Chapter 2
Music is heard in the Village ... A marriage made on Bank Street ... A dissolution on Bleecker Street ... The sexy Sabra of Long Island ... Dalliance
JAC: I was living in a railroad flat on Bank Street in the West Village when I met Nina.
NINA MERRICK: In the summer of 1955 I was fresh out of college. I found a sublet at 119 Bank Street. The West Village was bohemian. There were coffee places, and a bar nearby called the White Horse, a big literary hangout. The whole district had a spirit of its own, a vitality. You could talk to strangers, not feel you had to avoid eye contact.
Across the street from my apartment was an ice factory, and there would be men hacking on these huge blocks of ice way into the wee hours of the morning; and I remember—this tells you how different it was at that time—coming home at midnight, taking the subway, walking down the street by this ice factory, and feeling perfectly safe. It never occurred to me to be afraid. It wasn't naiveté, life just was like that.
My apartment was sixty-nine dollars a month. It was a walkup, very old, a railroad flat, with the rooms one after another, like a train. You came into what was a living room, then a little sort of bedroom, and beyond that the kitchen, and the bathtub was in the kitchen—you had a piece of wood on top of the bathtub so you could use it as a dish drain—and beyond that a little toilet-shower thing.
Early Sendak EKLP-6
JAC: My apartment featured original art painted directly onto the wall. Ed Canby had a friend struggling to make it as an illustrator, and I commissioned him to do several album covers. He created wonderful pen and ink drawings, an unusual, very special style. In exchange for one each of our records, about fifteen albums, he agreed to paint the wall above my tub, a little bathing scene with childlike figures happily gamboling. So that was my Maurice Sendak original. I hope no one painted it over after I left. I was entertaining a lady one evening and I went next door to borrow some paper napkins.
NINA MERRICK: I had been there maybe three weeks. A knock comes on the door, and there stands Jac. "Oh," he said, "who are you?" And he stood there and he chatted and chatted. I didn't know he had a lady literally next door.
JAC: I went back a few days later on the pretext of returning the napkins—
NINA MERRICK:—And he invited me out. On our first date, we went on the motor scooter. I was horrified. I had never been on one of those in my life. We went up to somewhere around Radio City and saw a Japanese movie, "Rashomon." On the second date he asked me to marry him.
I said, "No way, I have a career." I was working at Dance magazine, as assistant to the editor. Remember, it's 1955—it never occurred to anyone that you could be married and have a career. But he said, "You are going to marry me, and I will be a millionaire by the time I am thirty-five."
I thought, "Isn't that wonderful, to have a dream." He was twenty-four, living in this little funky apartment, and his favorite meal was tomato soup, potato sticks out of a can, two vitamin pills and a glass of water. And Elektra Records was a storefront on Bleecker Street. To me, his million by thirty-five was a complete fantasy. I admired it and I respected it, but that's all it was to me. I grew up without money, and the scripting I created on myself was, I never want to be poor, but I never said I want to be rich or that I aspired to it.
We kept going out. About a month after his first proposal I invited my mother and one of my sisters to come for dinner with Jac. I love to cook, but I had never even let on to Jac that I could, because I didn't want him to be interested in me because I could cook. Anyway, that night I cooked and Jac was flabbergasted.
So things were going along. The main problem over the next few months was his family. I was only half Jewish; my mother was Russian Jewish, my father was Spanish Catholic. I did not have money. And I was myopic, I wore glasses—this was a big consideration.
When Jac told them we were getting married, they were not thrilled.
JAC: We decided on Columbus Day.
NINA MERRICK: Jac was marvelous. He was very strong. He said to them, "We would love to have you there, but if you're not there, we're getting married anyway."
Our wedding was on Christmas Eve, at my family home out in the country, by Jac's grandfather who was a rabbi. Not very many people, our families and a few friends. Ripley was best man. Jac's family did show up, and it was pleasant enough. It wasn't my dream wedding or anything. We didn't have a honeymoon right away, not for four months. The whole business thing prevented our going right away, and then we went on a little cruise.
JAC: Now into my life came Josh White. My only experience recording black music had been two ten-inch LPs of folk and city blues with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.
Josh did not have a recording contract and couldn't get one, because his politics and some past connections were suspect during the ugly years of the blacklist and the anti-communist witch hunt of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
OSCAR BRAND: The blacklist period was a deadly business.
JEAN RITCHIE: It was a very egg-treading time. You didn't dare say anything. We think of the KGB in Russia—it was like that in our country for a while. So you had to—you did—watch your step.
THEODORE BIKEL: Folk singers went to the source, not only to rural sources but to urban sources, and that had to do with the labor movement, with songs of the Depression, hunger, social unrest, oppression by the very rich of the very poor, exploitation. And that's why I hardly know any folk songs written by right-wing conservatives.
