Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Lefsetts Podcast. My
Speaker 1: guest today is Yemi oh Yet it ran director of
Speaker 1: King of them All, the Story of King Records. Yemmy,
Speaker 1: how'd you decide to make this movie?
Speaker 2: Well, I've been a jazz musician in the Cincinnati area
Speaker 2: for about twenty years, and I've been hearing a lot
Speaker 2: of old timers tell me about how James Brown still
Speaker 2: owes the money. So finally, after kind of compiling the
Speaker 2: stories together, I got into kind of the King thing,
Speaker 2: and I started kind of doing different types of I
Speaker 2: call them King experiments, from whether it was bringing my
Speaker 2: entire recording studio into spaces and we recreated making a
Speaker 2: King Records with an audience of three hundred people, and
Speaker 2: then it kind of fell into a documentary from there.
Speaker 3: Okay, what's your history in filmmaking?
Speaker 2: My history in filmmaking has been it started really as
Speaker 2: a way to promote gigs. I tried to find different
Speaker 2: creative ways of getting people to check out jazz gigs,
Speaker 2: which is Bob, as you can imagine, is not the
Speaker 2: easiest task. But yeah, from there, it kind of just
Speaker 2: grew into storytelling and just getting interviews about different types
Speaker 2: of things and different interests, and kind of combining music
Speaker 2: and some filmmaking was kind of the path that led
Speaker 2: me this way.
Speaker 3: Okay, prior to this King Records documentary, what films had
Speaker 3: you made? Oh?
Speaker 2: Well, this is my first feature, but I'd made certain
Speaker 2: shorts about different subjects around Cincinnati, talking about food sustainability,
Speaker 2: talking about food insecurity in the area, highlighting different stories
Speaker 2: for a lot of different nonprofits, working with homeless shelters
Speaker 2: to get people to tell their stories. We looked for
Speaker 2: kind of ways to empower stories that people otherwise don't
Speaker 2: care about, and that from there kind of grew into filmmaking.
Speaker 2: This is kind of a separate path to something else
Speaker 2: that I was working on in my life, separate from music,
Speaker 2: and the combination of both of those paths led me
Speaker 2: towards this film.
Speaker 3: How much should it cost to make the film?
Speaker 2: Oh? My lord, it cost me nine years of my
Speaker 2: life for sure, which is priceless. A lot of it
Speaker 2: was also self financed in there, with my money, my
Speaker 2: business partner's money, my creative partner. Yeah, this was a
Speaker 2: passion project. So you know, it's kind of hard to
Speaker 2: specify how much it costs to buy this camera or
Speaker 2: this thing that we've had for years. But yeah, it
Speaker 2: was just a lot of love and labor and a
Speaker 2: lot of support from foundations in Cincinnati.
Speaker 3: So how did you end up making a deal for
Speaker 3: it to be aired on PBS.
Speaker 2: That's a great question. So PBS a couple of years
Speaker 2: ago put out this campaign where they were looking to
Speaker 2: highlight other types of filmmakers, and they put out an
Speaker 2: open call and I found out about the open call
Speaker 2: on the last day. I think that I actually submitted
Speaker 2: like ten minutes before they were not taking any more submissions,
Speaker 2: and I applied to this open call and it took
Speaker 2: them a couple of years. I think they got a
Speaker 2: little bit more than they bargained for, and it took
Speaker 2: them a couple of years to go through all of
Speaker 2: the submissions, and we just kind of stepped by step
Speaker 2: worked through their process and we wanted the selected projects.
Speaker 2: It was really amazing.
Speaker 3: So they selected you before the film was done.
Speaker 2: No, So the long story of the films, I've made
Speaker 2: it five times already because I'm insane, Bob. So I
Speaker 2: first started with my version of the film, which I
Speaker 2: worked with. I didn't know how to edit film at
Speaker 2: the time, so I worked with an editor who was
Speaker 2: in college who didn't listen to anything that I wanted
Speaker 2: to do. It was really frustrating and I didn't really
Speaker 2: get the project that I wanted, but it gave me
Speaker 2: enough of something to give people idea of what I
Speaker 2: was going for. And then over the next several years,
Speaker 2: I worked with either my business partner or myself when
Speaker 2: I finally learned how to edit, but over kind of
Speaker 2: like a five to six year period, I learned how
Speaker 2: to basically do the full all the steps of production,
Speaker 2: and once I kind of was empowered to do so,
Speaker 2: I was able to submit that version, which was a
Speaker 2: ninety minute version of the film. And then once PBS
Speaker 2: came on board, I tried to see if I could
Speaker 2: convince them to do the three and a half hour
Speaker 2: version of the film that it really was. So I
Speaker 2: stretched it all out and showed them all of it
Speaker 2: and they got mad at me, So then it became
Speaker 2: a seventy five minute Yeah, because for those this is
Speaker 2: the notes of filmmakers out there, you need to do
Speaker 2: something with fifty four minutes and forty eight seconds. That's
Speaker 2: how much time PBS gives you. Unless you are super
Speaker 2: special or ken Burns anybody outside of that, you get
Speaker 2: an hour. So I had to bring the film down
Speaker 2: to from seventy five minutes to an hour, and that's
Speaker 2: the version that we put out, but the director's cut.
Speaker 2: The seventy five minute version we have out. We share.
Speaker 2: I share with my friends and you know, anybody else
Speaker 2: who's bored enough to be interested.
Speaker 3: Okay. Was the first time there was any public exhibition
Speaker 3: when it went on PBS or did you go to
Speaker 3: the film circuit film festival circuit?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we tried our hand at the film festival circuit.
Speaker 2: And one thing that I learned about film festivals is
Speaker 2: that they're really hard to get into. Bob, I was
Speaker 2: really shocked. We submitted at all of the film festivals, big, small,
Speaker 2: and everything in between, and we weren't able to air
Speaker 2: show at a lot of the film festivals that we'd
Speaker 2: aimed for. But we did get to show at a
Speaker 2: local festival here called the Over the Ryan Film Festival,
Speaker 2: and then we showed at a film festival in Florida
Speaker 2: called the Florida Film Festival. But the one that we
Speaker 2: did here in Cincinnati, we showed it on It was
Speaker 2: coincidentally the same day that said Nathan Died, who was
Speaker 2: the subject of the film, and we also kind of
Speaker 2: felt I felt that it was really important. You know,
Speaker 2: it's a film about Cincinnati, where I live. It all
Speaker 2: takes place in Cincinnati, and it felt right to kind
Speaker 2: of open and have the first premiere, the public premiere,
Speaker 2: be in Cincinnati. So we went with that route and
Speaker 2: the rest is history.
Speaker 3: As they say, Okay, when we're speaking, the film has
Speaker 3: already started to air on PBS. What has the feedback
Speaker 3: What is your experience been in the wake of the
Speaker 3: movie finally going public.
Speaker 2: First of all, I want to thank you so much
Speaker 2: for talking about our film on your newsletter. That was
Speaker 2: really amazing. I got a lot of reach out from
Speaker 2: a lot of I told you, I'm a professional musician,
Speaker 2: from a lot of people I respect in the industry
Speaker 2: reached out to me and they're like, I can't believe it.
Speaker 2: This is amazing, So I wanted that was one of
Speaker 2: the first pieces of feedback that we actually received, and
Speaker 2: it was really heartwarming. A lot of years went into
Speaker 2: this and getting a review like that from you was
Speaker 2: life changing. So thank you. We were able to get
Speaker 2: a lot of great you know, the Wall Street Journal
Speaker 2: gave us a wonderful review, as well as some other
Speaker 2: outlets Billboard Magazine, which was really super special and amazing.
Speaker 2: We got a lot of local love in Cincinnati. There
Speaker 2: are some haters out there, and anybody who creates something,
Speaker 2: you always pay attention to the haters in the comments section.
Speaker 2: But most of that is from a lot of fellow
Speaker 2: nerds who didn't see their favorite artists featured, which I
Speaker 2: completely understand, which is why I made a three and
Speaker 2: a half hour version of the film and I had
Speaker 2: to have my heart broken by removing all of that,
Speaker 2: so I understand where all of them were coming from.
Speaker 2: That's just passion. I love it. But it's been an
Speaker 2: overwhelmingly positive response. A lot of people didn't know about this.
Speaker 2: This is kind of inject some things into the conversation
Speaker 2: that a lot of people didn't think about out and
Speaker 2: it kind of presents something that's new to people. So
Speaker 2: I think that's kind of fresh and interesting to a
Speaker 2: lot of people in music history, especially.
Speaker 3: Okay, what is special about Cincinnati?
Speaker 2: Oh my lord, A lot of things are special about Cincinnati, man.
Speaker 2: First of all, the drinking that if you want to
Speaker 2: find a great person to hang out with at a bar.
Speaker 2: Any Cincinnatian will like fit the bill, I promise, So
Speaker 2: if anybody comes in, you don't need to know anybody.
Speaker 2: Just come down, find a nice bar, sit down, and
Speaker 2: before you know it, you'll be best friends with half
Speaker 2: the city. It's the city's kind of like Cheers, you know,
Speaker 2: it's a city that is small enough but big enough
Speaker 2: to kind of get some things done. That's one of
Speaker 2: the things that's really special about it. The other thing
Speaker 2: is that it really has a love for the arts,
Speaker 2: which a lot of cities love arts, but Cincinnati is
Speaker 2: invested into arts in a really deep and meaningful way.
Speaker 2: So it's a place where, you know, as a musician,
Speaker 2: you can live as a full time musician, you can
Speaker 2: have a professional career as an artist and still live
Speaker 2: and raise a family and have children. It's kind of
Speaker 2: one of those few places in America where that still exists,
Speaker 2: and it's kind of a nestled little secret in the
Speaker 2: landscape of America, which is what kind of makes it cool.
Speaker 2: But there's a lot of things that make Cincinnati special.
Speaker 2: You know, the food scene here is amazing, which opens
Speaker 2: for a lot of collaborations between restaurants and musicians that
Speaker 2: always end up really special and meaningful. The people of
Speaker 2: Cincinnati are just really cool people. If like I could
Speaker 2: just kind of put it in like a very succinct way,
Speaker 2: just a very interesting combination of different types of people
Speaker 2: kind of coming together to create a community. It's cool.
Speaker 3: Okay, Ohio in the last half century is gone through
Speaker 3: the mill, which is funny. I'm using that term telling
Speaker 3: me about the steel mills, Columbus, Cleveland, etc. What is
Speaker 3: the economy of Cincinnati and how is it doing?
Speaker 2: Wow? So I used to live in the Cleveland I
Speaker 2: actually went to boarding school outside of Cleveland, and I
Speaker 2: grew up in Moorland Hills in Beechwood and outside of Cleveland.
Speaker 2: And so coming down to and seeing there's a different vibe.
Speaker 2: You know, Cleveland has a lot of old money. You
Speaker 2: still have a lot of that Rockefeller existence in the
Speaker 2: Cleveland area, and in Cincinnati it's a little bit different,
Speaker 2: but it's really based. You know, Procter and Gamble is here,
Speaker 2: which is a powerhouse part of the community, as is Kroger,
Speaker 2: which opens a lot of opportunities for advertising. For example.
Speaker 2: You know, there's actually a really strong advertising business community
Speaker 2: here as well as consumer product goods. You know a
Speaker 2: lot of these businesses around that the consumer product goods
Speaker 2: are important. We also have a really important railway. This
Speaker 2: is kind of a nerd fact. One of the biggest
Speaker 2: railports is still in Cincinnati. Cincinnati really left its rail
Speaker 2: system intact and that allowed for a lot of companies
Speaker 2: because we still move a lot of things by freight
Speaker 2: by rail, and that allowed a lot of companies who
Speaker 2: were involved in the consumer product goods business to also
Speaker 2: continue to thrive here. So there's kind of this underbelly
Speaker 2: that even like a lot of Cincinnatians don't know, but
Speaker 2: all these support structure of all these businesses that are
Speaker 2: built around supporting consumer product goods groceries. But then there's
Speaker 2: also a wide variety of other things. There's a tech
Speaker 2: industry here. I could go on and on, but Cincinnati's
Speaker 2: dope Man.
Speaker 3: Also Cincinnati's famous for Greaters ice cream too, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Greater's ice Cream, Skyline Chili Man. Those are the
Speaker 2: two things and I used early in my career. I'm
Speaker 2: also a software developer. I worked on both of their websites.
Speaker 2: So it wasn't very long before my doctor and I
Speaker 2: had to have a conversation about diabetes. Because every day
Speaker 2: in and out. All I could do is like eat
Speaker 2: and like work on skyline and Greaters. Greaters is amazing
Speaker 2: ice cream. If you've never had it before, like, let
Speaker 2: me know and I will send it out to you.
Speaker 2: It is the best. Have you ever tried it before?
Speaker 2: Bob Oh, Yeah, I have.
Speaker 3: That's why I mentioned it. I heard about it.
Speaker 2: But I mean, what's your favorite? What's your favorite flavor?
Speaker 3: I can't tell you, tell you the truth. I was
Speaker 3: at a food festival. I love ice cream. I tried
Speaker 3: multiple flavors. I can't tell you. And Cincinnati, I don't
Speaker 3: think I've ever been to Cincinnati. But going back to
Speaker 3: the street, since you're from the Cleveland area, how did
Speaker 3: gend up in Cincinnati?
Speaker 2: I'm actually so. My family's orisually from Nigeria, and I
Speaker 2: moved around a lot. So my father was doing a
Speaker 2: PhD in Cornell, and then we moved back to Nigeria.
Speaker 2: I'm kind of a weird generational type of thing because
Speaker 2: I spent a significant part of my childhood in Nigeria,
Speaker 2: so I speak the language and everything. And then we
Speaker 2: moved to the hospital, Alabama area where my father. My
Speaker 2: father was an essence of rocket scientist, so and then
Speaker 2: we moved to Cleveland, and then I came to Cincinnati
Speaker 2: for college. I was looking for a program that had
Speaker 2: a solid engineering program and a solid music program. And
Speaker 2: there are a lot of these other programs that I
Speaker 2: got into, but one would be better in one or
Speaker 2: not good enough in the other, and Cincinnati kind of
Speaker 2: had a good program in both. So I came here
Speaker 2: and studied jazz, and I studied computer science and computer engineering,
Speaker 2: and I continue to do both of those things here.
Speaker 3: Okay, forgetting the film for a second. What's keeping you alive? Software? Music?
Speaker 2: Oh lord, that's a good question. So what's keeping me
Speaker 2: emotionally alive is definitely the music. I learned very early
Speaker 2: in my career that if I tried to not if
Speaker 2: I try to not have music in my life and
Speaker 2: I couldn't create music, I turned into a dick. So
Speaker 2: that wasn't working. And it also actually helps my software
Speaker 2: career because I'm a lot more creative I think about.
