Neither the age progression photographs of myself nor the bold title above have anything to do with what’s on my mind this month. I did have a birthday, but that was last month. Old new. I mean, really old. Originally I was going to use a Frank Zappa shot holding an electric fan, but I had used it years ago for another column. So you’ve got me in triplicate, but there is still a Zappa thread to pull.
The topic is Verve Records, which came to mind during a walk I took this afternoon. It has a long history that in some ways almost parallels my life. It was founded in 1956 – I was four by then – by Norman Granz, and became home to the world’s largest jazz catalogue. A producer and concert promoter, Granz was acknowledged as “the most successful impresario in the history of jazz” and he was also a champion of racial equality, insisting, for example, on integrating audiences at concerts he promoted. And he spearheaded the fight to desegregate the hotels and casinos in Las Vegas, arguing that it was unfair that black artists could perform on the stages, but could not stay or gamble at the hotels, or even enter through the front doors.
In 1965 Frank Zappa joined a band called Soul Giants and they changed their name to The Mothers. In early 1966, they were spotted by leading record producer Tom Wilson when playing “Trouble Every Day”, a song about the Watts riots. Wilson had earned acclaim as the producer for Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel and was one of the few African-Americans working as a major label pop music producer at this time. Wilson signed the Mothers to Verve, a division of MGM, which had built up a strong reputation for its releases of modern jazz recordings in the 1940s and 1950s, but was attempting to diversify into pop and rock audiences.
Verve insisted that the band officially rename themselves the Mothers of Invention as Mother was short for motherfucker—a term that, apart from its profane meanings, can denote a skilled musician.They released their first five albums (if you count Lumpy Gravy, which really wasn’t the Mothers) on Verve, and Zappa, his wife, and all of the Mothers of Invention moved from LA to New York where they got an extended booking at the old Garrick Theater on Bleeker. They moved back to California in 1968, formed a deal with his own Bizarre label and that was the end of Frank and Verve.
Let’s backtrack to 1964, and Jerry Schoenbaum of Verve and Moe Asch of Folkways created Verve Folkways to take advantage of the popularity of folk music and get it on the shelves of the record stores, something Folkways by itself wasn’t able to do. They were distributed by MGM Records which also owned Big 3 Publishing. The president of that entity was Arnold Maxin, who was a huge believer in roots music. In an article in Billboard Magazine from 1965 he said “The most important music developments of our generation have come from the “roots”. I welcome all the material I can get from these sources for it is from these sources that we will obtain the standards of tomorrow”. With that he announced the signing of John Lee Hooker’s publishing. (Arnold is my cousin and and we share the same last name, which helped open doors for me throughout my own music career.)
To broaden the label’s appeal, in 1967 the name was changed from Verve Folkways to Verve Forecast. They first signed The Blues Project and then quickly added Tim Hardin, Jim and Jean, Janis Ian, Richie Havens, Odessa and Dave Van Ronk. There was also The Paupers from Toronto, and Velvet Underground, who had little sales but would end up casting a long shadow.
Over the years MGM had acquired both Verve’s jazz label and Verve Forecast catalogs, and in 1968 Arnold oversaw all three. They were riding high until they weren’t. The following year MGM shut down Verve Forecast and the entire company was soon swallowed up themselves in a purchase by PolyGram, the huge German music company. The product from all three labels was sliced, diced and shifted to various divisions and labels. The party was over.
In May 1998, PolyGram was sold to Seagram which owned Universal Music Group. They too split the catalog up like an apple pie. In 2004 they decided to reactivate the name Verve Forecast, and began signing new artists, Blues Traveller and Teddy Thompson among them. In 2016 Universal created the Verve Label Group to place all of it’s jazz and classical labels, as well as the flotsam and jetsam collected from over the decades. A few years later they made more changes and today the Verve Label Group reports up to the hip-hop/rap division.
And that’s what I was thinking about today. Verve….it was a helluva label.
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