JAC: Josh was born in Greenville, South Carolina, the son of a preacher who tried to bring Josh up as befits a preacher's son. As a boy Josh went on the road with wandering blues singers like Blind Lemon Jefferson. It was a hard-scrabble life, scratching for pennies. He was threatened by white sheriffs and he saw lynchings.
In the Forties he made his way to New York and became a celebrated cabaret singer, a charismatic performer and a stunning guitarist. He was a close friend of Libby Holman, who had created a sensation with a song called 'Strange Fruit,' telling of blacks lynched and left to hang for days from trees with blood staining the leaves and spattering the roots.
During World War II Josh did benefits for Russian relief and other organizations later said to be communist fronts. He was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, whom he accompanied to Scandinavia in 1950. Josh played to huge crowds but refused to sing 'Strange Fruit' overseas; he took the view that it was wrong to sing ill of his country on foreign soil.
The FBI had a dossier on Josh that ran to 473 pages. The mudslinging witchhunting publication surveying the entertainment business, Red Channels, offered to "clear" Josh if he would denounce Paul Robeson, the much admired black singer-actor-athlete-activist. Josh refused. He was subpoenaed by the House Un- American Affairs Committee, where he read a prepared statement but never named names. That left him on the outs with those who controlled media access and jobs in entertainment—just about unemployable. Like too many others.
OSCAR BRAND: Woody Guthrie couldn't work. The Weavers were knocked off the air. Harry Belafonte was attacked. Susan Reed was attacked. Cynthia Gooding dropped out, didn't record any more. I had been blacklisted by the other side, the Communist Party, and the House Un-American Activities Committee wanted me to cooperate with them, but I didn't, though everybody thought I had. Then there was the question whether Josh had named names.
ED McCURDY: Josh was working Café Society Downtown when I was working the Village Vanguard. He'd come around and talk to me between sets because no one else would speak to him. His leftist friends were a bunch of shits and didn't have the courage of their own decency.
JAC: My upbringing and my own sentiments were liberal. The witch hunt would have no effect on my musical judgment. I was impressed by Josh the musician and performer: compelling personality and terrific guitar chops.
Signing Josh gave me an artist with a broad reputation who might actually sell some records. And more importantly, it was my first contract as a professional with an artist who had inspired me to record folk music when I was DJ-ing at St. John's for Bob Sacks.
THEODORE BIKEL: Josh took simple musical forms and brought them into a club format. He played stuff on guitar that people in the fields obviously didn't play in that form—those chords, that slide up and down. He had a great regard for authenticity, but he was also a showman.
ED McCURDY: God, he was one of the most magnetic performers I ever saw. He was my friend. When I knew where he was appearing I used to wire him, "Dear Mr. White, please sing "Swanee River," and if you can't sing it, it makes a nice sand dance. Signed, Ratford P. Brown." And he introduced me one night at Café Society: "My motherfucking friend Ratford P. Brown."
JAC: Josh was nearing the twenty-fifth anniversary of his first recordings in 1931 and he had this notion to create an assemblage of railroad songs, tied together with a short narrative which we called 'The Story of John Henry.' It sold close to twenty thousand, a big hit for us.
Though Josh was compelling in concert, I thought he was at his very best late at night, in a small club crowded with great-looking ladies. There were Josh White groupies, stunning females, usually white, and he would seduce them musically. Every woman in the room thought he was singing just to her. And he was.
That was the mood we tried for on "Josh at Midnight," just Josh and his bass-playing pal, Sam Hall, recorded in the dark of evening, at a church that had been converted into a studio. Nina wrote the liner notes from a woman's perspective. It did very well.
NINA HOLZMAN: Josh would record with a cigarette behind his ear, like some people would put a pencil. He had a lot of style.
BILL HARVEY: We were shooting an album cover one night, with a model, very romantic mood, and underlying that very sexual, because everything about Josh was sexual. He kept chasing this girl all over the studio, and it wasn't very big, about the size of a living room. He'd get her in one corner, another corner, while the photographer kept lighting the different areas, trying to create a mood. I was interested in getting a good shot of him, but I wanted to imply that she was there. She had ample bosoms, so that in the haze of the silhouette you could very definitely make out that this was a lady. We got all the pictures, but Josh didn't make out with the girl.
Josh White (right) with Sam Hall, bass. "Josh at Midnight" Sessions, 1955
NINA HOLZMAN: Josh was very charming, unpredictable, irresponsible. We'd get midnight calls from his wife wanting to know where he was, which was the part I didn't want to know about.
OSCAR BRAND: Josh was my close friend. He was tough, exacting, prickly, especially with white college boys. Jac handled him very nicely, not presumptuous, supercilious, all the kinds of things Josh despised. Jac wasn't political with Josh either. Josh had taken awful bites from both sides. All he wanted was recognition as a musician and as a man. To him, Jac did what he was supposed to do. And it was so great to find a record producer who paid you.
