The King Records Documentary

"King of Them All - The Story of King Records": https://www.pbs.org/show/king-of-them-all-the-story-of-king-records/

I could watch this sh*t all day long. I love to learn, and I learned a lot watching this documentary.

From the very first time I met him, in a crowd at the Troubadour, Seymour Stein talked about Syd Nathan. And seemingly every time we were together after that he always circled back to Syd, working for him over the summer...AND I HAD NO IDEA WHO SYD NATHAN WAS!

Never mind basing his record company out of Cincinnati.

I knew King Records, because it was James Brown's record company, but the fact that the label was run by Syd Nathan?

Seymour assumed I knew. Because he was older than me.

But there was no internet back then.

And now there's so much history since then. And to tell you the truth, the pre-Beatle era is fading away, even Elvis Presley merch sales are declining, because the audience is dying off!

But we did have "The Twist" 45 at home.

Today's kids have no idea what it was like, the phenomenon. It was a dance everybody could do, AND THEY DID! Little kids, everybody was twisting. The twist was on TV. But I had no idea that Chubby Checker did not do the original version, that it was done by Little Willie John, a veritable superstar, who cut the original version of "Fever" for his debut King album back in '56.

Then there's "Good Rocking Tonight," which Ray Brown offered to Wynonie Harris for fifty bucks, and when turned down ended up recording it himself. But when the record got a little traction, Wynonie covered it and...

At this point, most connoisseurs consider Ike Turner/Jackie Brenston's "Rocket 88" to be the first rock and roll record. For a long time conventional wisdom said it was Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock," but that myth has been busted, just like Abner Doubleday inventing baseball. But "Rocket 88" is 1951. "Good Rocking Tonight" was 1947! You hear it in this doc and it screams rock and roll. Wynonie was magic, he was a star, you can feel it over half a century later.

But Syd started out with hillbilly music. Which faded away when the local radio station stopped paying live musicians and they all moved to Nashville. But race records, soul records, BLACK MUSIC, continued to sell.

At this late date, people point to Motown as the breakthrough Black music label, it even has its own museum in Detroit, King Records has been nearly forgotten.

Not that I knew much to begin with. I can distantly remember Bobby Rydell and Fabian, and the novelty records of the early sixties, but when it comes to the forties and fifties? My mind is a blank slate. But hearing the songs in this doc...there were a lot of great ones back then, and it's all part of a giant continuum, an evolution, the sound keeps changing, up through today.

So this doc is premiering on PBS on October 10th, you can see it on your local station or via the app. And PBS tends not to get a lot of popular music respect, it's not where edgy lives, but it lives here.

So if you watch this at home will you get the same feeling I did?

I mean almost nothing can maintain my interest these days. There's always something better, never mind the greats of yore. I have no time for most things. And I pulled up this doc just to get a taste, I'm running on empty, I had no interest or desire to watch the entire thing, but I couldn't turn it off. Because it was a window into the way it once was. The fifties... I lived through them, they feel like a dark age, but they come alive in this film.

And James Brown's evolution into funk...

I don't need to recite every element, there are many more high points in this documentary. Will you be bowled over, absolutely gobsmacked? No. Consider it a journey to another era. That had vitality, but has been mostly lost to the sands of time.

And unlike so many of the modern music documentaries, Syd Nathan is dead! Therefore he didn't have a hand in the film's production, his buddies were not building a monument to him at the same time pussyfooting around the facts, unwilling to offend anyone.

So it's not the usual hagiography.

But it's not too negative either.

Then again, Syd and James Brown fought a lot. And Syd was wrong more than once, as one person says in the film, he couldn't hear a hit.

But Syd was nobody from nowhere who got into the music business by accident. He was paid a debt in jukebox records. And when they sold like hotcakes at the electronics/photography store he worked at, he opened a record shop. And that evolved into a record company. This was the way it used to be, you didn't see acts on MTV, rich and famous musicians were not parading in the media, you didn't go to music business college, those who worked behind the scenes in the business...they fell into it.

And eventually, like tech, the business blew up, after the Beatles. But Syd Nathan had been working in music since the forties, just another business man. He was a wild card, as most of the original entrepreneurs were.

Watching this documentary is like going to a museum, one of my favorite pastimes. Drives my girlfriend crazy how I have to read each and every card, every explanation. But that's what turns me on.

Will everybody be turned on by this movie?

No, it's not "Jaws."

But for a certain subset of people, like me, it's a MUST-SEE!


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