Yemi Oyediran

Yemi Oyediran is the director of the must-watch documentary "King of Them All: The Story of King Records" presently airing on PBS.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Lefsetts Podcast. My
guest today is Yemi oh Yet it ran director of
King of them All, the Story of King Records. Yemmy,
how'd you decide to make this movie?

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Well, I've been a jazz musician in the Cincinnati area
for about twenty years, and I've been hearing a lot
of old timers tell me about how James Brown still
owes the money. So finally, after kind of compiling the
stories together, I got into kind of the King thing,
and I started kind of doing different types of I
call them King experiments, from whether it was bringing my

(00:46):
entire recording studio into spaces and we recreated making a
King Records with an audience of three hundred people, and
then it kind of fell into a documentary from there.

Speaker 3 (00:57):
Okay, what's your history in filmmaking?

Speaker 2 (01:01):
My history in filmmaking has been it started really as
a way to promote gigs. I tried to find different
creative ways of getting people to check out jazz gigs,
which is Bob, as you can imagine, is not the
easiest task. But yeah, from there, it kind of just
grew into storytelling and just getting interviews about different types

(01:21):
of things and different interests, and kind of combining music
and some filmmaking was kind of the path that led
me this way.

Speaker 3 (01:30):
Okay, prior to this King Records documentary, what films had
you made? Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:35):
Well, this is my first feature, but I'd made certain
shorts about different subjects around Cincinnati, talking about food sustainability,
talking about food insecurity in the area, highlighting different stories
for a lot of different nonprofits, working with homeless shelters
to get people to tell their stories. We looked for

(01:56):
kind of ways to empower stories that people otherwise don't
care about, and that from there kind of grew into filmmaking.
This is kind of a separate path to something else
that I was working on in my life, separate from music,
and the combination of both of those paths led me
towards this film.

Speaker 3 (02:14):
How much should it cost to make the film?

Speaker 2 (02:18):
Oh? My lord, it cost me nine years of my
life for sure, which is priceless. A lot of it
was also self financed in there, with my money, my
business partner's money, my creative partner. Yeah, this was a
passion project. So you know, it's kind of hard to
specify how much it costs to buy this camera or

(02:39):
this thing that we've had for years. But yeah, it
was just a lot of love and labor and a
lot of support from foundations in Cincinnati.

Speaker 3 (02:47):
So how did you end up making a deal for
it to be aired on PBS.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
That's a great question. So PBS a couple of years
ago put out this campaign where they were looking to
highlight other types of filmmakers, and they put out an
open call and I found out about the open call
on the last day. I think that I actually submitted
like ten minutes before they were not taking any more submissions,

(03:15):
and I applied to this open call and it took
them a couple of years. I think they got a
little bit more than they bargained for, and it took
them a couple of years to go through all of
the submissions, and we just kind of stepped by step
worked through their process and we wanted the selected projects.
It was really amazing.

Speaker 3 (03:33):
So they selected you before the film was done.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
No, So the long story of the films, I've made
it five times already because I'm insane, Bob. So I
first started with my version of the film, which I
worked with. I didn't know how to edit film at
the time, so I worked with an editor who was
in college who didn't listen to anything that I wanted
to do. It was really frustrating and I didn't really

(04:01):
get the project that I wanted, but it gave me
enough of something to give people idea of what I
was going for. And then over the next several years,
I worked with either my business partner or myself when
I finally learned how to edit, but over kind of
like a five to six year period, I learned how
to basically do the full all the steps of production,

(04:21):
and once I kind of was empowered to do so,
I was able to submit that version, which was a
ninety minute version of the film. And then once PBS
came on board, I tried to see if I could
convince them to do the three and a half hour
version of the film that it really was. So I
stretched it all out and showed them all of it
and they got mad at me, So then it became

(04:41):
a seventy five minute Yeah, because for those this is
the notes of filmmakers out there, you need to do
something with fifty four minutes and forty eight seconds. That's
how much time PBS gives you. Unless you are super
special or ken Burns anybody outside of that, you get
an hour. So I had to bring the film down

(05:01):
to from seventy five minutes to an hour, and that's
the version that we put out, but the director's cut.
The seventy five minute version we have out. We share.
I share with my friends and you know, anybody else
who's bored enough to be interested.

Speaker 3 (05:15):
Okay. Was the first time there was any public exhibition
when it went on PBS or did you go to
the film circuit film festival circuit?

Speaker 2 (05:28):
Yeah, we tried our hand at the film festival circuit.
And one thing that I learned about film festivals is
that they're really hard to get into. Bob, I was
really shocked. We submitted at all of the film festivals, big, small,
and everything in between, and we weren't able to air
show at a lot of the film festivals that we'd

(05:48):
aimed for. But we did get to show at a
local festival here called the Over the Ryan Film Festival,
and then we showed at a film festival in Florida
called the Florida Film Festival. But the one that we
did here in Cincinnati, we showed it on It was
coincidentally the same day that said Nathan Died, who was
the subject of the film, and we also kind of

(06:09):
felt I felt that it was really important. You know,
it's a film about Cincinnati, where I live. It all
takes place in Cincinnati, and it felt right to kind
of open and have the first premiere, the public premiere,
be in Cincinnati. So we went with that route and
the rest is history.

Speaker 3 (06:24):
As they say, Okay, when we're speaking, the film has
already started to air on PBS. What has the feedback
What is your experience been in the wake of the
movie finally going public.

Speaker 2 (06:40):
First of all, I want to thank you so much
for talking about our film on your newsletter. That was
really amazing. I got a lot of reach out from
a lot of I told you, I'm a professional musician,
from a lot of people I respect in the industry
reached out to me and they're like, I can't believe it.
This is amazing, So I wanted that was one of
the first pieces of feedback that we actually received, and

(07:03):
it was really heartwarming. A lot of years went into
this and getting a review like that from you was
life changing. So thank you. We were able to get
a lot of great you know, the Wall Street Journal
gave us a wonderful review, as well as some other
outlets Billboard Magazine, which was really super special and amazing.
We got a lot of local love in Cincinnati. There

(07:24):
are some haters out there, and anybody who creates something,
you always pay attention to the haters in the comments section.
But most of that is from a lot of fellow
nerds who didn't see their favorite artists featured, which I
completely understand, which is why I made a three and
a half hour version of the film and I had
to have my heart broken by removing all of that,

(07:45):
so I understand where all of them were coming from.
That's just passion. I love it. But it's been an
overwhelmingly positive response. A lot of people didn't know about this.
This is kind of inject some things into the conversation
that a lot of people didn't think about out and
it kind of presents something that's new to people. So
I think that's kind of fresh and interesting to a
lot of people in music history, especially.

Speaker 3 (08:07):
Okay, what is special about Cincinnati?

Speaker 2 (08:12):
Oh my lord, A lot of things are special about Cincinnati, man.
First of all, the drinking that if you want to
find a great person to hang out with at a bar.
Any Cincinnatian will like fit the bill, I promise, So
if anybody comes in, you don't need to know anybody.
Just come down, find a nice bar, sit down, and
before you know it, you'll be best friends with half

(08:32):
the city. It's the city's kind of like Cheers, you know,
it's a city that is small enough but big enough
to kind of get some things done. That's one of
the things that's really special about it. The other thing
is that it really has a love for the arts,
which a lot of cities love arts, but Cincinnati is
invested into arts in a really deep and meaningful way.

(08:53):
So it's a place where, you know, as a musician,
you can live as a full time musician, you can
have a professional career as an artist and still live
and raise a family and have children. It's kind of
one of those few places in America where that still exists,
and it's kind of a nestled little secret in the
landscape of America, which is what kind of makes it cool.

(09:16):
But there's a lot of things that make Cincinnati special.
You know, the food scene here is amazing, which opens
for a lot of collaborations between restaurants and musicians that
always end up really special and meaningful. The people of
Cincinnati are just really cool people. If like I could
just kind of put it in like a very succinct way,
just a very interesting combination of different types of people

(09:40):
kind of coming together to create a community. It's cool.

Speaker 3 (09:43):
Okay, Ohio in the last half century is gone through
the mill, which is funny. I'm using that term telling
me about the steel mills, Columbus, Cleveland, etc. What is
the economy of Cincinnati and how is it doing?

Speaker 2 (09:59):
Wow? So I used to live in the Cleveland I
actually went to boarding school outside of Cleveland, and I
grew up in Moorland Hills in Beechwood and outside of Cleveland.
And so coming down to and seeing there's a different vibe.
You know, Cleveland has a lot of old money. You
still have a lot of that Rockefeller existence in the
Cleveland area, and in Cincinnati it's a little bit different,

(10:20):
but it's really based. You know, Procter and Gamble is here,
which is a powerhouse part of the community, as is Kroger,
which opens a lot of opportunities for advertising. For example.
You know, there's actually a really strong advertising business community
here as well as consumer product goods. You know a
lot of these businesses around that the consumer product goods

(10:43):
are important. We also have a really important railway. This
is kind of a nerd fact. One of the biggest
railports is still in Cincinnati. Cincinnati really left its rail
system intact and that allowed for a lot of companies
because we still move a lot of things by freight
by rail, and that allowed a lot of companies who
were involved in the consumer product goods business to also

(11:04):
continue to thrive here. So there's kind of this underbelly
that even like a lot of Cincinnatians don't know, but
all these support structure of all these businesses that are
built around supporting consumer product goods groceries. But then there's
also a wide variety of other things. There's a tech
industry here. I could go on and on, but Cincinnati's
dope Man.

Speaker 3 (11:25):
Also Cincinnati's famous for Greaters ice cream too, right.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
Yeah, Greater's ice Cream, Skyline Chili Man. Those are the
two things and I used early in my career. I'm
also a software developer. I worked on both of their websites.
So it wasn't very long before my doctor and I
had to have a conversation about diabetes. Because every day
in and out. All I could do is like eat
and like work on skyline and Greaters. Greaters is amazing

(11:52):
ice cream. If you've never had it before, like, let
me know and I will send it out to you.
It is the best. Have you ever tried it before?
Bob Oh, Yeah, I have.

Speaker 3 (12:01):
That's why I mentioned it. I heard about it.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
But I mean, what's your favorite? What's your favorite flavor?

Speaker 3 (12:06):
I can't tell you, tell you the truth. I was
at a food festival. I love ice cream. I tried
multiple flavors. I can't tell you. And Cincinnati, I don't
think I've ever been to Cincinnati. But going back to
the street, since you're from the Cleveland area, how did
gend up in Cincinnati?

Speaker 2 (12:24):
I'm actually so. My family's orisually from Nigeria, and I
moved around a lot. So my father was doing a
PhD in Cornell, and then we moved back to Nigeria.
I'm kind of a weird generational type of thing because
I spent a significant part of my childhood in Nigeria,
so I speak the language and everything. And then we
moved to the hospital, Alabama area where my father. My

(12:45):
father was an essence of rocket scientist, so and then
we moved to Cleveland, and then I came to Cincinnati
for college. I was looking for a program that had
a solid engineering program and a solid music program. And
there are a lot of these other programs that I
got into, but one would be better in one or
not good enough in the other, and Cincinnati kind of

(13:06):
had a good program in both. So I came here
and studied jazz, and I studied computer science and computer engineering,
and I continue to do both of those things here.

Speaker 3 (13:17):
Okay, forgetting the film for a second. What's keeping you alive? Software? Music?

