Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (29 page)

When he was twelve and struggling at school, his parents divorced in unpleasant circumstances, causing both an emotional and geographical upheaval for their son. Chris was shipped off to Harrow, a prestigious English boarding school—both thousands of miles from his estranged parents and far behind his classmates academically. His father relocated to a town near Chicago, meaning Blackwell’s teenaged years were spent migrating between England, Jamaica, and Illinois. While visiting his father in the early fifties, he traveled the forty miles into Chicago to see his first jazz club.

In these formative years, Blackwell learned to be independent, but academically, he remained easily distracted, lagging through Harrow for five years until his education was cut short at the age of seventeen when he was caught peddling alcohol and cigarettes to fellow boarders. He was flogged in front of the pupils and expelled. “Christopher might be happier elsewhere,” his headmaster wrote to his mother. Floating without any qualifications, the young man briefly tried accountancy and even professional gambling but eventually returned to Jamaica in 1958, where he found a job as a water-skiing teacher at the luxurious Half Moon Hotel in Montego Bay.

For an heir of almost aristocratic lineage, Chris Blackwell was off to a disappointing start in life, but his destiny was about to change thanks to a series of freak incidents. One hot Jamaican afternoon in 1958, he headed out to sea on a motorboat excursion with some friends. Departing from the former pirate haven of Port Royal, they headed down Jamaica’s southern coast. Carelessness got the boat stranded in a swamp. With no other options, the athletic Blackwell headed for help. After four hours struggling through swamps in the tropical heat, he arrived at a beach and fell down, gasping from thirst and exhaustion. Weak and dizzy, he heard a voice overhead; dreadlocks were hanging down over him. The Rastafarian pulled Blackwell to his feet and helped him to an encampment. He drank the water they gave him and collapsed into sleep.

When he woke up sometime later, the Rastas were reading from the Bible. They fed him traditional Ital food and continued their prayers until he came to his senses. Although Blackwell was too confused to understand what was happening, the memory would stay with him for life. This was the late 1950s, a time when even the tough characters in downtown Kingston steered clear of these strange-looking tribal creatures, then called “beard-men.”

Shortly after his potentially fatal experience, Blackwell set up Island Records, which within a year scored a string of Jamaican hits. In 1961, when scenes of the first James Bond film,
Dr. No,
were shot in Jamaica, he briefly worked as a production assistant. The movie producer offered him a permanent job, prompting the twenty-three-year-old to consult a fortune-teller, who confidently advised him to stay in the music business.

In 1962, a new wave began dominating the Jamaican charts. Termed
Sound System
, these were producers of Jamaican R&B who deejayed their records through the streets of Kingston on the back of trucks. Rather than compete, Blackwell wisely moved to London, where he set up an import business distributing
Sound System
hit records from Sir Coxsone Dodd, Duke Reid, and King Edwards. He simply drove his Mini Cooper to shops and market stalls, selling records out of the trunk. The move proved quickly lucrative; big sellers like Jimmy Cliff’s “Miss Jamaica” and Derrick Morgan’s “Forward March” sold 30,000 copies each.

Much to Blackwell’s surprise, among London mods, the step from R&B to Jamaican rhythms wasn’t all that difficult. In clubs such as the Ram Jam in Brixton, Blackwell noticed mixed crowds, all dressed alike, moving in the same manner to the infectious beats of ska. London’s most happening mod club at the time was the Scene, a small basement club in Soho run by Ronan O’Rahilly, the Irish entrepreneur behind the first pirate ship, Radio Caroline. There, Blackwell noticed the in-house deejay Guy Stevens, who was such a brilliant researcher of obscure R&B records that the Rolling Stones and the Who were visiting his apartment to rummage through his collection.

In April 1964, while the Beatles were invading America, Blackwell began delivering Jamaican records to fashionable record stores in Soho. He also persuaded Guy Stevens to augment Island’s catalog with an R&B imprint, Sue Records, which quickly scored a string of British hits: “Mockingbird” by Inez & Charlie Foxx; “Land of a Thousand Dances” by Chris Kenner; “Harlem Shuffle” by Bob & Earl; “Night Train” by James Brown; and “Shotgun Wedding” by Roy C. “Guy Stevens took us out of West Indian reggae music with Sue Records,” attested Island’s first employee, David Betteridge. “He was buying in tracks from America, and that gave us the knowledge of how to break bands into the mainstream.”

