Remembering Leonard Chess (March 12, 1917 – October 16, 1969)
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. Who knows what it is? Record it, stick it out. If it sells, all right.’”
Leonard and Phil Chess were prototypical cigar-chomping, old-fashioned record men who took a chance on music they didn’t understand. Jewish immigrants from Poland, they got into the record business more or less by chance: Leonard bought a liquor store in an African American neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, and did well enough that he opened a small nightclub called the Macomba Lounge. It was a rough ghetto bar, patronized by prostitutes and drug dealers, but from the start it was known for having good music. In the late-1940s, that meant it had jazz groups playing bebop, pop tunes, and mellow blues ballads. 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.
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. 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. “What’s he saying?” he asked. “Who’s going to buy that?”
Fortunately, his partner in Aristocrat, Evelyn Aron, suggested that some of the black southerners who had moved north in search of jobs might enjoy the sounds of home. 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.
Chess's greatest years were the mid-fifties, when the R&B charts were dominated by Muddy, Wolf, Walter, Willie Mabon, the Moonglows, etc. Chuck Berry (Leonard's most important discovery), Bo Diddley and Dale Hawkins crossed over to the pop charts and had a huge influence on rock 'n' roll (and later on the British beat boom of the 1960s). The Chess group of labels never had a # 1 pop hit, but over a dozen # 1 R&B hits. By the late fifties Chess had dropped all blues acts except for the biggest and entered the sixties with Etta James, Clarence "Frogman" Henry, Koko Taylor, Sugarpie DeSanto, Fontella Bass and others.
There is much debate regarding the Chesses as actual record producers. In his autobiography, Willie Dixon tends to minimize the contributions of Leonard as a producer, indicating that his main contribution was to rile up the musicians in the studio with a string of friendly curses and then leave them to take out their frustrations on the music. (Leonard was notoriously crude, answering the phone with a "Hello, mothershager"). However, the ability to bring out the best from musicians is one of the very definitions of producer. It was in Dixon's interest to play down Leonard's output because Dixon was also a producer and writer with the company and felt unappreciated by the Chesses, especially financially. Starting in the late 1950s, outside producers were brought in, first Ralph Bass (formerly with King Records), a little later also Billy Davis, who had worked with Berry Gordy.
The Guardian / Dik de Heer
Photo: Henry Herr Gill, AP
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