Speaker 2: It puts me in different scenarios to work out problems
Speaker 2: because you just can't. It's just a different type of
Speaker 2: problem solving. But I live off of in my family,
Speaker 2: we live off of my computing career. But my music
Speaker 2: career and my teacher career. My music teaching career also
Speaker 2: is very very helpful and very very important. As you know,
Speaker 2: the ranch is too damn high.
Speaker 3: Okay, And how old are you today today?
Speaker 2: I believe I am forty four years old, Bob.
Speaker 3: Well, as I say this is audio only, you don't
Speaker 3: look forty four. I thought you were going to say
Speaker 3: like thirty something.
Speaker 2: But at any event, you know, people like to say
Speaker 2: black don't crack, and you know, I hope that continues
Speaker 2: to be true through you know, however long i'm here.
Speaker 3: One of the big points you make about King Records
Speaker 3: is how integrated it was as a black man living
Speaker 3: in Cincinnati today and in America, how do you experience racism?
Speaker 2: Ooh, you're hitting right to the tabasco sauce right now,
Speaker 2: getting spicy. That's a really good question. You know, race
Speaker 2: and talking about race and King Records is challenging because
Speaker 2: King Records offers a great example for why the complexities
Speaker 2: around how America came about our racial integration. You know,
Speaker 2: it wasn't done. You know, King Records shows that it's
Speaker 2: very business driven. But even King Records, you know, they
Speaker 2: start with a guy named Ben Siegel, who's the personnel director,
Speaker 2: and he comes in and he wants to have a
Speaker 2: you know, equal opportunity hiring policy and is able to
Speaker 2: convince the owner, Sid Nathan, to go along with this.
Speaker 2: And he's able to convince him because you know, he's like,
Speaker 2: we're both Jews, and you know, we've just seen and
Speaker 2: experience in Europe because again, this is the nineteen forties
Speaker 2: where we were treated in a particular way. The takeaway
Speaker 2: from this is we should probably not do the same thing.
Speaker 2: And this aligned with Sid's beliefs, and so they try
Speaker 2: an equal hiring policy into the production about I think
Speaker 2: maybe about a year ago or two years ago, his
Speaker 2: daughter I was able to finally get in touch with
Speaker 2: Ben Siegel's daughter, Deborah, and she was able to share
Speaker 2: some letters, some correspondence between Sid Nathan and her father.
Speaker 2: And what we find over time is that there's more
Speaker 2: complexity to this. When they have this policy at King Records,
Speaker 2: not everybody is into this policy. There starts to be
Speaker 2: conflicts between workers, you know, just inner office politics, and
Speaker 2: it's not as kumbaya as we would want it to be.
Speaker 2: It is still a product of the nineteen forties. So
Speaker 2: they first tried with a very progressive approach, and in
Speaker 2: a couple of years into this, they have to scale
Speaker 2: back some of it and they start realizing there's just
Speaker 2: not everybody gets along. So from a musical perspective, with
Speaker 2: people like Henry Glover, who is the first black music executive,
Speaker 2: that and King brings them on board and gives him
Speaker 2: stock in the company. So you have great examples of
Speaker 2: things like that that are really indicative of progressive racial ideas.
Speaker 2: But then over time you start to see that there
Speaker 2: is a separation. They stop having African Americans in the
Speaker 2: office towards the fifties after Ben Siegel leaves, and then
Speaker 2: in the sixties you start seeing a really much more
Speaker 2: stark separation of where African Americans are working in the
Speaker 2: pressing plants and not in the office. And there really
Speaker 2: is kind of a more classic Jim Crow segregation in
Speaker 2: the office, But it's not happening from the musical perspective,
Speaker 2: because again, you know there's going to be that. It's
Speaker 2: very back and forth. So we had to kind of
Speaker 2: wrestle with this as we were making the film because
Speaker 2: it is more indicative of what I see in America
Speaker 2: and my experiences of race in America, which are complex.
Speaker 2: You know, in some areas it's accessible and very easy
Speaker 2: to navigate and work through being a black person in America. However,
Speaker 2: there are some places is still today where navigating or
Speaker 2: some situations where navigating is problematic, where not everybody is
Speaker 2: comfortable where there should be access, but somebody is uncomfortable
Speaker 2: with something and instead of directly saying it, you know,
Speaker 2: there's going to be passive, aggressive behaviors that come out
Speaker 2: and you've got to work it through inter office politics
Speaker 2: or some sort of political situation. Some places. Sometimes some
Speaker 2: situations it's great. In some situations it's not so great.
Speaker 2: And you know, this film was able to kind of
Speaker 2: really articulate to me how there are differences in race,
Speaker 2: you know, especially watching One thing I did is that
Speaker 2: I went back all the way to the history of
Speaker 2: looking at some of the arrests of some of the
Speaker 2: people in around King records and some of the owners
Speaker 2: and a lot of the owners were from the Jewish community,
Speaker 2: and you see a policing of Jews in the Cincinnati
Speaker 2: area that I really didn't expect. It really started to
Speaker 2: dawn on me that what we have in America is
Speaker 2: more of a cast system, you know, and in the
Speaker 2: nineteen fifties you really see this. You see if you
Speaker 2: are Wasp, Western European, Anglo Saxon Protestant, that is the
Speaker 2: definition of whiteness in that area. And then if you're
Speaker 2: Eastern European, if you're Italian, if you're Irish, if you're
Speaker 2: pretty much anything else, you kind of fall on a
Speaker 2: sliding scale. And we see a lot of the policing,
Speaker 2: and we see a lot of these things that we're
Speaker 2: talking about in society. A lot of these communities were
Speaker 2: also talking about that then as well. You see a
Speaker 2: lot of Italian names in the arrest record, a lot
Speaker 2: of Jewish names, a lot of African American names, and
Speaker 2: what It just kind of shows that there's a lot
Speaker 2: more complexity to our racial story, just like there was
Speaker 2: a lot more complexity to the story at King Records. And yeah,
Speaker 2: it's been an illuminating process learning these things.
Speaker 3: So when did you first hear about Sid Nathan?
Speaker 2: So the first time I heard about Sid Nathan was yikes,
Speaker 2: at a at a gig, somebody telling me about the
Speaker 2: fights between him and James Brown. It was about the
Speaker 2: song I Feel Good and how James had gone to Smash,
Speaker 2: which was owned by Mercury at the time, and he
Speaker 2: thought that his contract with King Records was over. So
Speaker 2: he goes over to make a deal with Mercury and
Speaker 2: they release a song I Feel Good, and it pairs
Speaker 2: and they pair it with the film Ski Party. Have
Speaker 2: you ever seen that movie before, Bob? Which film Ski Party?
Speaker 2: It's like a net Funicello film back in Uh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, yeah, you say, yes, yes I did.
Speaker 3: It was a very famous film. Bring me to Another era.
Speaker 2: I've been living in that era for about ten years.
Speaker 2: So he does Ski Party and it's huge and Sid
Speaker 2: Nathan gets wind of this and is like, what the
Speaker 2: hell you still? Like, Oh, you're on my contract. So
Speaker 2: Sid has to put an embargo on the record. They've
Speaker 2: got a work it out and sue each other and
Speaker 2: it's intense, you know. And I was able to actually
Speaker 2: get a hold of some of the send each other
Speaker 2: telegrams and I was able to get some of the
Speaker 2: copies of the telegrams. But it was intense, like harsh talk.
Speaker 2: But they were able to work it out and James
Speaker 2: was able to come back and they released I Feel
Speaker 2: Good and became a huge hit for King. But that
Speaker 2: was the first time I heard about said Nathan, his
Speaker 2: harascible nature in working with James Brown.
Speaker 3: Okay, just stay on that one thing, because I'm old
Speaker 3: enough to remember what I feel good with the Gigantic Kid.
Speaker 3: Do you know how that worked out? Did Mercury actually
Speaker 3: who was based in Chicago at that point, did they
Speaker 3: actually release it? Because you know, normally you know who
Speaker 3: ended up making it a hit, Mercury or King and
Speaker 3: how did that happen?
Speaker 2: So, yeah, it got released on Smash because I was
Speaker 2: able to find the publicity shots. So there's a publicity
Speaker 2: shot where it's James performing, So the James of the
Speaker 2: Famous Flame, Bobby Bird and all those guys, they're all
Speaker 2: doing I Feel Good in the dance number on there,
Speaker 2: and they have they have a promo shot where it
Speaker 2: has Smashed Records right there on the bottom. So they
Speaker 2: released it under Smash. But once the release came out,
Speaker 2: King came in right away and they had to work
Speaker 2: that deal out very quickly.
Speaker 3: Okay, you know, I was thrilled to see an experiencial film,
Speaker 3: which is fantastic. Everybody literally should see so much. But
Speaker 3: I knew about Sid Nathan from Seymour Stein. You could
Speaker 3: not sit with se without Sid coming up. You made
Speaker 3: this film at the end of the day, how do
Speaker 3: you feel about Sid the Man?
Speaker 2: Uh, that's interesting, you know. I, first of all, seymour
Speaker 2: Stein one of the best interviews I've ever had in
Speaker 2: my life. He fell asleep in it twice, but he
Speaker 2: was determined to get every question answered. He wanted to
Speaker 2: make sure he went on record everything you need to
Speaker 2: know about Sid Nathan, which was amazing. And I also
Speaker 2: got like a lot of advice, just like music business
Speaker 2: advice and how to navigate. The guy is really really deep,
Speaker 2: So it was really amazing to be able to get
Speaker 2: spent some time with him, And yeah, he had a
Speaker 2: lot of interesting things to say about Sidneathan. He gave
Speaker 2: me a different color of Sidnathan. I'm very close with
Speaker 2: Sid Nathan's family, his nephew in particular, so I've gotten
Speaker 2: to have a lot of viewpoints from a lot of
Speaker 2: people who knew Sid personally. And Sid's kind of an
Speaker 2: interesting guy, you know, Sid the man, very principled, very stubborn.
Speaker 2: He's a classic metch you know, like it's that's the
Speaker 2: best way that I can kind of describe it. And
Speaker 2: that's something I'm I grew up in a Jewish community
Speaker 2: in Cleveland, so I understand what that means and who
Speaker 2: that guy is. But he's very much that classic guy
Speaker 2: smokes cigars, said the first thing on his mind is
Speaker 2: always kind of like making a joke, making a dirty joke,
Speaker 2: you know, but on you know, so like there's that
Speaker 2: kind of lovable side to him. He was very big
Speaker 2: with giving gifts. Sid would go out and he'd find
Speaker 2: a deal on something and he'd buy twenty of them,
Speaker 2: and he's so he like, there's one time he found radios.
Speaker 2: So he found this new fangled radio, so he bought
Speaker 2: twenty new fangled radios. He'd have people to his house.
Speaker 2: He had a pool, he was always throwing parties, and
Speaker 2: he'd give them these radios. Man, so you come into
Speaker 2: the house and you get this like new fangled radio
Speaker 2: from Sid and this other type of cigar. So I
Speaker 2: connected with him on those types of things. But then
Speaker 2: on the same side, you know, he's this cranky guy
Speaker 2: who's constantly fighting with like Nina Simone, and he's fighting
Speaker 2: with Otis Williams, and he's fighting with all these artists
Speaker 2: and he has favorite artists who he loves, but he's
Speaker 2: kind of a jerk to some of these people, and
Speaker 2: so that's kind of like an interesting dichotomy to kind
Speaker 2: of pull at, to kind of figure out with Sid.
Speaker 2: But you know, he's kind of an interesting, hilarious character.
Speaker 2: He's kind of every man. He's a knockabout, and I
Speaker 2: think he's kind of a character that everybody has a
Speaker 2: little bit of Sid Nathan inside of him.
Speaker 3: Okay, the business has evolved, oh my gosh, but even
Speaker 3: at this date, the terms are on the record company's side.
Speaker 3: Back in Sid Nathan's date, there are a lot of
Speaker 3: very famous labels that never paid royalties. In addition to
Speaker 3: the fact that the royalty rates were very low. To
Speaker 3: what degree were the acts angry that when they had success,
Speaker 3: the lion's share of the money went to the label
Speaker 3: as opposed to them.
Speaker 2: Wow, it is a subject matter that keeps coming, that
Speaker 2: came up in every interview with every artist or anybody's
Speaker 2: every artist interview comes up. So Sid was very, very
Speaker 2: scrupulous and very you know on the negotiations. You know,
Speaker 2: he'd come at you hard on the negotiations, and it
Speaker 2: was mainly because you know, Grandpa Jones talks about this
Speaker 2: in an interview he you know, he would come at
Speaker 2: you hard, but once you made the deal, he would
Speaker 2: stick to the end of the deal. You know, Grandpa
Speaker 2: Jones played four cents aside, which is a terrible deal,
Speaker 2: you know, and you know four cents is nothing, but
Speaker 2: you know, Grandpa Jones said nobody was going to give
Speaker 2: him a deal of any kind. And without that deal,
Speaker 2: you know, a couple of years later he moved to RCA.
Speaker 2: He would have never gotten the RCA deal if he
Speaker 2: didn't get the King deal. And he's able to move on.
Speaker 2: There's some artists, particularly African American artists, that their ability
Speaker 2: to move on wasn't easy and wasn't as there wasn't
Speaker 2: a path for them that they could easily move on
Speaker 2: to another label. Some there were, but a lot of
Speaker 2: people really did feel that Sid Nathan didn't do them right.
Speaker 2: But James, you know, there's an interview with James Brown
Speaker 2: where he kind of clarifies the situation. You know, James
Speaker 2: Brown is an international star. The first time I heard
Speaker 2: about James Brown was in my grandmother's records in Nigeria
Speaker 2: as a kid, and it wasn't a King record. I
Speaker 2: don't remember the name of the label, but I definitely
Speaker 2: remember it wasn't King because I definitely would have recognized it.
Speaker 2: It was, you know, a bootleg probably, and what James
Speaker 2: space was internationally, there wasn't anybody who could control his royalties.
Speaker 2: Sid Nathan couldn't collect royalty. You know, collecting royalties back
Speaker 2: then especially was really tough. You had to be the
Speaker 2: one to go out there and figure out who's making
Speaker 2: your stuff or playing your stuff, and you got to
Speaker 2: figure the money out, which was a lot tougher, you know.
Speaker 2: So the ability to collect all the royalties was difficult
Speaker 2: in the first place, and in James Brown's case, it
Speaker 2: wasn't possible, which was one of the things he wanted
Speaker 2: from a Polydor. So when he moved to an international
Speaker 2: German company like Polydor in seventy one, you know, he's
Speaker 2: now able to get the full He's now able to
Speaker 2: collect royalties. And along the way, James been able to
Speaker 2: renegotiate his deal, but not every artist was able to
Speaker 2: renegotiate their deal. So you have artists like Otis Williams
Speaker 2: and the Charms who lives here in Cincinnati, and he
Speaker 2: had the biggest doop group in the nineteen fifties. They
Speaker 2: were huge, and they had hit after hit after hit.
