’s guitar solo is the prototype for the innumerable solos that would echo through rock clubs and family garages in the decades that followed. And of course the lyric addressed rock ‘n’ roll’s twin preoccupations, cars and babes: “As I was motorvatin’ over the hill / I saw Maybellene in a Coupe de Ville.”

Maybellene motorvated to the top of all three of Billboard’s R&B charts. And like Elvis, Berry crossed the color barrier (from the opposite direction), reaching number four on the pop sales chart. Berry became a one-man hit factory for Chess, charting seven singles in a row. “School Day” in 1957 would duplicate the feat of “Maybellene,” hitting number one on all three R&B charts. His songs would often vie with Presley’s on the R&B charts, while lagging a little behind on the pop charts.

Even some that weren’t hits on original release would later become standards, like his “Roll Over Beethoven,” a hit for the Beatles. Wry and ringing at the same time, “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Johnny B. Goode,” and “Too Much Monkey Business” became rock ‘n’ roll’s most covered and imitated songs (not least by the frequently self-recycling Berry himself).

John, Paul, George, and Ringo properly credited Berry for “Roll Over, Beethoven.” On “Maybellene,” however, Leonard and Phil had not. Anyone examining the original sheet music for “Maybellene” would have noticed the names Russ Fratto and Alan Freed alongside Berry’s as composers. Fratto was a printer who owned the building that housed the Chess studios. The unmusical landlord was credited with an impressive twelve songs in the era. (Cohodas gingerly raises the question of whether the Chicago landlord had ties to organized crime, only to leave it, perhaps wisely, unanswered.) Freed, the wildly popular disc jockey, had twenty-eight song credits to his name.

Payola was standard industry practice, and label operators made little effort to conceal it. Indeed, the Chesses often listed payments to important DJs as deductible business expenses on their tax returns. They viewed these payments — checks, sweetheart loans, Baccarat crystal, cars, and writing credits — as the inevitable cost of getting their records on the air.

While payola might have been an inevitable — and defensible — cost in the context of the time, this shifting of that cost is indefensible. It is not clear Cohodas grasps the distinction. Acknowledging that money was diverted, she writes: “In the case of ‘Maybellene,’ the money was not diverted from Berry into [Leonard’s] pocket or Phil’s.” Oh, really? The brothers held that keeping Freed greased was a kind of fixed cost. By diverting a portion of Berry’s composer royalties to Freed, the brothers were shifting that cost from the Chess corporation to Berry, a contract artist. The diverted royalties were indeed going into the brothers’ pockets — as surely as if they had written Freed a check directly against corporate funds and then withheld royalty payments to Berry to reimburse themselves.

Still, Cohodas’s larger point holds: If the Chess brothers had been the greedy fast-buck artists of popular stereotype, they never would have entered this arena when they did. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the costs of the rhythm and blues record business were steep and the long-term prospects uncertain.

For starters, the market was small. Sales of forty thousand copies were generally sufficient to put a record on the R&B charts. Sales of eighty thousand were considered huge. Black radio stations numbered no more than a handful. Record distribution was effectively segregated — distributors of pop records aimed at white audiences generally declined to carry rhythm and blues. As late as 1953, R&B represented less than 6 percent of record sales.

Like many of its competitors, Chess was often caught in a cash squeeze of front-end costs and back-end revenues: While record pressers demanded payment up front, distributors typically paid only for records they sold, returning unsold records to the label. Much of the pressing was handled by the major record companies’ plants, which pressed outside orders only after first pressing their own. In a market where demand was fleeting, these production delays could be deadly. (Cincinnati independent King Records resorted to sending its tapes to a school for the blind in Kentucky; unfortunately, according to one King producer, the records sounded as though they had been manufactured at a school for the deaf.)

Throughout the early years of the label, Leonard and Phil were on the road virtually year-round. It is not overstating things to say that they were piecing together a national marketing and distribution network for their records one city at a time. Leaving aside “Maybellene,” little in the brothers’ conduct suggests that they viewed song-writing royalties as a means of getting rich at the expense of their artists. In fact, until well into the history of the company, they were blind to the value of song publishing.

Publishing companies obtain copyrights and register them with one of the monitoring associations that channel payments for live performance and radio play. (For Chess, it was usually BMI, which was created in 1940 in part to protect black composers who had been ignored by ASCAP.) Once copyrighted, songs are marketed to other performers and “mechanical royalties” (two cents per record sold, divided equally between publisher and composer) are collected. For years, Leonard brushed aside suggestions that he create a song publishing company for Chess material. “I can’t be bothered with that,” he told Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler. Only in August 1953 did Leonard relent, when outsiders Gene and Harry Goodman (brothers of swing giant Benny, to those looking for a convenient symbol of the shifting tide in American popular music) came to him with their own proposal. If Leonard had imagined that publishing royalties would make an important profit, it seems unlikely he would have agreed to cut the Goodmans in as partners in the new Chess publishing arm, Arc Music. In Leonard’s view, Chess was in the record business and only incidentally in the song business.

Only in 1956 did this view begin to change. That year, Chess released “See You Later, Alligator,” written and performed by Bobby Charles. Its sales were unspectacular, but shortly after, Decca released a cover version by Bill Haley, which sold a million copies. The “mechanicals” amounted to $ 20,000, to be split between Arc and Charles.

Today, the era’s covers of black R&B songs by popular white artists on major labels carry a sour taste of exploitation. It is true that these vanilla versions were generally inferior to the originals — think Pat Boone, singing Little Richard’s “Tutti-Frutti.” But if they were an offense against American ears, they were on balance a boon, yielding royalties to both the smallish labels that produced for the black market and the mostly black composers. One category of professionals, it is true, was harmed by the practice: the non-composing performers on the original releases. Their recordings often had little time to catch on before facing better-promoted versions by bigger names. But even this injury has been alleviated, as oldies radio stations and reissue labels prefer original recordings to saccharine covers.

Overseas licensing of the Chess material was little more than an after-thought in the 1950s. But it was the brothers’ British licensing arrangements with Decca and then Pye that introduced the records of Waters, Berry, and Howlin’ Wolf to such young British enthusiasts as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. And it was these later cover versions — by the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Yardbirds, and other blues-influenced British Invasion bands — that unlocked the value of the Arc catalogue.

So, much of the Rolling Stones’ source music was created at the Chess studios in Chicago by upwardly pushing immigrants who bet that making records for an underserved black market could lift them into affluence in one generation. Has anything done more to accelerate black embourgoisement than the billions of dollars generated by the recording industry’s discovery of the blues and its offshoots?

Now, half a century later, some still claim that rock poses a threat to the survival of liberal society. On the other hand, it has been argued, with some exaggeration, that rock’s expressive individualism helped dissolve the total-itarian regimes of the old Soviet bloc. In any case, it is clear that rock has been easily absorbed by the capitalist order and turned to its own purposes, used to sell everything from cars to software. And yet, attacks on rock from the cultural right have persisted. One wonders: Do conservative critics have difficulty accepting rock because it threatens the liberal order? Or do they instead have difficulty accepting a liberal order that permits rock?

Daniel Wattenberg is a writer living in Washington, D.C.