Tell Tchaikovsky the News by Michael James Roberts

8/13/2019 Tell Tchaikovsky the News by Michael James Roberts

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TELL TCHAIKOVSKY

THE NEWSRock n Roll, the Labor uestion, and

the Musicians Union,

Michael James Roberts


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TELL TCHAIKOVSKYTHE NEWS


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Rock n Roll, the Labor Question, andthe Musicians Union, 19421968

Duke University Press Durham and London 2014

TELL TCHAIKOVSKYTHE NEWS


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2014 Duke University Press All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker and typeset in Arno Pro by seng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataRoberts, Michael James.

ell chaikovsky the news : rock n roll, the labor question,and the musicians union, 19421968 / Michael James Roberts.

pages cmIncludes bibliographical references and index.

978-0-8223-5463-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 978-0-8223-5475-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. American Federation of MusiciansHistory.2. MusiciansLabor unionsUnited States.

3. Rock musiciansLabor unionsUnited States. . itle.3795. 598 2014

331.881178097309045dc232013026389


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For Christine


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Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii.Union Man Blues 1

.Solidarity Forever? 19Te Musicians Union Responds to Records and Radio

. Have You Heard the News?Theres Good Rockin Tonight 41

Wildcats, Hepcats, and the Emergence of Rock n Roll

.If I Had a Hammer 113Union Musicians Bop Rock n Roll

.A Working- Class Hero Is Something to Be 167Te Unions Attempt to Block the British Invasion Rock Bands

.Tuned In, Turned On, and Dropped Out 201Rock n Roll Music Production Restructures the

Music Industry along Non-Union Lines

Notes 209 Bibliography 233 Index 243 Photo gallery follows page 112


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Tis book is a case study of a particular period in the history of the Ameri-can Federation of Musicians ( ), the labor union that represents pro-fessional musicians in the United States and Canada. My investigation hasa particular spin, since it is not a comprehensive history of the institution

of the union itself during the period under consideration. Rather, this bookscrutinizes the ways in which the responded to the emergence of rockn roll music. Te years I examine, roughly from 1942 to 1968, span the erafrom the earliest recordings of what would become rock n roll music to the

year that the musicians union nally printed the wordsrock n roll in theirmain newspaper. Te implications of this history go beyond the institutionof the itself because the s response to rock n roll was one partof a much larger conict that historians refer to as the culture wars of the

1960s. In short, this case study seeks to add to our understanding of howthe labor movement went into a period of decline beginning in the 1960s,due in part to an inability to connect with the counterculture and create a

viable Left politics in the decades that followed.It would have been in the economic interests of the union to aggres-

sively organize rock n roll musicians and include them as equal members(members with equal political and cultural status) in the governance of theunion, but for cultural reasons the failed to do either: rock n roll was

not recognized as legitimate music, and its musicians were rarely seen ast for membership in the 1950s and early 1960s. Te case of the musiciansunion points to the importance of culture as a relatively independent vari-


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able in the structuring of union identity and union policy. Te emphasis onculture in this book focuses on the conditions that made it possible for alabor union to act against its own economic interests.

I also seek to emphasize the class and class conict dimension of rockn roll, because I nd that it remains relatively neglected in popular culturestudies compared with existing scholarship on rock n roll that focuses onthe race and gender- based dimensions of the phenomenon. On the onehand, there have been many very good critiques of rock n roll that focuson how its culture reproduces gender norms that marginalize women, in-cluding Susan Fasts Inside the Houses of the Holy , Sheila WhiteleysSexingthe Groove , and Jacqueline WarwicksGirl Groups, Girl Culture. Other cri-tiques of rock n roll focus on the question of race, particularly how whitemusicians and fans appropriated the original black form of rock n roll,rhythm and blues. Critics like Greg ate might prefer the phrase rippedoff, because the theft of music went beyond borrowing techniques andmusical forms developed by African Americans. White-owned and con-trolled record companies literally stole the songs written by black musi-cians. In their bookRock n Roll Is Here to Pay , Chapple and Garofalo referto this history as the phenomenon of black roots and white fruits. Tese

are, of course, legitimate criticisms, since there is a long history of racismand misogyny in the music industry. My intention is to add some com-plexity by lling in the gaps where the analysis of class in rock n roll musicremains underdeveloped. When social class is considered seriously, the story of rock n roll be-comes more complex, because African Americans, like all Americans, havehistorically been divided along class lines, and this class division often turnsupon differences in cultural practices, including the production and con-

sumption of music. In his book Blues People , Amiri Baraka has argued thatthroughout most of the twentieth century, bourgeois African Americansdid not embrace the culture of working-class African Americans, includ-ing blues and jump blues music. According to Baraka, rhythm and blues

became more of an anathema to the Negro middle class, perhaps, than theearlier blues forms. Following the lead of Baraka, in my own research Ihave found that black jazz musicians in the attacked rock n roll cul-ture with as much fervor as the white musicians.

While class has been relatively neglected in the study of rock n roll,there are some important works on the subject, including George Lip-sitzsRainbow at Midnight and Reebee GarofalosRockin Out . I situate my


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perspective alongside these works as well as within the broad theoreticalframework of cultural studies, building upon the work of Dick HebdigesSubculture: Te Meaning of Style and the collective of Marxist cultural theo-rists sometimes referred to as British cultural studies. Ultimately, how-ever, I break with their position on popular culture. Against Hebdige andothers from the Birmingham school, I argue that subcultural practices ofthe working-class provided more than imaginary or magical solutions tomaterial contradictions arising from the socioeconomic structure. On thecontrary, I argue that the struggle against work and its various representa-tions in rock n roll music has had tangible effects on the direction of classstruggle in the United States. Recent work by scholars of popular music likeRyan MooresSells Like een Spirit has also pointed out this problem in the

work of previous scholars in the area of Marxist cultural studies.I also focus on the class dimensions of rock n roll because I nd it

important to contribute to the existing scholarship that has sought to ex-plain how and why American labor unions have, at certain times in the his-tory of the labor movement, come to standopposed to the working class,

whether in terms of the conict between the leadership structure of laborunions and rank-and-le members, or the conict between union members

and the workers who have historically been excluded from membership,namely, women and ethnic and racial minority groups. With some important exceptions, labor historians have inadequately

accounted for the decline of labor unions in American politics over thelast four decades. In most accounts of this decline, the focus has been onstructural changes in the political economy: the offshoring of jobs overseas,automation, changes in labor law, the corporate assault on labor unions,and a hostile federal government that emerged with Reaganomics. Fewer

analyses look to the practices of union leadership as an important variablein the demise of labor union power. While I agree that political-economicstructural changes have played a signicant role in labors waning, theseanalyses do not adequately account for why the labor movement went intosteep decline, because they ignore how labor unionculture has also contrib-uted to the misfortunes of the American labor movement.