Speaker 2: You know, Sid would do things like, you know, his
Speaker 2: mom got married, so Sid would pay for the wedding
Speaker 2: and then Sid would then turn around and charge Otis's
Speaker 2: account for it. Or Sid would buy cars for people.
Speaker 2: So Sid had a relationship with a car dealership down
Speaker 2: the street from the studio, which was so he would
Speaker 2: go there and make a deal. I'll purchase these cars
Speaker 2: at this rate near cost, you make a little bit
Speaker 2: of money over it, and I'll sell it to the artists,
Speaker 2: which then gets him because it's depreciating asset. He's able
Speaker 2: to then make more money off the top of paying
Speaker 2: the artist these deals with the Cadillac, for example, and
Speaker 2: a lot of these artists didn't understand that that was
Speaker 2: going on, so a lot of them felt screwed over.
Speaker 2: But Sid would find these ways of being able to,
Speaker 2: you know, increase his profit by doing things like paying
Speaker 2: for events or paying for like your baby shower, things
Speaker 2: like that, which a lot of artists didn't appreciate because
Speaker 2: he wasn't really upfront with what was happening there. So
Speaker 2: there's a lot of that type of stuff. But you know,
Speaker 2: that was just record business back in the nineteen fifties
Speaker 2: and sixties, which, to be honest, Bob hasn't changed a
Speaker 2: whole lot. To be honest, you know, the deals are
Speaker 2: pretty much the same. Artists are getting the same type
Speaker 2: of you know, artists are coming to these deals with
Speaker 2: the same amount of education, and record labels are in
Speaker 2: essence doing the same version of what they've always been doing.
Speaker 3: So in terms of his business savvy, was Sid totally
Speaker 3: a man of experience or were there things in his
Speaker 3: family or other things that happened that gave insight into
Speaker 3: how to run a business?
Speaker 2: Oh, my lord, No, Sid was a knockabout man like.
Speaker 2: So he had his bookie. This guy named Howard Kessel
Speaker 2: was the family bookie, you know, and you know he
Speaker 2: was kind of he had like mob relations man, but
Speaker 2: he was like the local bookie. And he puts in
Speaker 2: ten grand But Howard's wife like is railing against him
Speaker 2: because he's Sid's cousin and he's saying, don't put much.
Speaker 2: She's like, don't put money into this. I can't believe it.
Speaker 2: And Howard was not the world's I met his granddaughter.
Speaker 2: She let me know that he was a horrible husband's
Speaker 2: very very mean man. So the fact that his wife
Speaker 2: wasn't into this really got Howard to double down. But
Speaker 2: you know, Sid was known as somebody who you weren't
Speaker 2: going to necessarily invest into. Sid was also really sick.
Speaker 2: He had a lot of health problems, so you know,
Speaker 2: he went into business with his brother in law. They
Speaker 2: started a that's actually how the idea of getting into
Speaker 2: the record business started. He thought that, hey, if I
Speaker 2: go into the record business, I can do this. They
Speaker 2: start a whole record shop and Sid ends up having
Speaker 2: some health issues and has to go down to Florida
Speaker 2: with his guy as a brother who's a doctor in
Speaker 2: Florida who has to nurse him back to health and
Speaker 2: it takes like two years. So Sid can get into stuff,
Speaker 2: but you know, because of his health, he might have
Speaker 2: to pull out of it because of all kinds of circumstances.
Speaker 2: Whether you know, he was sometimes not always on the
Speaker 2: top or on the table. Everything wasn't, you know, on
Speaker 2: the up and up as they say, so some things
Speaker 2: would fall apart. But he had different He was a
Speaker 2: he had a pawn shop, he was a wrestling promoter.
Speaker 2: He had a shooting gallery. He got arrested for that.
Speaker 2: He got arrested for crossing the street and getting a
Speaker 2: jaywalk coming out of a movie theater once. That was fun. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he was involved in all kinds of different schemes and
Speaker 2: they would always fall apart, so people didn't really see
Speaker 2: him to be a sure bet. But you know, he
Speaker 2: was able to get family. It was getting enough friends
Speaker 2: to kind of put money. They all put ten thousand
Speaker 2: dollars each in nineteen forty three. That's a ton of money,
Speaker 2: and they're able to get this record business started. But
Speaker 2: everybody was kind of dubious that he was going to
Speaker 2: be able to make anything out of it.
Speaker 3: Okay, at what point did it look like it was
Speaker 3: going to be a business?
Speaker 2: Oh, you know, that's a great question. You know, I
Speaker 2: would argue that from day one it looked like it
Speaker 2: was going to be a business. You know, WLW, which
Speaker 2: is this record, which is this radio station here in Cincinnati.
Speaker 2: It's still around, but it was one of the first
Speaker 2: big radio stations in America. They were able to broadcast
Speaker 2: at fifty thousand jigawatts. I'm making that word up, but
Speaker 2: they were able to broadcast at the highest level. Then
Speaker 2: they had to get government permission. It was a big
Speaker 2: deal and which allowed them to broadcast. Basically they could
Speaker 2: be heard through the HEMISPR. So a lot of the
Speaker 2: first places where you hear jazz is from this radio
Speaker 2: station WLW Jazz in the Midwest. That's what really distributes it.
Speaker 2: So this this radio station is right around the corner
Speaker 2: from his record shop, and a lot of these guys
Speaker 2: come into the record shop looking for music. They're looking
Speaker 2: In their interviews, they talk about looking for black music.
Speaker 2: They're looking to cover black music because they got to
Speaker 2: like come up with new songs after new songs after
Speaker 2: new song every day on the radio. So all these artists,
Speaker 2: Grandpa Jones, Cowboy Kopis, all these artists are coming through
Speaker 2: and they're buying records and they're learning these tunes, and
Speaker 2: they're saying, hey, why don't you None of them are
Speaker 2: at this point I'm capable of. They're not the big
Speaker 2: stars at WLW. They can't get record labels, you know,
Speaker 2: they're not like the Clooney sisters. You know, this is
Speaker 2: how Rosemary Clooney gets her starts from this radio station
Speaker 2: in fifties. So we're not the big ones. Hey, how
Speaker 2: about we connect. How we get this guy who's doing
Speaker 2: the record shop, How we get him to help us out.
Speaker 2: So he kind of came in with knowing what the
Speaker 2: client tell look like from people he was selling records to.
Speaker 2: And then he had all these artists that are sitting
Speaker 2: right there at WLW, and he kind of puts two
Speaker 2: and two together. I've got, you know, a hungary audience,
Speaker 2: and then I also have these musicians who are looking
Speaker 2: for outlets, and two and two together. He kind of
Speaker 2: had a built in situation. He was just kind of
Speaker 2: able to slot himself in. But you know what's interesting
Speaker 2: about WLW is that after they stopped having live on
Speaker 2: air talent, all of the acts go down to Nashville
Speaker 2: because the next station that's able to allow to broadcast
Speaker 2: at this level is WSM, which is that's the home
Speaker 2: of the grand Ole Opry. So that's when we now
Speaker 2: see the rise of grand Ole operating the rise of Nashville.
Speaker 2: After all of these musicians leave the prestige job of
Speaker 2: WLW because they're not doing live talent, and Nashville is
Speaker 2: able to keep this tradition going and keep it alive
Speaker 2: to what we see here and the celebration we see
Speaker 2: in the Ryeman and how Nashville is Nashville.
Speaker 3: So how does Sid get in the record business.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So he takes these guys from WLW and they're
Speaker 2: not allowed to record in Cincinnati. WLW has an embargoo
Speaker 2: on how they're allowed to and where they're allowed to record.
Speaker 2: So they have to drive up to Dayton, Dayton, Ohio,
Speaker 2: which is about an hour away, and they go there
Speaker 2: and they make a recording and it's a crappy recording.
Speaker 2: I was actually able to get a copy of that.
Speaker 2: It's really bad. We had to do a lot of
Speaker 2: music editing to get all the noise and all like.
Speaker 2: It's just not a good recording. And he puts this
Speaker 2: together and he's able to get it started, so he's
Speaker 2: able to kind of figure out a way of being
Speaker 2: able to record in Cincinnati. And these guys there's a
Speaker 2: guy named Bucky Herzog who did a lot of work
Speaker 2: with other main other major country acts here in here
Speaker 2: in Cincinnati area, and he starts working with them and
Speaker 2: Sid's like it's crazy. Sid like breaks into their sessions.
Speaker 2: He's screaming his head off, He's yelling at people, I
Speaker 2: want you to do this. And finally this guy Herzog
Speaker 2: has enough of it and kicks sit out, and Sid
Speaker 2: has to find a place to record. So that's when
Speaker 2: he finds his own recording studio and he sets up
Speaker 2: all of it. He sets up his own company. And
Speaker 2: because he's such a pain in the ass to deal with,
Speaker 2: and you know, he has to do it all by himself.
Speaker 2: So he has to have the recording studio by himself,
Speaker 2: he has to press the records by himself, and he
Speaker 2: ends up ending up at zero integration to solve the
Speaker 2: problems of the fact that he's a difficult he's an asshole,
Speaker 2: you know, like if I was just gonna put it
Speaker 2: like bluntly, he just isn't really able to play well
Speaker 2: with others. And because of that, he has to have
Speaker 2: everything in house, which ends up being his superpower.
Speaker 3: So when he built his own studio, I mean Atlantic Records,
Speaker 3: they used to record in the office. They would push
Speaker 3: the desks into the corner. Yeah, get up at night.
Speaker 3: So what kind of recording facilitated sid build?
Speaker 2: That's true. Yeah, you know they started just like that
Speaker 2: Ed King where they first started by doing things in
Speaker 2: the office. And so a lot of I've got these
Speaker 2: great interviews with with the office workers, and they would
Speaker 2: talk about the fact that they'd come in the next
Speaker 2: morning and they'd be boozed. So like the song good
Speaker 2: Rocking Tonight. They came in and they had to record
Speaker 2: because there's a band coming through. The Petrillo Band's about
Speaker 2: to come through, which is the first strike by the
Speaker 2: Musicians Union, and they are striking because of jukeboxes are
Speaker 2: taking a lot of their gigs away. So because of this,
Speaker 2: the record companies can't get artists to record. So before
Speaker 2: this in nineteen forty seven, in the December forty seven,
Speaker 2: they quickly have this marathon recording session and they bring
Speaker 2: in with Nony Harris and they record in the office.
Speaker 2: So that version of good Rocking Tonight that you hear
Speaker 2: is them in the office, and they'd have to go
Speaker 2: clean up after, you know, like he got booze and
Speaker 2: cigarettes all over the place and all these like office
Speaker 2: ladies have to clean it up, and they're finally sick
Speaker 2: of it. So Sid has to go build a recording studio.
Speaker 2: So he has his family has bad eyesight cataracts, so
Speaker 2: he has cataract surgery and all of them, all of
Speaker 2: his family members, they all this was like his sister
Speaker 2: had cataract surgery and actually made her vision worse. Every
Speaker 2: member of their family still to this day. They all
Speaker 2: have bad eyesight. So he goes in for cataract surgery
Speaker 2: and and then you had to stay in the hospital
Speaker 2: for I think like two weeks. So he gets out
Speaker 2: of the hospital after this forty eight session and they
Speaker 2: can't really do anything. So he starts. He decides that
Speaker 2: he's going to go out and he's going to build
Speaker 2: a recording studio. He doesn't know how to do one,
Speaker 2: and he's classic. Sid goes out there, takes his shovel
Speaker 2: and starts digging. He's got like bandages still on, so
Speaker 2: everybody's looking like Henry Glover is looking like what the
Speaker 2: hell is he doing. They go out and they figure
Speaker 2: out what's going on. They're finally able to get contractors
Speaker 2: and get the situation, but they didn't particularly get it's
Speaker 2: not on the same d because he did this, and
Speaker 2: it's separate from the building, so it causes all in
Speaker 2: King history and like in the efforts of saving the building,
Speaker 2: the fact that he did this actually ended up being
Speaker 2: the reason why they're actually able to preserve one large
Speaker 2: part of the King Building because Sid went ahead and
Speaker 2: just built it and without asking any permission or getting
Speaker 2: any kind of legals around. It actually ended up being
Speaker 2: to the benefit of rescuing it in the long run.
Speaker 2: But he just did whatever the hell he wanted, whenever
Speaker 2: he wanted, And that is how Sid started his record studio.
Speaker 3: Okay, for those who haven't seen the movie, tell us
Speaker 3: a story of how Sid even falls into the music business.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Sid had been So there was a big
Speaker 2: flood in nineteen thirty seven in Cincinnati. If you look
Speaker 2: at any archive footage, you will find hours and hours
Speaker 2: and hours talking about this flood. It's like hilarious. It
Speaker 2: was huge news. And there was a jukebox operator in
Speaker 2: the flood who lost everything and the only thing he
Speaker 2: had left was records. So he'd owed Sid money from
Speaker 2: the pawnshop and from the record shop. So he goes
Speaker 2: in from the pawn shop rather and he says, he man, like,
Speaker 2: I can't pay you back this six bucks. I just
Speaker 2: lost everything. Here are all my records. If you put
Speaker 2: these out and you sell them, you'll make more than
Speaker 2: enough of the six bucks back. So you know, Sid
Speaker 2: takes the deal and they put them out and they
Speaker 2: sell like hotcakes. They sell all of the records really quickly,
Speaker 2: so quickly they understand that there's a market here, so
Speaker 2: he gets into the record shop business that way. Over
Speaker 2: time he ends up having to leave it. As I
Speaker 2: said before, he gets sick, and then he comes back
Speaker 2: to Cincinnati and he's got this idea of this record shop.
Speaker 2: So he starts a record shop right next to WLW
Speaker 2: and he gets to the artists, and so these artists
Speaker 2: convince him to get into the record making business. And
Speaker 2: from the record making business he basically works because his
Speaker 2: struggles with working with others. He works himself into a
Speaker 2: situation where he is now he has to have vertical
Speaker 2: integration to be able to operate. And from there he
Speaker 2: starts looking for African American artists, and he starts looking
Speaker 2: for hillbilly at artists. There was really, you know, back then,
Speaker 2: a lot of the major record labels, RCA, Decca, all
Speaker 2: those guys weren't doing country. Forties country was really outrey
Speaker 2: back then. It wasn't in. Being a hillbilly wasn't cool.
