Where Have All the Good Times Gone?

Louis Barfe

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781782392194
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Louis Barfe's elegantly written, authoritative and highly entertaining history charts the meteoric rise and slow decline of the popular recording industry.

Barfe shows how the 1920s and 1930s saw the departure of Edison from the phonograph business he created and the birth of EMI and CBS. In the years after the war, these companies, and the buccaneers, hucksters, impresarios and con-men who ran them, reaped stupendous commercial benefits with the arrival of Elvis Presley, who changed popular music (and sales of popular music) overnight. After Presley came the Beatles, when the recording industry became global and record sales reached all time highs.

Where Have All The Good Times Gone? also charts the decline from that high-point a generation ago. The 1990s ushered in a period of profound crisis and uncertainty in the industry, encapsulated in one word: Napster. Barfe shows how the almost infinite amounts of free music available online have traumatic and disastrous consequences for an industry that has become cautious and undynamic.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1 Buying – and selling – the Edison myth

2 Tvinkle, tvinkle, little star

3 The Jones boy

4 Continental shift

5 The Coldstream Guards and all that jazz

6 Brother, can you spare 75c for a gramophone record?

7 Don’t you know there’s a war on?

8 Picking up the pieces

9 Pop goes the weasel

10 Paris, Liverpool and British West Hampstead

11 The spirit of independence

12 You can spread jam on them

13 Caught Napstering

AFTERWORD

NOTES

FURTHER READING

INDEX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Thomas Alva Edison

2 Diagram of the phonograph, Illustrated London News, 1878

3 Advertisement for the phonograph, c.1900

4 ‘The Song of Mister Phonograph’

5 The Gramophone Company’s first studio in Maiden Lane, London, c.1898

6 Fred Gaisberg

7 Emile Berliner and Charles Sumner Tainter

8 Edison ‘Gold Moulded’ wax cylinder

9 Edison ‘Diamond Disc’

10 Edison-Bell advertisement

11 Jack Hylton and his band

12 Edward Elgar opens studio 1 at Abbey Road

13 Ted Heath record sleeve

14 Mike Ross-Trevor in the control room of Levy’s Sound Studios, London, 1964

15 Advertisement for the Decca portable gramophone, 1924

16 Sir Edward Lewis

17 Decca calls a halt to its war of advertising with EMI, 1953

18 Arthur Godfrey’s TV Calendar Show, 1953

19 Goddard Lieberson, Jerry Herman and Clive Davis with Angela Lansbury, 1967

20 Ray Horricks, Arthur Lilley, Johnny Keating, Reg Guest and Tony d’Amato, 1964

21 HMV and Columbia advertisements, 1928

22 HMV French record sleeve, c.1935

23 The Minneapolis Journal’s interpretation of the HMV logo, 1908

24 Bruce Lundvall

25 Doug Morris

26 Sir Joseph Lockwood with the Beatles

27 1984 trade ad for Dire Straits on CD

The author and publishers are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce images: 1, Getty Images; 2, Bill Kibby-Johnson collection; 5, 6, 12, 26 EMI Records Ltd; 7, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; 14, Mike Ross-Trevor; 16, Decca Music Group Ltd; 19, Bettmann / Corbis; 20, Michael Ward; 23, Martin Fenton collection; 24, Blue Note Records; 27, Universal Music. All other images are from the author’s own collection.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to the following, without whom this book would have been a lot shorter.

• Toby Mundy at Atlantic Books for suggesting that there might be a book in my anorakdom, for ongoing encouragement and advice and for his liberal interpretation of the word ‘deadline’. Not to mention his colleagues Clara Farmer, Bonnie Chiang and Louisa Joyner for helping shape the whole thing into the form you see here. Thanks also to my copy-editor Rachel Leyshon for telling me when I was turning into Roger Irrelevant.

• Mike Ross-Trevor and the late Brian Masters for motivating me by both saying ‘Well, I’d read it’.

• Ruth Edge and Greg Burge, both formerly of the EMI archive at Hayes in Middlesex, without whom the early part of the book would have been very sketchy and their colleague, Chris Jones; John Warren at the Edison National Historic Monument in West Orange, New Jersey, for his time, enthusiasm and letting me make a tinfoil recording; Vince Giordano (ace tuba player) and Mike Panico at the RCA/BMG archive in New York; and to Maureen Fortey, who quite frankly is the Decca Record Company archive, for her help. Also, the staff who helped me at the British Library – both at St Pancras and Colindale – as well as their counterparts at the London Library and my local library in Lowestoft.