Speaker 2 (13:23):
Oh lord, that's a good question. So what's keeping me
emotionally alive is definitely the music. I learned very early
in my career that if I tried to not if
I try to not have music in my life and
I couldn't create music, I turned into a dick. So
that wasn't working. And it also actually helps my software

(13:44):
career because I'm a lot more creative I think about.
It puts me in different scenarios to work out problems
because you just can't. It's just a different type of
problem solving. But I live off of in my family,
we live off of my computing career. But my music
career and my teacher career. My music teaching career also
is very very helpful and very very important. As you know,

(14:06):
the ranch is too damn high.

Speaker 3 (14:08):
Okay, And how old are you today today?

Speaker 2 (14:12):
I believe I am forty four years old, Bob.

Speaker 3 (14:16):
Well, as I say this is audio only, you don't
look forty four. I thought you were going to say
like thirty something.

Speaker 2 (14:22):
But at any event, you know, people like to say
black don't crack, and you know, I hope that continues
to be true through you know, however long i'm here.

Speaker 3 (14:39):
One of the big points you make about King Records
is how integrated it was as a black man living
in Cincinnati today and in America, how do you experience racism?

Speaker 2 (14:54):
Ooh, you're hitting right to the tabasco sauce right now,
getting spicy. That's a really good question. You know, race
and talking about race and King Records is challenging because
King Records offers a great example for why the complexities

(15:14):
around how America came about our racial integration. You know,
it wasn't done. You know, King Records shows that it's
very business driven. But even King Records, you know, they
start with a guy named Ben Siegel, who's the personnel director,
and he comes in and he wants to have a
you know, equal opportunity hiring policy and is able to

(15:36):
convince the owner, Sid Nathan, to go along with this.
And he's able to convince him because you know, he's like,
we're both Jews, and you know, we've just seen and
experience in Europe because again, this is the nineteen forties
where we were treated in a particular way. The takeaway
from this is we should probably not do the same thing.
And this aligned with Sid's beliefs, and so they try

(15:57):
an equal hiring policy into the production about I think
maybe about a year ago or two years ago, his
daughter I was able to finally get in touch with
Ben Siegel's daughter, Deborah, and she was able to share
some letters, some correspondence between Sid Nathan and her father.
And what we find over time is that there's more

(16:17):
complexity to this. When they have this policy at King Records,
not everybody is into this policy. There starts to be
conflicts between workers, you know, just inner office politics, and
it's not as kumbaya as we would want it to be.
It is still a product of the nineteen forties. So

(16:38):
they first tried with a very progressive approach, and in
a couple of years into this, they have to scale
back some of it and they start realizing there's just
not everybody gets along. So from a musical perspective, with
people like Henry Glover, who is the first black music executive,
that and King brings them on board and gives him
stock in the company. So you have great examples of

(17:00):
things like that that are really indicative of progressive racial ideas.
But then over time you start to see that there
is a separation. They stop having African Americans in the
office towards the fifties after Ben Siegel leaves, and then
in the sixties you start seeing a really much more
stark separation of where African Americans are working in the

(17:22):
pressing plants and not in the office. And there really
is kind of a more classic Jim Crow segregation in
the office, But it's not happening from the musical perspective,
because again, you know there's going to be that. It's
very back and forth. So we had to kind of
wrestle with this as we were making the film because

(17:42):
it is more indicative of what I see in America
and my experiences of race in America, which are complex.
You know, in some areas it's accessible and very easy
to navigate and work through being a black person in America. However,
there are some places is still today where navigating or

(18:02):
some situations where navigating is problematic, where not everybody is
comfortable where there should be access, but somebody is uncomfortable
with something and instead of directly saying it, you know,
there's going to be passive, aggressive behaviors that come out
and you've got to work it through inter office politics
or some sort of political situation. Some places. Sometimes some

(18:25):
situations it's great. In some situations it's not so great.
And you know, this film was able to kind of
really articulate to me how there are differences in race,
you know, especially watching One thing I did is that
I went back all the way to the history of
looking at some of the arrests of some of the

(18:47):
people in around King records and some of the owners
and a lot of the owners were from the Jewish community,
and you see a policing of Jews in the Cincinnati
area that I really didn't expect. It really started to
dawn on me that what we have in America is
more of a cast system, you know, and in the

(19:07):
nineteen fifties you really see this. You see if you
are Wasp, Western European, Anglo Saxon Protestant, that is the
definition of whiteness in that area. And then if you're
Eastern European, if you're Italian, if you're Irish, if you're
pretty much anything else, you kind of fall on a
sliding scale. And we see a lot of the policing,

(19:27):
and we see a lot of these things that we're
talking about in society. A lot of these communities were
also talking about that then as well. You see a
lot of Italian names in the arrest record, a lot
of Jewish names, a lot of African American names, and
what It just kind of shows that there's a lot
more complexity to our racial story, just like there was
a lot more complexity to the story at King Records. And yeah,

(19:49):
it's been an illuminating process learning these things.

Speaker 3 (19:52):
So when did you first hear about Sid Nathan?

Speaker 2 (19:57):
So the first time I heard about Sid Nathan was yikes,
at a at a gig, somebody telling me about the
fights between him and James Brown. It was about the
song I Feel Good and how James had gone to Smash,

(20:18):
which was owned by Mercury at the time, and he
thought that his contract with King Records was over. So
he goes over to make a deal with Mercury and
they release a song I Feel Good, and it pairs
and they pair it with the film Ski Party. Have
you ever seen that movie before, Bob? Which film Ski Party?
It's like a net Funicello film back in Uh.

Speaker 3 (20:38):
Yeah, you know, yeah, you say, yes, yes I did.
It was a very famous film. Bring me to Another era.

Speaker 2 (20:46):
I've been living in that era for about ten years.
So he does Ski Party and it's huge and Sid
Nathan gets wind of this and is like, what the
hell you still? Like, Oh, you're on my contract. So
Sid has to put an embargo on the record. They've
got a work it out and sue each other and
it's intense, you know. And I was able to actually
get a hold of some of the send each other

(21:09):
telegrams and I was able to get some of the
copies of the telegrams. But it was intense, like harsh talk.
But they were able to work it out and James
was able to come back and they released I Feel
Good and became a huge hit for King. But that
was the first time I heard about said Nathan, his
harascible nature in working with James Brown.

Speaker 3 (21:29):
Okay, just stay on that one thing, because I'm old
enough to remember what I feel good with the Gigantic Kid.
Do you know how that worked out? Did Mercury actually
who was based in Chicago at that point, did they
actually release it? Because you know, normally you know who
ended up making it a hit, Mercury or King and
how did that happen?

Speaker 2 (21:51):
So, yeah, it got released on Smash because I was
able to find the publicity shots. So there's a publicity
shot where it's James performing, So the James of the
Famous Flame, Bobby Bird and all those guys, they're all
doing I Feel Good in the dance number on there,
and they have they have a promo shot where it
has Smashed Records right there on the bottom. So they

(22:13):
released it under Smash. But once the release came out,
King came in right away and they had to work
that deal out very quickly.

Speaker 3 (22:22):
Okay, you know, I was thrilled to see an experiencial film,
which is fantastic. Everybody literally should see so much. But
I knew about Sid Nathan from Seymour Stein. You could
not sit with se without Sid coming up. You made
this film at the end of the day, how do

(22:44):
you feel about Sid the Man?

Speaker 2 (22:48):
Uh, that's interesting, you know. I, first of all, seymour
Stein one of the best interviews I've ever had in
my life. He fell asleep in it twice, but he
was determined to get every question answered. He wanted to
make sure he went on record everything you need to
know about Sid Nathan, which was amazing. And I also
got like a lot of advice, just like music business

(23:10):
advice and how to navigate. The guy is really really deep,
So it was really amazing to be able to get
spent some time with him, And yeah, he had a
lot of interesting things to say about Sidneathan. He gave
me a different color of Sidnathan. I'm very close with
Sid Nathan's family, his nephew in particular, so I've gotten

(23:31):
to have a lot of viewpoints from a lot of
people who knew Sid personally. And Sid's kind of an
interesting guy, you know, Sid the man, very principled, very stubborn.
He's a classic metch you know, like it's that's the
best way that I can kind of describe it. And
that's something I'm I grew up in a Jewish community

(23:52):
in Cleveland, so I understand what that means and who
that guy is. But he's very much that classic guy
smokes cigars, said the first thing on his mind is
always kind of like making a joke, making a dirty joke,
you know, but on you know, so like there's that
kind of lovable side to him. He was very big

(24:13):
with giving gifts. Sid would go out and he'd find
a deal on something and he'd buy twenty of them,
and he's so he like, there's one time he found radios.
So he found this new fangled radio, so he bought
twenty new fangled radios. He'd have people to his house.
He had a pool, he was always throwing parties, and
he'd give them these radios. Man, so you come into
the house and you get this like new fangled radio
from Sid and this other type of cigar. So I

(24:37):
connected with him on those types of things. But then
on the same side, you know, he's this cranky guy
who's constantly fighting with like Nina Simone, and he's fighting
with Otis Williams, and he's fighting with all these artists
and he has favorite artists who he loves, but he's
kind of a jerk to some of these people, and
so that's kind of like an interesting dichotomy to kind

(24:57):
of pull at, to kind of figure out with Sid.
But you know, he's kind of an interesting, hilarious character.
He's kind of every man. He's a knockabout, and I
think he's kind of a character that everybody has a
little bit of Sid Nathan inside of him.

Speaker 3 (25:14):
Okay, the business has evolved, oh my gosh, but even
at this date, the terms are on the record company's side.
Back in Sid Nathan's date, there are a lot of
very famous labels that never paid royalties. In addition to
the fact that the royalty rates were very low. To

(25:36):
what degree were the acts angry that when they had success,
the lion's share of the money went to the label
as opposed to them.

Speaker 2 (25:46):
Wow, it is a subject matter that keeps coming, that
came up in every interview with every artist or anybody's
every artist interview comes up. So Sid was very, very
scrupulous and very you know on the negotiations. You know,
he'd come at you hard on the negotiations, and it
was mainly because you know, Grandpa Jones talks about this

(26:08):
in an interview he you know, he would come at
you hard, but once you made the deal, he would
stick to the end of the deal. You know, Grandpa
Jones played four cents aside, which is a terrible deal,
you know, and you know four cents is nothing, but
you know, Grandpa Jones said nobody was going to give

(26:29):
him a deal of any kind. And without that deal,
you know, a couple of years later he moved to RCA.
He would have never gotten the RCA deal if he
didn't get the King deal. And he's able to move on.
There's some artists, particularly African American artists, that their ability
to move on wasn't easy and wasn't as there wasn't
a path for them that they could easily move on

(26:50):
to another label. Some there were, but a lot of
people really did feel that Sid Nathan didn't do them right.
But James, you know, there's an interview with James Brown
where he kind of clarifies the situation. You know, James
Brown is an international star. The first time I heard
about James Brown was in my grandmother's records in Nigeria
as a kid, and it wasn't a King record. I

(27:11):
don't remember the name of the label, but I definitely
remember it wasn't King because I definitely would have recognized it.
It was, you know, a bootleg probably, and what James
space was internationally, there wasn't anybody who could control his royalties.
Sid Nathan couldn't collect royalty. You know, collecting royalties back
then especially was really tough. You had to be the

(27:33):
one to go out there and figure out who's making
your stuff or playing your stuff, and you got to
figure the money out, which was a lot tougher, you know.
So the ability to collect all the royalties was difficult
in the first place, and in James Brown's case, it
wasn't possible, which was one of the things he wanted
from a Polydor. So when he moved to an international
German company like Polydor in seventy one, you know, he's

(27:56):
now able to get the full He's now able to
collect royalties. And along the way, James been able to
renegotiate his deal, but not every artist was able to
renegotiate their deal. So you have artists like Otis Williams
and the Charms who lives here in Cincinnati, and he
had the biggest doop group in the nineteen fifties. They
were huge, and they had hit after hit after hit.

