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The day the music stopped

It was, without doubt, one of the strangest episodes in the history of the record business. Twice in the 1940s — from August 1942 to November 1944 and from January 1948 to early 1949 — the American Federation of Musicians banned its members from entering the recording studios. On the first occasion James C Petrillo, the union’s president, took action because believed that musicians were losing jobs as places of public entertainment closed and radio became a dominant medium; in compensation, he called for royalty payments by the record companies to the AF of M.

It took a while to get them to the negotiating table. Before the first ban ended, following piecemeal agreements with individual companies for royalties of between 0.25 and 0.5 cents per disc, a great deal of interesting music had gone undocumented. In particular, I think of the young Charlie Parker’s stints with the Earl Hines Orchestra between December 1942 and May 1943 and with the Billy Eckstine Band between April and August of 1944, neither of which were recorded; his fellow members of these fascinating aggregations included Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Harris, Fats Navarro, Wardell Gray, Oscar Pettiford, Shadow Wilson and Art Blakey, while the Eckstine Band’s book included arrangements by Gillespie and Tadd Dameron. An important period in Bird’s career was lost.

(Singers, curiously, were exempted from the ban, which is why Frank Sinatra’s first solo recordings for the Columbia label, made in 1943, featured strictly acapella treatments of such songs as “People Will Say We’re in Love” and “Oh! What a Beautiful Morning”, suavely arranged for the singer and the Bobby Tucker Singers by Alec Wilder.)

By the time the second ban loomed, imposed by Petrillo as a protest against the Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947 to restrict the power of labour unions, the labels had their pre-emptive plans in place. The appetite for recorded music was huge, and to stockpile the material that would enable them to meet it they scheduled round-the-clock sessions — with the willing collaboration, it seems, of the musicians whose services were about to be withdrawn. Most of the companies tried to stash away enough material to keep them supplied with new releases for what turned out to be a rather shorter recording hiatus.

Among those getting busy were the Bihari brothers of Los Angeles, who had started their Modern Records label three years earlier, concentrating on making records for the black audience, which Jules Bihari had encountered while servicing juke boxes in Watts. Their first hit, in their initial year, had come with “Swingin’ the Boogie” by Hadda Brooks, an accomplished pianist and a sultry singer, and their roster had expanded to include the Ebonaires, a vocal quartet, the gospel singer Madam Ira Mae Littlejohn and bandleaders such as the guitarist Gene Phillips, the drummer Al “Cake” Wichard, the saxophonist Little Willie Jackson and the trumpeter-singer Butch Stone.

All these were pressed into service to build up a stock of material for however long the ban lasted, but since it ended after barely a year, most of the sides went unreleased. Now Tony Rounce of Ace Records, which has licensed the catalogue of Modern and its associated labels for the past 30 years, has delved into the vault to assemble 49 of the 80-odd tracks recorded during that burst of activity, all but 10 of which are seeing the light of day for the first time, on a two-CD set titled Beating the Petrillo Ban: The Late December 1947 Modern Sessions.

Apart of from its curiosity value, the compilation provides a marvellous snapshot of black popular music at a time of change, when mainstream jazz styles were starting to mutate into early rhythm and blues. So most of the music is an invigorating combination of big, burly blues shouters — half a dozen tracks under Wichard’s leadership feature the young Jimmy Witherspoon — and excellent jazz soloists, all of whom, sadly, go uncredited, since no personnel information has survived the intervening 66 years.

The leaders’ names will be unfamiliar to many people, but the quality of the material and the musicianship is invariably high. So is the recording quality: most of the tracks could have been recorded this week. The offer of a dozen new tracks by the gifted Ms Brooks (born Hattie Hapgood) and her excellent accompanists is too good to refuse, and the four sides by Gene Phillips and his Rhythm Aces (pictured above, in a photograph taken from the well annotated and illustrated CD insert) are notable for the leader’s eloquent guitar playing, particularly on “Gene’s Guitar Blues”, where he plays in a Hawaiian style that Chuck Berry later utilised on his instrumental “Surfin’ Steel”.

But the real find, for me, is Madam Ira Mae Littlejohn, whose six tracks expose us to a gospel singer of quite staggering power. “The technology has only just arrived to allow us to copy what was once an extremely bent and unplayable acetate,” Rounce says, further informing us that these may have been her only recordings. Thank goodness for digital technology, then, allowing us to discover Madam Littlejohn’s raw, throat-tearing delivery, accompanied by rudimentary piano and acoustic guitar and occasionally by a handful of supporting voices. The rest of the set would make a fine addition to the collection of anyone interested in the music of the period, but this is real treasure.

James Caesar Petrillo, by the way, died in 1984, aged 92. He had started life as a trumpeter before devoting himself to union affairs, ran the Chicago branch for 40 years, and once wrote to Benito Mussolini to complain that the city’s Italian consul had hired a non-union band. He took control of the national body in 1940 and the recording bans quickly made him a national figure, but in the mid-Fifties there were attempts to dislodge him, led by Local 47 in Los Angeles and Local 802 in New York — two branches in which jazz musicians were prominent. He resigned from the presidency in 1958 and was ousted from the leadership of Chicago’s Local 10 four years later. The bandshell in the city’s Grant Park bandshell was named after him.

