Interesting LD interview

[Dan Gould]

I stumbled across an LD Muse album, Back Street and the liners consisted of an interesting and fairly wide ranging interview. I knew LD doesn't care for "Fusion or Con-Fusion musicians" but he doesn't much care for guys like Braxton either. So, I scanned in the interview and uploaded it to picture village, for your enjoyment.

[Peter Johnson]

Thanks for posting this, Dan!

Interesting stuff.

[Soul Stream]

Great article Dan. Lou doesn't pull punches and I agree with him 100%.

[AllenLowe]

I wonder if the Jeff referred to in the interview is Jeff Fuller, a great bassist and friend of mine from New Haven, who was working with Lou a lot at that time - and to whom I introduced Lou -

Edited November 17, 2005 by AllenLowe

[Dan Gould]

I wonder if the Jeff referred to in the interview is Jeff Fuller, a great bassist and friend of mine from New Haven, who was working with Lou a lot at that time - and to whom I introduced Lou -

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Yes it is, Allen. I cropped out the track listing and credits, but the group was Victor Jones, drums, Fuller, bass, and Herman Foster, piano. Recorded live in Paris in 1982. Edited and sequenced by Malcolm Addey.

[Indestructible!]

I stumbled across an LD Muse album, Back Street and the liners consisted of an interesting and fairly wide ranging interview.  I knew LD doesn't care for "Fusion or Con-Fusion musicians" but he doesn't much care for guys  like Braxton either.  So, I scanned in the interview and uploaded it to picture village, for your enjoyment.

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Hi Dan,

Thanks for posting that!

Does anyone know what Lou is referring to when he mentions "it was back in that time they had that big investigation and they caught 'em bootlegging records"?

Who was "'em", and what was this all about? Sounds interesting...

Cheers,

Shane

[Dan Gould]

I stumbled across an LD Muse album, Back Street and the liners consisted of an interesting and fairly wide ranging interview.  I knew LD doesn't care for "Fusion or Con-Fusion musicians" but he doesn't much care for guys  like Braxton either.  So, I scanned in the interview and uploaded it to picture village, for your enjoyment.

←

Hi Dan,

Thanks for posting that!

Does anyone know what Lou is referring to when he mentions "it was back in that time they had that big investigation and they caught 'em bootlegging records"?

Who was "'em", and what was this all about? Sounds interesting...

Cheers,

Shane

←

Uh, Chuck?

[JSngry]

I'm not Chuck (or Lisa for that matter), but I'll bet the reference was to Morris Levy.

[Dan Gould]

I'm not Chuck (or Lisa for that matter), but I'll bet the reference was to Morris Levy.

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Was Morris Levey bootlegging copies of Alligator Boogaloo and cutting into BN/Liberty's profits and LDs royalties?

On a separate issue, I'm curious what the royalty rate was back then. Even as little as .25 a copy, 150,000 in sales is almost $40,000, and that was only the first royalty statement he received. Even 7 cents a record is $10,000 and this was when new cars might have been two or three thousand dollars, and I'm pretty sure per-capita income wasn't $10,000.

[JSngry]

I would take everything (well, a lot) that Lou says with the proverbial grain of salt. He's prone to "colorful" comments that make for better copy than they do fact. Case in point - his telling a good friend of mine that Wayne Shorter "never could play changes right" and that "Miles Davis was always a faggot". That's not a dis on him or his music, I'm just saying that I'd use anything he says as a "starting point" rather than the "final word".

I'm also not saying that there wasn't a case involving counterfeited BNs at (roughly) the time of Alligator Boogaloo's initial release, just that I've never heard of such a thing. What I have heard of was Levy being convicted of racketeering and extortion, which involved, among other things, counterfeiting albums for sale as cutouts. And Alligator Boogaloo was a staple in cutout bins throughout the 1970s. Coincidence or not, I can't say. But if I was one to put all the various scattered facts together and make a blanket statement (a not uncommon tendency in the jazz world, btw), the results might be something like Lou said.

