| 23rd August 2006 02:06 PM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
America’s Best Ear for Music
American Heritage
August 22, 2006
John Hammond was the twentieth century’s greatest discoverer of popular musical talent, from Billie Holiday in 1933 to Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1982, with Count Basie, Charlie Christian, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen in between. Nobody else in the music business ever had a string of discoveries remotely approaching Hammond’s.
“He seemed to know what America wanted to hear before America knew it,” writes Dunstan Prial, in his fine new biography, The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27). When one stops to consider the difference between the worlds of Billie Holiday and Bruce Springsteen, one begins to grasp the uniqueness of what John Hammond accomplished. He had an amazing ear.
He was born in Manhattan to high privilege. His mother, Emily Vanderbilt Sloane Hammond, was the great-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the richest man in the nation when he died in 1877. And her Vanderbilt forebears weren’t her only source of wealth and pedigree. Her father’s family owned W. & J. Sloane, a prosperous furniture chain. John Henry Hammond, Jr., born in 1910, grew up in a five-story mansion just off Fifth Avenue at 9 East 91st Street.
Although he always got along with his parents, he rebelled early against his patrician background. “You know John always had to be in opposition to everything,” recalled his lifelong friend Katherine Graham, the newspaper publisher. “I think he wanted to go in the opposite direction of his family. He was overtly against everything establishment, and he sort of nourished that. He liked to shock.”
Before the boy was ten he was happily spending time in the basement of 9 East 91st Street with the mostly black household staff. What chiefly drew him downstairs was the music the servants played on their Grafonola phonograph, much of it blues and early jazz. By the time he was 12, he was an avid record collector. “All music fascinated me,” he later wrote, “but the simple honesty and convincing lyrics of the early blues singers, the rhythm and creative ingenuity of the jazz players, excited me most.” By his mid-teens he was tracking the sounds to their source, venturing into every theater and nightclub in Harlem. He was often the only white person there, listening raptly while sipping a lemonade.
After four years at Hotchkiss, a Connecticut prep school, and a stint at Yale—he dropped out in his sophomore year—Hammond moved back into the family mansion and set about trying to break into New York’s busy jazz scene. He began writing for the English jazz magazine Melody Maker, haunted Harlem’s jazz clubs, and supervised several recording sessions, bankrolling them himself, including one with the pioneer big-band arranger Fletcher Henderson. Politically Hammond was on the left. The writer Edmund Wilson, who knew him at the time, described him as “like somebody who had modeled himself on Proust, then received an injection of Communism.”
In March 1933 the progressive magazine The Nation sent him to Alabama to cover the ongoing trial of the Scottsboro boys, one of the day’s great civil rights causes. At about the same time, he became friends with Walter White, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who asked him to join the organization’s board. He declined—he didn’t think the NAACP was radical enough—although he later changed his mind and served on the board for 30 years.
Just before his Alabama trip, he was making his usual round of Harlem’s speakeasies when he heard a 17-year-old singer named Eleanora Fagan. She performed under the name Billie Holiday, and she was Hammond’s first great discovery. “I just absolutely was overwhelmed,” he would recall. “I decided that night that she was the best jazz singer I had ever heard.” He introduced her to the man who became her manager, the aggressive Joe Glaser, and then got her into a recording studio for the first time.
Billie Holiday’s initial recording session was led by a new friend of Hammond’s, an up-and-coming clarinetist named Benny Goodman. Hammond had been trying to persuade Goodman to record with black musicians, but Goodman was reluctant, telling him, “If it gets around that I recorded with colored guys, I won’t get another job in this town.” Hammond kept twisting his arm, and by late 1933 and early 1934 Goodman was recording regularly with blacks.
Next Hammond started working on him to lead an integrated band before live audiences. “Benny was extremely dubious,” writes one of Goodman’s biographers. “He was not an adventurous person and certainly wasn’t interested in sticking his neck out. . . . Racial integration was not a personal cause with Benny.” But it was with Hammond, who was convinced he had found just the black musician to integrate live jazz, a poised, well-educated pianist named Teddy Wilson.
On April 12, 1936, Goodman, Wilson, and the drummer Gene Krupa played during the intermission at a Chicago concert by Goodman’s big band. The audience was captivated. Before long, white bandleaders like Artie Shaw and Jimmy Dorsey were hiring black musicians, and formerly all-black outfits like Earl Hines’s and Fletcher Henderson’s were hiring whites. American audiences began to get used to seeing blacks and whites playing music together, a decade before Jackie Robinson‘s much more celebrated breaking of baseball’s color barrier.
Hammond soon persuaded Goodman to add a second black musician, the vibraharpist Lionel Hampton, and in 1937 Goodman’s band headed south to Dallas. Everyone advised the clarinetist to leave Wilson and Hampton behind, but the Dallas audience roared its approval. The South had accepted integrated jazz music—“a minor revolution,” as Hammond wrote at the time.
Prial sees Hammond as the Branch Rickey of American popular music, bringing African-Americans into the business on an equal footing with whites. By getting Goodman to hire Wilson and Hampton, Hammond led off a series of epochal events, Prial argues, that includes Robinson’s desegregation of baseball in 1947, Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and ’56, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. To take the full measure of John Hammond’s achievement, we have to see it in a broader context than just music.