(28:17):
You know, Sid would do things like, you know, his
mom got married, so Sid would pay for the wedding
and then Sid would then turn around and charge Otis's
account for it. Or Sid would buy cars for people.
So Sid had a relationship with a car dealership down
the street from the studio, which was so he would

(28:37):
go there and make a deal. I'll purchase these cars
at this rate near cost, you make a little bit
of money over it, and I'll sell it to the artists,
which then gets him because it's depreciating asset. He's able
to then make more money off the top of paying
the artist these deals with the Cadillac, for example, and
a lot of these artists didn't understand that that was
going on, so a lot of them felt screwed over.

(28:59):
But Sid would find these ways of being able to,
you know, increase his profit by doing things like paying
for events or paying for like your baby shower, things
like that, which a lot of artists didn't appreciate because
he wasn't really upfront with what was happening there. So
there's a lot of that type of stuff. But you know,
that was just record business back in the nineteen fifties

(29:21):
and sixties, which, to be honest, Bob hasn't changed a
whole lot. To be honest, you know, the deals are
pretty much the same. Artists are getting the same type
of you know, artists are coming to these deals with
the same amount of education, and record labels are in
essence doing the same version of what they've always been doing.

Speaker 3 (29:48):
So in terms of his business savvy, was Sid totally
a man of experience or were there things in his
family or other things that happened that gave insight into
how to run a business?

Speaker 2 (30:02):
Oh, my lord, No, Sid was a knockabout man like.
So he had his bookie. This guy named Howard Kessel
was the family bookie, you know, and you know he
was kind of he had like mob relations man, but
he was like the local bookie. And he puts in
ten grand But Howard's wife like is railing against him

(30:22):
because he's Sid's cousin and he's saying, don't put much.
She's like, don't put money into this. I can't believe it.
And Howard was not the world's I met his granddaughter.
She let me know that he was a horrible husband's
very very mean man. So the fact that his wife
wasn't into this really got Howard to double down. But

(30:42):
you know, Sid was known as somebody who you weren't
going to necessarily invest into. Sid was also really sick.
He had a lot of health problems, so you know,
he went into business with his brother in law. They
started a that's actually how the idea of getting into
the record business started. He thought that, hey, if I

(31:03):
go into the record business, I can do this. They
start a whole record shop and Sid ends up having
some health issues and has to go down to Florida
with his guy as a brother who's a doctor in
Florida who has to nurse him back to health and
it takes like two years. So Sid can get into stuff,
but you know, because of his health, he might have
to pull out of it because of all kinds of circumstances.
Whether you know, he was sometimes not always on the

(31:27):
top or on the table. Everything wasn't, you know, on
the up and up as they say, so some things
would fall apart. But he had different He was a
he had a pawn shop, he was a wrestling promoter.
He had a shooting gallery. He got arrested for that.
He got arrested for crossing the street and getting a
jaywalk coming out of a movie theater once. That was fun. Yeah,

(31:50):
he was involved in all kinds of different schemes and
they would always fall apart, so people didn't really see
him to be a sure bet. But you know, he
was able to get family. It was getting enough friends
to kind of put money. They all put ten thousand
dollars each in nineteen forty three. That's a ton of money,
and they're able to get this record business started. But

(32:11):
everybody was kind of dubious that he was going to
be able to make anything out of it.

Speaker 3 (32:15):
Okay, at what point did it look like it was
going to be a business?

Speaker 2 (32:20):
Oh, you know, that's a great question. You know, I
would argue that from day one it looked like it
was going to be a business. You know, WLW, which
is this record, which is this radio station here in Cincinnati.
It's still around, but it was one of the first
big radio stations in America. They were able to broadcast

(32:43):
at fifty thousand jigawatts. I'm making that word up, but
they were able to broadcast at the highest level. Then
they had to get government permission. It was a big
deal and which allowed them to broadcast. Basically they could
be heard through the HEMISPR. So a lot of the
first places where you hear jazz is from this radio

(33:05):
station WLW Jazz in the Midwest. That's what really distributes it.
So this this radio station is right around the corner
from his record shop, and a lot of these guys
come into the record shop looking for music. They're looking
In their interviews, they talk about looking for black music.
They're looking to cover black music because they got to
like come up with new songs after new songs after

(33:26):
new song every day on the radio. So all these artists,
Grandpa Jones, Cowboy Kopis, all these artists are coming through
and they're buying records and they're learning these tunes, and
they're saying, hey, why don't you None of them are
at this point I'm capable of. They're not the big
stars at WLW. They can't get record labels, you know,
they're not like the Clooney sisters. You know, this is

(33:46):
how Rosemary Clooney gets her starts from this radio station
in fifties. So we're not the big ones. Hey, how
about we connect. How we get this guy who's doing
the record shop, How we get him to help us out.
So he kind of came in with knowing what the
client tell look like from people he was selling records to.
And then he had all these artists that are sitting
right there at WLW, and he kind of puts two

(34:08):
and two together. I've got, you know, a hungary audience,
and then I also have these musicians who are looking
for outlets, and two and two together. He kind of
had a built in situation. He was just kind of
able to slot himself in. But you know what's interesting
about WLW is that after they stopped having live on
air talent, all of the acts go down to Nashville

(34:29):
because the next station that's able to allow to broadcast
at this level is WSM, which is that's the home
of the grand Ole Opry. So that's when we now
see the rise of grand Ole operating the rise of Nashville.
After all of these musicians leave the prestige job of
WLW because they're not doing live talent, and Nashville is

(34:49):
able to keep this tradition going and keep it alive
to what we see here and the celebration we see
in the Ryeman and how Nashville is Nashville.

Speaker 3 (34:59):
So how does Sid get in the record business.

Speaker 2 (35:03):
Yeah, So he takes these guys from WLW and they're
not allowed to record in Cincinnati. WLW has an embargoo
on how they're allowed to and where they're allowed to record.
So they have to drive up to Dayton, Dayton, Ohio,
which is about an hour away, and they go there
and they make a recording and it's a crappy recording.
I was actually able to get a copy of that.

(35:25):
It's really bad. We had to do a lot of
music editing to get all the noise and all like.
It's just not a good recording. And he puts this
together and he's able to get it started, so he's
able to kind of figure out a way of being
able to record in Cincinnati. And these guys there's a
guy named Bucky Herzog who did a lot of work

(35:47):
with other main other major country acts here in here
in Cincinnati area, and he starts working with them and
Sid's like it's crazy. Sid like breaks into their sessions.
He's screaming his head off, He's yelling at people, I
want you to do this. And finally this guy Herzog
has enough of it and kicks sit out, and Sid

(36:10):
has to find a place to record. So that's when
he finds his own recording studio and he sets up
all of it. He sets up his own company. And
because he's such a pain in the ass to deal with,
and you know, he has to do it all by himself.
So he has to have the recording studio by himself,
he has to press the records by himself, and he
ends up ending up at zero integration to solve the

(36:32):
problems of the fact that he's a difficult he's an asshole,
you know, like if I was just gonna put it
like bluntly, he just isn't really able to play well
with others. And because of that, he has to have
everything in house, which ends up being his superpower.

Speaker 3 (36:49):
So when he built his own studio, I mean Atlantic Records,
they used to record in the office. They would push
the desks into the corner. Yeah, get up at night.
So what kind of recording facilitated sid build?

Speaker 2 (37:07):
That's true. Yeah, you know they started just like that
Ed King where they first started by doing things in
the office. And so a lot of I've got these
great interviews with with the office workers, and they would
talk about the fact that they'd come in the next
morning and they'd be boozed. So like the song good
Rocking Tonight. They came in and they had to record

(37:29):
because there's a band coming through. The Petrillo Band's about
to come through, which is the first strike by the
Musicians Union, and they are striking because of jukeboxes are
taking a lot of their gigs away. So because of this,
the record companies can't get artists to record. So before
this in nineteen forty seven, in the December forty seven,

(37:50):
they quickly have this marathon recording session and they bring
in with Nony Harris and they record in the office.
So that version of good Rocking Tonight that you hear
is them in the office, and they'd have to go
clean up after, you know, like he got booze and
cigarettes all over the place and all these like office
ladies have to clean it up, and they're finally sick
of it. So Sid has to go build a recording studio.

(38:10):
So he has his family has bad eyesight cataracts, so
he has cataract surgery and all of them, all of
his family members, they all this was like his sister
had cataract surgery and actually made her vision worse. Every
member of their family still to this day. They all
have bad eyesight. So he goes in for cataract surgery

(38:32):
and and then you had to stay in the hospital
for I think like two weeks. So he gets out
of the hospital after this forty eight session and they
can't really do anything. So he starts. He decides that
he's going to go out and he's going to build
a recording studio. He doesn't know how to do one,
and he's classic. Sid goes out there, takes his shovel
and starts digging. He's got like bandages still on, so

(38:54):
everybody's looking like Henry Glover is looking like what the
hell is he doing. They go out and they figure
out what's going on. They're finally able to get contractors
and get the situation, but they didn't particularly get it's
not on the same d because he did this, and
it's separate from the building, so it causes all in
King history and like in the efforts of saving the building,

(39:16):
the fact that he did this actually ended up being
the reason why they're actually able to preserve one large
part of the King Building because Sid went ahead and
just built it and without asking any permission or getting
any kind of legals around. It actually ended up being
to the benefit of rescuing it in the long run.
But he just did whatever the hell he wanted, whenever
he wanted, And that is how Sid started his record studio.

Speaker 3 (39:41):
Okay, for those who haven't seen the movie, tell us
a story of how Sid even falls into the music business.

Speaker 2 (39:50):
Yeah, so Sid had been So there was a big
flood in nineteen thirty seven in Cincinnati. If you look
at any archive footage, you will find hours and hours
and hours talking about this flood. It's like hilarious. It
was huge news. And there was a jukebox operator in
the flood who lost everything and the only thing he

(40:12):
had left was records. So he'd owed Sid money from
the pawnshop and from the record shop. So he goes
in from the pawn shop rather and he says, he man, like,
I can't pay you back this six bucks. I just
lost everything. Here are all my records. If you put
these out and you sell them, you'll make more than
enough of the six bucks back. So you know, Sid

(40:35):
takes the deal and they put them out and they
sell like hotcakes. They sell all of the records really quickly,
so quickly they understand that there's a market here, so
he gets into the record shop business that way. Over
time he ends up having to leave it. As I
said before, he gets sick, and then he comes back
to Cincinnati and he's got this idea of this record shop.
So he starts a record shop right next to WLW

(40:57):
and he gets to the artists, and so these artists
convince him to get into the record making business. And
from the record making business he basically works because his
struggles with working with others. He works himself into a
situation where he is now he has to have vertical
integration to be able to operate. And from there he

(41:19):
starts looking for African American artists, and he starts looking
for hillbilly at artists. There was really, you know, back then,
a lot of the major record labels, RCA, Decca, all
those guys weren't doing country. Forties country was really outrey
back then. It wasn't in. Being a hillbilly wasn't cool.

