![]() The brothers were small-time “indie” record men making a quick buck from the poorest, least respected people in America By 1950 Arons had been replaced by Leonard’s brother Phil and the label was called Chess, but most of its releases continued to be by jazz saxophonists. But in real life he was not a patron of the arts he was a businessman trying to cut popular hits. In a movie – and there have been several based on this story – Chess would have instantly seen the light and devoted himself to creating further blues masterpieces. So Chess pressed 3,000 singles, they sold out in a day, and six decades later Waters’s recording is remembered as the first masterpiece of electric Chicago blues. “Who’s going to buy that?”įortunately, his partner in Aristocrat, Evelyn Arons, suggested that some of the black southerners who had moved north in search of jobs might enjoy the sounds of home. In fact, when Leonard Chess first heard Muddy Waters sing I Can’t Be Satisfied, in a Delta growl backed with a whining electric slide guitar, he couldn’t imagine it pleasing anyone. It was only after the first few records went nowhere that he took a chance on another kind of musician, a Mississippi singer who was too raw and country-sounding to have pleased the crowds at the Macomba. That was what the better-paying black patrons preferred to hear, and when Leonard got involved with a small local label, Aristocrat Records, that was what he intended to record. In the late-1940s, that meant it had jazz groups playing bebop, pop tunes, and mellow blues ballads. It was a rough ghetto bar, patronised by prostitutes and drug dealers, but from the start it was known for having good music. Jewish immigrants from Poland, they got into the record business more or less by chance: Leonard bought a liquor store in an African American neighbourhood on the south side of Chicago, and did well enough that he opened a small nightclub called the Macomba Lounge. Leonard and Phil Chess were prototypical cigar-chomping, old-fashioned record men who took a chance on music they didn’t understand. Who knows what it is? Record it, stick it out. The brothers sold the label to General Recorded Tape (GRT) in 1969, for $6.5 million. Leonard died later that year, and Phil retired in 1972.Ĭhess’ nephew told the Sun-Times that a private service is planned in Tucson.Frank Zappa once said that the best years of rock were when records were produced by “cigar-chomping old guys who looked at the product that came and said, ‘I don’t know. Terms of the settlement were sealed, but Arc ultimately gave Waters and Dixon back the copyrights to their songs. ![]() Chess denied the allegations, but the suits were settled within weeks of their filing. According to the book Spinning Blues Into Gold: The Chess Brothers and the Legendary Chess Records, the label used “several methods of undercounting” in order to reduce royalties to writers. A settlement was reached after Wolf’s death in 1976, the same year Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon filed similar suits against the company. ![]() In 1974, Howlin’ Wolf sued Chess’ publishing arm Arc Music for $2.5 million in damages, claiming the brothers defrauded him of his copyrights. Like many other labels of its time, Chess had a reputation for butting heads with its artists over royalties. ![]()
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