I position my work in the tradition of labor history scholarship that hasemphasized that our understanding of the peculiar cultural characteristics

of the American working class cannot be reduced to an examination of theinstitutions that are believed to be its representative, namely, the institu-tion of the labor union. Here I situate my book in the intellectual tradition


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staked out by E. P. Tompson, Paul Lafargue, Herbert Gutman, Stanley Aronowitz, George Rawick, Lizabeth Cohen, Ellen Willis, George Lipsitz,

and Robin D. G. Kelley as well as more recent work by important scholarslike Jefferson Cowie, Jonathan Cutler, and Kristin Lawler.

In short, I hope my book will nd two audiences, one in the area ofpopular music and popular culture studies and the other in labor studies.

Tere is one more reason why the musicians union is an important casein the history of the American labor movement, beyond the fact that histo-rians have largely neglected unions in the entertainment industry. In 1943,the was able to secure one of the most remarkable labor agreementsin history. By compelling record companies to take nancial responsibilityfor musicians who were put out of work as a result of the application ofinnovative sound recording technologies, the union demonstrated that it

was possible to oblige corporations to compensate workers for job lossesthat resulted from automation. Te implications of this agreement pointedtoward what had previously seemed impossible: a new way of living in a post-scarcity environment, with less work and a better material and culturalstandard of living for all workers made possible by labor-saving technolo-gies. Te signicance of this agreement should not be underestimated. Not

only did this agreement create a precedent for other labor unions to fol-low, but it also had the potential to impact all working people in the indus-trialized world. Indeed, it is important to reconsider just how importantan agreement it was, considering the dire situation of our postindustrialeconomy today, where widespread belief in the ineluctability of austeritypoisons the imagination. Tese post-scarcity possibilities may seem likescience ction to us now, but perhaps if we continue our rigorous studyof the history of our nations working class, we can provide an alternative

interpretation to what may yet come to pass. Recently, the Occupy move-ments around the world have begun to mount a serious challenge to theideology of austerity. Now, more than ever, it is crucial to reexamine our na-tions labor history and retrieve the forgotten discourse on the labor ques-tion. In short, we must go back to the future.


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Tis book began as a dissertation in the Department of Sociology at theGraduate School and University Center of the City University of New

York. Id like to thank the members of my committee, William Kornblum, Juan Flores, and especially Stanley Aronowitz, the chair of my committee

and my mentor while I was a graduate student at . In several graduateseminars on cultural studies, Stanley and Juan drew my attention to howthe rise of rock n roll culture contributed to the larger project of challeng-ing the idea of Great Art, a phenomenon that continues to arouse interestin my thinking about the relation between the culture wars and the laborquestion.

My dissertation grew out of multiple conversations and argumentsthat took place in a study group on cultural studies and the labor ques-

tion that I participated in while a graduate student at . Many ofthe positions staked out in this book were formed while discussing theseissues with my friends in that study group, including Penny Lewis, HeatherGautney, David Staples, Joshua Zuckerberg, Mark Halling, J. D. Howell,

eresa Poor, Susanna Jones, Jennifer Disney, racy Steffey, Joe DeMauro,anja DeMauro, David Van Arsdale, Jonathan Cutler, and Kristin Lawler.

Jonathans book Labors ime: Shorter Hours, the and the Struggle for American Unionism , and Kristins bookTe American Surfer: Radical Culture

and Capitalism , also derived much of their content from that study group,and in addition to being the best new books in their respective elds, their

work inspired me to keep our study group going in print.


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My intellectual soul mate since undergraduate days, Ryan Moore, hashad a profound inuence on everything I think about in terms of music andcultural politics. Sometimes we disagree on issues, but mostly we exist asfellow travelers, although separated now by a few thousand miles. His im-portant book,Sells Like een Spirit: Music, Youth Culture, and Social Crisis ,helped me clarify my own positions on rock n roll culture and its relation-ship to changes in the political economy.

Other points of view found here were formed beyond formal academicsettings from long conversations with the late Ellen Willis, whose essayson rock n roll are still my favorite. Ellen taught us how to understand the ways in which the Left continues to struggle with the issues of pleasure,freedom, and sexuality. My reading of rock n roll culture is profoundly in-uenced by her work. From Ellen and Stanley I also learned the importanceof psychoanalysis as a framework to approach the labor question. Shoutout also to Nona Willis Aronowitz and Kim OConnell, who together withEllen and Stanley were like family to me while I was a graduate student inNew York City. Tey taught me how to appreciate the richness of New Yorkculture and what it means to be in a New York state of mind. More thanksto Nona for putting together and editing the collection of Ellens writings

on rock n roll in the bookOut of the Vinyl Deeps.Many people at the American Federation of Musicians have been ex-tremely generous with their time in assisting me with my research, includ-ing Jay Schaffner and David Sheldon at Local 802 in New York City, andHal Espinosa from Local 47 in Los Angeles. Many thanks to Jay in particu-lar for his willingness to set aside many hours in order to school me on theinner workings of the political economy of the music industry. A very spe-cial thanks goes to guitar virtuoso, session musician, composer and activist

member of local 802, Marc Ribot. It was Marc who got me interested inthis particular topic in the rst place. If it were not for him, this book wouldnot exist. Marc is a great example of what Gramsci meant by the conceptorganic intellectual. If you have not heard his music, you must go have alisten. You wont be disappointed.

My colleagues at San Diego State University have been especially sup-portive of my project, including Sheldon Zhang, Phillip Gay, Bo Kolody,the late Paul Sargent, Enrico Marcelli, the late George Kirkpatrick, and

especially Jung Min Choi, om Semm, Hank Johnston, Jill Esbenshade,and Kyra Greene. Hank, om, Kyra, Jill, and Choi read many drafts of mychapters and articles on the topic, providing me with valuable suggestions


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for improvements. My graduate students at San Diego State have beenespecially helpful as sounding boards for my ideas in various seminars onlabor and popular culture. In particular, Id like to thank Chad Smith, JustinMyers, Ryan Gittins, Matt Kaneshiro, Graham Forbes, Amy Colony, Phil

Allen, Matt Rotondi, Shannon Sellars, Kristen Emory, Somer Hall, MicahMitrosky, Paul Cortopassi, Art Reed, Marilisa Navarro, Karen Romero,

Ashley Wardle, Shey Shey, Ed am, Jonathan upas, and Benjamin Wright.Tanks also to David McHenry and Melanie Dumont for tolerating all thechaos that I sometimes create in our department.