NINA HOLZMAN: The thing about Jac in those early days was that I knew even then that this was a very, very special person. There were a lot of gaps in his personality that I did not totally understand. But my feeling was, first of all, I very much loved him—
JEAN RITCHIE:—Nina and Jac were very much in love when they married. They couldn't stay two inches away from each other, they always had their arms around each other—
NINA HOLZMAN:—And at the same that this was a very gifted person. He wasn't just a wannabe businessman. He had the marks of an artist. In his own way he was a genius. He had a vision that very few people ever had. Because of that, I felt that he had to be excused for many things that would be expected of more ordinary people.
One day he said, "OK, now it's time that you come and work with me." So I left Dance magazine, way west on 57th Street, for Elektra, at 361 Bleecker Street.
Bleecker Street was very ethnic, which is probably why the rent was so cheap. Little restaurants, wonderful food stores, bakeries, places where you could buy cheese and salami, the best. Lots of Italian ladies sitting out on the doorsteps. The office was a funny little place, very Bleeckerish. It was old, but we thought it was wonderful. It looked like the front of a store, with windows where Jac would always have posters or the newest releases. Jac used the front part as a sort of shipping area, and then you walked up a few stairs, so there was a little balcony where we worked, and in the back there was a kitchen, where I would make coffee in the morning.
We sat across from each other, face to face. We each had a phone. I took typing in high school, and I was trained on an electric typewriter—Jac would always want state-of-the-art in whatever he could afford at the moment. And I did everything. I was the secretary-receptionist, I did the books, I paid the royalties, I wrote letters, I listened to everybody, and I made the coffee.
JAC: Nina was the first Elektra staffer. I paid her the same as Dance magazine, $55 a week. I was paying myself $100, so between us we were making $8,000 a year, adequate for 1956.
NINA HOLZMAN: In the morning we got on the motor scooter and went to work. We worked all day together.
JAC: We would stay until 7pm, then go to a little restaurant nearby for dinner.
NINA HOLZMAN: There was a place down the street called La Palette, $2.69 for a complete dinner.
JAC: We'd split a dish. Beef stroganoff was a splurge.
NINA HOLZMAN: Jac felt free to invite people home for dinner. I was a good cook, so there were plenty of people always wanting to come over. There was no separation between the work life and the other life. There were recording sessions at night, and concerts. It was very exciting.
Jac recording on location, 1956
JAC: After Jean Ritchie's first album I had decided to buy my own recording equipment, a Magnecord PT-6 tape machine, carryable in two cases, plus an Electro-Voice Hammerhead mike with a collapsible stand and a bag for tapes. For playback I modified a set of World War II tank commander's headphones.
We did our recording on location, and I'd drive there on my motor scooter with the equipment nestled between my legs and strapped to the rear luggage rack.
We avoided conventional studios, most of which were former broadcast studios, deadened with perforated, square acoustic tile. They were sound-neutral, neither adding to nor detracting much from what the microphone heard. Neutral is like beige, it lacks character. I preferred rooms with a fatter, more opulent sound.
One evening I was listening to Ed Canby's choral group, the Canby Singers. It was soon after we had made the first Elektra record of Georgianna Bannister in Peter Bartók's little studio on 57th Street. I had been vaguely dissatisfied with the overall sound and thought it would have been better to record her in a more spacious environment, but I was not yet sure of my opinion. Now the Canby Singers were performing Monteverdi in the armor room of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a tall vaulted thirteenth-century cathedral-like nave. It sounded so full and godlike, but to sing Bach or other baroque music in that same room—highly filigreed, contrapuntal music—the subtlety and clarity of line would be confused. It hit me that Bach composed consciously for the acoustics of a North German Protestant church, wood and plaster with modest ornamentation. The sound was relatively dry and the details of his music would be heard in sharp relief. At the other end of the spectrum are Gregorian chants, where each sung phrase floats on top of the preceding phrase, like a multi-layered, Catholic Jell-O. What I learned from that evening was to match the singer to the recording environment.
For folk music we shunned the Catholic cathedrals and went for Lutheran churches. Or we rented a recital hall in the Columbia Artists Building where we could flavor the acoustics with panels—reflective on one side, absorptive on the other—that rolled on rubber wheels. The miking was trickier, less forgiving, and we frequently had to stop for an airplane overhead or the subway below, but we were able to make it all work.
A fine way to record a folk artist—usually a single self-accompanied singer—was in their own home, an ambiance where they would be comfortable. Wood walls were ideal, reflecting responsively and adding timbre. We would hang heavy blankets to subdue over-reverberant corners. Always we would have to stop for passing trucks or neighboring domestic arguments. I recall a Frank Warner session on Long Island where Frank competed with a chiming clock, a noisy water heater, a parakeet, a duck, several children, numerous chickens, and the Grumman jet air base.