Speaker 2: So King Records because of that kind of captures bluegrass
Speaker 2: mountain music turning into bluegrass turning into country, and they
Speaker 2: get these artists who were kind of like having this
Speaker 2: migration into nineteen forties country, which eventually becomes huge with
Speaker 2: nineteen fifties and once kind of these record labels show
Speaker 2: that country music is hip, you start seeing the majors.
Speaker 2: RCA starts swooping in taking some of these guys, and
Speaker 2: a lot of these guys have a resurgence. So you
Speaker 2: see guys like Hawkshaw Hawkins and Cowboy Copis. They both
Speaker 2: pass away famously on the flight with Patsy Klein at
Speaker 2: the time. Both of them were bigger stars than Patsy
Speaker 2: Klein was in the fifties because they were the bigger acts.
Speaker 2: You know, they had this big They became huge on King,
Speaker 2: went to RCA and then eventually Starday Records, which was
Speaker 2: a famed label in Nashville. But you have these guys
Speaker 2: are huge, you know, country's big, and Sid gets into it,
Speaker 2: then he gets out of it. You have guys that
Speaker 2: are like the Stanley Brothers who were over at Capital.
Speaker 2: They moved to King because the majors leave bluegrass, bluegrasses
Speaker 2: in this cool country becomes the cool thing and Sid
Speaker 2: decides to invest into that, and he's also then investing
Speaker 2: in the black music at the time, because the majors
Speaker 2: weren't everybody's trying to do pop. Everybody's trying to have
Speaker 2: a pop break, and Sid, you know, he starts bringing
Speaker 2: some of these early Detroit artists like Hank Ballard and
Speaker 2: Little Willie John because there wasn't any place to record.
Speaker 2: Motown wasn't a thing yet, so a lot of these
Speaker 2: black artists like John Lee Hooker, they've got to find
Speaker 2: all these places to record. From Detroit, they come down
Speaker 2: three hours south to Cincinnati. Sid gets these guys too,
Speaker 2: and he's getting guys like Hank Ballard, which leads him
Speaker 2: to guys like James Brown, and James Brown's able to
Speaker 2: kind of carry the business forward through the sixties. But
Speaker 2: that's kind of like their arc you know, through American music,
Speaker 2: they kind of capture these they're in the spaces where
Speaker 2: nobody else is in because they're able to find an
Speaker 2: audience kind of you know, they had vertical integration. So
Speaker 2: Sid had no problem giving it a try. So he
Speaker 2: had guys like Otis Redding. Otis Redding recorded with King
Speaker 2: before his Stax days, and he has a great song
Speaker 2: Shout Bamlama. I highly recommend checking it out. It's super
Speaker 2: dope and it's like powerful. Otis Redding. You hear Otis
Speaker 2: Redding is fully formed. You know, he was a journeyman
Speaker 2: singing or going from label to label. He stops at King.
Speaker 2: Sid's like, why not, let's give it a try. Let's
Speaker 2: put it out and see what happens. Nothing happens, but
Speaker 2: you have you know, he has he's able to capture
Speaker 2: people like Patty Labelle's first record with the Blue Belts
Speaker 2: when she's fourteen, because she's a good singer. Let's give
Speaker 2: it a try and let's see what happens. And Sid
Speaker 2: ends up capturing a lot of these huge musical acts
Speaker 2: while they were young, while they were just getting started
Speaker 2: early in their career, because he has vertical ingration and
Speaker 2: he's he's willing to kind of take a shot, you know,
Speaker 2: you take a shot of these musicians. See what happens.
Speaker 2: If anything huge happens, go for it. If nothing happens,
Speaker 2: then you move on to the next guy. But that
Speaker 2: was kind of his arc in the music business.
Speaker 3: Why was it called King record, That's.
Speaker 2: A great question. He was driving to that first recording
Speaker 2: session in Dayton and Grandpa Jones had kind of been
Speaker 2: doodling this character. So Grandpa Jones had this he was
Speaker 2: a really he was really good at drawing. So he's
Speaker 2: like making this little cartoon and they're making jokes and
Speaker 2: finally the conversation shifts to, Okay, so you're starting this
Speaker 2: record company. What are you gonna call it? And Sid decides,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna call it King Records because I'm gonna be
Speaker 2: the King of them all and that was his goal
Speaker 2: and that's how he came up with it, and that
Speaker 2: was their first slogan. They put it on their first records.
Speaker 2: It's actually the title of our film, and that is
Speaker 2: why he named the King. He started Queen Records soon
Speaker 2: after that, which was the African American label, but he
Speaker 2: kind of starts with that King Queen thing. They're pressing
Speaker 2: companies called Royal Plastics, so he kind of has this
Speaker 2: theme that he's doing for the first couple of years
Speaker 2: of King, and then he kind of merges everything under
Speaker 2: there and eventually brings in other labels under his control
Speaker 2: over time.
Speaker 3: Why were James Brown's records put out on Federal Records?
Speaker 3: And do you have any idea where that name came from?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Federal label. So Federal. That label was started
Speaker 2: by I'm seeing his face and I am blanking on
Speaker 2: his name. I can't believe it. Not Henry Stone. Uh,
Speaker 2: there was a produce iowall blank, I'm so sorry. There
Speaker 2: was a producer that that they'd started Federal under and
Speaker 2: Sid kind of came to the situation as a partner,
Speaker 2: and that is that was their label for African American music,
Speaker 2: one of the labels that he picked up. So they
Speaker 2: had put different African American artists on there, like Hank
Speaker 2: Ballard was on Federal and they'd moved different people. They
Speaker 2: had Deluxe Records, which another record label that they had
Speaker 2: there was African American Focus that was with Henry Stone.
Speaker 2: They had different labels that were kind of focused for
Speaker 2: different target areas, and Federal was kind of their Southern music,
Speaker 2: so African American Southern label, because there was a lot
Speaker 2: of the producers that worked through there were working through
Speaker 2: the Chitlin circuits basically, and that's what that label's focus was.
Speaker 2: So when it came under the when Sid Nathan bought
Speaker 2: it and came under its ownership, all those artists kind
Speaker 2: of were put under that label. So a lot, yeah,
Speaker 2: a lot of the famous Flames were originally done under Federal,
Speaker 2: but then later in the sixties, they move under the
Speaker 2: King umbrella as well.
Speaker 3: Okay, he has the record shop right next to the
Speaker 3: radio station. What are literally the first acts he cuts?
Speaker 3: And what is the first one or the first couple
Speaker 3: that start to sell?
Speaker 2: So in forty three his first ones that he does.
Speaker 2: That's with Grandpa Jones and Merle Travis. Merle Travis, for
Speaker 2: any guitar fans out there, invented Travis picking. If you're
Speaker 2: familiar with that, it's with a thumb pick. He's one
Speaker 2: of the most important guitarists of all time. I got
Speaker 2: to have a whole rundown with Vince gil Vince Gill is,
Speaker 2: by the way, amazing. He knows everything about every guitar
Speaker 2: style and guitarist of country music lore, so he was
Speaker 2: really able to kind of like really color in a
Speaker 2: lot of those details for me. But Merle Travis is
Speaker 2: kind of the first guys. Then he's got the Delmore
Speaker 2: Brothers in there as well, and Cowboy copis hawkshaw Hawk
Speaker 2: Hawkins comes to the deal later. But it's a lot
Speaker 2: of these country guys, but a lot of them have
Speaker 2: to go to war, So a lot of them end
Speaker 2: up having to go to World War for World War two,
Speaker 2: which cuts kind of makes a break in their relationship.
Speaker 2: It's actually one of the reasons why they lose their
Speaker 2: deal with King. And when they come back, they see
Speaker 2: a resurgence because a lot of the big labels are
Speaker 2: now interested in these artists and a lot of them
Speaker 2: able to go on. So you see Grandpa Jones, for example,
Speaker 2: goes on to be on Hehaw. So anybody any fans
Speaker 2: of he Haw out there, Grandpa Jones from he Haw.
Speaker 2: But you see a lot of these artists. You know,
Speaker 2: World War Two kind of gets in the way, but
Speaker 2: the first stars that he gets are are these guys,
Speaker 2: and Cowboy Copus is his first hit. In nineteen forty eight,
Speaker 2: they have a hit with called Filipino Baby, which is
Speaker 2: looking back from the lens of understanding things now. It's
Speaker 2: a very kind of problematic song if you're a Filipino,
Speaker 2: I don't think it'd be your favorite song, but it is.
Speaker 2: It is a song of its time. But it was
Speaker 2: one of the first hits they have, and forty eight
Speaker 2: becomes their big year because they've got that song. They've
Speaker 2: got good rocking tonight, they've got a bull Moose Jackson hit.
Speaker 2: I think the forty eight forty eight. So Me and
Speaker 2: my ten inch record was like the big hit back then,
Speaker 2: which was a euphemism, you know, sexual euphemism back then.
Speaker 2: But yeah, so they in forty eight, they have a
Speaker 2: slew of hits with a lot of these artists. Tomorrow
Speaker 2: Night with is one big hit. They just kind of
Speaker 2: start having hits in the African American market, in the
Speaker 2: country market, first starting with Cowboy Copus, but then very
Speaker 2: quickly with a bunch of artists in forty eight.
Speaker 3: Let's be a little more granular. He opens the records store.
Speaker 3: They come from the radio station to buy records. The
Speaker 3: acts that played the radio station, are those the first
Speaker 3: acts he records.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the acts that are playing so Merle Travis, Grandpa Jones,
Speaker 2: the Delmore Brothers, they're all acts that are playing shows
Speaker 2: at WLW, also at some other radio stations. So like
Speaker 2: the Delmore brothers. Alton Delmore had a drinking problem, so
Speaker 2: they had they kind of were they bounced around from
Speaker 2: radio station to radio station. So at the time, I
Speaker 2: think they'd just been let go from WLW, but were
Speaker 2: picked up from one of the Kentucky radio stations. So
Speaker 2: they're in the area and they're able to work with Sid,
Speaker 2: but yeah, he's kind of farming from a lot of
Speaker 2: this talent that's kind of in the Cincinnati area because
Speaker 2: of the prestige radio jobs.
Speaker 3: Okay, how does the light bulb go off? These guys
Speaker 3: come to buy records bitching about the you know, the
Speaker 3: problems with the radio station. Did they say, hey, Sid,
Speaker 3: you should make a record with us. Where does light
Speaker 3: bulb go off? As Sid go wait a second here,
Speaker 3: I could make these records.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So I believe that it was the Delmore brothers
Speaker 2: who first hatched the idea because they needed like they
Speaker 2: needed some career help because I said, you know, one
Speaker 2: of the brothers had a really severe drinking problem. They
Speaker 2: got them in trouble, and they needed a way to
Speaker 2: be able to kind of advertise, and nobody was going
Speaker 2: to take a risk on them. So I believe it
Speaker 2: was first to Delmore brothers to kind of start the coercing,
Speaker 2: followed by Grandpa Jones and Merle Travis because none of
Speaker 2: them were going to get a record deal anywhere. And
Speaker 2: it's because of that that they kind of stay in
Speaker 2: Sid's ear and Sid's like, okay, I see there's a
Speaker 2: market here. Maybe you know, he SID was visually impaired,
Speaker 2: so allowed him to you know, he was familiar with
Speaker 2: Society for Blind made records for the blind, so he
Speaker 2: was kind of familiar with the process and had access
Speaker 2: to see how those records were pressed. So the combination
Speaker 2: of having access to see how the records were pressed
Speaker 2: allowed him to kind of say, Okay, so I had
Speaker 2: this access to seeing where the records are, I've got
Speaker 2: these artists, I've got this market. I think that I
Speaker 2: can pull this off, you know, and like a lot
Speaker 2: of these guys, you know, conversation kind of worked up.
Speaker 2: You know, these guys kind of worked them up to
Speaker 2: have the gumption to give it a try.
Speaker 3: Okay. So if you didn't make a record with SID,
Speaker 3: and you didn't make a record with the major companies
Speaker 3: like RCAA, did SID have any competition on the independent level?
Speaker 2: Oh? Absolutely, I mean there was a slew of independent
Speaker 2: record labels, particularly you know Chess, Leonard Chess, the Chess Brothers.
Speaker 2: One of the perfect examples again is with Jane The
Speaker 2: signing of James Brown is hilarious. And I just remember
Speaker 2: the name Ralph Bass over Federal Records, and Ralph Bass
Speaker 2: is a legendary for anybody who's familiar Ralph Bass is
Speaker 2: going through the South. You know, he's this Russian jew
Speaker 2: who was really really like had his pulse on African
Speaker 2: American music. He was the guy that would go into
Speaker 2: like the depths of it. There are a couple of
Speaker 2: guys like that around. King Moon Mulligan was another guy
Speaker 2: who was like this who they really were entrenched in
Speaker 2: African American music culture, and so he was like really
Speaker 2: he knew about James Brown, and you knew James Brown
Speaker 2: was happening. So he ends up heading to he gets
Speaker 2: wind of James Brown happening. James Brown was supposed to
Speaker 2: sign with Chess Brothers. In fact, a bunch of other
Speaker 2: record labels were snipping around James Brown around the time
Speaker 2: when James Brown becomes a hit the Chess Brothers, there's
Speaker 2: a huge snowstorm in Chicago, so the Chess Brothers an't
Speaker 2: able to get down to South to Georgia in time.
Speaker 2: Bass hears about this and hurries up and gets to
Speaker 2: these guys, and then he throws in a little bit
Speaker 2: of extra cash, so it kind of likes smooth it over,
Speaker 2: and he's able to get James Brown to sign the
Speaker 2: Federal contract, and even though he had already planned and
Speaker 2: agreed to sign the Chess contract. So there was a
Speaker 2: competition for artists between them, and there's also a competition
Speaker 2: for music. So I read once that Doctor John. One
Speaker 2: of Doctor John's first gigs was to transcribe records, and
Speaker 2: he would transcribe like King records, so you would see
Speaker 2: hits that were coming up in different cities. So you'd
Speaker 2: see hits coming up in New Orleans, you'd quickly come in,
Speaker 2: transcribe it, get the music out, get your own artists
Speaker 2: to record your version of it, and you'd put it
Speaker 2: out on the market. And that was a common thing.
Speaker 2: You know, we don't have holds. So the last time
Speaker 2: I think we saw this was that Rhyanne a Leanne
Speaker 2: rhyme song with Trisha Yearwood. They came out with the
Speaker 2: same song, what like ninety six how Do I Live
Speaker 2: Without You? That song. That's the last time we've seen
Speaker 2: this in like modern music. But that used to be
Speaker 2: a thing all the time. You'd had all these answer
Speaker 2: songs and people covering songs, and there was this kind
Speaker 2: of industry around who could kind of beat each other
Speaker 2: to the market, and so that was kind of the market.
