Great article

How the blues brothers behind Chess Records made all the right moves
Leonard and Phil Chess's legendary Chicago label helped invent rock'n'roll with Ike Turner, brought us the minimalist blues of Muddy Waters, and provided a direct influence on the young Rolling Stones

Elijah Wald
The Guardian, Saturday 6 November 2010

Frank Zappa once said that the best years of rock were when records were produced by "cigar-chomping old guys who looked at the product that came and said, 'I don't know. Who knows what it is? Record it, stick it out. If it sells, all right.'"

Leonard and Phil Chess were prototypical cigar-chomping, old-fashioned record men who took a chance on music they didn't understand. Jewish immigrants from Poland, they got into the record business more or less by chance: Leonard bought a liquor store in an African American neighbourhood on the south side of Chicago, and did well enough that he opened a small nightclub called the Macomba Lounge. It was a rough ghetto bar, patronised by prostitutes and drug dealers, but from the start it was known for having good music. In the late-1940s, that meant it had jazz groups playing bebop, pop tunes, and mellow blues ballads. That was what the better-paying black patrons preferred to hear, and when Leonard got involved with a small local label, Aristocrat Records, that was what he intended to record.

It was only after the first few records went nowhere that he took a chance on another kind of musician, a Mississippi singer who was too raw and country-sounding to have pleased the crowds at the Macomba. In fact, when Leonard Chess first heard Muddy Waters sing I Can't Be Satisfied, in a Delta growl backed with a whining electric slide guitar, he couldn't imagine it pleasing anyone. "What's he saying?" he asked. "Who's going to buy that?"

Fortunately, his partner in Aristocrat, Evelyn Arons, suggested that some of the black southerners who had moved north in search of jobs might enjoy the sounds of home. So Chess pressed 3,000 singles, they sold out in a day, and six decades later Waters's recording is remembered as the first masterpiece of electric Chicago blues.

In a movie – and there have been several based on this story – Chess would have instantly seen the light and devoted himself to creating further blues masterpieces. But in real life he was not a patron of the arts; he was a businessman trying to cut popular hits. By 1950 Arons had been replaced by Leonard's brother Phil and the label was called Chess, but most of its releases continued to be by jazz saxophonists.

The brothers were small-time "indie" record men making a quick buck from the poorest, least respected people in America


Little Walter. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty
Meanwhile Waters was also trying to reach a broader audience, adding a drummer and harmonica player to his live shows to create a tight, tough band. He was frustrated when Chess refused to mess with a winning formula and insisted that he keep making stark guitar-and-bass records like Rollin Stone, a one-chord chant that was archaic even by the standards of rural Mississippi. Neither of them could have imagined that a dozen years later five lads in London would like that record enough to name a band after it.

That is the paradox of the Chess story. The brothers were not musical visionaries; they were small-time "indie" record men making a quick buck from the poorest, least respected people in America. But their cheaply recorded, bread-and-butter discs of local street musicians and bar bands still sound as fresh today as they did 60 years ago. By failing to be timely, they succeeded in being timeless.

They were also lucky, and unusually loyal to their artists. That loyalty did not prevent them from playing some tricky games with publishing and royalty payments, but it meant that down-home bluesmen like Waters and Howlin' Wolf continued to make records long after other indie labels had switched to a trendy teen style called rock'n'roll.

Leonard Chess and Waters had a particularly close relationship, and it served both of them well. When Waters finally persuaded Chess to record his full band, he incidentally brought the label its biggest blues hit-maker: Little Walter was barely out of his teens, and reshaped the course of blues harmonica by amplifying his instrument and playing it like a jazz saxophone. It was a fresh, hip sound, and in 1952 he cut an instrumental called Juke that stayed at the top of the R&B charts for eight weeks. Then, in 1955, Waters introduced Chess to an unknown songwriter from St Louis named Chuck Berry. In retrospect, the list of artists who were associated with Chess in that first decade forms a pantheon of electric blues and blues-influenced rock'n'roll: Waters, Wolf, Walter, John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson, Berry, Bo Diddley. There were some startling one-offs as well: In 1951, a teenage Ike Turner recorded a romping boogie-woogie called Rocket 88 at Sun Studios in Memphis, soon to be the birthplace of rockabilly – but Sam Phillips had not yet started the record label that would spawn Elvis Presley, so the disc appeared on Chess. When Presley hit, Chess got its own white rock'n'rollers, Dale Hawkins and Bobby Charles. Many of the label's biggest hits in this period came from doo-wop groups.