Our records were easy to make. It was rare to spend more than three days in sessions. And they were inexpensive, usually under a thousand dollars. The sound was uniformly good. Although we didn't know it at the time, we were recording at a quality far above our ability to play it back. Listening to those early tapes now, with improved playback equipment, thinner-gapped heads, and the more sophisticated conductive materials of the last ten years, I am finding a richness of detail I never knew existed.
Jac in his home electronics lab
I did my own engineering and editing, cutting into the master tapes with Gem industrial single-edged razor blades, a hundred to a box, further honed on a well-worn whetstone. I never would do traditional fades or insert white plastic tape between tracks for silence, which was the normal practice; I preferred to separate songs with the natural sound of the room itself.
Our lacquer masters were cut by Peter Bartók. I would motor-scooter to his apartment in Riverdale with the tapes secure in a backpack. Peter would align the tape playback head with the high frequencies on my tape. Whenever we needed a level change or a slight equalization tweak, we did it on the fly. I prepared elaborate cue sheets and knew exactly when each adjustment was coming. We never dubbed the changes down to a second generation as most every other label did, because it added noise and lessened quality.
Manufacturing was a constant battle. I was looking for a combination of quality and price. Samples from pressing plants were highly suspicious, and with long production runs of LPs there was tremendous variability between pressings. Even though the re-cut was from the same tape, somebody might flavor it differently, or the cutter head would act up, or a tube in the final amplifier stage might be weak. In the analog world consistency was difficult to achieve—which was part of its charm and made it a craft. To be a good mastering engineer was an exalted skill.
Quality control—trying to get records that didn't have skips, pops, clicks, or distortion—was a headache. We were infamous for rejecting test pressings. We couldn't compete with the major labels in paying advances, but we could and did compete in giving the artist and the audience an album of quality.
For album covers we hired excellent photographers, such as George Pickow, Jean Ritchie's husband, and knowledgeable and witty writers for the liner notes, the ones we didn't write ourselves. For an album Bob Gibson did with Hamilton Camp, the notes were by Shel Silverstein, and they were very hip. On another of Bob's albums the notes were by Studs Terkel and the photo by Pompeo Posar, who went on to shoot a thousand Playboy Playmates.
Other labels occasionally provided notes and lyrics. We did full booklets consistently and conscientiously. If songs were in a language that did not use the Roman alphabet, we would have the original typed on a special keyboard, whether it be kanji or Cyrillic. There would be a transliteration so that you could follow along with the words as well as an English translation. I wanted our listeners to have the deepest experience of the music and reasoned that it would create a greater appreciation for the material and for Elektra. Heightened satisfaction, in turn, might encourage more people to talk about the record, and word of mouth was the engine for reputation and sales.
Mastering lathe circa 1959
Raw pressings were delivered to the Elektra office, the printer/fabricator would supply jackets, and we would do the assembling, slip the record into a protective glassine sleeve and then slide it plus the booklet into the jacket. Shrink wrapping was still unheard of. Orders would be boxed and lashed to the motor scooter and I would drive to freight forwarders on the West Side. For office pickup there was a surcharge of $1.25 per box of about fifty albums, so it was much cheaper to deliver them yourself.
We were now selling directly to independent distributors. Immortal in memory is K.O. Asher. He was headquartered in Chicago, claimed the Midwest as his realm, and defined "Midwest" with a scope and sweep worthy of a Roman emperor: if a state didn't have an ocean on one of its borders the territory belonged to K.O. He was the most careful person with a buck I ever met, including me. He refused to spend money on printed stationery or order forms. K.O. would take a sheet of hotel stationery torn in half, or a free color postcard, handwrite his order, then rubberstamp his name and address. For Christmas in 1957 I had some special stationery designed as a gift for him. He never acknowledged receipt and no trace of the elegant design ever crossed my desk. He kept on being K.O.
His one massively endearing quality was that he paid his bills on time. You always knew that, come the first of the month, K.O. would pay up. In 1958 I sent him a notice dropping him as our distributor because I wanted to break his huge territory into five or six smaller distributorships. Immediately I received a Mastering lathe circa 1959 telegram—an expensive first from K.O.—with a gigantic order. It totaled almost a year's supply of Elektra albums, for which I thought I was never going to be paid, but I was contractually obligated to ship. K.O. paid, right on the nose.
In retrospect, independent distribution was not efficient, but it worked for me at the time. Even though some distributorships in the big East Coast cities were reputed to have unsavory connections, I quickly found that if you treated these customers with a sincere respect to which they were unaccustomed, they reciprocated and paid their bills. Nina and I would invite them to our home for artist parties, and they were pussycats.