Speaker 2: That was the competition. But Sid, because he had vertical integration,
Speaker 2: he could beat everybody in the market. He could get
Speaker 2: to like you could record a song in the morning
Speaker 2: and you could have that on the trucks in the
Speaker 2: cities in the next within forty eight hours of recording.
Speaker 2: Nobody else had that speed in the music business. So
Speaker 2: it made it really hard for people to stay in.
Speaker 2: So that's why King is around for fifteen years. You know,
Speaker 2: if you look at all these other record labels, Chess,
Speaker 2: it's a very short line run. You look Sun Records,
Speaker 2: it's five years. You look in at Atlantic, you know,
Speaker 2: all of these runs the companies are five, six years,
Speaker 2: seven years here and there. Stax kind of has a
Speaker 2: second wing after their vote years. But you know, each
Speaker 2: one of these record labels, they're very they're in and out.
Speaker 2: You know, it's a short part of American history. King
Speaker 2: Records is able to stay from the Roosevelt administration to
Speaker 2: the Nixon administration because of being able to do this,
Speaker 2: They're able to be quick to market in the first
Speaker 2: one to market and that's kind of really what kept
Speaker 2: them floating, and that's what kept SID special in the marketplace.
Speaker 3: How did Sid get along with the Chess brothers and
Speaker 3: the rest of his contemporaries.
Speaker 2: I mean, I would love to be a fly in
Speaker 2: the wall between a meeting between Leonard Chess and Sid Nathan.
Speaker 2: That would make great TV America. You know, I assume
Speaker 2: that it would have been congenial but different, you know,
Speaker 2: I that's a good question because you know, a lot
Speaker 2: of these guys they had to work together. Sim could
Speaker 2: press his own records, so a lot of these companies
Speaker 2: would press their records with other record labels. So you
Speaker 2: would work with Sid. Other record labels were you know,
Speaker 2: there's a there's all these different artists that would use
Speaker 2: the record pressing business as their label. So some places
Speaker 2: would go to RCA. RCA had a spot in Indiana
Speaker 2: outside of Indianapolis that they would pressed a lot of
Speaker 2: their records. You'd have to get in line, and it
Speaker 2: wasn't very quick, you know, sometimes it'd be a month
Speaker 2: long turnaround, so you'd have to find all these other
Speaker 2: companies that did different parts of the business. Sid did
Speaker 2: his own stuff in house, so some of these record
Speaker 2: labels would have to rely on Sid and that's how
Speaker 2: they came into you know, like Bethlehem Records, which is
Speaker 2: a jazz label. We're pressing their records, and eventually, when
Speaker 2: they started running into problems, Sid buys the record label.
Speaker 2: He's working with people like there's a wonderful lady named
Speaker 2: Ruth Wallace. She is an artist. She used to do
Speaker 2: kind of like comedy songs. So like, uh, there's some
Speaker 2: of these great like tunes that they would talk about
Speaker 2: like homosexuality, or there's one song called boobs. But they
Speaker 2: are these like nineteen fifties songs talking about things that
Speaker 2: would be shocking. You know, you'd think that people didn't
Speaker 2: talk about this stuff in the fifties, but Sid wouldn't
Speaker 2: put his label on it, but he would press the records.
Speaker 2: So a lot of these other people, you know, you
Speaker 2: had to have working relationship with everybody because Sid had
Speaker 2: the full spectrum of the business around him. And because
Speaker 2: of that, it allowed him to kind of have a
Speaker 2: unique relationship with the Leonard Chess, with with an Urtigan.
Speaker 2: But you know, over time in the nineteen sixties, he's
Speaker 2: not able to kind of move along with the new
Speaker 2: independence that you see the next generation of guy Stacks Motown.
Speaker 2: He's not able to keep up with them because you know,
Speaker 2: he's an older generation. But that older generation of like
Speaker 2: you know, the dirty, grungy guys like Sam Phillips and
Speaker 2: those characters. They're all kind of similar, harassable personality types.
Speaker 2: And Sid's able to kind of navigate it because you know,
Speaker 2: he's a king of his own castle, as it were.
Speaker 3: Okay, what is the timeline both the order of the
Speaker 3: number of years he starts to make records in Dayton.
Speaker 3: How long after that does he build his own studio.
Speaker 3: How long after that does he buy his own pressing machines?
Speaker 2: Ooh, good question. Let me see. So forty three starts
Speaker 2: the business. Then he does the Dayton thing. In forty three,
Speaker 2: I think I believe they only do that once, maybe twice.
Speaker 2: From there, they start recording with Bucky Herzog, and they
Speaker 2: do that, I believe, for a couple months, maybe a year,
Speaker 2: and by I want to say forty five, forty four,
Speaker 2: forty five, I think he's moving into his own office.
Speaker 2: You know, there's and then the he starts having to
Speaker 2: press his own records because during the war, there's slack
Speaker 2: is being is being used for the war efforts, so
Speaker 2: they aren't able to press records at a cheap cost
Speaker 2: any longer, so he runs. He finds the cost to
Speaker 2: to be astronomical. They go up to Chicago to try
Speaker 2: to report the fact that there's bribery in this whole scheme,
Speaker 2: and finally coming back from Chicago, he decides that he's
Speaker 2: just going to make his own records. And that's happening
Speaker 2: between between forty Between forty four to forty seven is
Speaker 2: when he's kind of maturing into doing his own thing.
Speaker 3: Where does he get the money to buy these machines
Speaker 3: and where does he buy him? And how many does
Speaker 3: he buy? And how many records get he press on? Committally?
Speaker 2: Oh wow? So they first they first start out with
Speaker 2: one record press, and it's not a very good one.
Speaker 2: You know, they've got to find it from different broken parts.
Speaker 2: Like I said before, they are looking at the Society
Speaker 2: for the Blind and they're getting these specs for these parts.
Speaker 2: They're trying to find broken parts here and there, and
Speaker 2: they kind of frankenstein some together. And the first ones
Speaker 2: I mean, as I said, that's why the records they
Speaker 2: first do are terrible. They have no idea what they're doing,
Speaker 2: but they've gotten in deep enough that they're able to
Speaker 2: bring in some people who do know what they're doing
Speaker 2: and eventually help them put like a proper business together.
Speaker 2: But at first they had one press and then they
Speaker 2: eventually I've got a picture in the film where they
Speaker 2: have a full pressing facility, and I want to say
Speaker 2: something to the order if off the top of my head,
Speaker 2: I think six to eight presses is what I was
Speaker 2: able to see kind of their height. Maybe more, but
Speaker 2: I've only been able to see about six d eight presses.
Speaker 2: But you know, pressing records back in there, I mean
Speaker 2: it's like science, you know. In the research of this film,
Speaker 2: I went and I actually put a how to make
Speaker 2: a record film together that starts from the very beginning
Speaker 2: of the process of how you dip it in nickel caadium,
Speaker 2: and then how you did You did it with a nickel,
Speaker 2: then you dig in cadium, then you do You've got
Speaker 2: to deep, and you've got to make all these copies
Speaker 2: of a copy of a copy in different metals before
Speaker 2: you're actually able to make a metal stamper, and then
Speaker 2: you start stamping them out. It is like a twelve
Speaker 2: sep process. I mean, how they figured this out is amazing,
Speaker 2: but it's not the world's easiest process. And it takes
Speaker 2: a couple of years before they're able to make it happen.
Speaker 2: But Sid is able to figure it out. But the
Speaker 2: first couple of them are terrible. They're bad, They're not
Speaker 2: good at Okay.
Speaker 3: At the time, if you were an independent label, you
Speaker 3: used independent distributors were regional. But from what I can
Speaker 3: tell from your film, Sid didn't use them. He distributed
Speaker 3: the records himself. Correct, Is that true?
Speaker 2: Yep. They had offices all around the country. It's why
Speaker 2: you will find King records. A friend of mine sent
Speaker 2: me King Records from Iowa. I think it's I can't
Speaker 2: remember the number, but they had like twenty seven or
Speaker 2: something offices around the country.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: They also even had a studio in New York. Henry
Speaker 2: Glover was dispatched to New York City and a lot
Speaker 2: of the you know, Fever, they did a lot of
Speaker 2: the They recorded Fever in Cincinnati, but a lot of
Speaker 2: the prep work for Fever was done with Henry when
Speaker 2: he lived in New York City. They were they were
Speaker 2: a bigger, you know, right in America. It's hard for
Speaker 2: us to kind of think about everything so regionally, but
Speaker 2: America used to be a lot more regional. You know,
Speaker 2: you had beer that you could only get in your region,
Speaker 2: and you were very proud of it. You know, Guys
Speaker 2: from the South were all about the South. Guys from
Speaker 2: the Midwest, you were all about your region of where
Speaker 2: you came from. And businesses operated regionally and the ways
Speaker 2: that you worked to kind of national was was working
Speaker 2: through different relationships. But everything was very you know, even
Speaker 2: like wrestling, and we kind of take this for a
Speaker 2: but wrestling was was regional operations. You know, a lot
Speaker 2: of things in America were very regional based. That was
Speaker 2: the big game. So sid was able to expand outside
Speaker 2: of that was really impressive because it allowed him to
Speaker 2: kind of be in a place where the major players were.
Speaker 2: But he was largely a regional player who could extend
Speaker 2: into California, who could extend into the South, and he
Speaker 2: absorbed companies that kind of already had RESO. Again, as
Speaker 2: I said, Federal before was based in the South. Deluxe
Speaker 2: was also big. He had these companies who were based
Speaker 2: in Florida. That's how we picked up Hank Ballard. For example.
Speaker 2: You had artists there were that he get from the
Speaker 2: New York area, artists from different parts of the Midwest,
Speaker 2: and that's what really gave him the impetus to pick
Speaker 2: up different record labels because it gave him much more
Speaker 2: regional advantages. And that's what he was able to do
Speaker 2: to kind of plug all these networks together into one
Speaker 2: large network for himself for King Records.
Speaker 3: Did he know anything about music?
Speaker 2: Oh, my lord, that's a great question, uh, Philip Paul,
Speaker 2: who was one of the studio there was a lot
Speaker 2: of these studio drummers, Philip Paul, Henry Glover. A lot
Speaker 2: of the people talk about the fact that Sid was
Speaker 2: a drummer, you know, and he or a purported drummer,
Speaker 2: and he believed that he was a musician, and he
Speaker 2: believed he had the ear. A lot of people talk
Speaker 2: about the fact that he didn't really have the ear,
Speaker 2: but he knew record business and he had Henry Glover
Speaker 2: was kind of the guy that knew the music. So
Speaker 2: that's why that relation relationship between those two gentlemen was
Speaker 2: important because he needed somebody who knew the music. But
Speaker 2: Sid knew what sold and he had the business instincts
Speaker 2: to figure that out. Henry knew what was good and
Speaker 2: what people wanted, and where the market was and where
Speaker 2: it was going, and you see this with Henry because
Speaker 2: Henry Glover, you know, Levon helm and the band go
Speaker 2: on to work with him. Henry Glover ends up being
Speaker 2: one of the most important background characters in American rock
Speaker 2: and roll. But that was the guy you know when
Speaker 2: we look, you know, when you're looking for the hidden
Speaker 2: figure of the African American. We always talk about how
Speaker 2: African Americans created rock and roll and whether it's this
Speaker 2: or that. Henry Glover is really the African American. He's
Speaker 2: kind of the Lewis Latimer who was the assistant that
Speaker 2: worked with Edison. He's kind of like the similar type
Speaker 2: of hidden figure character in American music. He's the guy
Speaker 2: who takes kind of that generational jump from jump blues.
Speaker 2: The previous generation had the blues, the next generation's coming
Speaker 2: up with something a little grungier, a little dirtier. Henry's
Speaker 2: the one who kind of codifies the musical form, the
Speaker 2: hand claps, where the sax solo goes in the form.
Speaker 2: You know, it's very rock and roll. The style of
Speaker 2: music is very specific. You know, you've got your A section,
Speaker 2: you got your B section, then you go to that
Speaker 2: sax solo. You can do different things in that sax
Speaker 2: solo depend like if your vocalist sings too low of
Speaker 2: a key, you modulate, which is a trick that you
Speaker 2: see in that R. E. S P E C T
Speaker 2: with Aretha hit. That's a Henry Glover trick that still
Speaker 2: exists in music. There's a lot of things that Henry
Speaker 2: kind of did that like codified what ended up being
Speaker 2: the definition of the style of music of rock and roll,
Speaker 2: which is a difference from blues and jump blues and
Speaker 2: all these other styles. And he's able to codify it.
Speaker 2: And rock and roll is also and I'm sure you
Speaker 2: know this, Bob, isn't the guitar? A lot of people
Speaker 2: at like highlight when we see the first distorted guitar,
Speaker 2: which is with Rocket eighty eight. You know they're traveling
Speaker 2: and going into this record session and somebody busts the
Speaker 2: Gibson amp. I think it was a drum stand goes
Speaker 2: through it, and it's a to go into the recording
Speaker 2: session and it's a distorted amp. And because of that,
Speaker 2: people point that to be rock and roll, or people
Speaker 2: will say somebody like sister Rosetta Tharp is the start
Speaker 2: of rock and roll because she played the guitar well,
Speaker 2: ciner Rosetta Tharp is playing blues and the guitar doesn't
Speaker 2: make it, and a distorted guitar doesn't make it rock
Speaker 2: and roll. Interestingly enough, Henry Glover worked with sister Rosetta
Speaker 2: Tharp when she worked with Lucky Millinder. Lucky Millinder was
Speaker 2: the artist that King Records brought on, and that's what
Speaker 2: brought King Records into rock, into black music. But you
Speaker 2: have Lucky Millinder and his band are doing these interesting things,
Speaker 2: and from there, Henry Glover comes from that and says, Okay,
Speaker 2: I'm going to start taking all of these things that
Speaker 2: we worked with. These artists we worked with bull Muse Jackson,
Speaker 2: we worked and he starts doing these experiments with the
Speaker 2: Delmore Brothers. So Blue Stay Away for Me is one
Speaker 2: of the songs that's a contender for the first rock
Speaker 2: and roll song, as is Good rockin Tonight, which we
Speaker 2: say in the film is the first one, because you
Speaker 2: really see the full formal, you know, with Blue Stay
Speaker 2: Away from Me, we see Henry Glover takes a blue
Speaker 2: whose like Basseline, applies it into a country song and
Speaker 2: it's great, it's slamming, it sounds so good. You take
Speaker 2: him take that idea even further with Good Rocking Tonight.
