Cincinnati Unites to Celebrate Music Institution King Records’ Crucial Legacy while also Considering its Future Potential

September marks the sixth-annual King Records Month and the label’s 75th anniversary

By STEVEN ROSEN / CINCINNATI CITYBEAT / AUG 21, 2018 

 

The King Records building in EvanstonPHOTO: HAILEY BOLLINGER

It may not be as big an event as BLINK Cincinnati or Oktoberfest yet, but the annual King Records Month is rapidly becoming a genuine festival. In fact, in its sixth year it can no longer even be contained in a single month, as the events are becoming as numerous as the number of hit recordings made by King’s greatest star, James Brown, or the number of classic songs first recorded by King artists — like Little Willie John’s 1956 version of “Fever,” later covered successfully by Peggy Lee.

King Records Month is supposed to occur in September — it was September 1943 when King founder and Cincinnati native Syd Nathan recorded the first songs by Country singers Grandpa Jones and Merle Travis to be released by his new record company, which went on to be a pioneer in the development of Rock & Roll by bringing Country and R&B together. King was based on Brewster Avenue in Evanston, in buildings still  King Records markerPHOTO: HAILEY BOLLINGER

there but not in good condition.

This year the celebrating of the “month” starts early — next Saturday in fact, with the first Celebrate the King: The Gala, a ticketed event at Over-the-Rhine’s Memorial Hall with special guests, live music and the presentation of Lifetime Achievement Awards to key figures in King’s history: the late Henry Glover, an A&R executive and producer who was an early black executive in the recording industry, plus important King musicians Bootsy Collins, Philip Paul and Otis Williams. The design company We Have Become Vikings is organizing the event; its co-founder Jason Snell did some King-related design work for projections on the exterior wall of downtown’s St. Xavier Church during 2017’s massively successful BLINK Cincinnati.

“The idea for the gala started over beers with two people active in (the King Studios project),” Snell says. “I’d just be sitting there and go, ‘What? That happened? No.’ Just being a fan of the music coming out of here and not really knowing a tenth of what hap A King Records poster honoring Bootsy CollinsART: WE HAVE BECOME VIKINGS

happened… it gives me goosebumps.”

King Records Month activities also continue well past September with two high-profile events. On Oct. 25, the Cincinnati Preservation Association is bringing in Terry Stewart — the former director of Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — to speak at its 23rd Annual Fall Forum Luncheon on the importance of preserving King’s legacy.

At CityBeat’s 2008 Cincinnati Entertainment Awards’ tribute to King, Stewart came to town and famously said at the event, “There’s not a more important piece of real estate in musical history than the building over there on Brewster. If you folks don’t remember and preserve it, shame on you.”

At the urging of board member Margaret Valentine, Cincinnati Preservation decided to focus this year’s lecture on King, a break from broader topics of the recent past.

After that, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park debuts the long-awaited world premiere of KJ Sanchez’s play, Cincinnati King, on Nov. 3, which has been in development for five years as she researched the label’s history and its impact on the community. (The play runs at the Playhouse’s Shelterhouse Theatre through Dec. 23.)

September itself is packed with programming, from a serious panel discussion Sept. 5 at the Mercantile Library on Syd Nathan’s place in music history to the goofy fun of “The World’s Largest Twist Dance” on Sept. 7 at Great American Ball Park, following the end of a Cincinnati Reds’ game and before fireworks. King artist Hank Ballard had the first recording of “The Twist” in 1959, although it wasn’t until Chubby Checker covered it in 1960 that it became a massive hit and enduring pop culture touchstone. (See here for more events happening during King Records Month and beyond.)

Structural Security

A retouched 1966 photo of the King Records studio in EvanstonPHOTO: PROVIDED

All this is remarkable, when you consider that King Records lost its founder way back in 1968, when Nathan died, closed its Cincinnati studio/offices on Brewster in 1971 and essentially disappeared from the city’s consciousness after a Nashville company bought its assets. It’s been a long, slow process to make Cincinnatians aware.