• The interviewees who, between January 2002 and May 2003, took the time to speak to me. In doing so, they made the story come alive: George Avakian, Jay Berman, Ed Bicknell, Rodney Burbeck (some of the interviewees were easier to locate than others. Rodney was my editor when I worked at Publishing News), Richard Elen, Ahmet Ertegun, Derek Everett, David Fine, Tony Hall, Ray Horricks, Alan Kayes, Charles Kennedy, Eddie Levy, Jimmy Lock, Bruce Lundvall, Hugh Mendl, Angela Morley, Mike Ross-Trevor, Tim Satchell, Adele Siegal, Mike Smith, Coen Solleveld, Clive Stanhope, Seymour Stein, Roger Watson, Diana Weller, Muff Winwood and Walter Woyda. Gratitude also to Tina Taylor for help with transcription as the deadline loomed. There are others who gave me more general pointers and contacts, including Elisabeth Iles and Adrian Strain at the IFPI, Stan Cornyn, Adam White, Irv Lichtman, Norman Lebrecht, Earl Okin, Arthur Zimmermann, Tim Blackmore, Demitri Coryton, Mike Richter, David Sarsner, Brian Southall, Stanley and Edna Black and others who wish to remain anonymous.

• The friends who helped immensely: Mike Brown, Martin Fenton, Nigel Hunter, Gavin Sutherland and John Warburton for reading the manuscript with expert eyes; Bill Kibby-Johnson for historical documents and illustrations; Richard Abram, Bob Flag, Kif Bowden-Smith and Patrick Humphries for clarifying certain details; Bob Baker, Tom Bircher, Mike Hamilton, Anne Hanlon, Beryl Jackson, Howard Turner, Steve Turner, Joost van Loon and Trevor Wallis for laying the foundations, perhaps unwittingly; Nixon Bardsley, Ralph Baxter, Adam Cumiskey, Allen Eyles, Stuart Farnden, Alex George, Geoff Hiscott, Sally Kennedy, Matt Levy, Richard Lewis, Hilary Lowinger, Andrew Malcolm, Steve Mann, James Masterton, Charlie Mounter, Nick Parker, Sue Roccelli, Kerry Swash, Roger Tagholm, Ben Tisdall, David Trevor-Jones, Francis Wheen and Alan Wood for general encouragement; and my childhood partner-in-crime, Stephen Gilchrist, who typed up the Tony Hall interview in exchange for my help with installing a bathroom sink. Who said barter was dead?

• The family: My mother, Maureen Barfe, not only for the obvious biological reasons, but also because she started the whole thing off when I was five, by giving me her Dansette and a bunch of 45s; my grandparents, Bob and Jean Murray, for making me listen to certain things, giving me a vast number of records and the funds to acquire yet more; and finally to my wife, Susannah, who puts up with me, and our own Nipper lookalike dog, Lyttelton, who puts up with us both. Naturally, any errors are my own stupid fault.

Lowestoft and London

November 2003 and October 2004

INTRODUCTION

Hunter S. Thompson once described the television industry as a ‘cruel and shallow money trench. . .a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason’. Over the years, Thompson’s words have often been adapted and applied to the music industry, for a very good reason. Yet it is a branch of commerce that touches all of our lives, quite often for the better.

Even Warner Bros, for example, which had a reputation in the 1970s for musical enlightenment and attracted artists of the calibre of Paul Simon, Van Morrison, James Taylor, Tower of Power and Little Feat, issued one-sided contracts just like everyone else. After the payment of the initial advance, the act received a percentage so small that they would be in debt to the record company long after it had recouped its investment. The record company also had the absolute right to reject the recordings that their contracted artists had made. If the budget had been spent on the original recordings, the artist had to pay for the remakes. Somehow, though, the glorious end seemed to justify the means. Listen to Lowell George’s Thanks I’ll Eat It Here from beginning to end. Warners, despite the unfair business methods that were the industry standard, were doing something right.

In recent years, however, the industry has gone into freefall. Global music sales fell by 7 per cent in value and by 8 per cent in units in 2002. The pattern had, until the end of the 1990s, been one of growth, but it suddenly slipped into reverse. A business model that had endured untroubled for over a century is now taking a kicking. Some have argued that the problem started when the ‘suits’ took over – that the music business became everything to do with business and precious little to do with music. It’s a romantic idea, but it’s a myth. The record business has always been about making money, and from its outset, a few companies have been remarkably successful in doing it and making sure that no one else did without their approval.

That ‘no one’ includes the artists and producers. Until the 1960s, producers were invariably record company staffers, receiving modest salaries for keeping their bosses in profit. The artists were merely hired hands, with all but the biggest paid on a per session basis. As producers went freelance and artists got better mana...