Speaker 2: You see the original version and you see how he
Speaker 2: changes it up and all these details that he adds
Speaker 2: to it codifies the style of rock and roll. And
Speaker 2: from there you see Sun Records take it and then
Speaker 2: advertise it to kids, the emerging teenage market, and that
Speaker 2: explodes a rock and roll. But at every point in
Speaker 2: time and anything that you find to tie back to
Speaker 2: the early points of rock and roll, it really ties
Speaker 2: back to Henry Glover. And it's like, whether it's through
Speaker 2: Sister Rosetta Tharp and the work with Lucky Millinder, or
Speaker 2: whether it's going forward with American rock and roll with
Speaker 2: Levon Helm and the band and all the other actu
Speaker 2: that he works with. It's not Sid Nathan, but it's
Speaker 2: actually Henry Glover is the one who really starts like
Speaker 2: American music in this direction, and he's the ear that's
Speaker 2: said Nathan depends on to move the music forward.
Speaker 3: Okay, I wrote about your film and I started getting
Speaker 3: email from all these people linking me to YouTube and
Speaker 3: the speeches Sid made. Yeah, can you speak to that?
Speaker 2: Yeah. So we use those recordings in the film and
Speaker 2: they are some of my favorite recordings. Ever, Sid is hilarious,
Speaker 2: so he would come in. You know, it's a recording company.
Speaker 2: So like from time to time they grab a microphone
Speaker 2: and they recorded. So one of them, Sid goes to Europe,
Speaker 2: and Sid decides he comes back to Europe at the
Speaker 2: team meeting with all the producers and he's going to
Speaker 2: talk about his trip. So he talks about all the
Speaker 2: things that he sees, and I recommend people going and
Speaker 2: checking them out because it really shows Sid's personality. He
Speaker 2: talks about how how he thought he was cheap, but
Speaker 2: then he sees these like European people and some of
Speaker 2: them are even cheaper than he was. And he's coming
Speaker 2: up with all these jokes and talking about like all
Speaker 2: of the things that he's seeing and all the places
Speaker 2: that he went and different acts that he checked out
Speaker 2: and was considering signing, actually one of them being the
Speaker 2: Beatles that he did not sign on that trip. Funny enough,
Speaker 2: and then he has others where he's talking about so
Speaker 2: like they come back. He tells the story in one
Speaker 2: of these recordings about Wennoni Harris. We actually didn't put
Speaker 2: this in the film, but he so they are they
Speaker 2: have to find that he's trying to like have these
Speaker 2: marathon sessions because again they can't record. You know they're
Speaker 2: about to they know everybody's going to go on strike.
Speaker 2: He needs to pull in an artist. They find Wenoni Harris.
Speaker 2: He's performing somewhere in New York. So they go up
Speaker 2: there and they knock on the door in the hotel.
Speaker 2: Now Wenoni is having a great time. Sid describes the
Speaker 2: story as he goes in and they knock on the
Speaker 2: door and Winoni's in there with three other women and
Speaker 2: they're entertaining themselves. Sid interrupts this session to talk business.
Speaker 2: One of the women has a problem with this is
Speaker 2: what's going on. Wenoni kicks her out, So now he's
Speaker 2: with these two. He's now got Weinoni and these two ladies.
Speaker 2: And the point that Sid likes to recount to everyone
Speaker 2: is that they're coming in there and they have to
Speaker 2: do their negotiations for the business. And Menoni is there.
Speaker 2: He's shirtless and the only thing that he's wearing is
Speaker 2: his underwear with pink hearts on them. And he makes
Speaker 2: a big deal to be like, and olid were these
Speaker 2: pink on the head pink hearts on them? Can you
Speaker 2: believe it? And he reaches over to one of the
Speaker 2: producers and like one of the producers like yes, Sid,
Speaker 2: like because one of the guys was like no way,
Speaker 2: and like he's like tell him, tell him, and the
Speaker 2: guy's like, yes, this actually happened. He came in, we
Speaker 2: had a talk. They were definitely having a good time
Speaker 2: with these ladies. We had to work out the deal.
Speaker 2: We did the deal in his underwear. We get up,
Speaker 2: we leave, and he continues about his business that he
Speaker 2: was doing before we left, and that is how they
Speaker 2: signed Menony Harris, and he records us and he tells
Speaker 2: the story like right when they come back. So he
Speaker 2: has all these epic stories that they that they collect.
Speaker 2: There's all these other ones too, like sit in the session.
Speaker 2: You can hear Like saying there's an engineer who's talking
Speaker 2: back and forth between James Brown and Sid and you'll
Speaker 2: hear Sid say something like, mister Nathan would like you to,
Speaker 2: you know, sorry, if you guys can tighten it up
Speaker 2: a little bit or do this or something it and
Speaker 2: then you'll hear James be like, what what are you
Speaker 2: talking about? You want me to tighten up talk? And
Speaker 2: you see this back and forth with this engineer having
Speaker 2: to be the intermediary of these guys arguing. But yeah,
Speaker 2: he's got all these recording of his voice, and he's
Speaker 2: got this crazy vote atal like this, and he's big,
Speaker 2: and it's like he's braggadocious and he's constantly yelling and
Speaker 2: so he's got a cigar in his mouth and he's hilarious.
Speaker 2: But if anybody ever gets a chance, and if you've
Speaker 2: got time to kill, go listen to these recordings. He's
Speaker 2: got him on a disc. They're on a disc set,
Speaker 2: a compilation disc set that you can find on Amazon.
Speaker 2: It's called The Complete King and it's got all those
Speaker 2: recordings on them.
Speaker 3: Okay, you go through the arc of James Brown's career
Speaker 3: in Tenury King. James Brown an American icon. But he
Speaker 3: did spend time in jail. Was that an anomaly? Was
Speaker 3: that driving while black? Or was James hothead a little
Speaker 3: crazy himself?
Speaker 2: Ooh, that's a really great question. So the first thing
Speaker 2: that I think that you have to start with in
Speaker 2: understanding James Brown is that he is a product of
Speaker 2: his environment. And his environment was he was born, he
Speaker 2: was raising a whorehouse. You know, his mother abandoned him
Speaker 2: at a very early age and he went to live
Speaker 2: with an aunt and the aunt was, you know, a
Speaker 2: tough environment and he had to shine shoes, you know,
Speaker 2: like he had to earn his keep while living in
Speaker 2: this environment from a very young age, so he had
Speaker 2: a shine shoe. He learned how to be an entertainer,
Speaker 2: He learned how to be a hustler, he learned how
Speaker 2: to work hard. But it creates a personality type that
Speaker 2: is that is very, very troubled and has a very
Speaker 2: different way of looking at the world. You know, we
Speaker 2: see this. You know, Richard Pryor also came from similar backgrounds.
Speaker 2: You know, he was raised in a whorehouse and you know,
Speaker 2: it leaves a traumatic scar on them that you see
Speaker 2: through their artistry. There brilliant artists who learn how to
Speaker 2: perform at a very you know, it's intrinsic to them,
Speaker 2: but they have a lot of issues and very early
Speaker 2: you know, he had issues with the law very early on.
Speaker 2: And Bobby Byrd's family, you know, James is he's a
Speaker 2: tremendous athlete. He's he's a golden glove boxer, which I
Speaker 2: believe I was able to find proof that he was
Speaker 2: a golden but he definitely was a boxer, but he
Speaker 2: was in jail. He played baseball, and the church had
Speaker 2: an arrangement with kind of like trying to help these
Speaker 2: young people and the Bird family. Bobby Bird meets James
Speaker 2: Brown this way, and they're able to kind of get
Speaker 2: him to turn his energy towards music and they're able
Speaker 2: to sponsor him and get him out of prison. So
Speaker 2: James really starts, you know, music gives him this outlet
Speaker 2: and he really builds this discipline into this band Bobby Bird,
Speaker 2: and Bobby Bird's family gives him this like this spiritual
Speaker 2: discipline on top of like a real family. It's like
Speaker 2: the first time he has this experience with a real
Speaker 2: black family.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: At a point, you know, James Mary's Bobby Bird's sister,
Speaker 2: which ends up being one of the reasons their relationship
Speaker 2: falls apart, one of many later, but you know, James's
Speaker 2: this becomes their family. You know, the Birds really help
Speaker 2: him out and give him direction, and from there James
Speaker 2: is able to kind of hit his hit from there.
Speaker 2: You know, James had a strong similar to Miles Davis,
Speaker 2: had a strong anti drug policy, so his guys didn't
Speaker 2: didn't do drugs, which is one of the issues that
Speaker 2: he had with Bootsy. I don't know if you've heard
Speaker 2: the story before. So one of the gigs when Bootsy's
Speaker 2: banned comes on board, they are out messing with some
Speaker 2: liquid LSD on a gig and James comes outside and
Speaker 2: he's like, what's that orange drink you guys messing with?
Speaker 2: And they not wanting to explain this. Knowing James's policy,
Speaker 2: they decide to have him share some of this drink
Speaker 2: and James Brown goes out on the gig and you
Speaker 2: know the moment when the acid hits in the middle
Speaker 2: of the performance, and yeah, so James performs. The audience
Speaker 2: is none the wiser because James Brown Hell or high
Speaker 2: Water will perform and put on a good show, but
Speaker 2: comes off the bandstand and soon after that fires Bootsy
Speaker 2: and his boys because he had a strong anti drug policy,
Speaker 2: which starts to change in the eighties after James's sun
Speaker 2: passes away, that's when we start seeing the change. But
Speaker 2: you know, like just like Miles, you know, like he
Speaker 2: has a traumatic thing later which changed his viewpoint on drugs.
Speaker 2: But during the height of it, you know, he had
Speaker 2: a real strong policing of his band, which, yeah, which
Speaker 2: you see again after the Bird family gets involved in
Speaker 2: He ass issues early with the law. He really kind
Speaker 2: of turns around. He turns his life around.
Speaker 3: Okay, you tell the story of Sid not wanting to
Speaker 3: record James's live at the Apollo. James records it on
Speaker 3: his own mode. Sid puts it out. It's gigantic hit.
Speaker 3: Did James continue to be resentful about Sid's disbelief, not
Speaker 3: believing in him, not paying that money? How did James
Speaker 3: feel about Sid after that?
Speaker 2: Oh that's hilarious. So yeah, So they put out Please
Speaker 2: Please Please, and it's a medium hit. He the first
Speaker 2: thing that happens is that please Please Please. If the
Speaker 2: session is happening, Sid gets on the call and immediately
Speaker 2: fires Bats says, what is this shit? What have you
Speaker 2: brought me? All he says is please Please Please? One word?
Speaker 2: That's not a song. You are a fool. So Ralph
Speaker 2: Bass says, hey, man, I know this is going to
Speaker 2: be a hit. This was a hit when they recorded
Speaker 2: their first demo. How about we just release in Atlanta,
Speaker 2: Georgia and we see what happens. So there's a month
Speaker 2: long process where Hank Ballard is trying to convince Sid
Speaker 2: to release it. Otis Williams from Otis Williams in the
Speaker 2: Charms here is trying to convince Sid to release it.
Speaker 2: Sid's not having it, and finally they're able to convince him,
Speaker 2: and Ralph Bass says, releasing Atlanta, Let's see what happens,
Speaker 2: and then Sid says, you know what I'm gonna do.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna release it nationwide to show everybody what a
Speaker 2: fool you are. So he releases it nationwide and it
Speaker 2: becomes a medium hit. It's huge in Atlanta, it's a
Speaker 2: hit in It's a hit in these different markets. It's
Speaker 2: hitting New Orleans. I read through I went through every
Speaker 2: single page of Billboard magazine from nineteen forty to nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy two to look at all the different ads, look
Speaker 2: at all the different stories. So I just kind of
Speaker 2: went page for page on everything, and you start seeing
Speaker 2: there's this section in Billboard where you would see like
Speaker 2: the different markets where things would hit, and please, please please,
Speaker 2: there's a huge it's a pretty good hit for several
Speaker 2: weeks in the black market, especially and especially in the South,
Speaker 2: so it's enough to convince Sid, Okay, there's something here.
Speaker 2: But then they have about a six year period where
Speaker 2: Sid records, a whole bunch of stuff, and they all flop,
Speaker 2: every one of them. In fact, they put all of
Speaker 2: them onto a forty five and I've listened to them.
Speaker 2: I collect I now collect records to go to this
Speaker 2: and they're terrible. Every one of those songs are bad.
Speaker 2: But then so Sid's getting ready to drop drop James
Speaker 2: Brown from his label, and James is able to convince
Speaker 2: him to give him one last try. If you give
Speaker 2: me one last try, I'll pay for it myself. How
Speaker 2: about that. So Nathan's like, all right, if you pay
Speaker 2: for it yourself, you pay for the studio time. Fine. So,
Speaker 2: like you know, James works out the deal. This is
Speaker 2: one of the reasons why he believes he's done with
Speaker 2: his record label, with his record requirements after because he
Speaker 2: renegotiates and they come out with try Me, and try
Speaker 2: Me becomes a hit, and that's really the first one.
Speaker 2: That really is when James Brown starts to become James Brown.
Speaker 2: But he's got to convince Sid to get on board.
Speaker 2: And because he has to kind of negotiate his way
Speaker 2: through it, James believes that he has more freedom than
Speaker 2: he otherwise would because he came into the deal with
Speaker 2: his own money, so is James is constantly looking for
Speaker 2: opportunities where he can put his own seed money to
Speaker 2: start projects. And every single time that there would be
Speaker 2: any kind of issue, James would just kind of saying,
Speaker 2: how about if I put my own money into it.
Speaker 2: So finally, you know, Sid gets Winn into this, They
Speaker 2: work it into kind of the negotiations, and James slowly
Speaker 2: ekes out by basically you know, Sid not believing him
Speaker 2: in him or things falling apart. He negotiates a way
Speaker 2: to get more power in his record contracts and his business.
Speaker 2: And this is why we see James Brown go from
Speaker 2: the hardest working men in show business to the godfather
Speaker 2: of soul, because you don't get there without Ben Bart,
Speaker 2: who with these two principal actually these three principal Jewish men,
Speaker 2: Jack Pearl who was his lawyer, Ben Bart who ran
Speaker 2: Universal Attractions, his booking company, and then Sid Nathan who
Speaker 2: ran the record label. Because these men who were connected
Speaker 2: through their business connections and their community connections in the
Speaker 2: Jewish community, are able to kind of give James Brown
Speaker 2: the framework to kind of paint his own business, and
Speaker 2: that empowers James to get to the next level.
Speaker 3: Okay, so how does it end for King Records?
Speaker 2: So, as I mentioned, you know, Sid's got all these
Speaker 2: health issues, he's got heart, he's got bad art, he's
Speaker 2: got bad eyes and excuse me, everything to go along
Speaker 2: with that, and his health really starts to fade in
Speaker 2: the late sixties. But also in the sixties they start
Speaker 2: running into a payola scandal. And these are two things.
Speaker 2: So the first thing is Henry Glover, who's working in
Speaker 2: the company, runs he wants to expand to a multi
Speaker 2: track recording setup. So I think they were the two
Speaker 2: track and they want to move to a four track.