Our ad budgets were small. Promotion was centered on getting reviewers interested enough to write about an album or getting it played on whatever station or program would air folk music. Generating word of mouth was critical, people telling other people, or a clerk in a record store guiding a customer.
Inventory control and accounting were primitive. If we had an invoice with thirty different records on it, one or two or ten of each title, these all had to be posted to a card. That card would indicate what you received, shipped, were paid for and, by derivation, what you owed in royalties when you multiplied it all out.
The very first sampler
In the beginning I did the bookkeeping myself, with no experience or training. I kept track of the cash that came in and the cash that went out, cigar-box accounting. The economics were very simple. If I sold four or five thousand copies of an album I broke even on that project, paid for the overhead, and even made a little money, over time. For the first five years I never had a financial balance sheet because I had never heard of one; and since there were no profits there were no taxes.
It became our accounting practice, and it remains pretty much the standard industry practice to this day, to write off the value of newly released masters to zero. Once the record had been initially shipped it was no longer carried on the books as a financial asset, although it had value and we continued to work it energetically. This quick write-down minimized short-term profits which meant that more cash remained in the company.
Our suppliers carried us. In effect I was borrowing from them rather than the far more rigid banks. As long as I kept my commitment to pay agreed-upon installments, all was well. The first year Elektra could be said to have made even a small profit was 1956. Unexpectedly, and to the delight of our suppliers, we began to catch up on our bills, bringing most everyone current by late 1958. Suppliers who stuck with us, like our printer, Peter Strauss, continued to be our vendors when we entered our period of steeper growth.
The transition from red ink to black had resulted from a happy convergence of events. Clearly the most important were our artist signings, but I was also searching for a way to take our specialized and distinctive catalog and have it heard by more people. As a fanatical moviegoer, I knew the value of the film trailer. I translated that to the record business. My concept—I have always been big on concepts—was a sampler LP: a collection of musical trailers, a compendium of carefully assembled material, with lyrics and notes, all on a ten-inch LP that would sell for a bargain price unheard of in 1954: $2.00.
The first Elektra sampler featured a new logo, a drawing of a musician sitting on a conga-shaped barrel playing a guitar. My intuition was that samplers could become permanent marketing tools, so I inserted a "sampler clause" in all new artists' contracts, allowing me to use one track from any album, royalty-free.
In 1956 we produced our first twelve-inch sampler for sale through retail. The normal pricing structure wouldn't allow for any profit margin to us, so I engineered the "short discount," reducing the dealer's unit profit but convincing them that if they displayed the samplers prominently and pushed the concept, it would result not only in more sampler sales but increased visibility of records by the featured artists. The dealer margin was lowered to 25 percent and the distributors worked on half their usual markup. We received $1.25 per record against our direct costs of $.55 plus the cost of special point of sale marketing tools. With no royalty obligation and only the raw cost of manufacturing to consider, a good sampler could net between ten and twenty thousand dollars.
First twelve-inch sampler to be sold at retail
This was the best of all possible worlds. We were actively promoting our records, the public was paying for the privilege and getting good value in return, and Elektra was being fertilized by the profits. We were making our garden grow. Dr. Pangloss would have smiled.
One large American company was not thrilled. The word "sampler" had a folk connotation as a piece of sentimental needlepoint to be framed and hung on the wall, but it could also be construed as referring to the famous Whitman's Sampler of boxed chocolates. After our first sampler was released, Whitman's white-shoe lawyers sent me a threatening "cease and desist" letter on their ogre stationery, so thick it cracked when folded. My reply was to type up the definition of "sampler" from various unabridged dictionaries and send it back to them. After two years of sporadic correspondence they gave up.
Theo Bikel's debut album, 1955 EKLP-32
JAC: Theodore Bikel continued to be our main prestige name. Theo was fluent in many languages and at home in an international repertoire that seemed endless. In another part of his professional life he was a marquee-name actor, starring in films and on stage in London and on Broadway. He was a total entertainer. As a performer and recording artist he was respected, intelligent and much loved, especially by Jewish mothers who could fantasize a match for their comely daughters. The more Theo was seen, the better his record sales. His back catalog moved with happy regularity and with his endless repertoire and quick learning skills he could put out two new albums a year.
THEODORE BIKEL: In my case the concept was language—Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, or international, going from one language to another. A couple of times Jac teamed me up with other people, like Cynthia Gooding or Geula Gill. Jac had a good nose for talent in the first instance, and secondly, not just to take what the talent was doing at the moment, but to see the potential of what that talent might do and encouraging them in that direction.
JAC: Theo's first album, "Folksongs of Israel," had been originally issued in 1955 as a ten-inch LP with the title prominent and Theo's name in much smaller type, almost an afterthought. By mid-1956 Theodore Bikel was a name that, by itself, generated attention, so we took our ten-inch LP, recorded additional songs, and reissued it as a twelve-inch.