When people talk about the "Chess sound", though, they are not thinking of rockabilly or doo-wop, or even of the brilliant soul records the label produced in the 1960s with Etta James, Fontella Bass and Little Milton. They are thinking of the stripped-down blues discs that, despite changing fashions, always remained among the label's mainstays.

It was because Mick Jagger had a couple of Chess LPs under his arm that he was approached by an erstwhile schoolmate named Keith Richards


Fontella Bass. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty
Once again, that fame is in a large part due to decisions that at the time were simply efforts to wring a few more dollars out of a marginal style. By 1957, down-home blues singles were no longer hitting, but the Chess brothers had made pretty good money with their first LP, the soundtrack album for a forgettable teen movie, Rock, Rock, Rock. So, since reissues of old material were cheap to produce, they put out "best of" sets by Muddy Waters and Little Walter. The anthologies did not sell particularly well, but it was all clear profit, so over the next few years Chess recycled older tracks by Wolf, Williamson and John Lee Hooker as well. Their core audience was still buying singles, but some middle-class jazz and folk fans were beginning to get interested in blues and picked up the albums. As a result, when the Newport Jazz Festival put on a special afternoon of blues in 1960, it included a folkloric segment, a jazz segment, and a fiery electric set by Waters and his band.

The LPs' most significant influence was even less expected. American listeners thought of Waters and Berry as coming from different generations and styles, and the fact that both were on the same record label was irrelevant. In the UK, there was far less African American music to choose from, so the Chess albums were coveted keys to a mysterious, faraway world. A bright 18-year-old named Mick Jagger ordered them directly from Chicago, and it was because he had a couple under his arm that he was approached by an erstwhile schoolmate named Keith Richards.

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Chess Records owes its legendary status to that chance meeting on a Dartford train platform. Its British acolytes provided it with a unique identity, and today we associate Chess with the handful of brilliant artists whose work was adopted and recycled by the Rolling Stones and their peers.

According to Leonard's son Marshall, who for five years managed the Stones' record label, his father and uncle were unimpressed with the British groups. But the one thing the Chess brothers never argued with was success.

MARSHALL CHESS Son, employee and boss

"South Michigan Ave was called Record Row – there wasn't only Chess: Vee-Jay records was across the street, with five or six different distributors. We had a narrow two-storey 1920s Chicago building. The offices were on the first floor and the studios were on the second floor.

"In the front there was a waiting room – a wall with a window in the door, because a lot of people who came to Chess records weren't happy. Like, 'Why isn't my record a hit?' Billy Stewart, the R&B artist, pulled out a pistol and shot the door because they wouldn't let him in quick enough.

"We were dealing with blues artists … 80% of them were drinking. There was a lot of yelling, a lot of calling people '@#$%&', and fighting. Blues artists, often you could give them $2,000 on Friday and they'd be broke by Monday. Then they'd come in and say, 'You @#$%& me – where's my money?' You couldn't be an angel and run Chess records in the ghetto in Chicago.

"My father was the A-type aggressive personality; my uncle very laidback. He had a big fishtank in his office, smoked cigars. They divided up the artists almost by personality. Phil was more sensitive, and produced the doo-wop records. My father was in there with Muddy Waters and Etta James. They were tough Jews. You had to be. It was like the wild west, to be white in the black ghetto in that era. You were put down for even doing business with blacks. When I used to take the money to the bank, it was in a paper bag, and on my way there I used to pass a liquor store/bar, and we used to talk about whether there was blood on the sidewalk outside that day. People carried knives then, not guns.

"My favourite artists were Etta James, Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry – they used to send me to take him out to breakfast. I was fascinated that he would always order the dessert first – always the strawberry shortcake. Guys like Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf were natural stars, but when their records became hits, it seems like they sucked that in and their charisma grew and grew – it's fed by their stardom.

I got a quick education. Blues artists were primarily interested to know if I got any sex. What does a guy ask a kid? They're not going to ask 'How's school?' Muddy Waters used to ask me, 'Get any yet?'

The Stones came to Chicago to record – the one I spent most time with was Brian Jones. The first time I drank hard liquor out of the bottle was with those guys. I remember driving Brian Jones to his hotel – he had that long hair. No one in Chicago had hair like that. Kids were screaming 'Homo!' at us.