But neither the increase in the breadth and duration of events nor the easy peg of a 75-year anniversary is the only reason why this year’s annual King Records celebration/observation is so much bigger than the past five.

In April, Cincinnati City Council approved a land swap with the existing owner of the former studio property in Evanston, who had been threatening demolition. The city had made the space a historic landmark in 2015. The transaction was completed this summer, and the city now owns King’s old studio/office at 1532-36 Brewster Ave. That means that the owners of King Records’ home are the citizens of Cincinnati, and they can now begin to plan for using the site to honor the past and possibly play a part in the community’s future. (Another part of the King property, 1538-40 Brewster, which held some of the manufacturing facilities such as record pressing, is still in private hands.)

“It is now an important public asset,” says Greg Koehler, economic development supervisor with the city. “We just hit this milestone of finally getting control over the original recording studio. Now we can talk seriously about getting this big project to happen. It’s a big lift — like a small-scale version of Music Hall or Union Terminal.”

Elliott Ruther, a co-founder of the nonprofit Cincinnati USA Music Heritage Foundation that advocated for saving the building, says, “Here’s a truly significant spot where culture was created that had an impact on the world.”

People involved in King preservation efforts say that it isn’t just its contribution to American music that merits its remembrance. Owner Nathan was way ahead of the rest of society in running an integrated business. As Darren Blase, a co-owner of Shake It Records who studied King Records as an undergraduate at the University of Cincinnati, explains: “(King) had an integrated baseball team within the company, but when they played in the greater industrial league, they had to break into a black and a white team.”

Before efforts can start on the restoration of the King site, it first needs to be protected structurally due to the wear of time and the elements. L to R: King artists Bootsy Collins and Otis Williams with Jack White, Mayor John Cranley, Evanston Council President Anzora Adkins and fellow King musician Philip Paul at the original Evanston building.PHOTO: COURTESY OF THIRD MAN RECORDS AND DAVID SWANSON

“Short term, we hope to get a new roof on it before the end of year,” the city’s Koehler says. “It’s essentially missing half a roof. It’s been deteriorating; it’s essentially in abandoned condition.”

He says such roof repair will cost approximately $500,000 and will include new rafters and carpentry to support the roof. The building also needs some asbestos mitigation.

“That means you won’t be able to grow vegetables inside the building because it has a complete roof on it,” jokes Tim Riordan, the secretary-treasurer of King Studios, a nonprofit with the stated goal of exposing and energizing King’s legacy while also supporting efforts to spur revitalization in Evanston.

Riordan might have some useful contacts in that regard — he is a former Cincinnati assistant city manager and former Dayton city manager.

To work with the city on long-term plans, four nonprofit community groups that have been involved in King preservation efforts have formed a steering committee to make recommendations. Besides King Studios and Cincinnati USA Music Heritage, Evanston Community Council and the Bootsy Collins Foundation are involved. They are considering forming a new nonprofit organization that could conceivably be in charge of creating a new use for the site and supervising a fundraising campaign.

Concurrently, Cincinnati Preservation has been coordinating work on an application to get the site on the United States Department of Interior’s National Register of Historic Places. That could help with funding — both the federal and state governments provide sizeable tax credits for the restoration of historic properties.

Paul Muller, Cincinnati Preservation’s executive director, says that kind of funding already has been used for work on such public entities as Music Hall, Union Terminal and Memorial Hall. That the King site may not be their architectural equal doesn’t matter, he says.

“Preservation is about much more than bricks and mortar,” he says. “It’s about the lives of people who create things. (Historic buildings) become useful marks for people to tell our cultural history and how we came to be as a society.”

Once and Future King

A rendering of the renovated buildingPHOTO: PROVIDED

The initial steps being taken are about keeping the King building structurally secure. But the ultimate goals being discussed for the space are about much more than keeping King alive in an empty, worn-but-architecturally-sound memorial.