Id like to thank my editors at Duke University Press, Valerie Millhol-land, Miriam Angess, Elaine Otto, and Susan Albury, as well as my anony-mous readers who have provided so many suggestions for improvement tomy manuscript that I cannot begin to list them here. Any weaknesses thatremain are, of course, my own doing.

Im also lucky that my father, Nick Roberts, and my stepmother, SusanRoberts, are both English professors at Cabrillo College. Many thanks tothem for all the painstaking labor they put into my manuscript correct-ing multiple errors that escaped my eyes. Also my mother and stepfather,Kathy and Bill Herington, showed remarkable patience and endless sup-

port throughout my graduate school career. Finally, thanks to all my sib-lings, Paul, Matt, Kate, Sara, and Nick, for providing feedback on my chang-ing ideas about the history of the American labor movement over the years.My book is a much better read thanks to the support of all these people.

Christine Payne has been a great critic of my positions and a source ofnew ways to understand the politics of popular music. Ive learned moreabout contemporary popular music from her than anyone else.


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. Union Man Blues

Te Englishman met the West African as a reformed sinner meets a comrade of hisprevious debaucheries. Te reformed sinner very often creates a pornography of

his former life. He must suppress even his knowledge that he had acted that way oreven wanted to act that way. Prompted by his uneasiness at this great act of repres-sion, he cannot leave alone those who live as he once did or as he still unconsciously

desires to live. He must devote himself to their conversion or repression. .

In June 1969, the American Federation of Musicians ( ), the oldest andlargest labor union that represents professional musicians in the UnitedStates and Canada, published an article on the rock band Creedence Clear-

water Revival ( ) in their official newspaper, the International Musician.Te rock band from El Cerrito, California, was riding a wave of popularityfollowing the release of their self-titled debut album in 1968, which hadtwo singles, Susie Q and Proud Mary, reach Billboard magazines top10 that year. Te article, written by Jay Ruby, provided information abouttheir musical inuences, as well as biographical information for all the bandmembers. Te article also featured the broader San Francisco Bay Areamusic scene of the late 1960s, which included such rock bands as the Jeffer-

son Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin,and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Ruby refers to the Bay Areamusic scene of that time as Americas answer to the British Invasion of rock


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bands from the mid-1960s. Te article as a whole is a fairly interesting andinformative piece but nothing spectacular in the world of music criticismand music industry reporting. What is very interesting, however, about Rubys article is that it was therst time the featured a full-page article in their newspaper dedicatedto a rock n roll band. In fact, it was only the second time that the very

words rock n roll appeared in print between the covers of the International Musician , a monthly newspaper that rst went into circulation in 1901, ve

years after the itself was established as a chartered craft union of the American Federation of Labor under President Samuel Gompers. Priorto 1968, there is no mention of rock n roll in the musicians unions paper.Curiously, though, the wordsrock n roll didnt exactly roll off Jay Rubystypewriter; on the contrary, they appear indirectly in a quote from John Fo-gerty, the lead singer and songwriter for . In the article, Ruby refers toCreedence as a pop band; it is only in a passage from the text where Rubyquotes Fogerty that the phraserock n roll emerges. In that quote, Fogertyrefers to himself and his band mates as rock n roll musicians, but thats theonly instance in the entire article where that particular phrase is mentioned.It seems odd to read that article about today, more than thirty years

after it was written, and nd that the wordsrock n roll , words which seemso innocuous to us now, are almost nowhere to be found in such a relativelylengthy article about a band we now consider to be permanent membersin the pantheon of classic rock music. How could anyone todaynot use thephrase rock n roll or the term rock in a conversation that involved a descrip-tion of Creedence Clearwater Revival?

Like many of the successful American rock bands from the late 1960s,the members of grew up listening to rhythm and blues and early rock

n roll music on the radio, including the music of Wynonie Harris, RuthBrown, Big Joe urner, Roy Brown, Hadda Brooks, Amos Milburn, -Bone Walker, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard as well as the famous Sun Records

artistsElvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins andother rockabilly artists like Wanda Jackson. Indeed, a whole generation of

young musicians playing in rock n roll bands all over the States in the earlyto mid-1960s had already cut their teeth on the rock n roll and rhythm and

blues of earlier generations of musicians, whose careers spanned the years

from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s. Tat same 1940s and 1950s generationof rockers was also idolized by the British Invasion rock bands from 1964including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Surprisingly, Chuck Berry


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and his generation of rock n roll musicians were never fully recognized bythe American Federation of Musicians, and the Beatles themselves werethe subject of much controversy for the musicians union in 1964, when the

attempted to ban the group from playing in the United States. If arock n roll star like Chuck Berry ever had any interactions with the musi-cians union, it was not because the was looking to embrace him withopen arms. Berry did join the union because he played live gigs at venuesthat were already unionized venues, organized by the years beforeBerry performed there. Similarly, he did make recordings on labels that

were union shops before he recorded there, but the never actively or-ganized rock n rollers, nor did they ever recognize rock n roll musicians asmembers of any importance, if and when any rock n roll musicians becamecard carrying members. On the contrary, rock n roll musicians were the

virtual pariahs of the musicians union for nearly twenty years, and for thatreason, most rock n roll musicians either worked for non- union recordlabels and non-union venues for live music or, if they worked within unionestablishments, they remained second-class citizens within their union. Itseems odd that rock n roll, the roots of which lie in the American workingclass (black and white), would be shunned by the labor union that repre-

sents the interests of working musicians.Rock n roll, Americas most popular music, emerged as far back as theearly 1940s, yet there was no mention of any of its permutations in the snewspaper until nearly twenty-ve years later. Te working-class forms ofmusic that predated rock n roll, including blues, rhythm and blues, andhillbilly (country), were all more or less dismissed by the leadership of the

and famous rank-and-le members who were by and large jazz andclassical musicians. If one were to use the articles from the International

Musician as a guide to what was happening in the music industry between1940 and 1970, it would seem as if there were no such thing as rock n roll in America or anywhere else. Even as rock n roll records were racing up the

Billboard singles charts as early as 1953to say nothing of urban rhythmand blues records that topped the charts almost a decade earlier, there was virtually no recognition of the new music by the musicians union. On theother hand, many famous jazz and classical musicians, conductors, com-posers, bandleaders, and arrangers graced the cover of the unions monthly

newspaper over the same years (194769), including Louis Armstrong, Jascha Heifetz, Miles Davis, Zubin Mehta, Paul Whiteman, Duke Elling-

ton, Gene Krupa, Leonard Bernstein, Dizzy Gillespie, and Aaron Cope-


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land, to name but a few. Bernstein, Mehta, Gillespie, and Whiteman wereall on the cover of International Musician in 1968 alone, fully one-third of allthe issues in that year.