(41:40):
So King Records because of that kind of captures bluegrass
mountain music turning into bluegrass turning into country, and they
get these artists who were kind of like having this
migration into nineteen forties country, which eventually becomes huge with
nineteen fifties and once kind of these record labels show
that country music is hip, you start seeing the majors.

(42:02):
RCA starts swooping in taking some of these guys, and
a lot of these guys have a resurgence. So you
see guys like Hawkshaw Hawkins and Cowboy Copis. They both
pass away famously on the flight with Patsy Klein at
the time. Both of them were bigger stars than Patsy
Klein was in the fifties because they were the bigger acts.
You know, they had this big They became huge on King,

(42:25):
went to RCA and then eventually Starday Records, which was
a famed label in Nashville. But you have these guys
are huge, you know, country's big, and Sid gets into it,
then he gets out of it. You have guys that
are like the Stanley Brothers who were over at Capital.
They moved to King because the majors leave bluegrass, bluegrasses

(42:45):
in this cool country becomes the cool thing and Sid
decides to invest into that, and he's also then investing
in the black music at the time, because the majors
weren't everybody's trying to do pop. Everybody's trying to have
a pop break, and Sid, you know, he starts bringing
some of these early Detroit artists like Hank Ballard and
Little Willie John because there wasn't any place to record.

(43:06):
Motown wasn't a thing yet, so a lot of these
black artists like John Lee Hooker, they've got to find
all these places to record. From Detroit, they come down
three hours south to Cincinnati. Sid gets these guys too,
and he's getting guys like Hank Ballard, which leads him
to guys like James Brown, and James Brown's able to
kind of carry the business forward through the sixties. But

(43:28):
that's kind of like their arc you know, through American music,
they kind of capture these they're in the spaces where
nobody else is in because they're able to find an
audience kind of you know, they had vertical integration. So
Sid had no problem giving it a try. So he
had guys like Otis Redding. Otis Redding recorded with King
before his Stax days, and he has a great song

(43:50):
Shout Bamlama. I highly recommend checking it out. It's super
dope and it's like powerful. Otis Redding. You hear Otis
Redding is fully formed. You know, he was a journeyman
singing or going from label to label. He stops at King.
Sid's like, why not, let's give it a try. Let's
put it out and see what happens. Nothing happens, but
you have you know, he has he's able to capture
people like Patty Labelle's first record with the Blue Belts

(44:13):
when she's fourteen, because she's a good singer. Let's give
it a try and let's see what happens. And Sid
ends up capturing a lot of these huge musical acts
while they were young, while they were just getting started
early in their career, because he has vertical ingration and
he's he's willing to kind of take a shot, you know,
you take a shot of these musicians. See what happens.

(44:34):
If anything huge happens, go for it. If nothing happens,
then you move on to the next guy. But that
was kind of his arc in the music business.

Speaker 3 (44:43):
Why was it called King record, That's.

Speaker 2 (44:46):
A great question. He was driving to that first recording
session in Dayton and Grandpa Jones had kind of been
doodling this character. So Grandpa Jones had this he was
a really he was really good at drawing. So he's
like making this little cartoon and they're making jokes and
finally the conversation shifts to, Okay, so you're starting this
record company. What are you gonna call it? And Sid decides,

(45:08):
I'm gonna call it King Records because I'm gonna be
the King of them all and that was his goal
and that's how he came up with it, and that
was their first slogan. They put it on their first records.
It's actually the title of our film, and that is
why he named the King. He started Queen Records soon
after that, which was the African American label, but he
kind of starts with that King Queen thing. They're pressing

(45:31):
companies called Royal Plastics, so he kind of has this
theme that he's doing for the first couple of years
of King, and then he kind of merges everything under
there and eventually brings in other labels under his control
over time.

Speaker 3 (45:52):
Why were James Brown's records put out on Federal Records?
And do you have any idea where that name came from?

Speaker 2 (45:58):
Yeah, so Federal label. So Federal. That label was started
by I'm seeing his face and I am blanking on
his name. I can't believe it. Not Henry Stone. Uh,
there was a produce iowall blank, I'm so sorry. There
was a producer that that they'd started Federal under and

(46:23):
Sid kind of came to the situation as a partner,
and that is that was their label for African American music,
one of the labels that he picked up. So they
had put different African American artists on there, like Hank
Ballard was on Federal and they'd moved different people. They
had Deluxe Records, which another record label that they had

(46:43):
there was African American Focus that was with Henry Stone.
They had different labels that were kind of focused for
different target areas, and Federal was kind of their Southern music,
so African American Southern label, because there was a lot
of the producers that worked through there were working through
the Chitlin circuits basically, and that's what that label's focus was.

(47:05):
So when it came under the when Sid Nathan bought
it and came under its ownership, all those artists kind
of were put under that label. So a lot, yeah,
a lot of the famous Flames were originally done under Federal,
but then later in the sixties, they move under the
King umbrella as well.

Speaker 3 (47:24):
Okay, he has the record shop right next to the
radio station. What are literally the first acts he cuts?
And what is the first one or the first couple
that start to sell?

Speaker 2 (47:36):
So in forty three his first ones that he does.
That's with Grandpa Jones and Merle Travis. Merle Travis, for
any guitar fans out there, invented Travis picking. If you're
familiar with that, it's with a thumb pick. He's one
of the most important guitarists of all time. I got
to have a whole rundown with Vince gil Vince Gill is,

(47:59):
by the way, amazing. He knows everything about every guitar
style and guitarist of country music lore, so he was
really able to kind of like really color in a
lot of those details for me. But Merle Travis is
kind of the first guys. Then he's got the Delmore
Brothers in there as well, and Cowboy copis hawkshaw Hawk

(48:20):
Hawkins comes to the deal later. But it's a lot
of these country guys, but a lot of them have
to go to war, So a lot of them end
up having to go to World War for World War two,
which cuts kind of makes a break in their relationship.
It's actually one of the reasons why they lose their
deal with King. And when they come back, they see
a resurgence because a lot of the big labels are

(48:42):
now interested in these artists and a lot of them
able to go on. So you see Grandpa Jones, for example,
goes on to be on Hehaw. So anybody any fans
of he Haw out there, Grandpa Jones from he Haw.
But you see a lot of these artists. You know,
World War Two kind of gets in the way, but
the first stars that he gets are are these guys,
and Cowboy Copus is his first hit. In nineteen forty eight,

(49:05):
they have a hit with called Filipino Baby, which is
looking back from the lens of understanding things now. It's
a very kind of problematic song if you're a Filipino,
I don't think it'd be your favorite song, but it is.
It is a song of its time. But it was
one of the first hits they have, and forty eight

(49:25):
becomes their big year because they've got that song. They've
got good rocking tonight, they've got a bull Moose Jackson hit.
I think the forty eight forty eight. So Me and
my ten inch record was like the big hit back then,
which was a euphemism, you know, sexual euphemism back then.
But yeah, so they in forty eight, they have a

(49:46):
slew of hits with a lot of these artists. Tomorrow
Night with is one big hit. They just kind of
start having hits in the African American market, in the
country market, first starting with Cowboy Copus, but then very
quickly with a bunch of artists in forty eight.

Speaker 3 (50:02):
Let's be a little more granular. He opens the records store.
They come from the radio station to buy records. The
acts that played the radio station, are those the first
acts he records.

Speaker 2 (50:17):
Yeah, the acts that are playing so Merle Travis, Grandpa Jones,
the Delmore Brothers, they're all acts that are playing shows
at WLW, also at some other radio stations. So like
the Delmore brothers. Alton Delmore had a drinking problem, so
they had they kind of were they bounced around from
radio station to radio station. So at the time, I

(50:38):
think they'd just been let go from WLW, but were
picked up from one of the Kentucky radio stations. So
they're in the area and they're able to work with Sid,
but yeah, he's kind of farming from a lot of
this talent that's kind of in the Cincinnati area because
of the prestige radio jobs.

Speaker 3 (50:55):
Okay, how does the light bulb go off? These guys
come to buy records bitching about the you know, the
problems with the radio station. Did they say, hey, Sid,
you should make a record with us. Where does light
bulb go off? As Sid go wait a second here,
I could make these records.

Speaker 2 (51:11):
Yeah. So I believe that it was the Delmore brothers
who first hatched the idea because they needed like they
needed some career help because I said, you know, one
of the brothers had a really severe drinking problem. They
got them in trouble, and they needed a way to
be able to kind of advertise, and nobody was going

(51:33):
to take a risk on them. So I believe it
was first to Delmore brothers to kind of start the coercing,
followed by Grandpa Jones and Merle Travis because none of
them were going to get a record deal anywhere. And
it's because of that that they kind of stay in
Sid's ear and Sid's like, okay, I see there's a
market here. Maybe you know, he SID was visually impaired,

(51:57):
so allowed him to you know, he was familiar with
Society for Blind made records for the blind, so he
was kind of familiar with the process and had access
to see how those records were pressed. So the combination
of having access to see how the records were pressed
allowed him to kind of say, Okay, so I had
this access to seeing where the records are, I've got

(52:19):
these artists, I've got this market. I think that I
can pull this off, you know, and like a lot
of these guys, you know, conversation kind of worked up.
You know, these guys kind of worked them up to
have the gumption to give it a try.

Speaker 3 (52:33):
Okay. So if you didn't make a record with SID,
and you didn't make a record with the major companies
like RCAA, did SID have any competition on the independent level?

Speaker 2 (52:48):
Oh? Absolutely, I mean there was a slew of independent
record labels, particularly you know Chess, Leonard Chess, the Chess Brothers.
One of the perfect examples again is with Jane The
signing of James Brown is hilarious. And I just remember
the name Ralph Bass over Federal Records, and Ralph Bass

(53:09):
is a legendary for anybody who's familiar Ralph Bass is
going through the South. You know, he's this Russian jew
who was really really like had his pulse on African
American music. He was the guy that would go into
like the depths of it. There are a couple of
guys like that around. King Moon Mulligan was another guy
who was like this who they really were entrenched in

(53:31):
African American music culture, and so he was like really
he knew about James Brown, and you knew James Brown
was happening. So he ends up heading to he gets
wind of James Brown happening. James Brown was supposed to
sign with Chess Brothers. In fact, a bunch of other
record labels were snipping around James Brown around the time

(53:53):
when James Brown becomes a hit the Chess Brothers, there's
a huge snowstorm in Chicago, so the Chess Brothers an't
able to get down to South to Georgia in time.
Bass hears about this and hurries up and gets to
these guys, and then he throws in a little bit
of extra cash, so it kind of likes smooth it over,

(54:14):
and he's able to get James Brown to sign the
Federal contract, and even though he had already planned and
agreed to sign the Chess contract. So there was a
competition for artists between them, and there's also a competition
for music. So I read once that Doctor John. One
of Doctor John's first gigs was to transcribe records, and

(54:36):
he would transcribe like King records, so you would see
hits that were coming up in different cities. So you'd
see hits coming up in New Orleans, you'd quickly come in,
transcribe it, get the music out, get your own artists
to record your version of it, and you'd put it
out on the market. And that was a common thing.
You know, we don't have holds. So the last time

(54:57):
I think we saw this was that Rhyanne a Leanne
rhyme song with Trisha Yearwood. They came out with the
same song, what like ninety six how Do I Live
Without You? That song. That's the last time we've seen
this in like modern music. But that used to be
a thing all the time. You'd had all these answer
songs and people covering songs, and there was this kind
of industry around who could kind of beat each other

(55:19):
to the market, and so that was kind of the market.
That was the competition. But Sid, because he had vertical integration,
he could beat everybody in the market. He could get
to like you could record a song in the morning
and you could have that on the trucks in the
cities in the next within forty eight hours of recording.
Nobody else had that speed in the music business. So

(55:40):
it made it really hard for people to stay in.
So that's why King is around for fifteen years. You know,
if you look at all these other record labels, Chess,
it's a very short line run. You look Sun Records,
it's five years. You look in at Atlantic, you know,
all of these runs the companies are five, six years,
seven years here and there. Stax kind of has a
second wing after their vote years. But you know, each

(56:03):
one of these record labels, they're very they're in and out.
You know, it's a short part of American history. King
Records is able to stay from the Roosevelt administration to
the Nixon administration because of being able to do this,
They're able to be quick to market in the first
one to market and that's kind of really what kept
them floating, and that's what kept SID special in the marketplace.