Big hit records

Morgan Howell recreates 45s as pieces of art because he wants to make them larger than life. As big, in fact, as the space they take up in your heart and mind. That means making 27-inch discs rather than seven-inch, encasing the enlarged vinyl facsimile in a reproduction of the original paper bag made out of canvas and painting the original graphics and type from the label and the bag, and then mounting the result in a 32×32 frame. But Howell is not trying simply to reproduce the record as it came out of the freshly delivered box of 25 on the record shop counter one Friday morning two or three generations ago. He wants to show the whole history of the individual record: the signs that it has been played and played and played again, treasured and cherished and carried from bedsit to party and onwards through life. So, with infinite care, he reproduces all the creases and tears, all the fading, all the smudges and lipstick smears, and even the traces of a long-since removed sticky label.

Thirty of these three-dimensional objects — several full-scale originals, and some smaller prints — are on show all this month at the Snap Gallery, situated in an arcade between Piccadilly and Jermyn Street in London W1. Among them is Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell”, issued on the gorgeous yellow and red Pye International R&B label in 1964, about which David Hepworth wrote quite beautifully in his blog a few weeks ago (click on http://www.davidhepworth.com/blog.html and scroll down to June 19, 2013). You’ll also find “Shakin’ All Over” (with that marvellous expressionist 1960 EMI bag), “Green Onions” on Stax, “Good Luck Charm” on UK RCA, “My Generation”, the Chiffons’ “Sweet Talkin’ Guy” on Laurie, the original US Columbia issue of “Like a Rolling Stone” and many others.

When Morgan Howell told me that the first one on which he’d tried the technique was Martha and the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave”, borrowed from his big sister’s record collection, I knew he was a man after my own heart. I told him that I could remember precisely where and when I heard that record for the first time, standing beside my parents’ KB valve radio one evening in September 1963: my first blast of the full-strength, fully developed Motown sound. His own favourite is one of which he’s done both the A and B sides: “Get Back” and “Don’t Let Me Down” by the Beatles, which has a special meaning for him since he happened to be sitting in the back of his father’s Ford Zodiac, aged three, when they got stuck on Savile Row in an unexpected traffic jam on January 30, 1969, the day the Beatles played together in public for the last time on the Apple roof.

They’re not cheap: the originals cost £9,600, prints at the same size are £2,000, and the scaled-down versions are £595. In any size they’d be a very nice thing to have on your wall, even if you preferred “Paranoid” or “Hotel California” to “You Never Can Tell”. And, inevitably, you start playing the game of what you’d commission him to paint, if you could afford it. At the moment — and this is a purely imaginary exercise, you understand — I’m thinking Billy Preston’s “Billy’s Bag”, on the UK Sue label, with that fantastic paper bag listing all the label’s artists. Or maybe the Reflections’ “(Just Like) Romeo and Juliet” on Stateside. No, it’s got to be Kenny Dino’s “Your Ma Said You Cried in Your Sleep Last Night”, with my then-girlfriend’s name inscribed in nail polish on its HMV/United Artists label 51 years ago. Now there’s a record that deserves to have its portrait painted.

Rod’s Miura

The last time I saw this car, in May 1971, it was parked outside Morgan Studios in Willesden, North London. Its owner was inside the building, finishing off Every Picture Tells a Story.

That February I’d been on the road with Rod Stewart and the Faces in Boston and Jersey City, writing a story for the Melody Maker. You can imagine it was pretty good fun, as long weekends go. Now here I was, three months later, listening to Rod waxing lyrical about David Ruffin as he put the final touches to his cover of the Temptations’ “(I Know) I’m Losing You”. Then came the wonderful experience of having “Mandolin Wind” and “Maggie May” played back through the studio speakers. Martin Quittenton was in the studio that night, having made a vital contribution to the album as guitarist, mandolinist and co-writer. “Mandolin Wind” remains my favourite of Rod’s recordings, by a distance.

On the way into the studio I’d admired the brand-new yellow Lamborghini Miura parked on the forecourt. There weren’t many of those in London in 1971. This was the first of Rod’s many exotic cars, including a whole string of Lamborghinis, and probably the prettiest of the lot. Who cared that the clutch was unbearably stiff or that it overheated constantly? He’s very funny about it in his droll autobiography, put together last year with the help of Giles Smith. “The Miura was a considerable investment: £6,500,” he recalls. “Bear in mind that the first house I had just bought, in Muswell Hill, had only cost me £5,000. So, for a while there, my car was worth more than my house. And there was no off-road parking, so I had to leave it on the street. Small wonder I couldn’t sleep at night.”