Lengthy articles were dedicated to whomever the placed on thecover. Columns were devoted to reporting on the unions business affairs,national and local labor issues in American politics, sections about wherethe most popular jazz and classical musicians were playing, and styles andtechniques in the jazz and classical idioms. Rock n roll, on the other hand,did not get so much as a whisper, in spite of all the record- breaking salesgures for singles and albums in the emerging global marketplace. Otherpeople working in the music industry had already heard the news. As earlyas 1953, the rst year a rock n roll single made it onto the charts of Billboard and Cashbox magazines, it was clear to the managers of independent recordlabels and their distributors that the music of the American working class

was here to stay. Indeed, it already had a rich history in American culture.However, while the editors and writers for the International Musician

ignored rock music in their own articles and columns, the companies whopaid for ad space in their paper did not. Tere are numerous advertise-ments for electric guitars, the emblematic instrument of rock n roll, inside

the covers of the International Musician , starting as early as the mid-1950s.Beginning in the early 1960s, guitar manufacturers like Fender and Gibson were specically targeting younger, hipper rock musicians with their ad-

vertisements for both electric guitars and state-of-the-art ampliers thatcould, according to the ads, make it possible to play really loud. Teir adsalso included catchy phrases like freaked out sound, clearly aimed at rockmusicians. In one example from 1968, Fender placed an ad in the Interna-tional Musician with a picture of Jimi Hendrix playing the latest Strato-

caster model of electric guitar, which was, and remains, the most popularguitar used by rock musicians. By 1968, Hendrix was already an icon forup-and-coming rock guitarists, and Fender capitalized upon that as muchas possible, since they knew that no honest musician or music critic coulddeny the profound and immediate impact that Hendrix had on Americanmusic and popular culture in general. Yet the musicians unions own news-paper staff never formally acknowledged the contributions of Hendrix, ar-guably one of the greatest guitar virtuosos, in any of its own feature articles.

Clearly, the guitar companies were aware that rock n roll musicians were reading the International Musician; otherwise, why would they place

their advertisements there? It is safe to assume that at least some


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members who received the unions newspaper were rock musicians, eventhough their point of view on music was grossly underrepresented in print.So why, in spite of all the conditions stated above, would the American Fed-eration of Musicians ignore, and in many cases even condemn, rock n roll well into the 1960s? How could the musicians union ignore the signicanceof accomplished, talented musicians like Jimi Hendrix and the music theyplayed, the roots of which stem from the American working class?

Te answer, while complicated because of many overdetermined factorsincluding the advancement of more sophisticated recording technologies,changes in the structure of the recording industry and changes in U.S. laborlaw, can be found in the culture of the musicians union. Te culture I ex-amine includes both the leadership circles of the union and the elite rank-and-le members. Tere are several cultural phenomena that contributedto the marginalization of rock n roll within the . First, the wasfounded as a craft union, which meant that potential members had to dem-onstrate certain skills in the craft of musicianship to be considered worthyof inclusion. Te exclusion of unskilled workers was a dening feature ofall craft unions in the American Federation of Labor ( ). Te usedmusic reading exams as the principal means to restrict membership. Be-

cause most rock n roll musicians did not read music, and largely still donot, many of them were barred from membership in the union during the1950s and 1960s. Te exclusion of so-called unskilled musicians by the goes further back into history, as many blues and hillbilly musicians wereexcluded from membership in the union. Tis points to a second culturalproblem: the roots of rock n roll stem from working-class black and whiteculture, which has historically been the Other of white, bourgeois Euro-pean discourse. Because the leadership of the consisted mainly of

musicians trained in the classical tradition, rock n roll was viewed as some-thing Other than music, namely, entertainment. In fact, the unions leader-ship considered rock n roll to be a mere fad with no possibility of culturallongevity. Many jazz musicians in the union were equally dismissive of rockn roll, since among many circles of jazz musicians, jazz was referred to asblack classical music. Another important cultural phenomenon that con-tributed to the exclusion of rock n roll from the s purview was themedium of rock music: the record. Rock n roll was and is essentially a

record aesthetic, whereas the has always championed the superiorityof live music over recorded music. Lastly, the culture of the musiciansunion was also opposed to the culture of rock n roll because it was coded


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ous musicians union, the National League of Musicians, over whetherthey were to remain a professionalassociation of artists and stay with theLeague, or become a laborunion of workers by joining the AmericanFederation of Labor under a new name, the American Federation of Musi-cians. Younger musicians, who typically labored at a second job to supple-ment their income from performing music, favored joining the AmericanFederation of Labor, whereas older, established musicians who were ableto make a living exclusively from playing musicsymphony musicians inparticularopposed joining the on the grounds that it would debasetheir art. Musicians who opposed the proposal to be represented by the

argued that it would be degrading to associate with people who gottheir hands dirty for a living. In short, in the attempt to nd their identity,the musicians union struggled with a fundamental, hierarchical duality in American musical culture and western culture more generally: a binaryopposition based upon a distinction between music as cultivated and ori-ented toward the ideal as well as the problem of morality, and music asvernacular, oriented toward utility and entertainment andnot concerned

with morality and idealism. Tis cultural binary was and is overdetermined by another dualism rooted in the division of labor under capitalism that

divides mental from manual labor.Te process of Othering rock n roll in the musicians union, whichdeveloped along the lines of race and class, has historically been linked tothese more general dualistic differences that often exist in conict within

western culture. Te tiered dualism in American musical culture has oper-ated much in the same way as Derrida has described the operations of cul-tural dualisms in western culture more generally. At the center of the binarylies the image of western man, while the nonwestern Other is banished

to the margins. Of course, Derridas point was to demonstrate that thecenter relies on the presence of the marginal Other to exist in the rstplace, since difference is prior to being. In American society, art music,or classical music, exists as the center, around which popular music is mar-ginalized. Alas, the center never holds. Not only is it the case that profes-sional musicians struggle within particular cultural institutions in order toeither police and maintain musical boundariesor to scramble establishedcodes and conventions in musical forms by mixing together disparate ele-

ments; musicians also struggle for or against changes in the practices ofmusic within a larger social and cultural context of class struggle. Tereare several examples from history that demonstrate how musicians decon-