Speaker 3 (56:24):
How did Sid get along with the Chess brothers and
the rest of his contemporaries.

Speaker 2 (56:31):
I mean, I would love to be a fly in
the wall between a meeting between Leonard Chess and Sid Nathan.
That would make great TV America. You know, I assume
that it would have been congenial but different, you know,

(56:51):
I that's a good question because you know, a lot
of these guys they had to work together. Sim could
press his own records, so a lot of these companies
would press their records with other record labels. So you
would work with Sid. Other record labels were you know,
there's a there's all these different artists that would use

(57:13):
the record pressing business as their label. So some places
would go to RCA. RCA had a spot in Indiana
outside of Indianapolis that they would pressed a lot of
their records. You'd have to get in line, and it
wasn't very quick, you know, sometimes it'd be a month
long turnaround, so you'd have to find all these other
companies that did different parts of the business. Sid did

(57:33):
his own stuff in house, so some of these record
labels would have to rely on Sid and that's how
they came into you know, like Bethlehem Records, which is
a jazz label. We're pressing their records, and eventually, when
they started running into problems, Sid buys the record label.
He's working with people like there's a wonderful lady named
Ruth Wallace. She is an artist. She used to do

(57:55):
kind of like comedy songs. So like, uh, there's some
of these great like tunes that they would talk about
like homosexuality, or there's one song called boobs. But they
are these like nineteen fifties songs talking about things that
would be shocking. You know, you'd think that people didn't

(58:16):
talk about this stuff in the fifties, but Sid wouldn't
put his label on it, but he would press the records.
So a lot of these other people, you know, you
had to have working relationship with everybody because Sid had
the full spectrum of the business around him. And because
of that, it allowed him to kind of have a
unique relationship with the Leonard Chess, with with an Urtigan.

(58:38):
But you know, over time in the nineteen sixties, he's
not able to kind of move along with the new
independence that you see the next generation of guy Stacks Motown.
He's not able to keep up with them because you know,
he's an older generation. But that older generation of like
you know, the dirty, grungy guys like Sam Phillips and

(58:59):
those characters. They're all kind of similar, harassable personality types.
And Sid's able to kind of navigate it because you know,
he's a king of his own castle, as it were.

Speaker 3 (59:10):
Okay, what is the timeline both the order of the
number of years he starts to make records in Dayton.
How long after that does he build his own studio.
How long after that does he buy his own pressing machines?

Speaker 2 (59:25):
Ooh, good question. Let me see. So forty three starts
the business. Then he does the Dayton thing. In forty three,
I think I believe they only do that once, maybe twice.
From there, they start recording with Bucky Herzog, and they
do that, I believe, for a couple months, maybe a year,

(59:47):
and by I want to say forty five, forty four,
forty five, I think he's moving into his own office.
You know, there's and then the he starts having to
press his own records because during the war, there's slack
is being is being used for the war efforts, so
they aren't able to press records at a cheap cost

(01:00:10):
any longer, so he runs. He finds the cost to
to be astronomical. They go up to Chicago to try
to report the fact that there's bribery in this whole scheme,
and finally coming back from Chicago, he decides that he's
just going to make his own records. And that's happening
between between forty Between forty four to forty seven is

(01:00:31):
when he's kind of maturing into doing his own thing.

Speaker 3 (01:00:36):
Where does he get the money to buy these machines
and where does he buy him? And how many does
he buy? And how many records get he press on? Committally?

Speaker 2 (01:00:44):
Oh wow? So they first they first start out with
one record press, and it's not a very good one.
You know, they've got to find it from different broken parts.
Like I said before, they are looking at the Society
for the Blind and they're getting these specs for these parts.
They're trying to find broken parts here and there, and

(01:01:06):
they kind of frankenstein some together. And the first ones
I mean, as I said, that's why the records they
first do are terrible. They have no idea what they're doing,
but they've gotten in deep enough that they're able to
bring in some people who do know what they're doing
and eventually help them put like a proper business together.
But at first they had one press and then they

(01:01:27):
eventually I've got a picture in the film where they
have a full pressing facility, and I want to say
something to the order if off the top of my head,
I think six to eight presses is what I was
able to see kind of their height. Maybe more, but
I've only been able to see about six d eight presses.
But you know, pressing records back in there, I mean

(01:01:48):
it's like science, you know. In the research of this film,
I went and I actually put a how to make
a record film together that starts from the very beginning
of the process of how you dip it in nickel caadium,
and then how you did You did it with a nickel,
then you dig in cadium, then you do You've got
to deep, and you've got to make all these copies
of a copy of a copy in different metals before

(01:02:11):
you're actually able to make a metal stamper, and then
you start stamping them out. It is like a twelve
sep process. I mean, how they figured this out is amazing,
but it's not the world's easiest process. And it takes
a couple of years before they're able to make it happen.
But Sid is able to figure it out. But the
first couple of them are terrible. They're bad, They're not

(01:02:31):
good at Okay.

Speaker 3 (01:02:35):
At the time, if you were an independent label, you
used independent distributors were regional. But from what I can
tell from your film, Sid didn't use them. He distributed
the records himself. Correct, Is that true?

Speaker 2 (01:02:51):
Yep. They had offices all around the country. It's why
you will find King records. A friend of mine sent
me King Records from Iowa. I think it's I can't
remember the number, but they had like twenty seven or
something offices around the country.

Speaker 1 (01:03:07):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:03:08):
They also even had a studio in New York. Henry
Glover was dispatched to New York City and a lot
of the you know, Fever, they did a lot of
the They recorded Fever in Cincinnati, but a lot of
the prep work for Fever was done with Henry when
he lived in New York City. They were they were
a bigger, you know, right in America. It's hard for

(01:03:30):
us to kind of think about everything so regionally, but
America used to be a lot more regional. You know,
you had beer that you could only get in your region,
and you were very proud of it. You know, Guys
from the South were all about the South. Guys from
the Midwest, you were all about your region of where
you came from. And businesses operated regionally and the ways

(01:03:50):
that you worked to kind of national was was working
through different relationships. But everything was very you know, even
like wrestling, and we kind of take this for a
but wrestling was was regional operations. You know, a lot
of things in America were very regional based. That was
the big game. So sid was able to expand outside

(01:04:11):
of that was really impressive because it allowed him to
kind of be in a place where the major players were.
But he was largely a regional player who could extend
into California, who could extend into the South, and he
absorbed companies that kind of already had RESO. Again, as
I said, Federal before was based in the South. Deluxe
was also big. He had these companies who were based

(01:04:33):
in Florida. That's how we picked up Hank Ballard. For example.
You had artists there were that he get from the
New York area, artists from different parts of the Midwest,
and that's what really gave him the impetus to pick
up different record labels because it gave him much more
regional advantages. And that's what he was able to do

(01:04:53):
to kind of plug all these networks together into one
large network for himself for King Records.

Speaker 3 (01:05:06):
Did he know anything about music?

Speaker 2 (01:05:09):
Oh, my lord, that's a great question, uh, Philip Paul,
who was one of the studio there was a lot
of these studio drummers, Philip Paul, Henry Glover. A lot
of the people talk about the fact that Sid was
a drummer, you know, and he or a purported drummer,
and he believed that he was a musician, and he
believed he had the ear. A lot of people talk

(01:05:31):
about the fact that he didn't really have the ear,
but he knew record business and he had Henry Glover
was kind of the guy that knew the music. So
that's why that relation relationship between those two gentlemen was
important because he needed somebody who knew the music. But
Sid knew what sold and he had the business instincts
to figure that out. Henry knew what was good and

(01:05:53):
what people wanted, and where the market was and where
it was going, and you see this with Henry because
Henry Glover, you know, Levon helm and the band go
on to work with him. Henry Glover ends up being
one of the most important background characters in American rock
and roll. But that was the guy you know when
we look, you know, when you're looking for the hidden

(01:06:14):
figure of the African American. We always talk about how
African Americans created rock and roll and whether it's this
or that. Henry Glover is really the African American. He's
kind of the Lewis Latimer who was the assistant that
worked with Edison. He's kind of like the similar type
of hidden figure character in American music. He's the guy
who takes kind of that generational jump from jump blues.

(01:06:38):
The previous generation had the blues, the next generation's coming
up with something a little grungier, a little dirtier. Henry's
the one who kind of codifies the musical form, the
hand claps, where the sax solo goes in the form.
You know, it's very rock and roll. The style of
music is very specific. You know, you've got your A section,
you got your B section, then you go to that

(01:06:59):
sax solo. You can do different things in that sax
solo depend like if your vocalist sings too low of
a key, you modulate, which is a trick that you
see in that R. E. S P E C T
with Aretha hit. That's a Henry Glover trick that still
exists in music. There's a lot of things that Henry
kind of did that like codified what ended up being

(01:07:21):
the definition of the style of music of rock and roll,
which is a difference from blues and jump blues and
all these other styles. And he's able to codify it.
And rock and roll is also and I'm sure you
know this, Bob, isn't the guitar? A lot of people
at like highlight when we see the first distorted guitar,
which is with Rocket eighty eight. You know they're traveling

(01:07:44):
and going into this record session and somebody busts the
Gibson amp. I think it was a drum stand goes
through it, and it's a to go into the recording
session and it's a distorted amp. And because of that,
people point that to be rock and roll, or people
will say somebody like sister Rosetta Tharp is the start
of rock and roll because she played the guitar well,
ciner Rosetta Tharp is playing blues and the guitar doesn't

(01:08:07):
make it, and a distorted guitar doesn't make it rock
and roll. Interestingly enough, Henry Glover worked with sister Rosetta
Tharp when she worked with Lucky Millinder. Lucky Millinder was
the artist that King Records brought on, and that's what
brought King Records into rock, into black music. But you
have Lucky Millinder and his band are doing these interesting things,

(01:08:31):
and from there, Henry Glover comes from that and says, Okay,
I'm going to start taking all of these things that
we worked with. These artists we worked with bull Muse Jackson,
we worked and he starts doing these experiments with the
Delmore Brothers. So Blue Stay Away for Me is one
of the songs that's a contender for the first rock
and roll song, as is Good rockin Tonight, which we
say in the film is the first one, because you

(01:08:53):
really see the full formal, you know, with Blue Stay
Away from Me, we see Henry Glover takes a blue
whose like Basseline, applies it into a country song and
it's great, it's slamming, it sounds so good. You take
him take that idea even further with Good Rocking Tonight.
You see the original version and you see how he

(01:09:13):
changes it up and all these details that he adds
to it codifies the style of rock and roll. And
from there you see Sun Records take it and then
advertise it to kids, the emerging teenage market, and that
explodes a rock and roll. But at every point in
time and anything that you find to tie back to
the early points of rock and roll, it really ties

(01:09:36):
back to Henry Glover. And it's like, whether it's through
Sister Rosetta Tharp and the work with Lucky Millinder, or
whether it's going forward with American rock and roll with
Levon Helm and the band and all the other actu
that he works with. It's not Sid Nathan, but it's
actually Henry Glover is the one who really starts like

(01:09:56):
American music in this direction, and he's the ear that's
said Nathan depends on to move the music forward.