Details of the Moris Levy saga can be found in the book Hit Men. It ain't pretty stuff. When Mingus made his notorious comment in the early 1960s that "gangsters run jazz", it was surely Levy to whom he was referring.

Edited November 17, 2005 by JSngry

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

It's good to read that again. Lou tells it stright. Perhaps you could scan in the sleeve notes to his "Play the right thing" CD, which he wrote himself; it's even more truculent than the interview on "Back Street".

About Lou's royalties and sales, I wouldn't discount what he says. But it might need to be seen in te light of the following:

Every musician who put a Blue Note album on the pop charts in the early 1960s left Blue Note shortly afterwards to record for another label. Francis Wolf visited Europe in the summer of 1970, to produce Hank Mobley’s “The Flip” in Paris, and was interviewed on the BBC’s jazz programme one Sunday night. He explained why he and Alfred had had to sell the company to Liberty.

Blue Note was a cheapskate company with high standards. Normal first year sales of their albums were about 7,000. The breakeven point was about 2,500. But only about half the albums the company recorded came out at the time. Clearly, the company was profitable, since the records would sell for years, or decades, but not spectacularly so. Alfred Lion and Francis Wolf wanted to record the musicians they thought were best. To manage that, they needed to offer the musicians something they couldn’t get from other companies; and to do so within very tight budgets. They came up with the idea of a cash payment that would be greater than the standard Musicians Union scale. The kick was that there were to be no royalties.

All went well until Jimmy Smith, Donald Byrd and Lou Donaldson got records onto the pop charts. Not having read their contracts, they went to Blue Note and asked for their royalties and were told, and I quote, “fuck off, you don’t get no royalties! You were paid cash.”

Blue Note could evidently handle losing one big name a year; when Lee Morgan and Horace Silver came to them together, they couldn't sustain their business practices. So they sold Blue Note.

I doubt if "Alligator Boogaloo" sold 150,000 in its first year. It stayed on the pop charts 11 weeks and on the R&B charts 10 weeks (not a year). The single scraped into the hot hundred at 93 and didn't make the R&B chart at all. However, it's conceivable that Lou's management did a deal with Liberty for his "back" royalties, which he wasn't really due but could have ben promised. If so, $40K doesn't seem unlikely since "The Natural Soul" had been about as big a hit as "Alligator Boogaloo" and "Blues Walk" had sold well without making the charts.

I think Lou is more likely to have a clear memory of money going in the bank than his chart performance. Wouldn't anyone?

MG

[Chuck Nessa]

A whole bunch of semi-truths in that post.

[Dan Gould]

It's good to read that again. Lou tells it stright. Perhaps you could scan in the sleeve notes to his "Play the right thing" CD, which he wrote himself; it's even more truculent than the interview on "Back Street".

Blue Note was a cheapskate company with high standards. Normal first year sales of their albums were about 7,000. The breakeven point was about 2,500. But only about half the albums the company recorded came out at the time. Clearly, the company was profitable, since the records would sell for years, or decades, but not spectacularly so. Alfred Lion and Francis Wolf wanted to record the musicians they thought were best. To manage that, they needed to offer the musicians something they couldn’t get from other companies; and to do so within very tight budgets. They came up with the idea of a cash payment that would be greater than the standard Musicians Union scale. The kick was that there were to be no royalties.

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First of all, I don't have the Play the Right Thing CD. If you do, I'd be happy to read the notes if you can scan and upload them.

As to your assertions about the contractual rights of Blue Note recording artists, I'd like to see something a bit more definitive before I believe your statements. Here's why:

Before the BNBB bit the dust, Tom Evered told us of how happy he was to find and deliver to Jutta Hipp a very sizeable royalty check. Why would EMI provide a royalty accounting to a virtually forgotten musician if they had no contractual requirement?

[Indestructible!]

