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SPINNING BLUES INTO GOLD

The Chess Brothers and the Legendary Chess Records

By Nadine Cohodas

St. Martin's. 358 pp. $25.95 



In the late 1950s, R&B singer Etta James got some career advice from another


African American musician. "If you wanna be a big star, get on Chess," the 

Moonglows' Bobby Lester told her. "The Chess brothers are some smart Jews

who 

know how to sell records." Luckily for us, James soon did just that, joining


a talent roster that already included blues titans Muddy Waters and Howlin' 

Wolf as well as bedrock-and-rollers Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. Unlike a 

number of her label-mates, however, in later years she didn't think she'd 

been rooked.



The fraught relationship between black performers and the white, mostly 

Jewish entrepreneurs (Sun Records honcho Sam Phillips was the only gentile

in 

the bunch) who put their music across at the dawn of the rock era is the 

central theme of Nadine Cohodas's dual biography of Leonard and Phil Chess 

and the celebrated Chicago-based label they founded. Most previous accounts 

have told this story from the musicians' point of view--which is usually 

embittered, and in all too many cases for good reason. While Cohodas doesn't


go to the other extreme of portraying her subjects as saintly, her intent 

clearly is to restore some balance to the picture, at least as far as the 

Chess brothers are concerned.



In her view, what happened in the Chess studios during the label's golden 

years was the result of an alliance between two groups of outsiders, 

similarly excluded from the WASP mainstream. Born Lejzor and Fiszel Czyz in 

Poland, Leonard and Phil Chess were brought to America as children. In 

Chicago, they bumped up against another sort of exodus--the massive

migration 

to Northern cities of Southern blacks escaping Jim Crow. Once the brothers 

moved up from running a liquor store to owning a bar in the city's "black 

belt" just as Chicago blues was being born, older brother Leonard--always

the 

duo's dominant half--spotted money to be made in recording the entertainers 

his joint featured, and became a partner in and salesman for tiny Aristocrat


Records before taking the label over and giving it his and Phil's name.



Cohodas, whose previous books have dealt with racial issues in politics 

rather than the music world, isn't an exciting writer. When it comes to 

evoking cultural momentousness, descriptions on the level of "[Chuck] Berry 

hit his stride again with the witty 'Roll Over Beethoven,' a song about 

change in the music world" fall a bit flat. Yet her sobersided prose is also


appealingly free of rock writing's usual vice, sentimentality. This period 

has been gushed over so often in hyperbolic, romanticized terms that it's 

refreshing to read a straightforward account of how rock-the-business got

its 

start, full of often fascinating detail about topics ranging from how the 

music was recorded to how payola worked. Among other things, Cohodas's 

research has disposed of several minor myths long ensconced in Chess lore, 

including a scurrilous story about the brothers using Muddy Waters as a 

handyman--a tale whose promulgation we owe to the Rolling Stones' Keith 

Richards, although why anyone would consider Richards a reliable guide to 

what day of the week it is, much less the history of the blues, is a

mystery.



Cohodas has turned up several of the outrageously unfair publishing deals 

that were common practice at the time, but is unable to confirm--or 

conclusively refute--the allegations of some Chess stars that they were 

cheated on royalties and the like, mostly because the financial records

don't 

exist.



As to the larger question of exploitation, "the truth," she observes, 

probably rightly, "is in some amorphous middle ground. . . . Race was an 

element in the conflict, not because of Leonard and Phil's behavior toward 

their musicians but because of what it meant to be black in the mid-fifties,


particularly for a migrant from the South in Chicago." However, there's no 

question that the Chess brothers' dealings with their talent pool were 

paternalistic in a way that, however benign, may strike modern readers as 

unpalatable, particularly when Cohodas quotes Phil's reply to a remark that 

he and Leonard treated the performers like their children: "Well, they

wanted 

to be."



One flaw in "Spinning Blues Into Gold" is that the musicians themselves 

remain such dim figures, no mean trick with personalities as outsize as

Berry 

and Diddley. There's really only one vivid character in the book, and that's


Leonard Chess; even brother Phil remains a cipher. Still, the book's rich 

portrait of Leonard--driven enough to suffer his first heart attack at 39, 

streetwise enough to give a newly hired publicist an expertly guided tour of


black Chicago, and skinflint enough to make it a red-letter day when he 

bought an engineer at his studio a cup of coffee--more than makes up for

this 

failing. One story Cohodas tells could probably serve as his epitaph. When 

heart trouble landed him in the hospital again not long before his death at 

52, a relative urged him to retire; after all, he'd already made plenty of 

money. Here's what Leonard answered: "It's not the money. It's the game."



Tom Carson is "Screen" columnist for Esquire.


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