The films about the label? At first I hated it. My Uncle was bothered by it – my father didn't die that way. But Beyoncé was in Cadillac Records, and she's such a big star, now everyone knows about Chess records. It gets the history in to the mainstream. They remember it was important at the beginning of rock'n'roll."

Thanks for posting that, proudmary - Elijah Wald knows his stuff. Sometime I must get round to posting a review of his book about the history of popular music in the 20th century - it's called How The Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll, but in fact they don't appear till about page 300, and it's a great read ... One of the rewarding things about Mr Wald is that he doesn't take "received history" for granted, but does his own research (like the fact that what Chess is now famous for is not what they mostly did ).

Phil Chess is still alive and living in Tucson, AZ...The movie they made a few years ago - "Cadillac Records" - was a travesty, with Phil completely written out of the script and a made up romance between Leonard and a way-too-glamorous Etta James (played by Beyonce). At least the guy who played Howling Wolf was good.

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Green Lady
Sometime I must get round to posting a review of his book about the history of popular music in the 20th century - it's called How The Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll, but in fact they don't appear till about page 300, and it's a great read ....

Wow, now that's what I call a title of a book! Even better if it would have a subtitle "And How The Rolling Stones Saved it".><

- Doxa

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Doxa

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Green Lady
Sometime I must get round to posting a review of his book about the history of popular music in the 20th century - it's called How The Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll, but in fact they don't appear till about page 300, and it's a great read ....

Wow, now that's what I call a title of a book! Even better if it would have a subtitle "And How The Rolling Stones Saved it".><

- Doxa

I'm afraid not - if anything there's even less about the Stones than the Beatles in the book, although they do come off rather better in Elijah Wald's judgment. Looks like I'd better write that review for you.

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Green Lady

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Doxa

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Green Lady
Sometime I must get round to posting a review of his book about the history of popular music in the 20th century - it's called How The Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll, but in fact they don't appear till about page 300, and it's a great read ....

Wow, now that's what I call a title of a book! Even better if it would have a subtitle "And How The Rolling Stones Saved it".><

- Doxa

I'm afraid not - if anything there's even less about the Stones than the Beatles in the book, although they do come off rather better in Elijah Wald's judgment. Looks like I'd better write that review for you.

Please do that! It sounds interesting.

- Doxa



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2010-11-07 12:10 by Doxa.

i agree with Green Lady - Wald's books are fascinating.
the title How the Beatles Destroyed Rock & Roll is merely hype, aimed at shaking up some of our preconceptions,
but the book is really crammed with great information. i wish he'd expanded more on his observations, though!
sometimes i have to put it down every two sentences just to digest the ultra-dense content.

his book on Robert Johnson is even better.

oh yeah, and thanks for the Guardian article - here's a link, so we can see the photos: [www.guardian.co.uk]

Some credit should also go to the Modern/RPM label started by the
Bahari Brosin 1945 ....R&B..C&W..Gospel ..Jazz.. Blues and a for-runner to Chess...

With Ike Turner as a major talent scout, Joe Bahari took the recording equipment to many of the Southern blues artists and cut some of the rawest blues ever...

Elmore James..B.B. King..Roscoe Gordon...Lightnin' Hopkins...Little Willie Littlefield...Jimmy McCracklin....John Lee Hooker...Jimmy Witherspoon Pee Wee Crayton all cut records for Modern...And first to release Howling Wolf ...

The Bihari's also created subsidy labels Crown...Discos CoronaKent, , Riviera, Custom



ROCKMAN

Some credit should also go to the Modern/RPM label started by the
Bahari Brothers in 1945 ....R&B..C&W..Gospel ..Jazz.. Blues and a for-runner to Chess...

With Ike Turner as a major talent scout, Joe Bahari took the recording
equipment to many of the Southern blues artists and cut some of the rawest blues ever...

Elmore James..B.B. King..Roscoe Gordon...Lightnin' Hopkins...Little Willie Littlefield...Jimmy McCracklin....
John Lee Hooker...Jimmy Witherspoon Pee Wee Crayton etc all cut records for Modern...And first to release Howling Wolf recordings...

The Bihari's created subsidiary labels Crown...Discos Corona...Kent... Riviera..Custom

From all known imformation Joe Bahari is possibly still alive today....And would be approx 85..

His recording travels of the 40's..50's would make a mighty Doco/Movie ...



ROCKMAN



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2010-11-07 12:33 by Rockman.

There's a documentary on Chess Records next Friday on BBC4 (UK).



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2010-11-07 13:08 by Silver Dagger.