I'm also not saying that there wasn't a case involving counterfeited BNs at (roughly) the time of Alligator Boogaloo's initial release, just that I've never heard of such a thing. What I have heard of was Levy being convicted of racketeering and extortion, which involved, among other things, counterfeiting albums for sale as cutouts. And Alligator Boogaloo was a staple in cutout bins throughout the 1970s. Coincidence or not, I can't say. But if I was one to put all the various scattered facts together and make a blanket statement (a not uncommon tendency in the jazz world, btw), the results might be something like Lou said.

Details of the Moris Levy saga can be found in the book Hit Men. It ain't pretty stuff. When Mingus made his notorious comment in the early 1960s that "gangsters run jazz", it was surely Levy to whom he was referring.

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Hi Jim,

Thanks for that information... I'll look for Hit Men when I get the chance!

Cheers,

Shane

[Indestructible!]

A whole bunch of semi-truths in that post.

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Hi Chuck,

Are you referring to LD's comments, or to TMG's post above yours (my guess is the latter)?

Also, can you shed some more light on what LD was getting at with the "bootlegging records" comment, or was Jim's reply spot on (like he usually is!)?

Cheers,

Shane

[Chuck Nessa]

Jim got it right as usual.

[Indestructible!]

Jim got it right as usual.

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Thanks Chuck!

I gotta get that Hit Men book and see what the deal was... I've heard Levy was a piece of work, and stories like these only further that notion.

Cheers,

Shane

[catesta]

Jim got it right as usual.

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One of these days I would like to see you post something similar about me.

[JSngry]

One of these days I'd like to be worthy of such words...

[Hardbopjazz]

That was great Dan. Thanks for this post.

[marcello]

If you had the choice of royalities of a record that may sell a couple of thousand copies at a low rate, or taking a upfront fee that is much more than the union rate, what would you do?

Even today, unless you're selling in at least the mutiple thousands, there is no contract for a royality rate. Not in my circle. Hell, there is rarely a contract at all!

I would assume, that in the case of Jutta Hipp, that it may have been a matter of preventing a lawsuit from a living artist or, in her case, she opted for a royality payment instead of a larger recording fee.

Does anybody have any concrete knowledge of the Blue Note contract or agreement? I bet there was never a contract at all.

Part of Morris Levy's "business plan" was to put his name ( or own the rights to ) all the songs he could. Publishing is the gift that keep on giving, especially when he had all of those vocal groups in his clutches.

The Blue Note owners never did that, to my knowledge. So when Lee Morgan and Horace Silver came to them for a better deal, could they really afford it? I mean, how much money do you think they could make of those Dizzy Reece records?

[andybleaden]

Interesting post even if some of was a crock of the proverbial -_-

Interesting though I too remember the BNBB board discussion and Blue Note people were also chasing relatives of former artists the Mobleys and Willettes as well as as living ones etc so there were some who were (pre liberty ) in receipt of royalties.

As for fraud and stealing.......well business practices seem to insist upon now and I am sure they did then

Andy

[andybleaden]

and while we on the subject of Lou Donaldson, he has given plenty of interviews..all of varying interest ...here are a few

http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/audio_li...oudonaldson.ram

also here where he says

http://www.jazzprofessional.com/interviews...20Donaldson.htm

"In ‘68 with Blue Note we got a hit with a little tune called “Alligator Boogaloo”. In fact, I was the first jazz musician to do something like that; but it sold, man. I made a lot of money—no regrets about that. People like Lonnie Smith and George Benson were on the record; so that was a real good band. As for the commercial–type albums I made in the ‘seventies, the ideas for these came from the company. See, I had put the bite on ‘em for a sizeable amount of money, and it’s like any other business—as long as you play free, you do just about whatever you want to do. The minute you put demands on the company for money, they put demands on you for what to play. They bring in an A. and R. man. What they think they’re doing is bringing in somebody to make sure that they’ve got a saleable product, but actually, what they really do is kill everything they have."

by the way I have also just used google book search .........WOW!

anyway

enjoy!

Edited November 18, 2005 by andybleaden