“Long-term demands a pretty extensive renovation of the building,” Koehler says. “That gets into things like a museum, historic artifacts on display, a studio, community space. That gets into the millions of dollars. That’s really what a lot of people in the community want to see happen in the long run, and I do believe it’s doable.”

Because the vision of what King should be is still in the early stages, Koehler says concrete fundraising efforts aren’t in place yet. But he says the plan for King to be something living and breathing in the community of Evanston is more than notional, because all four of the nonprofit stakeholders “have coalesced around that vision.”

“This would be a public memorial that we think would have a pretty significant national and international audience, as well as a local one,” Koehler says. “And there are some significant national and international recording stars interested in this and may help with fundraising at some point. And there’s a target list of major foundations as well.’’

There are some early conceptual designs that were done at King Studios’ request, but are not meant to be final. SHP Leading Design, a Norwood firm whose executive vice president, Thomas Fernandez, sits on King Studios’ board and is also on the steering committee, earlier created renderings of a building that show space for exhibits, performances, an airy room with tables and chairs and a wall lined with old King vinyl albums. There’s also a draft of a reimagined Brewster Avenue between King and Montgomery Road in Evanston that shows it turned into a colorful walking King

A Brewster Avenue renderingPHOTO: PROVIDED

timeline, with historic markers on the side. Earlier, King Studios had pursued plans for a complex on Montgomery Road, in the business heart of Evanston.

“The idea in a perfect world is to still have a facility on Montgomery that’s a welcome center, maybe a record store and gift shop, and then take a cart down Brewster or walk to the original building,” says Chris Schadler, a board member of King Studios.

There is also much feeling that a revived King Records building should serve residents of Evanston, especially students, by offering music education and being a source of community pride.

There is another concern. Some feel that if and when the King site gets its second life with a museum component, it shouldn’t be a “top-down” one that solely interprets the company’s history through the eyes of the movers and shakers who owned it. There needs to be a “people’s history,” one that honors and respects all the musicians and other workers who helped create what King became.

To that end, Kent Butts — vice chair of both King Studios and the new steering committee — is trying to keep those musicians and employees still alive (or surviving family members) aware of what’s happening as the King revival grows.

“Many of them didn’t have a clue; they thought it was over with King,” Butts says. “I want to get the legacy individuals — mostly families of artists — to understand there is something here and that we’re thinking about them. It needs to be understood for history’s sake what their father or mother did for king.”

Butts has a personal stake in this — his father, Otis Williams, recorded one of King’s greatest hits, the R&B/Doo-wop smash “Hearts of Stone,” with the Charms in 1954, and still performs.

Philip Paul, a King Studios board member who became a session drummer at King in the 1950s, also believes respect must be paid to the label’s forgotten musicians. He keeps a list of lesser-known King musicians he doesn’t want to see forgotten, such as session guitarist Freddie Jordan.

“If we couldn’t get the chord changes together, they’d send for Freddie Jordan and he’d put it together,” Paul says in praise of the musician. “I promised his wife that if I got an opportunity, I’d make sure he would be honored.”

While all this is going on, national and international interest continues to grow as more is learned about the early and influential Country and R&B records that came out of King. A string of visiting Rock musicians have paid their respects in recent years — Paul McCartney, Nick Lowe, Jack White, Billy Gibbons and more.

“We’ve always said, and there is tons of evidence to support it, that King can sustain a claim to being the birthplace of Rock & Roll,” Schadler says. “I’ve always said there should be billboards on Interstate 71 and 75 that say, ‘Welcome to Cincinnati, the Birthplace of Rock & Roll.’ ”

That may happen soon.

The Cincinnati Roots of Charles Brown’s “Please Come Home for Christmas”

Christmas song has mysterious local roots

Steven Rosen / Cincinnati Enquirer / Dec. 18, 2014

(Photo: Provided/Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archives)

A year doesn’t go by without a new recording of “Please Come Home for Christmas,” that melodically stately, melancholy ballad about not wanting to spend the holidays alone.