Speaker 3 (01:10:05):
Okay, I wrote about your film and I started getting
email from all these people linking me to YouTube and
the speeches Sid made. Yeah, can you speak to that?

Speaker 2 (01:10:18):
Yeah. So we use those recordings in the film and
they are some of my favorite recordings. Ever, Sid is hilarious,
so he would come in. You know, it's a recording company.
So like from time to time they grab a microphone
and they recorded. So one of them, Sid goes to Europe,

(01:10:39):
and Sid decides he comes back to Europe at the
team meeting with all the producers and he's going to
talk about his trip. So he talks about all the
things that he sees, and I recommend people going and
checking them out because it really shows Sid's personality. He
talks about how how he thought he was cheap, but

(01:10:59):
then he sees these like European people and some of
them are even cheaper than he was. And he's coming
up with all these jokes and talking about like all
of the things that he's seeing and all the places
that he went and different acts that he checked out
and was considering signing, actually one of them being the
Beatles that he did not sign on that trip. Funny enough,
and then he has others where he's talking about so

(01:11:22):
like they come back. He tells the story in one
of these recordings about Wennoni Harris. We actually didn't put
this in the film, but he so they are they
have to find that he's trying to like have these
marathon sessions because again they can't record. You know they're
about to they know everybody's going to go on strike.
He needs to pull in an artist. They find Wenoni Harris.

(01:11:42):
He's performing somewhere in New York. So they go up
there and they knock on the door in the hotel.
Now Wenoni is having a great time. Sid describes the
story as he goes in and they knock on the
door and Winoni's in there with three other women and
they're entertaining themselves. Sid interrupts this session to talk business.

(01:12:08):
One of the women has a problem with this is
what's going on. Wenoni kicks her out, So now he's
with these two. He's now got Weinoni and these two ladies.
And the point that Sid likes to recount to everyone
is that they're coming in there and they have to
do their negotiations for the business. And Menoni is there.
He's shirtless and the only thing that he's wearing is

(01:12:28):
his underwear with pink hearts on them. And he makes
a big deal to be like, and olid were these
pink on the head pink hearts on them? Can you
believe it? And he reaches over to one of the
producers and like one of the producers like yes, Sid,
like because one of the guys was like no way,
and like he's like tell him, tell him, and the
guy's like, yes, this actually happened. He came in, we

(01:12:52):
had a talk. They were definitely having a good time
with these ladies. We had to work out the deal.
We did the deal in his underwear. We get up,
we leave, and he continues about his business that he
was doing before we left, and that is how they
signed Menony Harris, and he records us and he tells
the story like right when they come back. So he
has all these epic stories that they that they collect.

(01:13:15):
There's all these other ones too, like sit in the session.
You can hear Like saying there's an engineer who's talking
back and forth between James Brown and Sid and you'll
hear Sid say something like, mister Nathan would like you to,
you know, sorry, if you guys can tighten it up
a little bit or do this or something it and
then you'll hear James be like, what what are you
talking about? You want me to tighten up talk? And

(01:13:36):
you see this back and forth with this engineer having
to be the intermediary of these guys arguing. But yeah,
he's got all these recording of his voice, and he's
got this crazy vote atal like this, and he's big,
and it's like he's braggadocious and he's constantly yelling and
so he's got a cigar in his mouth and he's hilarious.
But if anybody ever gets a chance, and if you've

(01:13:57):
got time to kill, go listen to these recordings. He's
got him on a disc. They're on a disc set,
a compilation disc set that you can find on Amazon.
It's called The Complete King and it's got all those
recordings on them.

Speaker 3 (01:14:10):
Okay, you go through the arc of James Brown's career
in Tenury King. James Brown an American icon. But he
did spend time in jail. Was that an anomaly? Was
that driving while black? Or was James hothead a little
crazy himself?

Speaker 2 (01:14:31):
Ooh, that's a really great question. So the first thing
that I think that you have to start with in
understanding James Brown is that he is a product of
his environment. And his environment was he was born, he
was raising a whorehouse. You know, his mother abandoned him
at a very early age and he went to live
with an aunt and the aunt was, you know, a

(01:14:51):
tough environment and he had to shine shoes, you know,
like he had to earn his keep while living in
this environment from a very young age, so he had
a shine shoe. He learned how to be an entertainer,
He learned how to be a hustler, he learned how
to work hard. But it creates a personality type that
is that is very, very troubled and has a very
different way of looking at the world. You know, we

(01:15:13):
see this. You know, Richard Pryor also came from similar backgrounds.
You know, he was raised in a whorehouse and you know,
it leaves a traumatic scar on them that you see
through their artistry. There brilliant artists who learn how to
perform at a very you know, it's intrinsic to them,
but they have a lot of issues and very early

(01:15:33):
you know, he had issues with the law very early on.
And Bobby Byrd's family, you know, James is he's a
tremendous athlete. He's he's a golden glove boxer, which I
believe I was able to find proof that he was
a golden but he definitely was a boxer, but he
was in jail. He played baseball, and the church had

(01:15:57):
an arrangement with kind of like trying to help these
young people and the Bird family. Bobby Bird meets James
Brown this way, and they're able to kind of get
him to turn his energy towards music and they're able
to sponsor him and get him out of prison. So
James really starts, you know, music gives him this outlet
and he really builds this discipline into this band Bobby Bird,

(01:16:21):
and Bobby Bird's family gives him this like this spiritual
discipline on top of like a real family. It's like
the first time he has this experience with a real
black family.

Speaker 3 (01:16:31):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:16:31):
At a point, you know, James Mary's Bobby Bird's sister,
which ends up being one of the reasons their relationship
falls apart, one of many later, but you know, James's
this becomes their family. You know, the Birds really help
him out and give him direction, and from there James
is able to kind of hit his hit from there.

(01:16:52):
You know, James had a strong similar to Miles Davis,
had a strong anti drug policy, so his guys didn't
didn't do drugs, which is one of the issues that
he had with Bootsy. I don't know if you've heard
the story before. So one of the gigs when Bootsy's
banned comes on board, they are out messing with some
liquid LSD on a gig and James comes outside and

(01:17:14):
he's like, what's that orange drink you guys messing with?
And they not wanting to explain this. Knowing James's policy,
they decide to have him share some of this drink
and James Brown goes out on the gig and you
know the moment when the acid hits in the middle
of the performance, and yeah, so James performs. The audience

(01:17:36):
is none the wiser because James Brown Hell or high
Water will perform and put on a good show, but
comes off the bandstand and soon after that fires Bootsy
and his boys because he had a strong anti drug policy,
which starts to change in the eighties after James's sun
passes away, that's when we start seeing the change. But
you know, like just like Miles, you know, like he

(01:17:57):
has a traumatic thing later which changed his viewpoint on drugs.
But during the height of it, you know, he had
a real strong policing of his band, which, yeah, which
you see again after the Bird family gets involved in
He ass issues early with the law. He really kind
of turns around. He turns his life around.

Speaker 3 (01:18:18):
Okay, you tell the story of Sid not wanting to
record James's live at the Apollo. James records it on
his own mode. Sid puts it out. It's gigantic hit.
Did James continue to be resentful about Sid's disbelief, not

(01:18:38):
believing in him, not paying that money? How did James
feel about Sid after that?

Speaker 2 (01:18:42):
Oh that's hilarious. So yeah, So they put out Please
Please Please, and it's a medium hit. He the first
thing that happens is that please Please Please. If the
session is happening, Sid gets on the call and immediately
fires Bats says, what is this shit? What have you

(01:19:02):
brought me? All he says is please Please Please? One word?
That's not a song. You are a fool. So Ralph
Bass says, hey, man, I know this is going to
be a hit. This was a hit when they recorded
their first demo. How about we just release in Atlanta,
Georgia and we see what happens. So there's a month
long process where Hank Ballard is trying to convince Sid

(01:19:23):
to release it. Otis Williams from Otis Williams in the
Charms here is trying to convince Sid to release it.
Sid's not having it, and finally they're able to convince him,
and Ralph Bass says, releasing Atlanta, Let's see what happens,
and then Sid says, you know what I'm gonna do.
I'm gonna release it nationwide to show everybody what a
fool you are. So he releases it nationwide and it

(01:19:44):
becomes a medium hit. It's huge in Atlanta, it's a
hit in It's a hit in these different markets. It's
hitting New Orleans. I read through I went through every
single page of Billboard magazine from nineteen forty to nineteen
seventy two to look at all the different ads, look
at all the different stories. So I just kind of
went page for page on everything, and you start seeing

(01:20:05):
there's this section in Billboard where you would see like
the different markets where things would hit, and please, please please,
there's a huge it's a pretty good hit for several
weeks in the black market, especially and especially in the South,
so it's enough to convince Sid, Okay, there's something here.
But then they have about a six year period where
Sid records, a whole bunch of stuff, and they all flop,

(01:20:26):
every one of them. In fact, they put all of
them onto a forty five and I've listened to them.
I collect I now collect records to go to this
and they're terrible. Every one of those songs are bad.
But then so Sid's getting ready to drop drop James
Brown from his label, and James is able to convince

(01:20:47):
him to give him one last try. If you give
me one last try, I'll pay for it myself. How
about that. So Nathan's like, all right, if you pay
for it yourself, you pay for the studio time. Fine. So,
like you know, James works out the deal. This is
one of the reasons why he believes he's done with
his record label, with his record requirements after because he
renegotiates and they come out with try Me, and try

(01:21:10):
Me becomes a hit, and that's really the first one.
That really is when James Brown starts to become James Brown.
But he's got to convince Sid to get on board.
And because he has to kind of negotiate his way
through it, James believes that he has more freedom than
he otherwise would because he came into the deal with

(01:21:31):
his own money, so is James is constantly looking for
opportunities where he can put his own seed money to
start projects. And every single time that there would be
any kind of issue, James would just kind of saying,
how about if I put my own money into it.
So finally, you know, Sid gets Winn into this, They
work it into kind of the negotiations, and James slowly

(01:21:52):
ekes out by basically you know, Sid not believing him
in him or things falling apart. He negotiates a way
to get more power in his record contracts and his business.
And this is why we see James Brown go from
the hardest working men in show business to the godfather
of soul, because you don't get there without Ben Bart,

(01:22:12):
who with these two principal actually these three principal Jewish men,
Jack Pearl who was his lawyer, Ben Bart who ran
Universal Attractions, his booking company, and then Sid Nathan who
ran the record label. Because these men who were connected
through their business connections and their community connections in the
Jewish community, are able to kind of give James Brown

(01:22:37):
the framework to kind of paint his own business, and
that empowers James to get to the next level.

Speaker 3 (01:22:44):
Okay, so how does it end for King Records?

Speaker 2 (01:22:50):
So, as I mentioned, you know, Sid's got all these
health issues, he's got heart, he's got bad art, he's
got bad eyes and excuse me, everything to go along
with that, and his health really starts to fade in
the late sixties. But also in the sixties they start
running into a payola scandal. And these are two things.