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structed received musical forms, as when jazz moved from the margins ofsociety in the early years of the twentieth century to become popular musicin the 1930s, then art music in the 1950s and 1960s. Te example I focuson in this book is how once jazz became art, jazz musicians and classicalmusicians worked theother side of the binary by marginalizing rock n rollmusic as Other and reproducing the division and opposition between artand entertainment. In short, jazz musicians, once seen as a threat to cul-tural stability, became key actors in policing musical boundaries once jazzearned the label art. By the 1950s, it was the turn of rock n roll musiciansto play the part of deconstructing musical forms by disrupting the hier-archy of highbrow and lowbrow culture; in their way stood many famous

jazz and classical musicians in the .In addition to the pleas of artistic purity that framed the craft of musi-

cianship as a moral issue, the musicians union also struggled over the iden-tity markers of race and class. Indeed, the question of whether musicians

were artists or workers, which was also a way of saying artists, as opposedto entertainers, has been displaced through race and class. Working-class

black and white musicians have struggled against the stigma of worker/entertainer both inside and outside of the musicians union, as their music

has been associated with popular culture, which is commonly understoodas mass entertainment, rather than authentic or pure art. In the pages thatfollow, I will argue that the struggle between different factions in the over the identity of the musicians union that followed from the questionsof art (music versus entertainment) and craft (trained versus untrainedmusicians), explains why the American Federation of Musicians refusedto recognize rock n roll as a legitimate music and its performers as skilledmusicians for two decades, a controversy that culminated in the unions

attempt to place an embargo on the British Invasion of rock n roll bandsin 1964.In some ways, the story of rock n roll and the musicians union is a

repetition of the problem posed by ragtime music that drove a wedge be-tween members at the beginning of the twentieth century. Te unionsleadership condemned ragtime for many of the same reasons they con-demned rock n roll. Ragtime music was associated with deviant behav-ior that was viewed as essentially low class. However, ragtime developed

into jazz, and jazz became the nations most popular music. Te musiciansunion eventually embraced jazz enthusiastically, unlike rock n roll, which

was never embraced with the same enthusiasm. Jazz moved quickly up the


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ladder of cultural hierarchy; it took less than a generation for the musiciansunion to accept jazz musicians in large numbers, and by the late 1920s, jazz

was the popular music in both black and white America. Furthermore, aca-demic musicians quickly recognized that jazz had legitimate aesthetic

value as art, although only after jazz was pressed into a symphonic form.Te period of controversy over jazz was relatively short compared to thecontroversy over rock n roll. Ironically, jazz musicians whose own music

was once attacked on moral and aesthetic grounds would in the 1950s jointhe chorus of public outcry against the so-called depravity of rock n rollmusic.

For many rank-and-le members as well as established leaders in themusicians union during the late 1950s and early 1960s, rock n roll wasseen to be a passing fad designed by morally suspect record labels andmanipulative disc jockeys specically for impressionable teenagers, whoseperceived innocence made them passive consumers and therefore perfect

victims for greedy, unscrupulous record label owners. Tis was the officialinstitutional explanation for why rock n roll was not considered seriousmusic by the union. Even as it was clear to industry insiders writing for thetrade magazines like Billboard, Cashbox , and Variety that rock n roll wasnt

going away, the continued to look down on the music as a short-livedfad articially created by sleazy record label owners.Tere were dissenters in the musicians union regarding the question

of rock n roll. Cultural or aesthetic elitism didnt entirely dominate unionpolitics and policy over the years, even during the period of rock n roll

between the years 19401970. Tere were important exceptions to culturalelitism in the history of the , including the unions most popular andcontroversial leader, James Caesar Petrillo, who spent most of his career

in the ghting against the aesthetic distinction between good andbad music and the related division between trained and untrained musi-cians. Petrillo, who was president of the from 1940 to 1958, was amongthose in the union bureaucracy that believed that in order for the tomaintain its identity as alabor union, and in order to be a potent laborunion, the issue of taste could not be allowed to inuence union policy,

because aesthetic preference would inevitably divide the union and breakdown solidarity. He broke from the cultural elitism of the previous presi-

dent, Joseph Weber, but it didnt last, because Petrillos successor, HermanKenin, embraced a highbrow perspective in politics and policy duringthe years when rock n roll emerged as the dominant music in America. It is


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perhaps no coincidence that the had its most success as a labor unionunder the leadership of Petrillo, which included the greatest victories in theunions history, the recording bans of 1942 and 1946. But a little more thana decade later, the fortunes of the musicians union changed beginning withKenins presidency, when the , like other unions in the United States,entered a period of decline that continues today. Tere were also leaders ofkey locals in the who argued against the bifurcation of musicians intoskilled and unskilled musicians, like George Cooper Jr., the presidentof Local 257 in Nashville, who argued against requiring musicians to pass amusic-reading test as the primary basis for joining the union.

Te second aesthetic issue that drove a wedge between the androck music had to do with the essentialmedium of rock n roll music,namely, records. Unlike jazz and classical music, where the performanceand the composition are the principal aesthetic objects, in rock n rollmusic it is therecording that is the primary referent. In jazz and classicalmusic it is the performance on the one hand, and the composition on theother, that gives a piece of music its aura. It is a different matter with rockn roll. Te technology of recording or the particularsound of a recordingis what counts, which means that the instrument ortechnology of recording

is an important component of the music and culture of rock n roll. Soundengineers working in the studio play an important role in the constructionof the record.