Blackwell’s first major hit as a producer was the international smash “My Boy Lollipop” by Jamaican teenager Millie Small. While accompanying Millie to an appearance in Birmingham, Blackwell checked out a local band called the Spencer Davis Group, led by a fourteen-year-old prodigy, Steve Winwood. Repeating the same recipe, he signed a management deal with the band and persuaded them to rework a Jamaican song, “Keep On Running,” with a pop beat and fuzzy guitar reminiscent of “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.”

He pitched the recording to Fontana, a Philips sublabel whose clueless but cocky A&R man advised Blackwell to improve various aspects of the mix. In an indication of how charmingly devious Chris Blackwell could be, he waited two weeks and returned to Fontana with the exact same master. With elegance, he thanked the A&R man for such great advice. “Listen to how good it sounds now!” The flattered A&R man fell for Blackwell’s trick and arranged a release. By January 1966, the smash-hit record knocked the Beatles “Day Tripper” out of Britain’s No. 1 spot. Chris Blackwell, approaching thirty, was entering the big time.

When the Spencer Davis Group broke up after two albums, Island Records was big enough for Blackwell to sign Steve Winwood’s new group, Traffic. Released in 1967 with the recently redesigned pink label, Traffic’s first album,
Mr. Fantasy,
was a jazzy, psychedelic hit, complete with elaborate sleeve artwork. Another key sign of Island’s growing legitimacy arose from Blackwell’s belief that “a proper label has to have a studio,” which he duly built on Basing Street.

Of all the unique features that made Island boom, Blackwell’s knack of attracting artist magnets was spectacular. He recruited Joe Boyd, the American émigré formerly connected to Elektra, who had been running the seminal UFO club parties where Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, and Procol Harum first got noticed. Through Boyd, Island picked up Fairport Convention, whose
Liege & Lief
probably represents the very pinnacle of English folk. Better still, Boyd discovered and produced for Island the genius Nick Drake, whose superlative debut album,
Five Leaves Left,
included several priceless gems, most notably “River Man” and “Way to Blue.”

To lure the highly solicited Jethro Tull to Island, Blackwell set its ambitious managers, Chris Wright and Terry Ellis, an irresistible challenge. “When you have made ten hits which go top thirty, I’ll switch everything over to your own label.” Chris Wright later surmised, “I would imagine at the time, Blackwell being pretty smart, as he is, would have said to himself ‘They won’t have ten top-ten singles anyway, so I can easily agree to that,’ and he also would have said, ‘But if they do, I’m gonna be making lots of money out of it as well.’ It was a win-win situation for him.” Wright and Ellis fulfilled the bargain and set up Chrysalis in 1969.

Blackwell’s deft touch was getting noticed by the foxiest players in the game. Because Island was licensing Traffic’s North American rights to Atlantic, it was Ahmet Ertegun who gave Chris Blackwell his legendary nickname,
the baby-faced killer
. As Terry Ellis explained, “Chris would arrive from Jamaica to New York, there could be a foot of snow, and Chris would be in jeans and flip flops, a big shock of blond hair. The fresh-faced island boy! And if you’re a businessman like Ahmet Ertegun, you’d think, ‘This guy’s easy meat, I’ll deal with him.’ But then when Chris gets to the bargaining table, he’s tough and
very
smart.”

Another important mover in Chris Blackwell’s inner circle was manager David Enthoven, who brought the pioneering progressive rock group King Crimson to Island. “Blackwell allowed you to have a vision and you stood or fell by your vision,” said Enthoven. “I have an undying gratitude for the man, I think he’s a genius. He’s a good people’s person. He was very skilled in tact. He was a leader. And I unashamedly followed him.” Enthoven also pointed out that “without Guy Stevens, Island would have been a very different place … It was Guy Stevens really that found King Crimson and then took them to Chris. Guy Stevens set the palate really, he was a music maniac … He actually allowed—along with Chris, to be fair—musical freedom for the artists. That’s what no other record company was allowing at the time.”

Chris Wright also emphasized the role of Guy Stevens in Island’s early success. “Blackwell was the overall creative presence there, but he had a great aspiring partner in Guy Stevens, who moved them into areas that even Blackwell wouldn’t have gone into. Guy was obviously a bit nutty like sometimes talented people can be. He had this wildish mop of frizzy hair, a little intense, wild in a way, but he was good fun.” Island’s managing director at the time, David Betteridge, concurred. “Guy had a very high-intensity personality; hard and driven. Very nice man, possibly bordering on the edge of madness. He saw things before anyone else. He was really an absolute genius.” Having foreseen the rising tide of progressive rock, in 1969 Guy Stevens also spotted and named the glam rock group Mott the Hoople—another scoop pointing Island toward the sound and spirit of the future.

