RUMOR MILL
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
FIELD NOTES FROM A MUSIC BIZ LIFE, PART TWO
The second in series of excerpts from Michael Sigman's forthcoming book of the same name
| "Carl never forgave me for rock 'n' roll." —Jerry Wexler You could count on Wex to cut through the bullshit. I was in a rotten mood, hunched over my desk at LA Weekly on a broiling late September afternoon in 2000, one of those oppressive Hollywood days when the temperature climbs past 100 before lunch while your East Coast friends gloat about cool breezes and spectacular fall foliage. |
| My father, the songwriter Carl Sigman, had died a few days before at my parents' Long Island home and I'd just been on the receiving end of a verbal thrashing, in Thai, from an enraged restaurateur whose tiny ad we'd had the gall to run near the equally tiny ad of his Thai food rival. I loved being publisher of the nation's largest alt-weekly and its sister paper OC Weekly, but since Carl's death I'd found myself longing for the music-filled days and nights of the 1970s, when I edited the NY-based trade magazine Record World and there was such a thing as a free lunch. Also free concert tickets, press junkets, lavish record company parties and more promo T-shirts than your cleaners could launder in a lifetime. |
| My mood brightened considerably when a call came in from Jerry Wexler, a longtime family friend and a pioneer of the '50s-60s R&B/rock 'n' roll revolution. The last thing I needed right then was another Hallmark condolence call, but given that Wex hated clichés as much as Carl hated rock 'n' roll, I hoped for a dose of his deliciously mordant wit. It took the man who did so much to shatter the music biz dominance of the Great American Songbook just eight words to encapsulate a half-century's worth of love, laughs, tunes, and, yes, yelling: "Carl never forgave me for rock 'n' roll." While still in grade school, I learned volumes about the music business at the feet of Carl, Jerry and their friends. I mean literally at their feet. In the weeks leading up to my 10th birthday, my mom, Terry Sigman, took to running around our ranch house in leafy Great Neck, Lawn Guyland, exclaiming, "You're on the threshold of teenagery!" (Never mind that a 10-year-old is only technically a teenager.) |
| The dispensation I received for this achievement in chronology was permission to sit under the living room table and listen to the proceedings at my folks' Saturday night dinner parties. |
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| On any given Saturday, six or seven of these men and their wives, most of whom lived in Great Neck or nearby Gold Coast towns like Roslyn or Manhasset, would arrive around 7pm. (The big jobs were all held by men; it was the '50s. But the wives were forces of nature too, about which more in a future chapter.) The dress was snappy, the banter snappier. Cocktails of the shrimp and alcoholic varieties were served to the sounds of Cole Porter, the Gershwins or the soundtrack from West Side Story. (Never Elvis, Chuck Berry, or Jackie Wilson.) |
Perry Como’s TV theme song, words and music by Carl Sigman |
| That Terry's talents did not extend to matters culinary led to scenes I wouldn't trade for a thousand gourmet feasts. Once she summoned the family kitchen-ward with the perplexing cry, "I lost the steak!" If only Norman Rockwell had been on hand to immortalize the moment when my parents and their three sons gathered round the oven and peered curiously into its depths in a vain attempt to locate the shriveled remains of a once-juicy slab of meat that Terry had baked into oblivion. Terry did know how to executive-produce a fine sit-down meal. By the time the guests had put away a heavenly slice of seven-layer cake from Benkerts, a fab local bakery, they were ready to repair to the living room for a musicale. Carl would assume the position at the Mason & Hamlin grand, still my favorite piano, and preview his latest tunes. His voice may have sounded like the air brakes on a long-haul tractor-trailer, but like many songwriters he had a way of delivering his material with a reverence that superseded tonal grace. Other guests would chime in with choice cuts from their repertoire of songs and spins. Apres music, talk about politics (mostly liberal), culture (mostly musical) and golf (mostly fantastical) veered from intense to hilarious and back again. Most riveting were the serious, sometimes heated arguments about the pros and cons of rock 'n' roll. This was no academic exercise; careers and legacies were on the line. Carl, Harry Meyerson and Percy Faith were among the rock haters. They'd scream, "It's just noise," "It's not music," "They should call it something else" and "It's garbage." Wexler, Blaine and Kapp angrily accused their adversaries of head-in-the-sand closed mindedness. As it turned out, though, the folks who were most vocal about their hatred of rock ‘n’ roll didn't miss a backbeat when hit-making opportunities presented themselves. They weren't hypocrites or liars—just music-makers looking for the next chart-topper and capable of holding two opposing thoughts at the same time. Looking back, I can't believe my luck. Like the singer in Stephen Sondheim's "Someone in a Tree" who recalls eavesdropping on crucial U.S.-Japan negotiations—"Underneath the floor/And so I can't see anything/But I can hear"—I had a front-row seat and a backstage pass to the insights and insecurities of an extraordinary collection of minds, hearts, and ears. Next time: Rock 'n' roll adaptation. Harry Meyerson tells the press, "We have reached the nadir of garbage," while he seeks the rights to "Tutti Frutti." Carl hates the new music but scores with Phil Spector, Van Morrison and Cilla Black. Wex changes the world while championing old standards. Jerry Blaine, rock pioneer, signs Della Reese. And more. |
| Susan Barry (Paul's daughter and my first girlfriend) and Jeff Sigman (son of Carl and Terry, brother of Michael and Randy) portraying Jerry Wexler's act Sonny & Cher, who hit big with a new-fashioned version of Carl's old-fashioned ballad, "What Now, My Love." Carl, with cigar, congratulates unidentified guest for still having his hair. |
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael Sigman is a writer, editor, publisher and media consultant and the president of Major Songs, a music publishing company that handles the catalogs of his late father Carl Sigman and several contemporary songwriters. While still in high school in Great Neck, L.I. (where beginning in the seventh grade he was consistently outplayed in basketball by the much taller Lenny Beer), Sigman worked for music publishing giant The Richmond Organization cataloging the music publishing giant’s vast catalogue of pop, folk and rock songs. During the summers between college semesters at Bucknell, he worked as a reporter for Record World magazine, a leading music industry publication. The day after he graduated (Magna Cum Laude/Phi Beta Kappa) from Bucknell, he began full-time work at RW and served as the magazine’s editor from 1972-82. After a year as a consultant for CBS Records, Sigman moved to Los Angeles in 1983 to become the publisher of LA Weekly, the nation’s largest alternative newsweekly, where he served from 1983-2002. He was also the founding publisher of OC Weekly, sister paper to LA Weekly, when it was launched in 1995. Sigman’s writing has appeared in Record World, LA Weekly, the L.A. Times, OC Weekly, The District Weekly, LA Style, The Bluegrass Special, Record Collector News, LA Progressive and other newspapers and magazines. He is also the author of a biography of his father. He currently writes a weekly blog for Huffingtonpost.com. |