Speaker 2: At this point in time, Sid isn't convinced, and Sid
Speaker 2: relies on one of the other business people who doesn't
Speaker 2: have a music background to make the decision, and basically
Speaker 2: he doesn't side with Henry. He basically sides with this
Speaker 2: other music executive who was associated with Ging Records, and
Speaker 2: they don't follow that. So Henry feels that they're a
Speaker 2: little shorthanded and not being able to make these follow
Speaker 2: the new sound of the sixties in essence. And then
Speaker 2: on top of that, Sid also kind of threw Henry
Speaker 2: under the bus for the payola stuff, you Knowola, the
Speaker 2: Payola scandal starts happening, and King isn't really what's the
Speaker 2: word King is a part of it. King's affected by this,
Speaker 2: and Henry kind of kind of gets thrown under the bus.
Speaker 2: He feels kind of gets thrown under the bus because
Speaker 2: of this. So Henry leaves the company and so the
Speaker 2: artistic direction in the company isn't as progressive. They're not
Speaker 2: able to jump into the sixties. You know, Little Willie
Speaker 2: John starts having problems, you know, he starts having drinking problems,
Speaker 2: and the director's cut of the film goes through this.
Speaker 2: The PBS we had to pull some of this out,
Speaker 2: but you start seeing problems in the sixties with Little
Speaker 2: Willie John. So he was going to be there for
Speaker 2: Frank Sinatra. Before Little Willie John goes to jail, he
Speaker 2: records this record with Capital that's amazing. I think it's
Speaker 2: called nineteen sixty eight or something like that. Highly check
Speaker 2: people checking it out. But you see the direction that
Speaker 2: King would have eventually gone with him, and it's amazing,
Speaker 2: luscious strings and beautiful all that type of stuff. You know,
Speaker 2: they couldn't go into that space. They didn't have enough tracks.
Speaker 2: Henry wasn't there to kind of push that any longer,
Speaker 2: and they kind of become kind of the old man's label,
Speaker 2: and they don't really recover well from Paolan. They limped
Speaker 2: their way through the sixties, but James Brown is able
Speaker 2: to keep them going.
Speaker 3: So in the late.
Speaker 2: Sixties Sid starts getting sicker and sicker and sicker, and
Speaker 2: ultimately he passes away. And when he passes away, there
Speaker 2: wasn't anybody left to run the company. There wasn't anybody
Speaker 2: who's trained. You know, seymour Stein at this point in
Speaker 2: time is in New York. He is in the last
Speaker 2: several years of his life. He allowed Sid allows Seymour
Speaker 2: to set up shop in the New York studios. So
Speaker 2: Seymour is actually getting because he has free rent, is
Speaker 2: able now to start his career. So Seymour would have
Speaker 2: actually been the perfect person to pass that on to.
Speaker 2: But there were some of these other people that were
Speaker 2: working around King Records that didn't really know what they
Speaker 2: were doing. And Sid kind of trusted a lot of
Speaker 2: these figures who didn't really understand the music business, but
Speaker 2: they had a lot of bravado and they got into
Speaker 2: his face about stuff. So they kind of had they
Speaker 2: you know, they kind of spoke to the to the
Speaker 2: guy's guy type of attitude that Sid had. So Sid
Speaker 2: ended up trusting some of these people that didn't know
Speaker 2: what they were doing, and they ran the business into
Speaker 2: the ground, and very quickly they merged with They start
Speaker 2: looking for options to get out of the business. Basically,
Speaker 2: so Henry Glover comes back to kind of help the
Speaker 2: business shut down. In essence, they sell to start a
Speaker 2: Records in Nashville, which is a record label that is
Speaker 2: basically it's kind of the same record label, but in
Speaker 2: Nashville they start the same way. They have the same Actually,
Speaker 2: a lot of the former King artists moved the Country artists,
Speaker 2: they moved to Star Day, So there's a relationship between
Speaker 2: the two labels, and the merger was kind of a
Speaker 2: natural of those guys, so King and start a merge.
Speaker 2: James Brown stays on through this. James Brown now has
Speaker 2: full control because in sixty eight Sid dies, as does
Speaker 2: Ben Bart at this time, so James is now free.
Speaker 2: He now is running he's booking side of his business.
Speaker 2: He's running the record label side of this business. Because
Speaker 2: nobody can stop James any longer. So this is like
Speaker 2: James's best year. This is when you start getting say loud,
Speaker 2: I'm Black and I'm proud, you start getting all these
Speaker 2: things in like the late sixties early seventies that are
Speaker 2: really progressive. James Brown super bad, all these tunes and
Speaker 2: a lot of these records. Yeah, they start the business.
Speaker 2: So the business basically figures out that they need to
Speaker 2: sell James Brown's track because he's the only thing that
Speaker 2: has value. So they sell it to Polodor and it's
Speaker 2: a multimillion dollar deal. James goes to Polydor within two years.
Speaker 2: He hates Polydor. The Germans want to make everything the same.
Speaker 2: They don't want they want everything process driven. They don't
Speaker 2: let James do whatever he wants. You know, he no
Speaker 2: longer has that freedom of king. King then sells to Starday.
Speaker 2: They sell everything in Cincinnati. They take whatever they find
Speaker 2: valuable in the process, they take down to Nashville. Some
Speaker 2: of the pressing pressing stuff goes down to Nashville. Starday
Speaker 2: goes out of business the following year because they again
Speaker 2: were also in a similar situation and they were also
Speaker 2: listening to the same idiot that Sid was listening to.
Speaker 2: So that business falls apart and the business basically gets split.
Speaker 2: They sell the publishing aspect of the business to liber
Speaker 2: and Stoler and that starts their licensing business. Liber and Stoller.
Speaker 2: Their business goes on to be one of the biggest
Speaker 2: licensing companies, which still exists today. And then they sold
Speaker 2: the mechanical rights to a company called Gusto, which is
Speaker 2: also still in Nashville. And yeah, so a lot of
Speaker 2: the mechanical rights go in one direction and the publishing
Speaker 2: rights go in another. They get split up. They basically
Speaker 2: sell the business. You have parts of the business still exist.
Speaker 2: So for example, the lathe that is in Jack White's
Speaker 2: Blue Room Jack White has got inducted into the National
Speaker 2: Hall of Fame, big shout out. The lathe that is
Speaker 2: in the Third Man Records room is the lathe from
Speaker 2: King Records. They were able to get the same laid
Speaker 2: the King Records. It went to Starday and that's how
Speaker 2: it got to Nashville, the Oregon. I traced down some
Speaker 2: of the parts. I was able to find some of it.
Speaker 2: There are some of the record presses. There's a couple
Speaker 2: of them that ended up in Jamaica, which is super interesting.
Speaker 2: A lot of them covered like early SKA, so like
Speaker 2: the King Records, like presses ended up going on to
Speaker 2: press life early Jamaican music. But you see the parts
Speaker 2: of King like it gets split up and it ends
Speaker 2: up actually continuing to exist in modern American music. It
Speaker 2: continues to be the it's parts ends up being fueling
Speaker 2: different parts of music. You start sing the birth of
Speaker 2: hip hop when people start scratching their records. The next
Speaker 2: generation starts doing that, and you kind of just see
Speaker 2: its influence continue to kind of continue. But the business
Speaker 2: itself basically comes to an end soon after Sid's death.
Speaker 3: So how'd you learn all this?
Speaker 2: Cud? I am an obsessive person, so I so this
Speaker 2: isn't the first record label where I've dug into listening
Speaker 2: to everything and learning all about their history. I've got
Speaker 2: a similar relationship with ECM Records, for example. I'm a drummer,
Speaker 2: so I've listened to every Jack Djionnette record, for example,
Speaker 2: every Miles Davis record, every Tony Williams record, every Elvin Jones,
Speaker 2: like every one of these guys. I've gone into a
Speaker 2: deep dive of like jazz labels, where I listened to
Speaker 2: everything and I do obsessions about every record and all
Speaker 2: the things that they that were done with these records
Speaker 2: and record labels, so it was kind of a natural
Speaker 2: thing for me. I had a great teacher. I studied
Speaker 2: with a guy who teaches at Berkeley School of Music,
Speaker 2: Ian Frohman, and he got me really into this idea.
Speaker 2: And the jazz saxophonist who I worked with, J D. Allen,
Speaker 2: they got me really into this idea of digging into
Speaker 2: records and digging into learning everything, like you learn about
Speaker 2: what they had for breakfast before they made this record.
Speaker 2: So I think very early in my twenties, the first
Speaker 2: one was kind of Blue that I got super into,
Speaker 2: and from that that led me into other records and
Speaker 2: more and more records and more like eras of music.
Speaker 2: So from everything from the roots and Biangelo and questlove
Speaker 2: in like the early two thousands to like eighties funk
Speaker 2: in like Dayton, Ohio, to Cincinnati King records to ECM
Speaker 2: records in Germany and jazz records. All of these things
Speaker 2: are things that drive me and fuel me to make
Speaker 2: me a better music producer, to make me a better musician.
Speaker 2: That it is kind of where I derived, you know,
Speaker 2: I started this record, I started this film to learn
Speaker 2: how to be a better music producer, how to make
Speaker 2: better records, and also how to advise people on making
Speaker 2: better records. And from the process of doing this, I
Speaker 2: ended up having all this information about that fit into
Speaker 2: a documentary, but the real purpose was to be a
Speaker 2: better music maker, better music creator. And I've been fortunate
Speaker 2: enough to work with some of the best artists and
Speaker 2: musicians in the world in like either consulting capacity or
Speaker 2: in a playing capacity. But you know, hopefully I'm hoping
Speaker 2: to be able to tell more of these stories about
Speaker 2: all of this information about music that I've learned. I
Speaker 2: have lots and lots like you can tell, I have
Speaker 2: a lot of information about very obscure record labels and
Speaker 2: musicians that I'd like to share and find ways to
Speaker 2: share those stories, especially more modern stories and black Black
Speaker 2: American music, and then also different expirations as a musician myself.
Speaker 2: You know, I'm hoping be able to take this film
Speaker 2: and a lot of these like information I have from
Speaker 2: this be able to apply it to records and all
Speaker 2: the way from how you you know, I learned all
Speaker 2: about the processes that they used the King Records, from
Speaker 2: micing techniques to using soul feedge to help vocalists come
Speaker 2: up with different parts and harmony parts. Henry Glover, there's
Speaker 2: all these recordings of him talking about all of this
Speaker 2: stuff that they did and how they made records back
Speaker 2: in the day, man, and all that stuff still applies.
Speaker 2: You know, these old school guys in the fifties the
Speaker 2: fifties really figured out American music, and the way they
Speaker 2: do things inspires the way I do. So my record,
Speaker 2: my record studio, everything is pre nineteen eighty, like all
Speaker 2: my instruments, all my microphones. I do everything something there's
Speaker 2: I can do tape. Everything I do is kind of
Speaker 2: like the old school vintage sounds and vintage music. Organic music,
Speaker 2: I like to call it, because you can't ai that stuff.
Speaker 2: You know, it sounds different, it feels different, it's funky,
Speaker 2: it's grittier, it's dirty. You know, it's it has mistakes
Speaker 2: in it that are beautiful. And that's kind of the
Speaker 2: stuff that I learned of how how this music was made.
Speaker 2: You know, how American soul music was. It was gritty,
Speaker 2: it was nasty, it was it was beautiful and soul
Speaker 2: driven and not perfect. And that's my vibe. Man. I'm
Speaker 2: super into like finding that magic and being able to
Speaker 2: make that magic relevant today, whether it's a storytelling or
Speaker 2: in music.
Speaker 3: Making, specifically when it comes to Sid Nathan and King,
Speaker 3: was all this information hiding and plain sight? Where did
Speaker 3: you have to dig and make a lot of connections,
Speaker 3: do a lot of interviews to assemble all the information
Speaker 3: not only in the film but in your head.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, I mean I had to do a lot
Speaker 2: of digging. I had to do a lot of interviews.
Speaker 2: It took a lot of research because, you know, like
Speaker 2: every record label, who did what and what did and
Speaker 2: when something happened is a little fuzzy because some of
Speaker 2: these people's memories are faded, some of the people are gone,
Speaker 2: some people take more credit than they're deserved. All kinds
Speaker 2: of issues come, and so there had to be a
Speaker 2: lot of you know, especially with like Hank Ballard is
Speaker 2: a you know, the recording of the Twist is super
Speaker 2: controversial with a lot of the people. There's a lot
Speaker 2: of apocryphal stories. A lot of people talk about how Hank.
Speaker 2: The stories I kept hearing was Hank Ballard had a
Speaker 2: wild night with a woman or partying the night before
Speaker 2: he was supposed to go on American Bandstand and because
Speaker 2: of that he missed his flight and couldn't get to
Speaker 2: Philadelphia to tape the show and missed his opportunity to
Speaker 2: do the twist. And this has kind of been the
Speaker 2: lore a lot of people have been telling the story
Speaker 2: for years. I you know, being on PBS, you have
Speaker 2: to fact check the hell out of everything. So we
Speaker 2: had to, like I had to go and like figure out, Okay,
Speaker 2: so what happened? I need to find proof of this,
Speaker 2: And what I actually ended up finding was interviews of
Speaker 2: Hank Ballard telling a different story, and everything that I
Speaker 2: was able to find out in the history backed up
Speaker 2: Hank's version of the events. So one in interviews I
Speaker 2: was able to find out with Seymour Stein, for example,
Speaker 2: that Hank Ballard was Sid's favorite artist. He showed up
Speaker 2: on time, he did everything perfect, he never was late
Speaker 2: to gigs, he never had issues with the drinking, he
Speaker 2: never had issues with he partied, He did all that stuff,
Speaker 2: all the women and all that stuff. But he was
Speaker 2: really like on his business. That's why Sid loved him.
Speaker 2: He always he was a guarantee and Seymour toured with him,
Speaker 2: you know, he was one of the artists that was
Speaker 2: his tour manager for the label. So Seymour got to
Speaker 2: really know Hank really well and like loved him so
Speaker 2: one it would be strange that Hank would have missed
Speaker 2: a flight to a gig since he wasn't known to
Speaker 2: you know, literal Willie John was known for that all
Speaker 2: the time, but Hank wasn't. Then the other thing was
Speaker 2: Hank actually performs on Bandstand. He performs on Bandstand in
Speaker 2: June of that year, and what the deal is that
Speaker 2: Dick Clark decides he hears the song in Baltimore because
Speaker 2: Dick Clark used to control. Dick Clark was kind of
Speaker 2: a mob figure. He controlled all the radio stations in
Speaker 2: Baltimore and Philly and a lot of the East Coast.