This year, there are at least two new versions – by country singer Darius Rucker and alternative rockers Landlady (with guest vocalist Amelia Meath). They join the impressive likes of the Eagles, Bon Jovi, Willie Nelson, James Brown and others in making the song well known.

But what’s not so well known is that the original version was recorded in 1960 at Evanston’s King Records studio by Charles Brown, an African-American blues musician known for his jazz-influenced piano playing and his genteel and politely forlorn vocal style.

Brown came and went from Cincinnati with little fanfare. And, as he claimed in interviews before he died in 1999 at age 76, he may have been held here against his will by a kingpin of Northern Kentucky’s famous illegal-gambling operations, the late Frank “Screw” Andrews (Andriola). Andrews ran several gambling clubs along Newport’s Central Avenue, at least some of which welcomed African-American customers. Some of Brown’s predicament seems to have seeped into the emotions of his Christmas song.

Brown had once been a star to black audiences, but by 1959-1961, his Cincinnati years, he was down and out. In the 1940s, as the pianist/singer for a Los Angeles trio called Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, the Texas-born Brown had several huge hits with the trio in “Merry Christmas Baby” and “Drifting Blues.” On his own in the early 1950s, he had many other national rhythm-and-blues smashes, including “Black Night” and “Trouble Blues.”

But after the hits and cash flow stopped, Brown had a weakness that may have made him an easy mark in Newport. He needed money to bet on horses, according to Danny Caron, the musician who befriended Brown in the late 1980s and helped him launch a late-in-life return to popularity that also saw Brown inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

“It was easy for Charles to get indebted,” Caron said in an interview. “He could go through thousands of dollars a day. You gave Charles Brown a thousand dollars and it was gone in an hour. He didn’t have enough money ever to gamble. That makes it very easy for him to get indebted.”

In an interview for the Denver Post with this writer in 1990, before he was set to open for Bonnie Raitt as part of his comeback, Brown recalled his Cincinnati/Newport days and how he got an employment offer from Andrews. “Mr. Screw was crazy about me. When he picked me up and wanted me to come there and stay and join the music department, he paid me $750 a week. Anybody I wanted to bring in, I could.”

Brown was Andrews’ house pianist. And one artist Brown brought to town to work with him was close friend Amos Milburn, another seemingly past-his-prime blues pianist and singer (“One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer,” “Chicken Shack Boogie”).

In 1960, word of Brown’s presence in town reached Syd Nathan of King Records. In the 1990 interview, Brown recalled that Nathan asked him, “‘Could you write something as good as ‘Merry Christmas Baby?’ I said, ‘I don’t know how good it will be, but I’ll write.’ He said, ‘You and Amos go write one apiece and let me hear what you done.’ When we brought it to Syd Nathan he fell in love with mine.” Milburn’s “Christmas Comes But Once a Year” ended up as the B-side of Brown’s King single.

“Please Come Home’s” opening was a memorable chiming-bell sound. Philip Paul, who played drums on the record, said that was a gong played by Gene Redd, a King Records musician. “I think that made the recording,” Paul said.

The song became Brown’s first hit record in eight years and reached No. 21 on Billboard’s Top Rhythm & Blues Singles chart. Brown subsequently recorded other singles and even an album of Christmas songs for Nathan, but never had another hit. While Brown claimed he wrote “Please Come Home” alone, the credits listed Redd as co-writer.

Brown told Living Blues magazine in a 1994 interview that in Cincinnati he married an older white woman with children named Eva McGhee, who owned “one of the finest garages in Cincinnati.” He characterized it as a “a friendly marriage – it wasn’t really love.” Brown’s 1999 obituary said he was twice divorced and left no family. (Some who knew Brown say he was gay.)

But he also told of wanting to leave town and being threatened by Andrews. He finally escaped, Brown recounted, when federal Internal Revenue Service agents launched a devastating raid on Andrews’ Sportsman’s Club at 333 Central Ave. on Aug. 22, 1961. The raid was part of the new Kennedy administration’s crackdown, and made headlines for days when it happened.