The new version hit you in the eye with a knockout cover—a field in Israel, the crops poking their little green sprouts above the rich soil of the promised land, and a busty Sabra with an olive tan, a shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and khaki shorts over long slender legs, proudly striding the plowed furrows, a hoe resting on her shoulders, a jaunty kibbutz-type cap perched on her head, her eyes fixed on the future. The authentic spirit of Israel. And sexy.
New and improved "Folksongs of Israel" EKL-132
THEODORE BIKEL: Everybody was so impressed that we had gone all the way to Israel to photograph a real kibbutz person. Actually, I don't think this girl had been out of the country, or even out of New York. The art director found her in Manhattan and had her march through some green fields on Long Island.
JAC: We must have answered a hundred calls from eager young men desperate to meet that girl. Letters from Israel begged for her name and her kibbutz. It was a film fantasy brought to record covers, and a lesson I would never forget about the power of album cover art.
Ed McCurdy
JAC: Ed McCurdy was a character around the Village, tall, taciturn and lanternjawed, with an orotund voice, in which he pronounced more than talked.
Records and occasional concerts weren't sufficient to feed his family, so weekday afternoons Ed metamorphosed into Freddy the Fireman, hosting a local television show for kids in New York. Ed's landlord liked to see Freddy on the tube. It meant Ed was working and able to pay the rent.
OSCAR BRAND: Ed was a tough nut. A couple of drinks and he could be nasty. When he was not in his cups, he was a doll, a funny, clever guy.
MARK ABRAMSON: His voice had that whiskey depth. We would be on 14th Street, across from the armory, with those crenellated towers, and he would yell out as loudly as he could: "Who's manning the battlements? Someone should be manning the battlements!" Everyone stopped and stared.
"Blood, Booze 'n Bones" EKL-108
JAC: We recorded several virile McCurdy folk albums with testosterone titles like 'Sin Songs Pro and Con'—one side in favor, the other against—and 'Blood, Booze 'n' Bones.' One day Ed dropped off a batch of Elizabethan lyrics from Tom D'Urfey's "Songs of Wit and Mirth, Or Pills to Purge Melancholy." The words were great but there were no melodies, so Ed adapted them to traditional melodies of their time, or wrote new ones.
Ed played robust, dexterous guitar, and we brought in Erik Darling, later of The Rooftop Singers, to play banjo, and Alan Arkin of the Tarriers (and eventually of Broadway and Hollywood) to play recorder. Ed and I anguished over a title. The word "dalliance" popped up and he said, "Well, maybe we'll call it "When Dalliance Was in Flower,"" and I said, "Yeah—'And Maidens Lost Their Heads.'" Very racy.
The album was an instant smash in college dorms, not six years after the birth of Elektra in a similar dorm. Students would be heard humming snatches of 'Go Bring Me a Lass'—"Let her body be tall, let her waist be small, and her age not above eighteen, Let her care for no bed, but here let her spread, her mantle upon the green."
First of the "Dalliance" series
The original cover was line drawings of buxom maidens. After the album took off I decided to switch to a color photo. We shot a photo of saucy wenches, featuring some nubile Playmates of the Month and some horny dallying dudes, of whom Leonard Ripley was one and I was another, to save the cost of male models. The record company president on his own record cover, in jerkin and tights—certainly a more fetching vision than my out-of-focus guitar-playing Cossack on Theo Bikel's "Songs of a Russian Gypsy."
The first "Dalliance" sold so well that follow-ups were inevitable. Fortunately, "Pills to Purge Melancholy" was stuffed with adaptable lyrics and so "Son of Dalliance" was born, with the cover shot featuring a maiden being banished for having an out-of wedlock baby.
Over time the four albums of the "Dalliance" series probably sold over one hundred thousand copies. These were numbers big for any record company and gigantic for us.
Follow-up in the "Dalliance" series
JAC: In mid-1957 Nina and I got pregnant.
NINA HOLZMAN: That was great. It was what we wanted. I can remember one of the first days I wore a maternity dress. It was at some incredible audio show that took place every year, at 38th Street and Seventh Avenue. Jac was demonstrating his records on certain equipment, somehow involved with small speakers. One of the trademarks of Elektra Records, and what propelled him into the business in the first place, was that he wanted to have the best possible sound. He felt that Columbia LPs didn't sound that good. So hi-fi and the whole idea of the best sound possible was a driving force. And when this stuff was demonstrated at audio shows, it really sounded terrific.
I was wrapped up in getting ready to be a mother, even though I continued to work with Jac. We were not on such great terms with Jac's family at that point. But our obstetrician was a family friend. He had delivered Jac and his younger brother Keith. There were phases where we went in and out with Jac's parents. There did come a time when I could do no wrong with them, though Jac continued to have a hard time with his father.