Speaker 2: And because he hears like Hank's versions becoming a hit,
Speaker 2: he doesn't really want to use Hank Ballard to make
Speaker 2: a global hit out of it because of the songs
Speaker 2: Hank had done. These anti had a baby songs which
Speaker 2: are outrey and they were kind of singing to be
Speaker 2: dirty and it was kind of against that squeaky clean
Speaker 2: image that Dick had back in the day. So they
Speaker 2: make it back. So he goes to sit and says,
Speaker 2: how about this, You basically don't charge me for publishing.
Speaker 2: I can't tell whether it was either for free or
Speaker 2: reduced rate. I assume it would be don't charge me
Speaker 2: for publishing for X number of years on this song,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna go re record it and release it. You
Speaker 2: come on my show and I'll give you a hit.
Speaker 2: I'll make you a hit out of something else. So
Speaker 2: he comes on and he does finger Popping Time in June,
Speaker 2: and Finger Popping Time becomes a huge hit Frank Ballard.
Speaker 2: In August of that year, they release the Twist. Chubby
Speaker 2: Tucker's version of the Twist comes out. So the reason why,
Speaker 2: like the apocryphal story doesn't work is because they would
Speaker 2: have needed time to record it. You couldn't just on
Speaker 2: a drop of a dime bring to checker in, record
Speaker 2: him and release it to the next day. That did.
Speaker 2: It worked that way for King, but it did not
Speaker 2: work that way for any other record label. It took
Speaker 2: months and months of planning, and it took a lot
Speaker 2: of prep to get that stuff moving and getting an emotion.
Speaker 2: So Dick Clark had planned in advance to make this
Speaker 2: a hit. He had planned to give Sid another hit
Speaker 2: with finger pop in Time, and he took all the
Speaker 2: royalties and all the money from the twist. And you
Speaker 2: see he plays the twist I think five times that
Speaker 2: year on bandstand because anything that played on Bandstand was
Speaker 2: going to be a hit. Everybody knew it. Dick Clark
Speaker 2: knew it. Sid knew it. So Sid knew that if
Speaker 2: I give you a deal for a couple of years
Speaker 2: on this, on this publishing for this tune, you make
Speaker 2: a hit about something else, I'll take the money and run.
Speaker 2: And that's the deal that they made. And actually, Hank,
Speaker 2: Hank Baler was able to make three hits that year.
Speaker 2: So he had the Twist, he had finger Pop in time,
Speaker 2: then he had Let's Go, Let's Go, Let's Go. Because
Speaker 2: he was of the twist, he was able to make
Speaker 2: three hits. And then he also was able to make
Speaker 2: more hits by the answer songs. He had an answer song,
Speaker 2: you know, Chubby Chucker, they did the Peppermint Twist as
Speaker 2: their answer song. But Henry also I'm Sorry, Hank Ballard
Speaker 2: also released his own answer songs as well. So they
Speaker 2: were able to get a whole bunch of money out
Speaker 2: of this, because that's how the business worked back then.
Speaker 2: But that's the type of stuff that I had to
Speaker 2: go through and tease out, and it made a lot
Speaker 2: of the old timers really uncomfortable because I was going
Speaker 2: to find out who played on what you Know. The
Speaker 2: drummer Phil Paul believes that he played on the Twist.
Speaker 2: It turns out that he played on the answer song
Speaker 2: the backup You Know Hank Hank Ballard when he wrote
Speaker 2: the song the Twist, the original version he wrote with
Speaker 2: his band in Florida, and he gets into a fight
Speaker 2: with these guys and he decides that he wants to
Speaker 2: take this song and make it his. So he rewrites
Speaker 2: the song and records it at King, but he doesn't
Speaker 2: have the Midnighters anymore. The Midnighters breaks up after this.
Speaker 2: He doesn't have his Midnighters, so he needs to use
Speaker 2: another band to come and sing, so he says Otis
Speaker 2: Williams and the Charms has his backups band on this.
Speaker 2: They get a guy named Sunny Thompson from Chicago who's
Speaker 2: in town recording a King. He's the backing band for
Speaker 2: the Twist because they're already in the studio recording and
Speaker 2: so they play that. They end up being the backing band.
Speaker 2: He has backing vocalists. Because all these people are around
Speaker 2: King and they record the twist. He rewrote the song
Speaker 2: one of the things I was able to discover, and
Speaker 2: we didn't put it in the film. We didn't have
Speaker 2: space for it. But you know, Hank Ballard, his father
Speaker 2: and his mother had a really tumultuous relationship. So his father,
Speaker 2: the story goes that they had a fight when Hank
Speaker 2: was very young. The mother goes running out of the house,
Speaker 2: father grabs his shotgun and chases her. Mother does not
Speaker 2: come back. There is no clarity on what happens and
Speaker 2: why she doesn't come back, but doesn't come back, and
Speaker 2: he now has his father. They're in Detroit, who is
Speaker 2: a single father. A couple of years later, he has
Speaker 2: a heart attacking father. Hank has to go live with
Speaker 2: family in Alabama, which he hates, by the way, But
Speaker 2: in that he has a lyric that he uses in
Speaker 2: the twist where it's my daddy is sleeping and Mama
Speaker 2: ain't around. So you'll hear that in the film where
Speaker 2: we do our transition point where you hear Hank Ballard
Speaker 2: say it, and then you hear you hear sorry Chubby
Speaker 2: Chucker sing that line, and then you hear Hank Ballard
Speaker 2: sing that line. And you hear there's an authenticity shift
Speaker 2: there because Hank Ballard is talking about his story. He's
Speaker 2: talking about something in that song that was great pain
Speaker 2: for him, which is really interesting. You know, it's something
Speaker 2: that's of great pain, but it's something that brings the
Speaker 2: American people great joy in the song. And there are
Speaker 2: a lot of songs that have this history. We talked
Speaker 2: to Vince gil about this actually, because you know, Vince
Speaker 2: wrote that song about his brother go Rest You on
Speaker 2: the Mountain. I'm messing the butcher during the title. But
Speaker 2: you know, you have a lot of these moments where
Speaker 2: artists write about the most personal, painful moments in their life,
Speaker 2: and it turns out it translates very powerfully in music.
Speaker 2: And that's one of the secret sauces of the twist
Speaker 2: that we try to find ways to kind of point
Speaker 2: that we learn in the history that that song is
Speaker 2: like really powerfully his. It's his story that he infuses
Speaker 2: into this song, and that's one of the things that
Speaker 2: makes it powerful. And that's one of the differences you
Speaker 2: hear in Hank's version versus Chubby's version. But this is
Speaker 2: the type of stuff that we had to dig deep
Speaker 2: into and I can tell you about things we didn't
Speaker 2: even put in the film all the way. I mean,
Speaker 2: things that you would be surprised to learn about different
Speaker 2: recordings and different songs. But we had to go deep
Speaker 2: that level into being able to get to the bottom
Speaker 2: of every fact, every point because PBS is really really
Speaker 2: serious about fact and truth, which is what makes them
Speaker 2: really makes the opportunity really powerful and makes working with
Speaker 2: somebody like PBS really amazing.
Speaker 3: So what's next for you?
Speaker 2: The first thing I'm doing is hanging out with my kids.
Speaker 2: For the last nine years, I haven't really spent a
Speaker 2: lot of time. I've three kids, a twenty five year
Speaker 2: old and all my twenty five year old sister who
Speaker 2: I raise, and I've got eighteen year old twins. They're
Speaker 2: freshmen in college, so they're ones in jazz studies and
Speaker 2: the other one is in engineering, so I am helping
Speaker 2: them guide through that process. Then I am exploring several
Speaker 2: stories that have kind of come out of this King
Speaker 2: record stuff. I'm working on trying to find different documentary
Speaker 2: stories in music to pursue. You know, this film for
Speaker 2: me was really talking about diversity, you know when we started.
Speaker 2: When I started this film in twenty sixteen. It was
Speaker 2: during our current president's first first campaign, first election campaign,
Speaker 2: and I really we found that there was like very
Speaker 2: divisive language around diversity, and I wanted to find something
Speaker 2: that spoke to that, to really show that we didn't
Speaker 2: come about diversity because America is a nice, jolly place
Speaker 2: and we're all friends and we all do the right thing.
Speaker 2: We came to diversity because of business, and that diversity
Speaker 2: opened up more business. It was, you know, it's very
Speaker 2: quintessential American that it's a business, business driven diversity. You know,
Speaker 2: it was a business driven decision that led us here
Speaker 2: as a society, and I wanted to show that I
Speaker 2: wanted to kind of bring some complexity to that conversation,
Speaker 2: and music is a perfect place to do that. You
Speaker 2: can hear the diversity and the content that's created, and
Speaker 2: you can also see the business effect that it had
Speaker 2: through sales and all kinds of things, through impact. You
Speaker 2: can see the data and here the effect. So that's
Speaker 2: for me, was really powerful to what I wanted. And
Speaker 2: I'm looking for different there's different stories that I've definitely
Speaker 2: I've been developing, but I'm looking for something that speaks
Speaker 2: to the power of music and the effects that it's
Speaker 2: had on us as a culture. I'm looking for ways
Speaker 2: to have deeper conversations about things that we take for granted.
Speaker 2: You know, King Records is just a rock and roll
Speaker 2: and all these conversations are is just music to some people,
Speaker 2: but it really wasn't. It was much more than that,
Speaker 2: and there were more lessons that were learned in this
Speaker 2: process that we've forgotten. We've forgotten about some of the labels,
Speaker 2: but we've also forgotten some of the lessons we learned
Speaker 2: in that process. So a lot of the things I'm
Speaker 2: wanting to explore are reminding us of the things that
Speaker 2: we've forgotten. Whether it's the way we made music, which
Speaker 2: I think right now is really important. I'm really interested
Speaker 2: in exploring the process of making music and how we
Speaker 2: can I'm hoping to inspire people to go back to
Speaker 2: making records on tape, to go back to pressing records,
Speaker 2: you know, all the information is there, or at least
Speaker 2: taking some of that process. This is something that I'm
Speaker 2: hoping musicians can kind of take away, and I'm looking
Speaker 2: for ways to kind of find stories to highlight that
Speaker 2: I'll also able to kind of able to show the
Speaker 2: cultural significance of these things and how they're applicable. Music
Speaker 2: business has not changed since the nineteen forties. It's shocking,
Speaker 2: you know, you would think that it has. But we're
Speaker 2: back to releasing singles just like they were releasing like
Speaker 2: singles back a King. You know, they released two sides.
Speaker 2: It's a song in another song, and that's the type
Speaker 2: of stuff that King. This type of stuff King Records
Speaker 2: was doing. The business that they were doing is the
Speaker 2: same business that we're doing today. And if we're able
Speaker 2: to get if we're able to continue making music through
Speaker 2: this AI revolution, and we want to continue making organic
Speaker 2: revolution organic music, rather, we're going to need to find
Speaker 2: We're going to need people who are going to highlight
Speaker 2: these stories, who are going to show the process and
Speaker 2: show the effect of how these things were made organically
Speaker 2: and the importance of that. And I think those are
Speaker 2: the things that will allow us to create new sounds,
Speaker 2: create new music, because AI can only recreate, It doesn't
Speaker 2: have the ability of being able to create new And
Speaker 2: I'm hoping that by digging into history and by showing
Speaker 2: all of these things, here is how we created this stuff,
Speaker 2: Here's how we arrived here, I'm hoping that other musicians
Speaker 2: like myself can be inspired to say, Okay, so this
Speaker 2: is what we are today, this is what we're doing.
Speaker 2: We're trying to find something that's in a different market
Speaker 2: in a different way and a different thing, a different sound.
Speaker 2: Here's how Sid Nathan did it. Here is how these
Speaker 2: groups did it. Here's how they did it with ECM,
Speaker 2: Here's how questlov did it. Here's how all these polices
Speaker 2: did it. And I'm hoping that I can find ways
Speaker 2: of being able to highlight those stories and give people
Speaker 2: reason to not be afraid of AI. You know, I
Speaker 2: do AI for a living. It's my research area and
Speaker 2: my PhD studies and computer engineering, it's what I do
Speaker 2: professionally at work. I know it's limitations. I understand its
Speaker 2: limitations musically, and I understand what the differences are with
Speaker 2: what a human can do and what a machine can do.
Speaker 2: And I'm hoping that by highlighting these stories, you know,
Speaker 2: you can inspire people to not be afraid, to be
Speaker 2: able to see what we're capable of doing and find
Speaker 2: ways to recreate it again.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean my mind is blown. As I say,
Speaker 3: I knew Seymour pretty well and he could wax rhapsodic
Speaker 3: about SID. I think you are the number one repository
Speaker 3: for information on SID and people make movies and they
Speaker 3: have an interest. You really have gone deep. I think
Speaker 3: you know more about SID and King Records than anybody else,
Speaker 3: you know. I hope all this information just gets recorded
Speaker 3: somewhere so we're not lost in the sands in time.
Speaker 3: You've accumulated it. I haven't seen it accumulated anywhere else
Speaker 3: in any event. I mean, it's been fantastic talking to you.
Speaker 3: As I said earlier, the film is fantastic.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much.
Speaker 3: As I said, it's got so many threads. It's got
Speaker 3: the Cincinnati thread, it's got the country and black music thread,
Speaker 3: it's got it's really a lot. It's really good, and
Speaker 3: you have been really good. Yeahmy, I want to thank
Speaker 3: you for taking this time to speak with my audience.
Speaker 2: I appreciate you. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2: I hope that the audience gets to check out the film.
Speaker 2: It's going to be freely available till the seventh of
Speaker 2: December on the PBS app, also on YouTube, and if
Speaker 2: you feel free to get in the comments section and
Speaker 2: say something positive to all those haters out there, I
Speaker 2: would love you for it. Audience, Thank you. But yeah,
Speaker 2: please check it out, and if you get an opportunity to,
Speaker 2: you can reach out to me. I'd love to come
Speaker 2: and show you the director's cut and talk about the
Speaker 2: film and all its intersecting threads in American music anytime.
Speaker 2: So I'm available to talk because I've got nothing else
Speaker 2: going on to that school of my life. And I
Speaker 2: really appreciate you for having me on this show, Bob.
Speaker 2: It's an honor. It's an honor to have been covered,
Speaker 2: for you to come the story to come to your attention.
Speaker 2: I deeply appreciate it, your effect. I've been a fan
Speaker 2: for a long time. Your effect on American music since
Speaker 2: the nineties is dope. I agree with you a lot
Speaker 2: of your strong, hot takes on music, and I thank
Speaker 2: you so much for having me on the show. It's
Speaker 2: truly an honor. Thank you.
Speaker 3: While you're making me smile, you're making my day in
Speaker 3: any event.
Speaker 2: Thank you. Yeah maze.
Speaker 3: Until next time. This is Bob Left says