(01:23:12):
So the first thing is Henry Glover, who's working in
the company, runs he wants to expand to a multi
track recording setup. So I think they were the two
track and they want to move to a four track.
At this point in time, Sid isn't convinced, and Sid
relies on one of the other business people who doesn't

(01:23:37):
have a music background to make the decision, and basically
he doesn't side with Henry. He basically sides with this
other music executive who was associated with Ging Records, and
they don't follow that. So Henry feels that they're a
little shorthanded and not being able to make these follow
the new sound of the sixties in essence. And then

(01:23:59):
on top of that, Sid also kind of threw Henry
under the bus for the payola stuff, you Knowola, the
Payola scandal starts happening, and King isn't really what's the
word King is a part of it. King's affected by this,
and Henry kind of kind of gets thrown under the bus.
He feels kind of gets thrown under the bus because

(01:24:21):
of this. So Henry leaves the company and so the
artistic direction in the company isn't as progressive. They're not
able to jump into the sixties. You know, Little Willie
John starts having problems, you know, he starts having drinking problems,
and the director's cut of the film goes through this.
The PBS we had to pull some of this out,

(01:24:41):
but you start seeing problems in the sixties with Little
Willie John. So he was going to be there for
Frank Sinatra. Before Little Willie John goes to jail, he
records this record with Capital that's amazing. I think it's
called nineteen sixty eight or something like that. Highly check
people checking it out. But you see the direction that
King would have eventually gone with him, and it's amazing,

(01:25:01):
luscious strings and beautiful all that type of stuff. You know,
they couldn't go into that space. They didn't have enough tracks.
Henry wasn't there to kind of push that any longer,
and they kind of become kind of the old man's label,
and they don't really recover well from Paolan. They limped
their way through the sixties, but James Brown is able

(01:25:23):
to keep them going.

Speaker 3 (01:25:24):
So in the late.

Speaker 2 (01:25:25):
Sixties Sid starts getting sicker and sicker and sicker, and
ultimately he passes away. And when he passes away, there
wasn't anybody left to run the company. There wasn't anybody
who's trained. You know, seymour Stein at this point in
time is in New York. He is in the last
several years of his life. He allowed Sid allows Seymour

(01:25:48):
to set up shop in the New York studios. So
Seymour is actually getting because he has free rent, is
able now to start his career. So Seymour would have
actually been the perfect person to pass that on to.
But there were some of these other people that were
working around King Records that didn't really know what they

(01:26:09):
were doing. And Sid kind of trusted a lot of
these figures who didn't really understand the music business, but
they had a lot of bravado and they got into
his face about stuff. So they kind of had they
you know, they kind of spoke to the to the
guy's guy type of attitude that Sid had. So Sid
ended up trusting some of these people that didn't know

(01:26:30):
what they were doing, and they ran the business into
the ground, and very quickly they merged with They start
looking for options to get out of the business. Basically,
so Henry Glover comes back to kind of help the
business shut down. In essence, they sell to start a
Records in Nashville, which is a record label that is

(01:26:53):
basically it's kind of the same record label, but in
Nashville they start the same way. They have the same Actually,
a lot of the former King artists moved the Country artists,
they moved to Star Day, So there's a relationship between
the two labels, and the merger was kind of a
natural of those guys, so King and start a merge.

(01:27:14):
James Brown stays on through this. James Brown now has
full control because in sixty eight Sid dies, as does
Ben Bart at this time, so James is now free.
He now is running he's booking side of his business.
He's running the record label side of this business. Because
nobody can stop James any longer. So this is like

(01:27:34):
James's best year. This is when you start getting say loud,
I'm Black and I'm proud, you start getting all these
things in like the late sixties early seventies that are
really progressive. James Brown super bad, all these tunes and
a lot of these records. Yeah, they start the business.

(01:27:56):
So the business basically figures out that they need to
sell James Brown's track because he's the only thing that
has value. So they sell it to Polodor and it's
a multimillion dollar deal. James goes to Polydor within two years.
He hates Polydor. The Germans want to make everything the same.
They don't want they want everything process driven. They don't

(01:28:17):
let James do whatever he wants. You know, he no
longer has that freedom of king. King then sells to Starday.
They sell everything in Cincinnati. They take whatever they find
valuable in the process, they take down to Nashville. Some
of the pressing pressing stuff goes down to Nashville. Starday
goes out of business the following year because they again

(01:28:38):
were also in a similar situation and they were also
listening to the same idiot that Sid was listening to.
So that business falls apart and the business basically gets split.
They sell the publishing aspect of the business to liber
and Stoler and that starts their licensing business. Liber and Stoller.
Their business goes on to be one of the biggest

(01:28:58):
licensing companies, which still exists today. And then they sold
the mechanical rights to a company called Gusto, which is
also still in Nashville. And yeah, so a lot of
the mechanical rights go in one direction and the publishing
rights go in another. They get split up. They basically
sell the business. You have parts of the business still exist.

(01:29:23):
So for example, the lathe that is in Jack White's
Blue Room Jack White has got inducted into the National
Hall of Fame, big shout out. The lathe that is
in the Third Man Records room is the lathe from
King Records. They were able to get the same laid

(01:29:43):
the King Records. It went to Starday and that's how
it got to Nashville, the Oregon. I traced down some
of the parts. I was able to find some of it.
There are some of the record presses. There's a couple
of them that ended up in Jamaica, which is super interesting.
A lot of them covered like early SKA, so like
the King Records, like presses ended up going on to
press life early Jamaican music. But you see the parts

(01:30:06):
of King like it gets split up and it ends
up actually continuing to exist in modern American music. It
continues to be the it's parts ends up being fueling
different parts of music. You start sing the birth of
hip hop when people start scratching their records. The next
generation starts doing that, and you kind of just see

(01:30:27):
its influence continue to kind of continue. But the business
itself basically comes to an end soon after Sid's death.

Speaker 3 (01:30:42):
So how'd you learn all this?

Speaker 2 (01:30:43):
Cud? I am an obsessive person, so I so this
isn't the first record label where I've dug into listening
to everything and learning all about their history. I've got
a similar relationship with ECM Records, for example. I'm a drummer,
so I've listened to every Jack Djionnette record, for example,

(01:31:06):
every Miles Davis record, every Tony Williams record, every Elvin Jones,
like every one of these guys. I've gone into a
deep dive of like jazz labels, where I listened to
everything and I do obsessions about every record and all
the things that they that were done with these records
and record labels, so it was kind of a natural

(01:31:27):
thing for me. I had a great teacher. I studied
with a guy who teaches at Berkeley School of Music,
Ian Frohman, and he got me really into this idea.
And the jazz saxophonist who I worked with, J D. Allen,
they got me really into this idea of digging into
records and digging into learning everything, like you learn about

(01:31:50):
what they had for breakfast before they made this record.
So I think very early in my twenties, the first
one was kind of Blue that I got super into,
and from that that led me into other records and
more and more records and more like eras of music.
So from everything from the roots and Biangelo and questlove

(01:32:15):
in like the early two thousands to like eighties funk
in like Dayton, Ohio, to Cincinnati King records to ECM
records in Germany and jazz records. All of these things
are things that drive me and fuel me to make
me a better music producer, to make me a better musician.

(01:32:35):
That it is kind of where I derived, you know,
I started this record, I started this film to learn
how to be a better music producer, how to make
better records, and also how to advise people on making
better records. And from the process of doing this, I
ended up having all this information about that fit into
a documentary, but the real purpose was to be a
better music maker, better music creator. And I've been fortunate

(01:32:59):
enough to work with some of the best artists and
musicians in the world in like either consulting capacity or
in a playing capacity. But you know, hopefully I'm hoping
to be able to tell more of these stories about
all of this information about music that I've learned. I
have lots and lots like you can tell, I have
a lot of information about very obscure record labels and

(01:33:20):
musicians that I'd like to share and find ways to
share those stories, especially more modern stories and black Black
American music, and then also different expirations as a musician myself.
You know, I'm hoping be able to take this film
and a lot of these like information I have from
this be able to apply it to records and all
the way from how you you know, I learned all

(01:33:43):
about the processes that they used the King Records, from
micing techniques to using soul feedge to help vocalists come
up with different parts and harmony parts. Henry Glover, there's
all these recordings of him talking about all of this
stuff that they did and how they made records back
in the day, man, and all that stuff still applies.
You know, these old school guys in the fifties the

(01:34:04):
fifties really figured out American music, and the way they
do things inspires the way I do. So my record,
my record studio, everything is pre nineteen eighty, like all
my instruments, all my microphones. I do everything something there's
I can do tape. Everything I do is kind of
like the old school vintage sounds and vintage music. Organic music,

(01:34:26):
I like to call it, because you can't ai that stuff.
You know, it sounds different, it feels different, it's funky,
it's grittier, it's dirty. You know, it's it has mistakes
in it that are beautiful. And that's kind of the
stuff that I learned of how how this music was made.
You know, how American soul music was. It was gritty,
it was nasty, it was it was beautiful and soul

(01:34:50):
driven and not perfect. And that's my vibe. Man. I'm
super into like finding that magic and being able to
make that magic relevant today, whether it's a storytelling or
in music.

Speaker 3 (01:35:01):
Making, specifically when it comes to Sid Nathan and King,
was all this information hiding and plain sight? Where did
you have to dig and make a lot of connections,
do a lot of interviews to assemble all the information
not only in the film but in your head.

Speaker 2 (01:35:19):
Uh yeah, I mean I had to do a lot
of digging. I had to do a lot of interviews.
It took a lot of research because, you know, like
every record label, who did what and what did and
when something happened is a little fuzzy because some of
these people's memories are faded, some of the people are gone,
some people take more credit than they're deserved. All kinds

(01:35:40):
of issues come, and so there had to be a
lot of you know, especially with like Hank Ballard is
a you know, the recording of the Twist is super
controversial with a lot of the people. There's a lot
of apocryphal stories. A lot of people talk about how Hank.
The stories I kept hearing was Hank Ballard had a
wild night with a woman or partying the night before

(01:36:02):
he was supposed to go on American Bandstand and because
of that he missed his flight and couldn't get to
Philadelphia to tape the show and missed his opportunity to
do the twist. And this has kind of been the
lore a lot of people have been telling the story
for years. I you know, being on PBS, you have
to fact check the hell out of everything. So we

(01:36:24):
had to, like I had to go and like figure out, Okay,
so what happened? I need to find proof of this,
And what I actually ended up finding was interviews of
Hank Ballard telling a different story, and everything that I
was able to find out in the history backed up
Hank's version of the events. So one in interviews I
was able to find out with Seymour Stein, for example,

(01:36:47):
that Hank Ballard was Sid's favorite artist. He showed up
on time, he did everything perfect, he never was late
to gigs, he never had issues with the drinking, he
never had issues with he partied, He did all that stuff,
all the women and all that stuff. But he was
really like on his business. That's why Sid loved him.
He always he was a guarantee and Seymour toured with him,

(01:37:09):
you know, he was one of the artists that was
his tour manager for the label. So Seymour got to
really know Hank really well and like loved him so
one it would be strange that Hank would have missed
a flight to a gig since he wasn't known to
you know, literal Willie John was known for that all
the time, but Hank wasn't. Then the other thing was
Hank actually performs on Bandstand. He performs on Bandstand in

(01:37:31):
June of that year, and what the deal is that
Dick Clark decides he hears the song in Baltimore because
Dick Clark used to control. Dick Clark was kind of
a mob figure. He controlled all the radio stations in
Baltimore and Philly and a lot of the East Coast.
And because he hears like Hank's versions becoming a hit,