Fortunately for Brown, one “customer” may have helped him escape both Andrews and the federal bust. He was an African-American undercover IRS agent who infiltrated the place before the raid.

In his memoir “Three of the First,” Hilton Owens Sr. (who died in 2007) recalled, “I struck up an acquaintance with well-known ballad singer Charles Brown who was famous almost everywhere, except at the Sportsman’s Club, where he was merely a fill-in during intermission for the main entertainer. … Brown never discussed why he was trapped in the Sportsman’s Club, and I did not pry.”

In his 1990 interview, Brown recounted those events. “That night we were playing there, this black guy came and asked, ‘Mr. Brown, would it took you and Amos long to get out of there?'”

Brown’s path after that is unclear. Accounts say he went to Los Angeles, but a 2004 CD collection called The Very Best of Charles Brown: Original King Recordings shows he recorded again for King on Oct. 9, 1961, and off and on until 1968 while also recording elsewhere. A booklet accompanying another CD says he lived in Cincinnati awhile in the late 1960s, too.

The 1960s and 1970s were decades of struggle and obscurity for Brown. But his one towering accomplishment was “Please Come Home.” It becomes more appreciated with each passing Christmas.

Brian Powers of Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County helped with the research.

Sparking Urban Renewal by Reviving a City’s Historic Brands

King Records symposium helps revive another Cincinnati brand

STEVEN ROSEN | MONDAY, MAY 05, 2008/ CINCINNATI SOAPBOX

Cincinnati is a city of fascinating legacies – unusual companies, traditions and neighborhoods that, in their heyday, helped the city develop and attract international attention. As interest in urban revival grows, there are ongoing efforts to not let them become part of a dead and forgotten past.
In recent times, such legacies as the city’s old breweries and beer gardens, Rookwood Pottery, streetcars, even historic Over-the-Rhine itself, have been targets for preservation and/or revival. Now, some music lovers are trying to call attention to King Records, a local post-World War II rhythm-and-blues and hard-edged country label that once flourished nationally and was a precursor to rock ‘n’ roll and its attendant pop culture.
Established in 1943 and reaching its peak with label artist James Brown’s mainstream-pop breakthrough in the 1960s, it lasted until the Evanston-based studio officially shuttered in 1971, after owner Sydney Nathan’s 1968 death and the company’s subsequent sale to out-of-town interests.
For other cities lucky enough to have once had record companies crucial to the birth of rock – like Memphis, Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans and Nashville – that legacy has come alive in recent years through new museums, festivals, nightclubs and music-oriented tourism.
King enthusiasts’ efforts to do something similar here get a boost from a Saturday afternoon symposium, “King Records: A Cincinnati Legacy,” in the Main Library’s Garden Lounge, 800 Vine St. At 1 p.m., a panel with special guests will discuss “The Early Years: Country and Bluegrass.” At 3 p.m., “The Later Years: R&B and the Blues” will be the topic. There also will be an accompanying display of some 65 photos.
The library event is in honor of the 65th anniversary of the founding of the feisty record company, whose first release was by country singer (and, later, “Hee Haw” star) Grandpa Jones. The photo display will stay up in the library’s Cincinnati Room, along with old album jackets and sheet music, through the summer.
“King really says something about this city,” says Brian Powers, the librarian who organized the event. “In its studio, everybody from the (bluegrass) Stanley Brothers to James Brown recorded. King did everything; it was versatile and eclectic. To me, King is a great part of music history. But I don’t think a lot of people know about it.”
Urban legacies in general are important to the new influx of urban dwellers – young people and empty nesters looking for openness in arts and culture coupled with a colorful history and a pedestrian-oriented lifestyle. Wanting authenticity as well as quality, they seek apartments in rehabbed office and factory buildings and historic neighborhoods. They want a distinctive metropolitan experience – not stodgy or frozen in time, but with strong roots and a sense of place.
And they want to reverse the damage done to cities by the post-World War II urban renewal movement, which tried to make them all look the same – temples to modernism built around high-rises, freeways and parking. In short, they want warmth – which a good city, like a great song, needs to exude.