Hammond equipped his car with a special radio, a superpowerful unit that let him hear broadcasts from every part of the United States. He first heard Teddy Wilson that way, and the machine served him well on at least one other occasion. In the winter of 1936 he was in Chicago, nervously twiddling his radio’s knob, when he was gripped by the sound of a band led by a young man who called himself Count Basie, broadcasting live from a Kansas City nightclub. Six months later he drove out to Kansas City to meet Basie, and he helped get Basie’s band bookings in Chicago and then New York and all across the country. Of course, the Count Basie Orchestra became one of the greatest, most successful big bands of all time. “That John,” said Basie in 1971. “If he hadn’t come out to Kansas City, God knows what would have happened to me. I might still be out there.”
By 1939 Hammond was working full-time as associate recording director for Columbia Records. Tipped off by the pianist Mary Lou Williams, he traveled to Oklahoma City to hear a young virtuoso on a still unusual instrument. The musician was Charlie Christian, the instrument the electric guitar, and Hammond knew at once that he was hearing something great. Christian, Hammond decided, belonged in Benny Goodman’s band. Goodman, as usual, balked at first, but as soon as he heard Christian play he hired him. Christian, arguably the greatest of the first generation of electric guitarists, was in the spotlight for only three years. He died in 1941 of tuberculosis, just 25.
Before he died, Charlie Christian sat in on the Harlem jam sessions that led to bebop, the musical style that eclipsed the swing that John Hammond loved. Christian would be Hammond’s last great discovery for almost a generation. Between 1940 and 1960 the producer stayed busy (among other things, he helped start the Newport Jazz Festival, in 1954), but the kinds of music that drew him most—warm, visceral, and infectious—were out of favor. In jazz, cerebral bebop reigned; in pop, the treacly sounds of Patti Page. But by 1959, when Columbia rehired him, popular tastes had changed again. Rock ’n’ roll, folk, and rhythm and blues were creating an atmosphere in which he could stage a remarkable second act, as Prial calls it.
In 1960 a songwriter brought a tape of his songs to Hammond, and he was bowled over by the singer on one of the numbers. She turned out to be the 18-year-old daughter of a popular Detroit minister. Her name was Aretha Franklin, and Hammond signed her to Columbia. Nonetheless, Franklin’s career languished for six years until she left Columbia for fame at Atlantic Records. Hammond’s gift was for discovering talent, not necessarily for developing it. The title of Prial’s book is something of a misnomer; Hammond was less a producer than a talent scout—of genius.
In September 1961 he was getting ready to record a young folk-blues singer named Carolyn Hester and was intrigued by Hester’s harmonica player, a scruffy 20-year-old. He asked the kid if he wrote songs and sang. Sure, both, Bob Dylan replied. After hearing Dylan sing and play, Hammond offered him a Columbia contract. Dylan couldn’t really sing and couldn’t really play guitar or harmonica, but for Hammond those imperfect parts cohered into a perfect whole. Not many people agreed with him. At Columbia, Dylan was referred to as “Hammond’s Folly.” At one point, Hammond’s boss threatened to drop the young singer. “Over my dead body,” Hammond purportedly replied.
Dylan’s first album sold badly, his second much better, and by his third, The Times They Are A-Changin’, he was a cultural phenomenon. By then, his and Hammond’s paths had diverged, but Dylan never forgot the role the older man had played in getting him started. Hammond, Dylan wrote in his recent memoir, Chronicles, Vol. I, “believed in me and had backed up his belief, had given me my first start on the world’s stage.”
It was May 1972 when a pushy music-business manager named Mike Appel talked his way into Hammond’s office, bringing with him his only client, a 22-year-old singer-songwriter from New Jersey named Bruce Springsteen. Appel almost managed to antagonize Hammond with his sales pitch, but Hammond turned abruptly from him to Springsteen and asked him to play. He had sung just two songs, “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” and “Growin’ Up,” when Hammond stopped him and said, “You’ve got to be on Columbia Records.” It was the beginning of Springsteen’s recording career.
By the time he heard Springsteen, Hammond was 61 and increasingly frail. He would champion only one more world-class artist, Stevie Ray Vaughan, the great blues-rock guitarist from Texas, who released his first album in 1983. Two years later Hammond suffered a massive stroke, and two years after that he died. His friend Bruce Lundvall, a longtime Columbia executive, recalled visiting him very soon before the end. “John was in bed and we had this wonderful conversation. He said to me, ‘Bruce, on top of the bureau there’s a cassette. Could you get it down? I want you to hear this woman who’s very talented.’” Telling Prial about the episode, Lundvall laughed and shook his head. “He was playing a new artist for me that he’d discovered on his deathbed.” (The book doesn’t tell us who it was.)
What was it that enabled Hammond to make so many great discoveries, and over so many years? Perhaps he was able to hear new musical sounds precisely because he exposed himself to so many areas beyond music. Prial turns to the jazz writer John McDonough, who profiled Hammond shortly before the record man died, for insight into how his catholicity of interest, his refusal to live a blinkered music-biz life, may have been what made him such a great talent scout.
“Musical styles may come and go, but the dynamics of social change are eternal, notwithstanding periods of eclipse,” McDonough wrote. “Hammond could hear the important voices no one else could hear in the ’30s, the ’60s and the ’70s because he was the only figure in the commercial recording industry who was so profoundly in touch with the underlying intellectual, social and revolutionary forces driving those times. Hammond’s incredible string of insights from 1932 to the present simply cannot be explained as luck. His ears respond to new music as soundings of social change. He understands instinctively the equations between politics and culture.”
—Tony Scherman is a writer who lives in Nyack, New York.
[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels] |
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