>> There's a documentary on Chess Records next Friday on BBC4 (UK). <<

if it's something other than the one from that Scorsese series on the blues,
i sure hope someone can record it - my rock & roll students need it!
the one from the Scorsese series is okay, but it overdoes the focus on Electric Mud,
and as everyone's noticed, Cadillac Records distorts the story way too much.

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Silver Dagger
There's a documentary on Chess Records next Friday on BBC4 (UK).

It's called Roll Over Beethoven - The Chess Records Saga. They're also showing the recent BBC Keith interview plus a look at the blues - all over 3 hours.

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Silver Dagger

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Silver Dagger
There's a documentary on Chess Records next Friday on BBC4 (UK).

It's called Roll Over Beethoven - The Chess Records Saga. They're also showing the recent BBC Keith interview plus a look at the blues - all over 3 hours.

Wow, I'd like to see it. Still, britons have the best TV

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proudmary

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Silver Dagger

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Silver Dagger
There's a documentary on Chess Records next Friday on BBC4 (UK).

It's called Roll Over Beethoven - The Chess Records Saga. They're also showing the recent BBC Keith interview plus a look at the blues - all over 3 hours.

Wow, I'd like to see it. Still, britons have the best TV

Friday night on BBC4 is Music Night - sometimes themed, sometimes not, but usually worth watching.

Thanks for posting!

very interesting and also a bit one-sided, reinforcing black stereotypes of today and yesterday, and framing up the people making a fockload of money off the artists SIMPLY as scrappy pioneers in the wild west. They were pioneers, and there were elements of "wildness" in the areas they chose to wander into to monetize the culture and talent, but it's more complex than that.

"Blues artists, often you could give them $2,000 on Friday and they'd be broke by Monday. Then they'd come in and say, 'You @#$%& me – where's my money?'"

Possibly in part because they were being paid shit, and hadn't been paid for 6 months. and when they finally did get paid it all went to debts and they did come back to Chess on Monday saying "You focked me."

Just sayin' it's important to hear the money-maker's perspective, for sure--but I'd be interested in a more well-rounded account of those years.

- swiss

Thanks for posting,proudmary .

<<In fact, when Leonard Chess first heard Muddy Waters sing I Can't Be Satisfied, in a Delta growl backed with a whining electric slide guitar, he couldn't imagine it pleasing anyone. "What's he saying?" he asked. "Who's going to buy that?"



Is this what could be called "Belt & supenders " ?



I am a Frenchie ,as Mick affectionately called them in the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1977 .



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2010-11-08 10:30 by SwayStones.

Blue heaven: music mogul Marshall Chess
Chess Records brought the blues to the world. Now Hollywood is in on the act. Simon Hardeman talks to Marshall Chess

With beatific bemusement, Marshall Chess says that he never set out to be a music legend: "It's amazing. Chess Records, then The Rolling Stones, then the birth of hip-hop... I didn't go after one of those things. They just happened."

It was the family business, after all. If his folks had run a grocery, you can bet he would have taken on the firm and expanded it; if they'd been doctors, he would worked his socks off to have his own initials etched into the nameplate; if they been gangsters... well, there's more than a hint of Pacino in the looks of the smiling, spry, 66-year-old I meet in the Covent Garden Hotel.

His father, Leonard, and uncle Phil set up one of the most important record labels in rock history, one so key that they're making not one, but two films about it.

The Czyz brothers, as they were then, had arrived in Chicago in the 1940s, refugees from a Poland where people slept with their horses to keep warm. "My father got into the liquor business in a black neighbourhood because white people didn't want to set up in those neighbourhoods," says Chess. Soon, there was a club called the Macamba Lounge, where it was "jazz, along with hookers and pimps. My father got the idea that black people would spend money. So in 1947, he bought a white label called Aristocrat records."

Young Marshall began by fetching the drinks for an up-and-coming bluesman called Muddy Waters. "Muddy would call me his white grandson," says Chess. The artists who followed Waters on to the (now renamed) Chess label are a pantheon of blues gods: Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Bo Diddley, Memphis Slim, Memphis Minnie, John Lee Hooker, Rufus Thomas, James Elmore, Willie Dixon, Etta James and Buddy Guy and others.

And then there was Chuck Berry. "I was his road manager in 1963 when he came out of prison [Berry did four years after bringing a 14-year-old Apache waitress across a state line] and we were desperate because he was our biggest star. He came right from jail, looking raggedy. My dad gave me $100 and said, 'Take him down to State Street and get him some new clothes.' Then he came right back to our studio and recorded 'Nadine'.