I rode on the back of the motor scooter right up until the day I went to the hospital to give birth, much to the horror of the Italian ladies on Bleecker Street. Our son Adam was born in February, 1958.
MEL POSNER: When I got out of the army in April of 1958 I couldn't shake two nickels together. I went to an employment agency and I was sent out on an interview, and it was at Elektra Records. I didn't know anything about Elektra. I was going to take the job for the summer and go back to school at CCNY in the fall.
NINA HOLZMAN: I always adored Mel. He was as close as I could get to having a brother, because I never had one. He was just very loyal, he was sweet, he was good, and if he wasn't all that capable initially when he walked in the door, it was because he was very young, and he did develop.
JAC: Mel was eager to learn, quick to ask questions, didn't have to be told things twice, was quite disciplined and was willing to work hard for not a lot of money—it couldn't have been much more than fifty dollars a week—and if he resented working in the deep dungeon of our subterranean stockroom he was smart enough to keep it to himself. One thing Mel did was to take over the assembly and packing of records from me, a blessed relief after eight years of personal pick and pack. I would still transport the boxed orders to the freight forwarders on the West Side. The poor Vespa—if I suddenly got off when it was loaded it would tilt dangerously backwards, so Mel would strap the boxes to the carrying rack while I cautiously mounted this unruly beast, careful not to upset its delicate balance. And Mel and I went on the road, doing presentations.
MEL POSNER: In Cleveland the Elektra distributor was also the distributor for RCA white goods, and one time, to show them the covers of our albums, we actually set the slide projector up on a dishwasher and projected against a refrigerator.
MARK ABRAMSON: Mel had a lot of friends in Brooklyn, people he grew up with, policemen, firemen. Once I went with him to a place out there euphemistically called "the pigpen," a place to pick up women. This was pre-singles bars. It was an indescribable scene. I will describe the indescribable. It was this big hall, with some band playing that you didn't want to hear, and when the band wasn't playing, the piped-in music was so distorted you couldn't hear, and there were people milling about, all these hungry, predatory people of both sexes. Mel had himself beautiful women all along. He was very attractive to women. I think it was because he was genuine. He didn't make fun of people, he wasn't one of those ha-ha guys, he wasn't the guy in the corner going, "Hey!" He had a good heart, good soul, and I think women sensed that. A lot of the women there knew him. You could tell that he had a place in the group.
NINA HOLZMAN: Years later, when I saw "Saturday Night Fever," I thought of Mel, because there's something about that commute from Brooklyn into Manhattan. It was way more than a subway ride. Especially to the Village.
MEL POSNER: Working in the Village was a strange kind of thing for me. Every day was an adventure.
I was never aware of this huge homosexual contingent in the Village. I knew about homosexuality, but I didn't know there was a large community down there. I would take my lunch to the park, and I suddenly found myself in a strange situation, and I would just say, "Thanks, but no thanks," and that would be the end of it. But I suddenly became aware of things that I would not have been conscious of in Brooklyn.
And not only from that point of view, but from the artistic point of view. I suddenly recognized that where I thought it was important that people go out and earn a living and have a certain kind of lifestyle, now I was confronted with artists who were giving everything for their art, and they were more talented than I was, more willing to expose themselves, more willing to say things publicly that I was shy about, and that's when I got my respect for that community. I really became enamored by the whole creative process.
One evening Jac said to me, "Would you like to go to the studio?" I said, "Great, who?" He said, "Josh White." I got on the back of the Vespa. I had the microphone boxes on my lap and Jac had the cables and everything, and we went up to Judson Hall and recorded Josh White. And that was the kind of thing that started happening more and more, so that while I was learning from the business standpoint and the shipping standpoint, traffic and so forth, there was another element that I had never thought about, the association with the creative aspect of it, which in the end becomes the most exciting. At that stage, I'm twenty-two years old. And that summer job lasted twenty-six years.
JAC: In the spring of 1958, our financial nose was just a whisker above water when trouble began to brew with Mr. and Mrs. Ripley. Ripley's wife had insinuated herself into what had been a relaxed and friendly working relationship. She was convinced her husband should be running Elektra because he had invested more cash than I, but I owned more than half the stock and was drawing a modest salary. In her opinion I was bleeding Elektra.
She urged Ripley to tell our artists about the problems he was having, and that the company might not survive unless they supported him. I should have guessed that he would lobby the artists, but when I found out it stunned me.
It didn't have to become a contentious or vitriolic situation. Ripley had been best man at my wedding and we had always gotten on well. When he met this woman, that well-balanced equation changed, and I was so wrapped up in what I was doing that I didn't notice. Then they sued.
NINA HOLZMAN: That was a tense time—Adam just a baby and a lawsuit looming. It was the only blight on that whole period.
