Rock and Roll; Interview with Jerry Wexler [Part 2 of 4]

I want the market. I got it back. Now a days. Now a days record by using young music fans accustomed to. A really integrated music picture. Some like like Bruce Springsteen might have a black saxophone player. Somebody like Eric Clapton might and does have a black drummer. Audiences are intermingled. Certainly rap has escalated and has come out of the inner city and now is a universal music for white people. And it's probably unthinkable to some of the current generation that there was a time when music was very segregated. Black people went to see black music. White people went to see white music. But one of the liberating factors and one of the seminal factors leading to rock n roll which was a blending was.

Some of these bus tours in the south. We have buy you'd have maybe Fats Domino was banned. Ruth Brown Clovis and Sam Cooke you know huge package show making huge one night jumps the plate. And so what they called colored theaters back then called the dance halls. Well what happened which a lot of people don't realize that occasionally and some of these performances Weiss would be permitted but they'd have to be in the balcony. It's sort of a Crow Jim a rage moment. But these were dedicated fans of the music and slowly they came down from the balcony and slowly the ropes that segregated separate the crowds were removed and music began to come together. One of the of course the most important factor in moving from the graph record is radio play. It was then and it is now maybe with

some few exceptions such as dancehall music and so on and. The radio stations. What then and still are as a matter of fact. Separately they were categorized as either a pop R&B and within that there are many subcategories which are no point to go into now. But. In the early days let's say of. My years with Atlantic Records. We were dealing with black music only. Until maybe 1961. YOUNG MAN and Bobby Darin became the bellwether for a lot of our. Subsequently white acts. We couldn't get our records played on a pop radio station. We had to go out to the so-called black radio stations which were black only in the sense that the records were programmed for

black audiences very often with black this jockeys. However at the time there were many many white this jockeys broadcasting black radio stations and not necessarily assuming black dialect or black style but in general a lowdown funky southern style. And the audiences presumed that they were black. It's just amazing how many of these people there were that he Sears in New Jersey and lay there in Atlanta. Gentleman George Oxford and San Francisco. Of course the ineffable Alan Freed in New York. Of course everybody knew that he was white that wasn't the question. But many George Lawrence the Hound Dog and Buffalo jivin gene and Charlotte the audience of black audiences thought that these people were black and certainly nothing was done to discourage the notion because the idea was

to hold these constituencies. And there was a great light and of course there was a great national grouping of people like course Allen and John Richburg and Jean. Nobles broadcast 20 channels. In 22 states Clear Channel and was sending this black music out into white America. Very important contribution toward the melding that became rock n roll. And the other important phenomenon which was really a subgrouping of this particular drill was the so-called beach wreck in the Carolinas. This was a function of two things the development of the transistor radio which kids could take to the beach and these broadcasts from these powerful stations

in. Nashville Cincinnati Chicago New York so that young white. High school kids would go to the beach with the transistors and one station would be Patti Page and Perry Como. They'd switch the dial and suddenly say watch this. Fats Domino a friend Baker Clyde McPhatter in the Driftless. And it was like somebody who had been subjected to a diet fudge sundaes coming across a really good time in a chili mac a good honest hot dog. So. The. I take it as a given I think history has proved it that there was a trope in some for black music that is undeniable and that black music has shaped all of our popular music and. It was. Kept you know categorized separated and

and in a hidden corner so to speak it was parochial only because white people didn't know about it. Which leads me. To the role of the great enunciator Elvis because he did live in the greatest cultural boom. Nobody ever did more for. The American people he became the great president of black music. Trance made it through his own sensibility its own sensitivity. Of course Elvis was a different kind of. White purveyor of black music because it was. Naturally black even though it was conveyed through him. It was not a white man doing a version of black music. Pat Bono the Hilltoppers. It was real and he was I could just feel him as a conduit. And. America was really changed by talking

about American music in our cultural general. We are far more to Elvis Presley than all the British groups put together. I have my own prejudice Thank you. And. Speaking of Elvis Presley when I was at Atlantic in the 50s. We were very well aware of him long before he became a national phenomenon on the Ed Sullivan Show. And. We had a pretty fair notion that he would have been a magical signing for us. Because we didn't know nor could we predict that he was going to become the phenomenon you know the king of kings but we try to sign him. Because we had. Heard we had understood that he might be available for sale from his son records contract with Sam Phillips who was a very good friend of ours by the way. And so we made a pitch and

we went as high as $30000 which we didn't have. And if they'd said yes we probably would gone out begging I held up a bank but RCA beat us out with a price of forty thousand dollars. Come by it wasn't their money. The money was still in range is money the publishing company interests either bought the contract and then presented it to RCA in return for which they got the no small benefit of the publication of Elvis Presley songs and as a matter of fact for many years in the beginning controlled his recordings they brought the songs to him and what he was offered by Dylan range. He was permitted to select from them and those are the songs he recorded which was a great move on the part of a couple of fellas named Albert back. Yeah yeah