"He was our greatest star," says Chess, who is still Berry's music publisher. "We were the hottest blues label. Then rock'n'roll started, and we had Chuck and Bo Diddley, and they crossed over." In part, that was because the Chess brothers played the notorious, but inescapable, payola game that led to influential DJs like Alan Freed getting writers' credits (and so royalties) on records in exchange for playing them. "He [Freed] played the hell out of Chuck's first record, 'Maybellene', because of that. My father says he made the deal, and by the time he got to Pittsburgh, which was half a day's drive away, my uncle back at home was screaming, 'What's happening? We're getting all these calls for thousands of records!'"

Marshall Chess's biggest solo coup was setting up the Rolling Stones' record label, with the band's now permanent-trademark lips logo. He had become president of Chess, but his father was dead (without leaving a will, which still rankles) and the label was out of family hands. "I was depressed, and I heard the Stones were unhappy with their label and manager. So I got Mick's number and I called him up and came to London.

"I'd met the Stones. I used to go to all the clubs in London, and I was treated like royalty by all these groups because of Chess. I was at the St James club when the guy who worked with Eric Burdon [Chas Chandler] brought over Jimi Hendrix. I was there the night he played his first gig in London. I knew he was good... but I wasn't looking at it musically, I was looking at it more from marketing."

They formed Rolling Stones Records in 1970. But they needed a logo. "The Stones were at a castle near Rotterdam, recording, and on my way there I saw a Shell gas station, and it didn't have the name, just the sign, and I got the instantaneous thing that our logo shouldn't have to need a name. Then that night, sitting round with Keith, Mick and Charlie, I laid it on them. I don't remember how we came up with the tongue and lips specifically."

It's not surprising that the memory blurs at this point. It was the start of a wild ride through the Seventies, all the wilder because Chess lived with the band. "I lived with Keith on Cheyne Walk, and Mick was next door. I knew Anita [Pallenberg], Bianca [Jagger], the whole thing.

"It was all sex and drugs and rock'n'roll. I was taking drugs, everything, sleeping, waking, it was the whole scene. One day, I woke up in Montreux and looked in the mirror, and that night I told Mick: 'I've got to get out of here, man. It's nothing to do with you.'"

A few years later, in 1979, he found that the Chess catalogue was owned by "this black label in Englewood, New Jersey". It was Sugar Hill Records. He wanted to buy it, but they didn't need money, having just released "Rapper's Delight". "So I made a deal with them and began putting out LPs resurrecting Chess. But I was there for all these amazing hits 'White Lines', 'The Message', and so on."

It was there that he met the Sugar Hill rhythm section, who have now been "retrofitted" by Keith Le Blanc to classic Chess tracks by Howlin' Wolf, Waters, James and more, on Chess's latest project, Chess Moves. "Blues purists hate it," he laughs. "The original was the best, the purest, but it's still my job to spread it to new markets. And it works!"

There are two films in production about Chess Records Cadillac Records and Chess. "The first one has Adrien Brody playing my father, Jeffrey Wright playing Muddy Waters, Mos Def playing Chuck Berry, and Beyonc playing Etta James. I heard her version of 'I'd Rather Go Blind', and it blew me away."

Finally, I ask the question that has been nagging at me: "Were you into the music?" Marshall Chess thinks, even grimaces a little. "That's a real hard question. Was I going out like an English fanatic and buying every single by an artist? No. But somehow I was into Chess Records... I think it grew on me. I'm more into it now than I've ever been."

[www.independent.co.uk]

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Green Lady

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proudmary

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Silver Dagger

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Silver Dagger
There's a documentary on Chess Records next Friday on BBC4 (UK).

It's called Roll Over Beethoven - The Chess Records Saga. They're also showing the recent BBC Keith interview plus a look at the blues - all over 3 hours.

Wow, I'd like to see it. Still, britons have the best TV

Friday night on BBC4 is Music Night - sometimes themed, sometimes not, but usually worth watching.

[www.bbc.co.uk]


"As we say in England, it can get a bit trainspottery"

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Deltics
[www.bbc.co.uk]

very nice - as indicated above, if anyone can record it (and then share it)
my students and i will be hugely grateful!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2010-11-08 14:02 by with sssoul.

I always enjoy Marshall Chess's interviews, especially the live ones. He's very warm and humourous and of course, he has a lot to tell.