Fittingly, the dream transatlantic alliance formed between Island and the rapidly booming A&M, which had moved into Charlie Chaplin’s former film studios. “That was the beginning of a great time for me,” recalled A&M boss Jerry Moss. “I met Denny Cordell, I met Chris Blackwell. I would go to England every six weeks and put my bags down in Chris’s house and just start going to clubs. It was perfect: They had records they wanted distributed in America and I was looking for bands. Through Denny, I got Joe Cocker, I got Procol Harum, and through Chris, I got Free, Cat Stevens, Spooky Tooth—some great English rock ’n’ roll.”

Moss became so enchanted by London that he opened a British A&M company in 1969. “It did affect our relationship,” admitted Moss, who, though eternally grateful to his hosts for setting him up, effectively became a competitor. Of course, by then, the race to find the next supergroups was intensifying. “Every time I turned up somewhere to see a group,” sighed Jerry Moss, “I’d see Ahmet Ertegun’s limo parked outside … He was
very
charming and could be
very
persuasive!” By 1969, Ertegun’s limo had started appearing on Moss’s scouting trips around London. When both were chasing British blues group Humble Pie, “Ahmet kept upping the ante,” said Moss. “I ended up signing them for 400,000 bucks, which was a ton of money in those days.” Fortunately, “Humble Pie was a very successful signing for us. We got a platinum album and we got Peter Frampton in the net.”

Artistically, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but organizationally Island Records had been built on sand. As David Betteridge explained, “In about 1968–69, Island went from being a sort of specialist West Indian label to suddenly breaking acts all over the place. And the shock of that, although we didn’t feel it in that sense because we were young guns, sort of began to spell the inevitable downfall. I just think we became too successful too quickly and didn’t know where to go.” Betteridge paints a portrait of Chris Blackwell in those years as a creative individual who, in the proverbial sense, only wanted to eat his meat but not his greens.

In fairness to Chris Blackwell and his hip staff, the culture of London’s record industry in the late sixties was not conducive to responsible, studious management. You shall know them by their fruit, holy men say, and in those fertile years, Chris Blackwell’s private island became
the
orchard for Britain’s hottest acts. He hadn’t been the first artistic entrepreneur to challenge EMI and Decca, but by 1969, he had gone further than his predecessors; Island had its own studio, its own fleet of vans distributing Jamaican records directly to stores—even its own pressing plant.

By about 1969, a changing of the guard was under way. Andrew Loog Oldham was falling out of the race, while Apple had degenerated into the most comical mistake in record business history. Such was the privileged opulence of daily life inside Apple’s £1 million Savile Row headquarters, those lucky enough to get a seat on the gravy train were draining the river dry. A kitchen staff cooked meals on order and even kept an ever-replenishing cellar of fine wines. Its payroll of forty was teeming with friends, consultants, and various parasites who all ran up expense bills. John Lennon’s acid buddy, a crank scientist nicknamed Magic Alex, had personally wasted £300,000 trying to make flying saucers, an artificial sun, electric paint, a seventy-two-track studio, and various other mad creations. The Apple boutique supposedly selling “groovy” fashion was so badly managed that it paid more than retail for its tatty stock and recorded more thefts than sales. If the original idea had been to spend money rather than pay taxes, Apple Corps had fulfilled its purpose.

In an interview given just after the abandoned
Let It Be,
John Lennon, by now a hairy heroin addict, admitted that Apple had been “pie in the sky from the start. Apple’s losing money every week because it needs close running by a big businessman. It doesn’t need to make vast profits, but if it carries on like this, we will all be broke in the next six months.” After reading the interview, Allen Klein began asking Mick Jagger probing questions. “Who was their natural leader?” he wondered. “John,” replied the deceptively shrewd Jagger, whose girlfriend Marianne Faithfull described how “Mick called up John Lennon and told him, ‘you know who you should get to manage you, man? Allen Klein.’ And John, who was susceptible to Utopian joint projects such as alliances between the Beatles and the Stones, said, ‘yeah, what a fuckin’ brilliant idea.’ It was a bit of a dirty trick, but once Mick had distracted Klein’s attention by giving him bigger fish to fry, Mick could begin unraveling the Stones’ ties to him.”