“For a city to understand its authenticity is of great value,” says Tom Murphy, a senior resident fellow for Urban Land Institute and mayor of Pittsburgh from 1994-2005. “As mayor, I felt like my task was to tear down everything from the 1950s and 1960s, when the underlying theory of cities was that they were built around the automobile. That’s the antithesis of what people now look for in cities.”
Along with a renewed civic investment in the city core is a more grass-roots effort to revive interest in some of the city’s forgotten “brands.” Cincinnati recently has seen renewed interest in the Christian Moerlein Brewing Company, an important part of its once-flourishing German brewing industry, which operated from 1853 to Prohibition. Moerlein had a national and even international following, being the first American beer to pass Germany’s 1516 Purity Law.
Though originally revived as a brand in 1981 by then-active Hudepohl Brewing Co., Moerlein has had stops and starts until local entrepreneur Greg Hardman bought it in 2004 and started marketing the label as a craft beer. (He has plans to brew it here, eventually.) He has since acquired the names of such old Cincinnati breweries as Burger, Hudepohl, Windish-Mulhauser and John Hauck.
“You can take the old and bring it into the present in a way that makes it relevant to today,” Hardman says. “Christian Moerlein is an iconic name.”
In another revival of a Cincinnati legacy, Christopher Rose in 2006 acquired the assets and trademark rights for Rookwood Pottery Co., which was established in 1880 and won international awards for its art and architectural ceramics. It went bankrupt in 1941. He has started up the kilns again and plans to locate near Findlay Market.
Jim Tarbell, the former city councilman long active in preservation efforts, sees all of what’s happening as a way for the city to brand itself by saving what’s extraordinary from its past. “The reclaiming of our heritage as an instrument for our future growth is so appropriate,” he says. “And it’s happening here.”
King Records has increasingly been making it into discussions of roots-music lovers and record collectors, especially since its founder Nathan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (as a non-performer) in 1997. It was home not only to the late Brown – the Godfather of Soul – but also many other earlier African-American artists and their now classic blues and rhythm-and-blues songs. Wynonie Harris, Bull Moose Jackson, Billy Ward & His Dominoes, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters all often get cited as key precursors of rock ‘n’ roll. Ballard also recorded the original version of “The Twist.”
In addition, King’s early country artists included Moon Mullican, a Rockabilly Hall of Fame member known as King of the Hillbilly Piano Players, as well as Charlie Feathers, Reno and Smiley, and honky tonk singer Cowboy Copas.
The extent to which King’s legacy can be revived and celebrated by Cincinnatians –is difficult to ascertain. One reason is that it had a slightly disreputable, underground reputation in its time. But it also never created a recognizable King Sound or Cincinnati Sound the way other celebrated labels did. King historians say label owner Nathan was more businessman than music visionary. He wanted to sell hit singles, however and whatever. He originally owned a downtown record store and – like a record store – was a generalist in his tastes.
“He would throw it against the wall and see what happened,” explains Darren Blase, co-owner of Northside’s Shake It Records and a King historian, about Nathan’s aesthetic.
But Nathan had great strengths nevertheless. Unlike most other independent labels, King was an all-in-one operation – artists could record at an on-site studio; their records could be pressed and shipped from an on-site record plant. That gave King a leg up in sales and served as a model for the record industry.
Blase recalls: “I talked with musician Bill Doggett (1956’s instrumental “Honky Tonk,” King’s first major pop hit) once, and he told of recording a single at King on Friday and going into a record store in Chicago on Monday and finding it there. Nobody else could do that – nobody could beat King business-wise. Syd Nathan was a revolutionary.”
Blase compares King to another Cincinnati legacy – one that has never gone out of style. “It should be right up there in respect with Procter & Gamble,” he says.
Steve Rosen is a Cincinnati-based freelance writer who serves as CityBeat‘s Contributing Visual Arts Editor and is a frequent contributor to The Enquirer. His writing also appears in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Denver Post, Dallas Morning News, Boston Globe, Variety, IndieWire.com, Western Art & Architecture, Paste and other publications and websites.