(01:37:53):
he doesn't really want to use Hank Ballard to make
a global hit out of it because of the songs
Hank had done. These anti had a baby songs which
are outrey and they were kind of singing to be
dirty and it was kind of against that squeaky clean
image that Dick had back in the day. So they
make it back. So he goes to sit and says,

(01:38:15):
how about this, You basically don't charge me for publishing.
I can't tell whether it was either for free or
reduced rate. I assume it would be don't charge me
for publishing for X number of years on this song,
I'm gonna go re record it and release it. You
come on my show and I'll give you a hit.
I'll make you a hit out of something else. So

(01:38:36):
he comes on and he does finger Popping Time in June,
and Finger Popping Time becomes a huge hit Frank Ballard.
In August of that year, they release the Twist. Chubby
Tucker's version of the Twist comes out. So the reason why,
like the apocryphal story doesn't work is because they would
have needed time to record it. You couldn't just on

(01:38:58):
a drop of a dime bring to checker in, record
him and release it to the next day. That did.
It worked that way for King, but it did not
work that way for any other record label. It took
months and months of planning, and it took a lot
of prep to get that stuff moving and getting an emotion.
So Dick Clark had planned in advance to make this
a hit. He had planned to give Sid another hit

(01:39:19):
with finger pop in Time, and he took all the
royalties and all the money from the twist. And you
see he plays the twist I think five times that
year on bandstand because anything that played on Bandstand was
going to be a hit. Everybody knew it. Dick Clark
knew it. Sid knew it. So Sid knew that if
I give you a deal for a couple of years
on this, on this publishing for this tune, you make

(01:39:39):
a hit about something else, I'll take the money and run.
And that's the deal that they made. And actually, Hank,
Hank Baler was able to make three hits that year.
So he had the Twist, he had finger Pop in time,
then he had Let's Go, Let's Go, Let's Go. Because
he was of the twist, he was able to make
three hits. And then he also was able to make
more hits by the answer songs. He had an answer song,

(01:40:04):
you know, Chubby Chucker, they did the Peppermint Twist as
their answer song. But Henry also I'm Sorry, Hank Ballard
also released his own answer songs as well. So they
were able to get a whole bunch of money out
of this, because that's how the business worked back then.
But that's the type of stuff that I had to
go through and tease out, and it made a lot
of the old timers really uncomfortable because I was going

(01:40:24):
to find out who played on what you Know. The
drummer Phil Paul believes that he played on the Twist.
It turns out that he played on the answer song
the backup You Know Hank Hank Ballard when he wrote
the song the Twist, the original version he wrote with
his band in Florida, and he gets into a fight
with these guys and he decides that he wants to

(01:40:45):
take this song and make it his. So he rewrites
the song and records it at King, but he doesn't
have the Midnighters anymore. The Midnighters breaks up after this.
He doesn't have his Midnighters, so he needs to use
another band to come and sing, so he says Otis
Williams and the Charms has his backups band on this.
They get a guy named Sunny Thompson from Chicago who's

(01:41:08):
in town recording a King. He's the backing band for
the Twist because they're already in the studio recording and
so they play that. They end up being the backing band.
He has backing vocalists. Because all these people are around
King and they record the twist. He rewrote the song
one of the things I was able to discover, and
we didn't put it in the film. We didn't have

(01:41:29):
space for it. But you know, Hank Ballard, his father
and his mother had a really tumultuous relationship. So his father,
the story goes that they had a fight when Hank
was very young. The mother goes running out of the house,
father grabs his shotgun and chases her. Mother does not

(01:41:52):
come back. There is no clarity on what happens and
why she doesn't come back, but doesn't come back, and
he now has his father. They're in Detroit, who is
a single father. A couple of years later, he has
a heart attacking father. Hank has to go live with
family in Alabama, which he hates, by the way, But

(01:42:12):
in that he has a lyric that he uses in
the twist where it's my daddy is sleeping and Mama
ain't around. So you'll hear that in the film where
we do our transition point where you hear Hank Ballard
say it, and then you hear you hear sorry Chubby
Chucker sing that line, and then you hear Hank Ballard
sing that line. And you hear there's an authenticity shift

(01:42:34):
there because Hank Ballard is talking about his story. He's
talking about something in that song that was great pain
for him, which is really interesting. You know, it's something
that's of great pain, but it's something that brings the
American people great joy in the song. And there are
a lot of songs that have this history. We talked
to Vince gil about this actually, because you know, Vince
wrote that song about his brother go Rest You on

(01:42:58):
the Mountain. I'm messing the butcher during the title. But
you know, you have a lot of these moments where
artists write about the most personal, painful moments in their life,
and it turns out it translates very powerfully in music.
And that's one of the secret sauces of the twist
that we try to find ways to kind of point
that we learn in the history that that song is

(01:43:20):
like really powerfully his. It's his story that he infuses
into this song, and that's one of the things that
makes it powerful. And that's one of the differences you
hear in Hank's version versus Chubby's version. But this is
the type of stuff that we had to dig deep
into and I can tell you about things we didn't
even put in the film all the way. I mean,

(01:43:40):
things that you would be surprised to learn about different
recordings and different songs. But we had to go deep
that level into being able to get to the bottom
of every fact, every point because PBS is really really
serious about fact and truth, which is what makes them
really makes the opportunity really powerful and makes working with
somebody like PBS really amazing.

Speaker 3 (01:44:03):
So what's next for you?

Speaker 2 (01:44:06):
The first thing I'm doing is hanging out with my kids.
For the last nine years, I haven't really spent a
lot of time. I've three kids, a twenty five year
old and all my twenty five year old sister who
I raise, and I've got eighteen year old twins. They're
freshmen in college, so they're ones in jazz studies and
the other one is in engineering, so I am helping

(01:44:29):
them guide through that process. Then I am exploring several
stories that have kind of come out of this King
record stuff. I'm working on trying to find different documentary
stories in music to pursue. You know, this film for
me was really talking about diversity, you know when we started.
When I started this film in twenty sixteen. It was

(01:44:50):
during our current president's first first campaign, first election campaign,
and I really we found that there was like very
divisive language around diversity, and I wanted to find something
that spoke to that, to really show that we didn't
come about diversity because America is a nice, jolly place

(01:45:13):
and we're all friends and we all do the right thing.
We came to diversity because of business, and that diversity
opened up more business. It was, you know, it's very
quintessential American that it's a business, business driven diversity. You know,
it was a business driven decision that led us here
as a society, and I wanted to show that I
wanted to kind of bring some complexity to that conversation,

(01:45:36):
and music is a perfect place to do that. You
can hear the diversity and the content that's created, and
you can also see the business effect that it had
through sales and all kinds of things, through impact. You
can see the data and here the effect. So that's
for me, was really powerful to what I wanted. And
I'm looking for different there's different stories that I've definitely

(01:45:57):
I've been developing, but I'm looking for something that speaks
to the power of music and the effects that it's
had on us as a culture. I'm looking for ways
to have deeper conversations about things that we take for granted.
You know, King Records is just a rock and roll
and all these conversations are is just music to some people,
but it really wasn't. It was much more than that,

(01:46:18):
and there were more lessons that were learned in this
process that we've forgotten. We've forgotten about some of the labels,
but we've also forgotten some of the lessons we learned
in that process. So a lot of the things I'm
wanting to explore are reminding us of the things that
we've forgotten. Whether it's the way we made music, which
I think right now is really important. I'm really interested

(01:46:38):
in exploring the process of making music and how we
can I'm hoping to inspire people to go back to
making records on tape, to go back to pressing records,
you know, all the information is there, or at least
taking some of that process. This is something that I'm
hoping musicians can kind of take away, and I'm looking
for ways to kind of find stories to highlight that

(01:47:00):
I'll also able to kind of able to show the
cultural significance of these things and how they're applicable. Music
business has not changed since the nineteen forties. It's shocking,
you know, you would think that it has. But we're
back to releasing singles just like they were releasing like
singles back a King. You know, they released two sides.

(01:47:20):
It's a song in another song, and that's the type
of stuff that King. This type of stuff King Records
was doing. The business that they were doing is the
same business that we're doing today. And if we're able
to get if we're able to continue making music through
this AI revolution, and we want to continue making organic
revolution organic music, rather, we're going to need to find

(01:47:41):
We're going to need people who are going to highlight
these stories, who are going to show the process and
show the effect of how these things were made organically
and the importance of that. And I think those are
the things that will allow us to create new sounds,
create new music, because AI can only recreate, It doesn't
have the ability of being able to create new And
I'm hoping that by digging into history and by showing

(01:48:04):
all of these things, here is how we created this stuff,
Here's how we arrived here, I'm hoping that other musicians
like myself can be inspired to say, Okay, so this
is what we are today, this is what we're doing.
We're trying to find something that's in a different market
in a different way and a different thing, a different sound.
Here's how Sid Nathan did it. Here is how these

(01:48:26):
groups did it. Here's how they did it with ECM,
Here's how questlov did it. Here's how all these polices
did it. And I'm hoping that I can find ways
of being able to highlight those stories and give people
reason to not be afraid of AI. You know, I
do AI for a living. It's my research area and
my PhD studies and computer engineering, it's what I do

(01:48:47):
professionally at work. I know it's limitations. I understand its
limitations musically, and I understand what the differences are with
what a human can do and what a machine can do.
And I'm hoping that by highlighting these stories, you know,
you can inspire people to not be afraid, to be
able to see what we're capable of doing and find

(01:49:07):
ways to recreate it again.

Speaker 3 (01:49:09):
Yeah, I mean my mind is blown. As I say,
I knew Seymour pretty well and he could wax rhapsodic
about SID. I think you are the number one repository
for information on SID and people make movies and they
have an interest. You really have gone deep. I think
you know more about SID and King Records than anybody else,

(01:49:31):
you know. I hope all this information just gets recorded
somewhere so we're not lost in the sands in time.
You've accumulated it. I haven't seen it accumulated anywhere else
in any event. I mean, it's been fantastic talking to you.
As I said earlier, the film is fantastic.

Speaker 2 (01:49:49):
Thank you so much.

Speaker 3 (01:49:50):
As I said, it's got so many threads. It's got
the Cincinnati thread, it's got the country and black music thread,
it's got it's really a lot. It's really good, and
you have been really good. Yeahmy, I want to thank
you for taking this time to speak with my audience.

Speaker 2 (01:50:09):
I appreciate you. Thank you so much for having me.
I hope that the audience gets to check out the film.
It's going to be freely available till the seventh of
December on the PBS app, also on YouTube, and if
you feel free to get in the comments section and
say something positive to all those haters out there, I
would love you for it. Audience, Thank you. But yeah,

(01:50:31):
please check it out, and if you get an opportunity to,
you can reach out to me. I'd love to come
and show you the director's cut and talk about the
film and all its intersecting threads in American music anytime.
So I'm available to talk because I've got nothing else
going on to that school of my life. And I
really appreciate you for having me on this show, Bob.
It's an honor. It's an honor to have been covered,

(01:50:52):
for you to come the story to come to your attention.
I deeply appreciate it, your effect. I've been a fan
for a long time. Your effect on American music since
the nineties is dope. I agree with you a lot
of your strong, hot takes on music, and I thank
you so much for having me on the show. It's
truly an honor. Thank you.

Speaker 3 (01:51:11):
While you're making me smile, you're making my day in
any event.

Speaker 2 (01:51:15):
Thank you. Yeah maze.

Speaker 3 (01:51:17):
Until next time. This is Bob Left says