The car over which he lost sleep is now to be auctioned by Bonhams at the Goodwood Revival in September. The picture above is of the sale brochure, and the estimate for the car is between £750,000 and £850,000. A lot of money, but almost certainly a great deal less than the value of whichever of his houses its first owner will be sleeping in tonight.

I’ll save my story about seeing Rod for the first time in 1964, with one of my favourite bands ever, for another day.

Mick Farren 1943-2013

Mick Farren collapsed and died on stage at the Borderline in London on Saturday night while singing with the latest version of his band, the Deviants. After three decades in New York and Los Angeles, he had spent the last few years back in Britain. Here’s a tribute by his old friend and NME colleague Charles Shaar Murray, and here’s my obituary, both from today’s Guardian.

I knew Mick at the end of the ’60s and the beginning of the ’70s, which was probably his best time, and I always enjoyed his company. I’d first clapped eyes on him in Nottingham in 1967, when an enterprising friend of mine organised the city’s first (and only) “happening” at the Rainbow Rooms, and booked the Social Deviants — as they were then called — along with a projector and a print of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, a bubble machine and the bits and pieces to make a rudimentary light show. How cool we were, suddenly transformed from mods into hippies! I bought a Tibetan love bell and gave my friend Paul Smith, then managing the men’s floor of a boutique called Birdcage, 25 shillings to get his tailor to make me a royal blue kaftan with floral braid. It looked fine until I tried to dance and discovered that the arm-holes had been made so small that I could barely move. So much for letting it all hang out. (Having some sense of history, I kept the garment; it made a second public appearance in True Brit, the exhibition devoted to Paul’s work at the Design Museum a few years ago.)

The photograph above is taken from the back of the dust jacket of Mick’s excellent memoir, Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, published by Jonathan Cape in 2001. It was taken by Barrie Wentzell, the Melody Maker‘s staff photographer, and it records a round-table discussion at the MM‘s old Fleet Street offices, probably in 1971. The discussion was being moderated by Michael Watts, who has his back to the photographer, and our much-missed colleague Roy Hollingworth, on Watts’s left. Neither of us can remember who the hippie on Hollingworth’s left is. That’s Farren next to the unknown person, with Sandy Denny opposite him at the top of the table (no, it’s not Sandy Denny: see Comments). On Sandy’s left, wearing a cap, is Robert Wyatt. On Robert’s left is another person whom neither of us can identify. We can’t remember what the subject of the discussion was, either. Maybe someone out there can help.

Frances Ha

It’s not often I want to get up and dance in the aisles of a cinema, but that’s how I felt halfway through Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha the other night, when David Bowie’s “Modern Love” erupted out of the speakers. I’ve never been keen on Bowie (although I admire the stuff from his Berlin period), but “Modern Love” is one of those tracks — like Boffalongo’s “Dancing in the Moonlight”, Danny Wilson’s “Mary’s Prayer” or the New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give” — that automatically quicken the heartbeat and turn the world’s colours up a shade. It doesn’t matter who it’s by. Listen without prejudice, as someone once suggested.

Frances Ha benefits from an excellent soundtrack, including a fine cello-led piece by Joan Jeanrenaud (the Kronos Quartet’s original cellist) and incidental music by Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips. You might or might not remember Wareham from the indie rock bands Galaxie 500 and Luna, in which he was joined by Phillips, to whom he is now married. They’ve also recorded as Dean and Britta, and they contributed music to Baumbach’s first film, The Squid and the Whale, in 2006.

I hadn’t expected to like Frances Ha as much as I did. It’s not nearly as cutesy as this trailer might make it seem. By the end, Greta Gerwig turns Frances into a character with real depth, someone you really care about.

Bert Stern: an eye on jazz

Six weeks before Marilyn Monroe died in the summer of 1962, Bert Stern spent three days in a Los Angeles hotel room taking the photographs that will forever make it difficult to believe that the actress took her own life. Not surprisingly, it was the story of the Monroe sessions that led the obituaries marking his death last week, at the age of 83, such as this one in the New York Times and this one in the Guardian. And here I am, falling for the same temptation.

Four years earlier, however, Stern, then a top advertising photographer, had earned the permanent gratitude of jazz fans when he travelled to Rhode Island to record the Newport Jazz Festival for a feature film titled Jazz on a Summer’s Day. Thanks to him, and his co-director and editor Aram Avakian, we have a beautifully shot first-hand record of how Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry, Jimmy Giuffre, Thelonious Monk, Mahalia Jackson and many others looked as well as sounded in performance at that point in their careers.

Most of the famous sequences from the film were shot during the hours of daylight, capturing the garden-party atmosphere of the early Newport festivals. That’s certainly what you get in the clip of Anita O’Day above. Look a bit harder on YouTube, however, and you’ll find a night-time sequence of the magnificent Big Maybelle, dressed as if for her own wedding, singing “I Ain’t Mad at You”, with a band led by Buck Clayton, who takes the trumpet solo. For some technical reason I can’t share it with you here, but a simple search should lead you to it. Better still, buy the whole thing on DVD, and say a little thank-you to the late Mr Stern.