CONTACT STEVEN ROSEN: srosenone@aol.com

Danny Adler’s ‘Last Session on Brewster’ closes a King Records story

BY STEVEN ROSEN / CINCINNATI ENQUIRER / May 18, 2015

(Photo: Photo is by Dan Peabody. Danny Adler, left, with Charlie Watts)

 

Danny Adler has rewritten Cincinnati music history. The native-Cincinnati musician secretly made a new recording in the long-defunct King Records studio, where so many classic R&B and C&W tracks were cut.

By his account, it was like Indiana Jones entering a dark, forbidding, sacrosanct tomb – armed with an acoustic guitar.

Forty-one years after King in 1971 shut down its Brewster Avenue operations in Evanston, following the 1968 death of founder Syd Nathan, Adler brought it back to life for at least a few hours. He wanted to be the man who recorded the Last Session on Brewster.

He had an assistant, audio and video engineer/producer Bill Gwynne, who was running LED spotlights, two cameras and portable sound equipment through a four-channel mixer connected by cable to his car’s cigarette lighter.

Adler got in by finding a key for the attached lock. He took care to find the exact place in the building, which housed several King operations, where the studio was. There, he and Gwynne erected a standing platform of old linoleum pieces, railroad ties and fallen acoustic tile so Adler could keep his feet out of water while playing.

This was on an afternoon in October 2012. “This is probably, unfortunately, the last recording in King studios,” Adler spoke into the microphone, his voice carrying a slight echo: “I’m standing in what’s left of the old King studios in Cincinnati, Ohio.”

He covered several R&B classics released by King in its 1940s-1960s heyday: Charles Brown’s “Please Come Home for Christmas,” the “5” Royales’ “Say It,” James Brown’s “Cold Sweat,” and Lonnie Johnson’s “Tomorrow Night.”

He had a little trouble keeping the guitar in tune, but his playing was supple and bluesy, as it has been throughout a long and generally underappreciated career that has seen him work with many greats of blues, R&B and rock ‘n’ roll. And while his 66-year-old voice was not youthful, it was respectful and warm.

He also recorded one song not familiar to any King aficionado other than himself – “Smile at the Sundial,” which he wrote and auditioned at King back in 1968. He has loved that record company’s R&B, blues and funk – and wanted to play music like it – since he was a teenager.

Working on his own, and splitting his time between recording here and being a Michigan-based train engineer, it took Adler quite awhile to edit and prepare “Last Session on Brewster: Trespassin’ at King Records Studio” for commercial release.

But it became available earlier this year as a combined 30-minute DVD of that session and a 78-minute CD of its audio combined with 13 other Cincinnati-related songs recorded live or in the studio between 1977 and last year. Digital copies are at iTunes; physical ones via www.cdbaby.com or at Shake It and Everybody’s Records.

It has had a special screening sponsored by Cincinnati USA Music Heritage Foundation, and that non-profit organization cited Adler’s quest this month when it and the Bootsy Collins Foundation asked the city’s Historic Conservation Office to recognize the King complex.

(The building housing the old studio is owned by Dynamic Industries, which did not return calls.)

Growing up on Red Bud Avenue in Avondale in the 1950s and 1960s, the son of Thomas and Emily Adler, Adler developed two great loves – popular music and trains.

As a youth, Adler took to guitar, rock ‘n’ roll and the African-American roots music that inspired the latter. And in 1963, a family friend invited him to visit the King studio. “I said I would definitely like that because when I listened to records, I’d close my eyes and wonder what it looked like where they were playing,” Adler recalled in an interview.

He was writing songs and practicing guitar, and around 1965 he started to play with much older Cincinnati blues veterans in clubs. That was in the summers – because he placed music over academics, his parents had to send him to a boarding school in Massachusetts so he could graduate high school.

