Producing Country. Michael Jarrett

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

       DON LAW JR.

      My father came from a formal English background. He was a member of the London Choral Society. He had two uncles who had been knighted. He came over [in 1924], and through family connections, he was given a job in the import-export steel business. He worked in New York. After the steel market collapsed, he decided, “I’m going to go south.”

      He went down to Georgia, and he hooked up with a White Russian friend of the family. With backing, they started a large sheep ranch. The sheep got hit by some disease. My father described riding from dawn till dusk, doing an operation on these sheep—trying to save them and being unable to. He said it was catastrophic. So the White Russian friend went down to Brazil.

      My father said, “I’m going to go see what cowboys are about.” He got on the bus and went to Dallas. He really had no idea what he was going to do. He went to work for Brunswick, who made bowling balls and phonograph records. They were bought by the American Record Corporation [in 1931]. There, he started working with another Englishman named Art Satherley, and he worked his way into doing field recordings. Then ARC took over Columbia [1934], whose home base was Bridgeport, Connecticut. That was before they were bought by CBS [in 1938]. My father and Satherley did the early recordings of Gene Autry—“Back in the Saddle Again” and the first recording of “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer”—and a lot of the early Carter Family stuff.

ROBERT JOHNSON, THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS (1936–1937) (COMPILATION, 1990, COLUMBIA/LEGACY)

       LAWRENCE COHN

      Don Law made all of the Robert Johnson recordings; he was Robert Johnson’s producer. He had nothing to do with the LPs [issued 1961, 1970]. The guy responsible for the LPs was a guy who was a staff producer at Columbia Records in the ’60s, named Frank Driggs. He was one of the premier jazz reissue guys. It was his idea to reissue the Robert Johnson stuff. He did the two LPs, and of course he worked for John Hammond Sr. Hammond was the consummate Robert Johnson freak. So he had Hammond’s full support. By that time, Law was strictly doing country music and nothing else.

       DON LAW JR.

      I always imagine my father as an oddity early on; it certainly wasn’t what he was used to in England. It was very different than anything he had been exposed to, and it fascinated him. It was kind of like what happened later in the ’60s with the British blues musicians who picked up on American blues and then changed the blues form and changed popular music forever. There was a little bit of that same fascination for him, I’m sure, as an Englishman.

      But I think who he signed and what he recorded was a function of if he really liked what he heard. In the beginning, he did a lot of blues. A lot of those field recordings were both country-and-western artists.

      I talked with my father about the sessions he did with Robert Johnson [in San Antonio, 1936, and Dallas, 1937]. They had to do those recordings in un-air-conditioned venues; they made the record on-site. You had an engineer, and as they recorded, they were actually cutting the record—the final record. It was the engineer, Robert Johnson, my father, and a bottle of whiskey. They would all drink.

      At the session in San Antonio, they had a bathtub filled with ice and a fan blowing the air across the ice to keep the records from melting. Field recordings were really pretty crude and primitive.

      My father was a quasi-salesman. He had to go try to sell it; he had to get the record distributed, get it out into the marketplace, around to stores and so forth. It wasn’t a very big business back in the ’30s, particularly in the South.

      My mother talked about walking down the street with Robert Johnson and my father. She described this really bizarre circumstance, where my father was determined to walk alongside Robert, and Robert was determined not to let him. My father kept stopping, and Robert kept walking farther back. My mother, who was from Texas, said, “Don, he can’t walk with you because he’d be seen as ‘uppity.’ He’d get beaten up.” My father didn’t get it. It wasn’t like where he’d come from, but he had wanted no part of the environment that he left.

      When I think of my father, I think of that Jack London passage where he talks about “a sailor on horseback”—a man totally out of his environment. I think of my father as this wrecked English gentlemen in the Deep South, trying to walk along the road with Robert Johnson. It must’ve been the strangest thing in the world: this guy with an English accent recording this Delta blues singer. A “sailor on horseback”—I love that image of cultural dichotomy: the two of them walking down the street; my father bailing Johnson out of jail; that whole nonsense of “I’m lonesome, and there’s a lady here. She wants fifty cents, and I lacks a nickel.”

       In 1942, Glenn Wallichs, Johnny Mercer, and Buddy DeSylva formed Capitol Records in Hollywood. The first country recording issued by the new company was Tex Ritter’s “Jingle, Jangle, Jingle.”

TEX RITTER, “JINGLE, JANGLE, JINGLE” (1942), CAPITOL COLLECTORS SERIES (COMPILATION, 1992, CAPITOL)

       KEN NELSON

      One day, Glenn came to Chicago and asked Lee [Gillette] what he was doing. He told him, “I’m musical director of [radio station] WJJD.”

      Glenn said, “You’re just the guy I’m looking for.” So Lee and his wife moved out to California, and I went back to my old job at JJD. We had live country music at that time. We had Uncle Henry’s Kentucky Mountaineers, Bob Atcher, and several other artists [including Les Paul as “Rubarb Red”]. The program was called the Suppertime Frolic, and it was tremendously popular. Then, the station decided they were going to drop the live musicians, and I had to buy records by the umpteen millions. It was all country records. I bought records from Canada and, even, from England.

      Are you familiar with transcriptions [recordings cut to sixteen-inch discs for radio broadcasts]? There was Standard. There was World, which was owned by Decca. There was Lang-Worth and Capitol. When Lee went with Capitol, he started out in the transcription department. He wasn’t producing any records at all. Finally, they decided that they were going to go into the country field. At that time it was called “hillbilly.” So Lee took over the country department of Capitol. Then, they decided he couldn’t do both jobs, and Lee went strictly into country.

      Lee went to Glenn Wallichs, who was president of Capitol. He said, “Hey, get Ken Nelson out here.” I had a fairly good knowledge of songs. So Capitol brought me out to take over the transcription department [in 1946].

With the help of Cliffie Stone, Lee really got into the country department.* He brought Tex Williams to Capitol. He brought Hank Thompson, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and Merle Travis. Next, Capitol decided that they wanted Lee over in the pop department, and I took over the country department. Lee was probably the greatest producer of that era. He did all of Nat King Cole. He did Kay Starr, Stan Kenton, and Jan Garber. He did Guy Lombardo.

      Oh, and Capitol put transcriptions out of business. They started to give away promotion records, started to send them to radio stations. Lee had recorded a song on transcription called “Twelfth Street Rag” with Pee Wee Hunt. The demand for it as a record was tremendous. There weren’t any records [only transcriptions were available]. So they [Capitol] decided to put out a record and to give them away [to radio stations for promotional purposes]. Before that, the СКАЧАТЬ