Machers and Rockers: Chess Records and the Business of Rock & Roll

by Rich Cohen

Overview

"Rich Cohen is a born storyteller, and this tale of how Muddy Waters and Leonard Chess helped invent Rock & Roll in Chicago in the 1950s is a tough, funny and smart read. It's a big story, told in a big way." —Jann Wenner

A tour-de-force history of Jews, blues, and the birth of a new industry. On the south side of Chicago in the late 1940s, two immigrants, one a Jew born in Russia, the other a black blues singer from Mississippi met and changed the course of musical history. Muddy Waters electrified the blues, and Leonard Chess recorded it. Soon Bo Diddly and Chuck Berry added a dose of pulsating rhythm, and Chess Records captured that, too. Rock & roll had arrived, and an industry was born. In a book as vibrantly and exuberantly written as the music and people it portrays, Rich Cohen tells the engrossing story of how Leonard Chess, with the other record men, made this new sound into a multi-billion-dollar business aggressively acquiring artists, hard-selling distributors, riding the crest of a wave that would crash over a whole generation. Full of absorbing lore and animated by a deep love for popular music, Machers and Rockers is a smash hit.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393052800
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/17/2004
Series:	Enterprise Series
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	222
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Rich Cohen is the author of Tough Jews, The Avengers, and Lake Effect. He lives in New York City.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

July 30, 1968

Place of Birth:

Lake Forest, Illinois

Education:

B.A., Tulane University, 1990

Table of Contents

1	Today You Are a Man, Go Get Me a Drink	13
2	Jew Street	23
3	The Call It the Blues, but It Makes You Want to Dance	69
4	2120 South Michigan	119
5	The Kids Dig It, but the Kids Are Sick	155
6	The Record Man Pays for Our Sins	179
	Sources	199
	Suggested Listening	203
	Acknowledgments	206
	Index	209

Editorial Reviews

It's a great story, and Cohen is ideally suited to tell it; a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and author of three previous books, including Tough Jews, he grew up in the Chicago suburb of Glencoe and writes with the jagged rhythms of the street. Most important, he understands the mythic fabric of the music, the way blues walks a line between the spiritual and the worldly, between Sunday morning and Saturday night.
— The Washington Post

David L. Ulin

In a postscript to his dynamic history of Chess Records, Cohen (Tough Jews) confesses that its tale is one he's been telling since adolescence, "using whatever was at hand to make the case: not only does this song rock, it also has something big to tell us." Cohen's book has something big to say too about how the unlikely marriage of the shtetl and the plantation produced Chicago blues and rock and roll. The music that exploded into the living rooms of America and the world might have remained in the juke joints of the South if not for "record men" like Leonard Chess, whose label is rivaled only by Atlantic for its influence. Sensing an audience where the big labels didn't, Chess carted unvarnished recordings of artists like Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry in the trunk of his Cadillac, getting them in stores and on the air by any means necessary. Cohen weaves the story of the mercurial, lovable but not always entirely ethical Chess with the stories of the artists he recorded and well-judged glimpses of social history. Though written with the energy of his teenage bull sessions, Cohen's history avoids the rhetorical excess nearly endemic to rock and roll books, offering instead a punchy and driven but also sturdy and careful narrative. Agent, The Wylie Agency. (Sept.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

With the label that bore his (and brother Philip's) name, Leonard Chess changed the business of popular music by introducing some of rock's greatest musicians. Cohen, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, chronicles the Polish immigrant's rise to fame in this entry of the new "Enterprise" series, which seeks to present business stories as literature. Starting out as a club owner, Chess learned the music business from the bottom up; his initial experience taught him how to gain the confidence of musicians. During his 20-year run, Chess launched the careers of Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, and Chuck Berry, profiled here in separate chapters. While these are written with obvious knowledge and affection, they distract from the story of Chess himself. Had Cohen maintained his focus, this book might have filled a need in business collections; as is, it just recycles well-known music history. For a tighter, if drier, portrait of Chess Records, see Nadine Cohodas's Spinning Blues into Gold. For larger performing arts collections only.-Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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