JAC: My regular lawyer evaporated, because he knew both Ripley and me and was uncomfortable representing either, so he turned me over to a partner in his office named Irwin Russell.
IRWIN RUSSELL: When I started to handle Jac's work he had his twenty-foot storefront on Bleecker Street. If we had to go through some contracts I'd come around, and we'd finish packing up the records and make the shipment for the day, then we'd sit down and do the contract paperwork.
JAC: It was fortuitous casting because Irwin and I quickly became friends and he helped me navigate through the Ripley situation, for which I was totally unprepared. There is always a lot of posturing in the opening phases of any lawsuit and this one was no exception. We met with Ripley, his lawyer and, of course, the wife. The lawyer did all the talking, fanciful tales about how I was bankrupting the company with my $100 per week salary plus the clear nepotism of having Nina also work for Elektra. I kept my mouth shut, which is never easy. I just stared at Ripley, who was trying to project firmness but looked sheepish instead.
IRWIN RUSSELL: It got to the point where it seemed that either one or the other side would have to buy the other out. And we decided that they really didn't understand the business, so we would let them set the figure.
JAC: The beauty of Irwin's plan was that we retained the critical option to either buy Ripley out at his figure, or sell to him for that figure plus an additional sum representing my control of the majority stock. It all boiled down to one number. If they set it right, it would represent a bargain for him but a figure too rich for me.
IRWIN RUSSELL: Ripley was no businessman, and his lawyers didn't comprehend the whole thing. They just assumed we didn't have any money. They set a very low figure, quite a bit lower than we would have been prepared to pay.
JAC: That figure turned out to be $25,000. The minute I heard the number I knew it was a bargain. My twenty-seventh birthday was coming and I decided to buy all of Elektra as my birthday present to me.
The Ripleys were surprised when we opted to acquire rather than sell they were convinced I didn't have the cash. And they were absolutely right. I had thirty days to come up with the money. I slept fitfully for two weeks until I figured it out: Sam Goody was the key.
Sam was the king of New York's largest record store, west of Broadway, about twenty thousand square feet—gargantuan for a music outlet. Sam tried to keep every worthwhile LP of every label in stock, and he filled orders for customers worldwide.
Sam was short, thick, balding, fast-talking, a lover of fine deli, with a scrappy personality and an eye for the ladies—you never walked into his office without first listening at the glass door. He and I were friendly. One day I was visiting him and slipped off my loafers, and for years after, if I didn't remove my shoes, Sam thought I was uncomfortable.
Sam had filed for bankruptcy in the mid-Fifties. I wangled a seat on the creditors' committee as representative of the smaller independent labels. Although I stood to lose almost five thousand dollars I was strongly on Sam's side, because the independents couldn't afford to lose the outlet—at one point Sam was doing five percent of all the record business in the country. So I was very supportive and vocal in his defense.
With the Ripley buyout on my horizon it was time for Sam to return a favor, and he did. With an exaggerated flourish, Sam wrote me a check for $10,000 for records yet to be delivered. I gave him a big hug. Irwin found the other $15,000 for me by way of a friend.
IRWIN RUSSELL: I had to guarantee the signature.
JAC: Irwin's $15,000 was short-term money, to be paid back within ninety days. I had no idea how I was going to do that, but I managed to borrow $7,500 from my father on a six-month note and the other $7,500 from my bank, where I had been running smallish balances. The collateral was merely all my master tapes.
Now I owned Elektra. It was by far the most daring thing I had ever done. And I was deeply in debt. Not only did I have the Ripley buyout money to pay off, I still owed $90,000 to my suppliers. But I didn't worry much about this larger, looming debt. It never occurred to me, having suffered through the lawsuit with Ripley, that Elektra was going to be anything other than successful. When one hundred percent of Elektra was my responsibility I threw myself into fifth gear.
Theo's breakthrough album, "Songs of a Russian Gypsy" EKS-7150
Theo Bikel's "Songs of a Russian Gypsy" turned into an immediate hit. We sold over thirty-five thousand copies within the first four months. That was big cash flow for us, and there were no copyright payments on folk songs, which at $0.24 each for thirty-five thousand units meant an extra $8,000 for the company to reduce debt.
Ninety days after the Ripley buyout was completed, in the late fall of 1958, I was up to date with all my suppliers.
THEODORE BIKEL: A few months after Jac bought Ripley out he said to me, "I really feel I owe you, because you were with me from the beginning and you have done well for me. If you want five percent of the company, I'll let you have it for $20,000." At the time, that was a pretty piece of change for me, or for anybody, to come up with. But five percent of Elektra was already worth far more than twenty grand. And Jac really didn't have to do that. He could have walked away from buying Ripley out and said, "I own all of it and I earned it and that's it." But he did make the offer. And I accepted. The investment was later returned twenty-five-fold.