Tere are two reasons why rock n roll is a record culture. On the onehand, most rock n roll musicians learn how to play music from listeningto records rather than by reading music. Records had, to borrow an argu-ment from Walter Benjamin, a democratizing effect on the eld of musicand the institutions that create musicians, insofar as it is relatively easy for

people of lesser means to obtain records and use them to learn how to playmusic. Compared to the relatively expensive and time-consuming train-ing in formal music schools, records provided a cheap and immediate entryinto the realm of music performance. Records opened the doors for drovesof working-class kids who yearned to play music. In addition, once the per-formance of a musical score is on record, everyone can own it, appropriateit, and participate in it. In this way, records deconstruct the aura of a pieceof music just as the photograph does to the aura of the painting, which

is the topic that Benjamin discusses in his essay on the signicance of me-chanical reproduction in the eld of art. Benjamin celebrates the demise ofthe aura of a work of art, because it frees us from the shackles of tradition.


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For Benjamin, deconstructing the aura of a work of art means thatevery-one can participate in the creation and criticism of art. Specically, its the

working class that benets from the development of technology in the me-chanical reproduction of the work of art. Benjamins essay is a classic appli-cation of the Marxist argument that under particular historical conditions,the forces of production (technology) break down the relations of pro-duction (hierarchy and domination) within a given mode of production.

Te American Federation of Musicians, however, has been, and in somecases continues to be, opposed to recorded music for two reasons. Terst reason is completely understandable: the musicians union lost tens ofthousands of its members to recorded music, both on vinyl and on lm. Be-ginning in the late 1920s, both on radio and in theaters, live musicians, themajority of whom were members, were eliminated in huge numbersand replaced by canned music. Tese were very bad years for the musi-cians union, and the massive hemorrhaging of membership they sufferedfrom the improvement of recording technology had a profound impacton their collective identity, for the technology threatened their place insociety. Recordings threatened both their ability to make a living and theirconception of the role of music in the advancement of culture. From the

unions point of view in the 1920s, recordings were a degradation of music(because the quality of the sound was still quite poor), and the displace-ment of the live musician with the recording would leadin their view atthe timeto the degradation of culture more generally. In short, recordingtechnologies equaled permanent loss of jobs and the end of many careersin music. Te musicians unions ght against recorded music has been, his-torically, a ght to save jobs. As a strategy to obtain good favor from thepublic, the union has tried to present their interests as being in sync with

the interests of the public at large. Since then, it has been policy topromote live music over canned music in as many public venues as pos-sible, arguing that live music provides an audience with a more completeand more authentic aesthetic experience than does recorded music. Tesearguments were derived, in part, from traditional European values; namely,live music is better than recorded, period. It was the combination of all ofthese cultural factors that created the conditions for the marginalization ofrock n roll music by the musicians union.

Lastly, the musicians union was part of the larger union establishment(the - ) that stood opposed to rock n roll music because it becamesynonymous with the 1960s counterculture. During the era of protest in


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the 1960s, large segments of the white working class in America becamea largely conservative cultural force, led by its representatives, the laborunions. By the 1960s, many union members had achieved the Americandream: a house in the suburbs and a semi-middle-class lifestyle. As a result,many union members were alienated from the radicalism of the student-led New Left movements, the counterculture hippies, and the militantBlack Power movement. Many union workers didnt identify with the cul-tural radicalism of the New Left and the Black Power movements, whichcreated the conditions for several conicts, the most infamous being the

violent assault led by construction workers against Vietnam War protestersin New York City in 1970. Te image of construction workers in hard hatscarrying American ags and beating nonviolent demonstrators who op-posed the war in Vietnam is emblematic of how some labor unions joinedthe conservative establishment. In popular culture, the Archie Bunker char-acter on the popular television sitcom All in the Family came to be the iconfor the culturally conservative white, working-class man in America. Tis broad context of conict between the labor movement and the counter-culture was foreshadowed by the controversy over the s attempt toprevent the Beatles from touring the United States, a controversy that de-

veloped into a nationwide scandal, as legions of Beatles fans entered a verypublic ght against the musicians union and its president, Herman Kenin.Te cultural reasons for why the excluded rock n roll from its col-

lective identity, however, is not the only interesting issue at hand, becauserock n roll would eventually turn the entire structure of the music record-ing industry upside down. Te explosion of rock n roll in the 1950s restruc-tured the recording industry in profound ways that eventually displacedthe American Federation of Musicians as a major player inside the core

of the music recording industry. Te union itself is partly to blame for itsown displacement precisely because it ignored rock n roll for so long andneglected to aggressively organize its musicians. Te musicians union wasonce one of the most powerful labor unions in America, able to demandand obtain signicant concessions from the corporations that controlledthe music industry. Te was also a major player in national politics between the late 1930s and the late 1950s, and along with other powerfulunions, it shared the space at the apex of the American economy with the

dominant corporations, although as junior partners in the booming warand postwar economies.

Unfortunately, however, like other unions that were once central players


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in the American economythe United Auto Workers, the United Mine Workers, and the United Steel Workers, to name a fewthe has, sincethe 1960s, lost much of its inuence, especially in the recording industry.Te was at one time powerful enough to successfully execute a generalstrike that crippled the entire recording industry. oday, after decades ofstructural realignment in the industry, the musicians union has lost inu-ence and control over a signicant share of the market for recorded musicin America, and no longer has the means to organize a strike of any mag-nitude upon the recording industry. Te core of the active members in themusicians union are jazz and classical musicians, the same constituencyas seventy years ago, but today jazz and classical music together are but5 percent of the market for recorded music. wice in the 1940s, the

was able to pull its members out of recording studios all across the states,conduct successful long-term strikes, and win concessions from the cor-porations that owned the major record labels. Beginning in the late 1950sand continuing throughout the 1960s, the years when rock n roll becamedominant, the major record labels developed a pattern of outsourcing theproduction of records to independent record labels that served as a kindof non-union subcontractor in the recording industry. Most of the non-

union labels from that era recorded rock n roll music almost exclusively,the same music that the considered a fad in the 1950s. Of course, inretrospect we know that it was not a fad and that rock n roll, and the musicthat has developed out of it, including hip-hop, totally dominated the mar-ket for records in the 1950s and has ever since. oday the multinationalcorporations that control the music recording industry do so through amonopoly ondistribution; production matters little in the grand schemeof things, and the independent labels remain mostly non-union shops. Te

outsourcing of the production of rock n roll records by the major recordlabels that began in the 1960s eventually became the norm for the entiremusic recording industry, and the effects on the musicians union has beendevastating. A strike in the recording industry by the musicians union today would

be almost meaningless, since so much of the production of records takesplace in non-union shops by musicians that are most likelynot members ofthe . Even if those musicians are members of the union, their member-

ship is largely the work of inertia; they are far from being active membersin the union. Te relative impotence of the musicians union in the record-ing industry today means that the American Federation of Musicians acts


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more like an organization that provides services, managing pension fundsand health insurance plans for itsexisting members, rather than a laborunion; a labor union, by denition, is an organization that focuses on orga-nizingnew members and obtaining wage increases and better working con-ditions for its members by conducting strikes and contract campaigns de-signed to extract concessions from employers. In short, the has sharedthe fate of the rest of the labor movement, as labor unions across various in-dustries have lost their ability to ex their muscles and get results that theyonce could before the great U-turn in the economy in the late 1960s.