yeah. Now LHC stood by itself because of its signal and its power. Excuse me at home. In the 50s New Orleans was really you know a hotbed of talent for both jazz and rhythm and blues and there were so many hot artists down there. I mean just be hooved you could be down there and look around see what you could do. People like Little Richard Fats Domino. Smiley Lewis. Frankie for dough who was a white man doing rhythm and blues. James Booker. And later on Dr. John Malcolm Robinette. Course a New Orleans music had its own style its own sound actually had its own beat and it yielded some terrific music so my partner Ahmet Ertegun I

would fly down and convert his twin engine convience it took forever to get there. And then we settle in and look around. One great place to hear music. Was that Frank Penn used to drop in. Have been many do drop ins all across America you know in the in the cities and in general they conveyed the same sort of attractions. And before there'd be music there'd be proscribed substances and there'd be places maybe to sleep and so on and we'd go they had to have a party and so on. There were certain problems in those days in getting around. Because of the segregation. Which affected transportation that so-called colored cabs and so-called white cabs distend hadn't anything to do with the paint job on taxi but had to do that by custom certain taxi cabs

let's say for example driven by black drivers would only pick up people at Black addresses and deliver them to black addresses. And conversely with white people. For example one time I had dinner with Okie dokie who was a famous noise this jockey about whom the. Famous rockabilly song okie dokie Stomp which you know very well. It was written and I was at his house for dinner and he had picked me up and taken me there. He left after dinner. You had to do going to a commercial they used to sell beer and do beer commercials at retail stores and I was there with his family and I had no way of getting home. I walked maybe six or eight miles to a bakery which I had come for and I was picked up there. Now. When Ahmet Ertegun and I would go back in town to see a shell to go to a

nightclub. The only way we could get back to. Downtown or we would just stay in the quarter at some of the quarter hotels like the Monteleone of the junk hotel was to get a so-called colored taxi driven by a black man. And as soon as we crossed Claiborne Claiborne Avenue we would lie down in the back of the cab so we couldn't be seen and they'd let us off at the alley and back of the junk hotel. One time I remember there was a birthday party for Joe Turner and he had a driver in his car Berenice burnished prepared a fantastic meal at Frank Penn used to drop in. Wasn't feeling well that night and I saw he was home with a cold and I was back in the hotel and I was there and I got really modeled.

And the next thing you know I wake up in the morning and I slept over what was a great scene because it was maybe 10 or 11 o'clock. There was Joe Turner but to suspend his young and his Balbriggan underwear and there was smiley Lois and having spaghetti for breakfast. And so my goes to the piano and his smiley playing and saying as Joe turned to joining in it was an incredible scene. And as Frank Conyers said at the time he said to me well actually you and Lash LaRue and the only two old face who ever slept overnight at my saloon. Yeah. Roland. One of the. Psychological human

and social economic reasons for the development of rock and roll was as I said before the exposure. Of white people to black music. They began by listening to it. The next thing that it was attempt to play it quite poorly. But the ones who persisted managed to learn their instruments and soon became perhaps as professional as their black role models. Maybe not with the same grab them and of authenticity and so on it became something else. And. In the beginning and then the idea is this why was rock n roll necessary when the black originals were available. What was the thrust corps that. Well. It's a sort it's a very curious little aspect of racism in my opinion which is this.

To hear Muddy Waters or Howling Wolf deliver an impassioned Chicago blues is one thing for a little white girl from Teaneck Scotch they have to hear this and to be absolutely taken with the music is one story. But then to see these huge sweating black men with strange looking hair and different skin and great patches of perspiration and their blue work shirts was not entirely. Showing. Them. So this sort of was a vacuum. He has some music that people could like but the play is we had to substitute some different players. Now we get androgynous British boys we get white. Country people so called hillbillies cotton bottom people share crop as well now became present the bull because we come not to the sexual imagery of

rock n roll. Or. The little white sensual girl. Who. Whose imagination whose fantasy went just as far as it could go short of penetration. Had to substitute now. A suitable. Fantasy partner and it would have to be. A acceptable caucasian of their own particular background their old social status and all class. This to me was the big Genesis cause rock'n'roll is surely about sex because that's what it originally meant when it was the property of the Black musicians and the black audiences. Rock N Roll on Saturday night as I said before it had to do ultimately with a sexual experience. Yeah oh yeah

oh yeah. Tremendous reaction an attempt to censor rock n roll which came from administrators in cities mayors police chiefs aldermen maybe even governors of states tremendous. Version of music because it was going to put innocent young girls. It was going to break the moral codes. It was going to break down the very structure structure of white European morality and so on. It was a form again of racism because it was so-called unquote black music. And again. I don't know how much there is to this but it's always been taken as a given that.

The real impetus behind Jim Crow and the Southern whites antipathy toward the black was the notion that was that the black man was going to take the white woman. You don't need me to inform me that's one of the big lies that we've ever had in history. But that's how this thing was kept going for many days. Yeah. Yeah I'd. Say all. Right. Thank you.