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Gareth Murphy set out to write an obituary for the record man. A French label boss had told him over lunch that the record producer was a dying breed, and in the 2010s, with the industry shrinking every year since 1999, it looked like he was right. Then Murphy went back to the beginning, found the same collapse in the 1920s and again in the Depression, and came out the other side with the opposite conclusion: the record business is cyclical, it has to go extinct now and then, and it always comes back.
Host Nate Wilcox welcomes Gareth Murphy, author of “Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry,” in a conversation first recorded in 2022 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning.
It starts with Thomas Edison, who Murphy suspects did not invent half of what he patented, losing the format war to Emile Berliner and the Victor Talking Machine Company - not on technology but on content, because Victor found Enrico Caruso, the first superstar of the recording age, and hid the ugly horn inside a cabinet so women would let it into the parlor. The pitch was opera at home - high culture for people who could never afford a seat - and, as Nate puts it, opera then was not just high culture but mass culture: Caruso moved millions of records.
Then John Hammond, the rich kid who did not need a salary and so could afford to be right: Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman’s integrated bands, From Spirituals to Swing at Carnegie Hall, and, years later at Columbia under his old friend Goddard Lieberson, Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan. Also Mitch Miller, who Nate argues invented studio recording as we know it, and the jukebox, the shellac shortage and the musicians’ strike that remade the business in the 1940s.
Then the indies, and Britain: Chris Blackwell of Island Records - born in Jamaica, half Sephardic and half Irish, raised around Ian Fleming - and the long slog of breaking Bob Marley, which finally happened by way of Eric Clapton’s “I Shot the Sheriff.” Murphy on why every English label that tried to conquer America nearly went broke doing it, and on the Go-Go film that almost sank Island.
After the paywall: Geoff Travis and Rough Trade, the indie distribution network that built the Smiths, New Order and Depeche Mode and was then killed by its own success; Martin Mills and Beggars Banquet, the survivors; and why Murphy thinks streaming has already brought the record business back to life.
MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE
* “E lucevan le stelle,” Enrico Caruso
* “God Bless the Child,” Billie Holiday
* “Concrete Jungle,” Bob Marley and the Wailers
* “How Soon Is Now?,” The Smiths
Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park.
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