Organized labor in America has often acted against its own interests,especially over issues about the identity of its membership as well as theidentity of potential members, workers who t the denition of their bar-gaining unit but are yet unorganized. ypically, in American unions and the working class generally, the struggle over collective identitya struggle

with a violent pasttakes place along the lines of class (which is displacedthrough craft and skill), race, and gender. Racism and sexism among therank and le of labor unions has severely damaged organized labor inthe United States, problems which have only recently been addressed

by the - . In addition to the problems of racism and sexism inside

the house of labor, splits within the U.S. working class have occurred be-tween skilled and unskilled workers or between what labor historians havereferred to as the split between the labor aristocracy, which consists ofskilled workers in the craft unions, and unorganized, unskilled industrial

workers, who historically have been neglected by the leadership of the craftunions.

Te concept of a labor aristocracy was coined by Lenin, who argued thatthe proletariat in the First World benets from the hyper-exploitation of

impoverished workers in the developing countries on the periphery of the world economy. Labor historians have modied Lenins concept in orderto apply it to the formation of the working class within the borders of theUnited States. For example, many of the older craft- based unions of the

American Federation of Labor ( ) never organized unskilled workersas a matter of principle. Since its inception in 1886, it was an organizingstrategy of the to focus specically on craft workers, which by deni-tion excluded millions of unskilled workers. Tese unskilled workers were

nally organized by the industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Or-ganizations beginning in the 1930s after failed attempts by the International

Workers of the World ( ) in the rst decade of the twentieth century.


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Te situation of the American Federation of Musicians in the history of American labor unions is a complicated one. Like most craft unions

in the early years of the post- bellum labor movement, the often ex-cluded working musicians from membership on the basis of race, gender,and skill (through which class division is displaced). Gender was a par-ticularly conspicuous marker, since most locals barred women frommembership altogether. In the economy as a whole, in 1900 fewer than3 percent of women workers were members of unions, compared to 20percent for men. Most women who worked in the music industry at thattime worked as piano teachers in grade schools. Very few women musi-cians performed in commercial venues on a professional basis at the turnof the century.

Te class dimension of the identity of the musicians union was of courseoverdetermined by the rst two factors, especiall y race. In fact, I will makethe case that the identity conict over craft in the musicians union con-cerning the question of rock n roll was at times largely a class issue that

was displaced through race. In other words, the discourse of hierarchicalduality between highbrow and lowbrow culture was sometimes displaced

when the issue was supposedly over the craft, or the training of a musician.

rained musician was code for musicians, usually white, who played inthe European classical idioms and who were able to read music. As statedabove, the musicians union considered the ability to read music an essen-tial aspect to the craft of musicianship, but this was also a veil, or displace-ment of sorts, since many other genres of music do not rely so heavily onthe graphic representation of music in notational form as does the classi-cal tradition of European bourgeois music. Tis combination of culturalmarkers was set against folk music as a way to Other American folk music

and excluded large numbers of rural, working-class musicians, black and white, from the .In other instances, the termtrained was explicitly used as code for

white musicians, and these divisions were used to justify the institution-alized segregation in the that lasted for several decades. Te , likemost unions, has a particularly poor record of race relations. On theother hand, when black musicians, particularly jazz musicians who wererecognized by the union as adequately trained and skilled, spoke disparag-

ingly about other musicians, then skill was aclass marker, and again it wasa way to mask or displace the discourse of hierarchical duality of high andlow culture. Cultural divisions turned on both race and class, especially in


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the case of bebop musicians who went on the attack against rhythm and blues and rock n roll.

When rock n roll upended the structure of the music industry, the mu-sicians union circled its wagons around its core members, the jazz andclassical musicians, and clung to a withering New Deal pact between labor,capital, and the government. Rather than organize rock n roll musiciansand respond to the changing structure of the recording industry with neworganizing strategies, the chose to maintain its stronghold among itstraditional base of jazz and classical musicians and hope that the majorrecord labels would continue to renew favorable labor contracts. Teirstrategy ultimately proved unsustainable because the major record labelshave outsourced production to record labels that do not hold a labor con-tract with the union.

Te destructiveness of cultural hierarchy that plagued the musiciansunion had far-reaching effects for the entire labor movement because notonly did cultural imperialism sabotage solidarity in the musicians union, italso sabotaged what could have been the most radical achievement of themusicians union: the historic compromise between the and the majorrecord labels that followed the recording ban of 1942. When Decca Records

agreed to terms set by the in 1943, the musicians union won one ofthe most signicant confrontations between labor and capital in the twen-tieth century. By winning the strike, the was able to compel recordcompanies to create a fund to be used to compensate union musicians whohad lost their jobs as a result of being replaced by records at radio stationsand jukeboxes in live venues like taverns. Te 1943 recording contract be-tween the and the record companies foreshadowed the very real his-torical possibility that the working class could have more for less: more

material comforts, more material goods, more free time,and less work.Te record companies were making enough money that they could pay themusicians who made the recordsand support musicians who did not makerecords, who were essentially idle, performing occasional concerts that

were free to the public. It was a truly radical achievement, and in the con-text of the epic struggle of labor unions to shorten working hours and pushup wages, it provided a concrete example of what possibilities are waitingfor us on the horizon of a post-scarcity social formation.

Unfortunately, the union itself sabotaged the historic achievement ofthe 1943 labor agreement. Te turn against rock n roll music meant thatsolidarity among musicians would wither, and record companies would ex-


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ploit the reserve army of labor that existed among the growing pool of un-organized, non-union, working-class rock n roll musicians. If the unionhad organized rock n roll musicians rather than banish them to the mar-gins of the industry in the early years of rock n roll, the union might have been able to continue to increase its pressure on record companies andcontinue to set the example for the entire labor movement in the drive torealize labors quest for more leisure time and a higher standard of living.How ironic, too, that rock n roll music, which contains as its raison dtrethe unequivocal affirmation of leisure and the rejection of delayed grati-cation, would be neglected by a labor union.


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. Union Man Blues1. See Jay Ruby, Creedence Clearwater Revival, in International Musician , June

1969, 5.2. Te rst time the International Musician published the wordsrock n roll was in

1968. See Nat Hentoff, Te Pop Explosion, International Musician , April 1968.3. Te story of the and the Beatles is covered in more detail in chapter 4.4. Berrys rst union gig was at the Crank Club in St. Louis in the early 1950s. Berry

writes in his autobiography that he made twice as much money working union gigsthan he did playing non- union establishments. See Berry,Te Autobiography (New

York: Harmony Books), 9192.5. In the mid-1940s, the music that we know today as rock n roll was still referred

to by musicians who played itincluding Louis Jordanas jump blues. In 1949, it be-came known as rhythm and blues. And of course there were other important inu-ences on the formation of rock n roll besides jump blues. Country music, bluegrass,popular swooners like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, the blues, and swing jazz allplayed an important role in the development of rock n roll. I discuss all these inu-ences in later chapters.

6. Te rst rock n roll record to appear on the Billboard charts was Crazy Man,Crazy, by Bill Haley and His Comets. I make the case that rock n roll is the music ofthe American working class rather than exclusively an expression of American youthculture as many critics, including Frith (Sound Effects) have argued. Certainly youthculture shaped rock n roll in important ways, but the roots of rock n roll music runmuch deeper than youth culture. My interpretation of rock n roll as a working-classphenomenon will be clear in the chapters that follow. Simon Frith,Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock-and-Roll (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981).


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7. International Musician , October 1968, 23.8. In chapter 3, I discuss the case of ommy Dorsey and his extreme dislike of Elvis.9. For a sociological analysis of the formal aspects of western classical music, see

Max Weber,Te Rational and Social Foundations of Music , trans. Don Martindale et al.

(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958).10. James P. Kraft,Stage to Studio: Musicians and the Sound Revolution (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).11. For an analysis of the cultural impact of the division between mental and manual

labor in the capitalist mode of production, see Alfred Sohn-Rethel , Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology (London: Macmillan, 1978).

12. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1982).

13. Neil Leonard, Jazz and the White Americans: Te Acceptance of a New Art Form (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

14. I discuss these strikes in more detail in later chapters.15. For an excellent analysis of the record aesthetic that contributes to the produc-

tion of rock n roll culture, see Teodore Gracyk,Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetic ofRock (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).

16. Rock n roll musicians have made these arguments. For instance, Eric Claptonsaid that his band, Cream, would never have had the success that it did if it were not for

om Dowd, the sound engineer who recorded their celebrated album Disraeli Gears. According to Clapton, Dowds inuence in the recording studio was just as important

as any of the band members. In addition, George Martin, who produced many of theBeatles albums, became known as the fth Beatle because he played such an impor-tant role in the sound engineering of albums likeSgt. Peppers.

17. I am borrowing Walter Benjamins famous argument from his essay Te Workof Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which is from the collection of essayspublished in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). Benjamins argumentabout the loss of aura and the democratizing effect of technology on art was based onphotography and its impact on painting, but I think it works equally well with record-

ing technology in the area of music, especially rock n roll. I cover Benjamins argu-ment in more detail in chapter 2.18. Kraft,Stage to Studio.19. Peter B. Levy,Te New Left and Labor in the 1960s (Urbana: University of Illinois

Press, 1994); Jefferson Cowie,Stayin Alive: Te 1970s and the Last Days of the WorkingClass (New York: New Press, 2010).

20. Michael Roberts, Papas Got a Brand New Bag, inRhythm and Business: Te Political Economy of Black Music , ed. Norman Kelley (New York: Akashic Books, 2005).

21. Harrison Bennett and Barry Bluestone , Te Great U- urn: Corporate Restructuring

and the Polarizing of America (New York: Basic Books, 1988).22. See Robin D. G. Kelley, Te New Urban Working Class and Organized Labor,in New Labor Forum: A Journal of Ideas, Analysis, and Debate , no. 1 (fall 1997).


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23. Art Preis, Labors Giant Step: wenty Years of the (New York: Pioneer, 1964).24. I am using the termoverdetermined much in the same way as Althusser does, as a

way to avoid the reduction of complex relations to simplied cause-and-effect expla-nations.Overdetermined is used to emphasize how variables like class and race are

not things or things-in-themselves but rather sets of relations that develop dialecti-cally and become displaced through one another in a variety of specic social contexts.

25. Racism existed in the American Federation of Musicians, much like in otherunions, but as white working-class musicians began playing rhythm and blues and rockn roll, class became an equally determining factor in the split inside the union.

26. Clark Halker, A History of Local 208 and the Struggle for Racial Equality in the American Federation of Musicians, Black Music Research Journal 8 (fall 1988): 20722.

. Solidarity Forever?1. International Musician , July 1942.2. Russell Sanjek, Pennies from Heaven: Te American Popular Music Business in the

wentieth Century (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 5152.3. Arnold Seltzer, Music Matters: Te Performer and the American Federation of Musi-

cians (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1989), 24.4. James P. Kraft,Stage to Studio: Musicians and the Sound Revolution (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 130.5. im J. Anderson, Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American

Recording (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 35.6. Kraft,Stage to Studio , 8889. I have placed the numbers for both union locals in

Minneapolis as well as Atlanta to identify what were once racially segregated locals inthose cities.

7. Official Proceedings of the Annual Convention of the American Federation of Musi-cians , 1938 (in Secretary reasurers Office of the American Federation of Musicians,1501 Broadway, Suite 600, New York 10036), 93.

8. Robert D. Leiter,Te Musicians and Petrillo (New York: Bookman Associates,

1953).9. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations , trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books,1969). I discuss the signicance of Benjamins perspective in the next chapter.

10. Leiter,Te Musicians and Petrillo , 53.11.Official Proceedings , 1930, 30.12. Kraft,Stage to Studio , 51.13. Kraft,Stage to Studio , 83.14. Anderson, Making Easy Listening , 12.15. Leiter,Te Musicians and Petrillo , 60.

16. Ryan,Te Production of Culture in the Music Industry: Te - Controversy (New York: University Press of America, 1985), 1726.17. Ryan,Te Production of Culture , 3637; Sanjek, Pennies from Heaven.

Tell Tchaikovsky the News by Michael James Roberts

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