At the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s, Adler played music in the Bay Area and was briefly part of a New York-based rock band called Elephant’s Memory.

With nothing much happening, he went to England and found work as a session guitarist. It was through those connections that he formed a groove-oriented band called Roogalator primarily with British musicians in 1972. The band lucked into one of those new pop-music trends that perennially sweep Great Britain – pub-rock.

Roogalator became a favorite of John Peel, an influential announcer on BBC Radio 1, and recorded some live sessions with him. That in turn led to a 1976 single – “All Aboard/Cincinnati Fatback” – on Stiff Records, the upstart label that was eventually to have such famous acts as Elvis Costello, Ian Dury and the Blockheads and Nick Lowe.

Roogalator’s contribution came early – it was just Stiff’s third single – and pub rock ultimately didn’t make the impression that Stiff’s later punk and New Wave records did. But it still earned a devoted following – “Cincinnati Fatback” was a funky, rollicking, good-naturedly randy tribute to his hometown.

“ ‘Cincinnati Fatback’ and ‘All Aboard’ were our flag-wavers,” Adler said. “The record’s always been popular – it’s sold about 100,000 plus, more than anything else I’ve ever done.”

Adler went on to spend the better part of the 1970s and 1980s in England and Europe, recording with his own Danny Adler Band and Rocket 88, a blues-revivalist band with Charlie Watts and Ian Stewart of the Rolling Stones. He created a mini-scandal by posing as an old-time blues veteran, Otis Elevator Gilmore. And he also learned to be a fireman on steam locomotives, which opened up a new career for him when he returned to the States for good in 1990.

Adler in 2006 he started making his archival recordings available through iTunes. Besides Last Session, there’s another new recording, Danny Adler 2014, also sold in hard copy at CD Baby and the two local record stores. More are coming. “Once I got rolling, I was inspired to start writing and recording new stuff,” Adler said.

Classic Christmas Song Has Mysterious Local Roots

Christmas song has mysterious local roots

BY STEVEN ROSEN / CINCINNATI ENQUIRER / Dec. 18, 2014

(Photo: Provided/Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archives)

 

A year doesn’t go by without a new recording of “Please Come Home for Christmas,” that melodically stately, melancholy ballad about not wanting to spend the holidays alone.

This year, there are at least two new versions – by country singer Darius Rucker and alternative rockers Landlady (with guest vocalist Amelia Meath). They join the impressive likes of the Eagles, Bon Jovi, Willie Nelson, James Brown and others in making the song well known.

But what’s not so well known is that the original version was recorded in 1960 at Evanston’s King Records studio by Charles Brown, an African-American blues musician known for his jazz-influenced piano playing and his genteel and politely forlorn vocal style.

Brown came and went from Cincinnati with little fanfare. And, as he claimed in interviews before he died in 1999 at age 76, he may have been held here against his will by a kingpin of Northern Kentucky’s famous illegal-gambling operations, the late Frank “Screw” Andrews (Andriola). Andrews ran several gambling clubs along Newport’s Central Avenue, at least some of which welcomed African-American customers. Some of Brown’s predicament seems to have seeped into the emotions of his Christmas song.

 

Brown had once been a star to black audiences, but by 1959-1961, his Cincinnati years, he was down and out. In the 1940s, as the pianist/singer for a Los Angeles trio called Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, the Texas-born Brown had several huge hits with the trio in “Merry Christmas Baby” and “Drifting Blues.” On his own in the early 1950s, he had many other national rhythm-and-blues smashes, including “Black Night” and “Trouble Blues.”

But after the hits and cash flow stopped, Brown had a weakness that may have made him an easy mark in Newport. He needed money to bet on horses, according to Danny Caron, the musician who befriended Brown in the late 1980s and helped him launch a late-in-life return to popularity that also saw Brown inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

“It was easy for Charles to get indebted,” Caron said in an interview. “He could go through thousands of dollars a day. You gave Charles Brown a thousand dollars and it was gone in an hour. He didn’t have enough money ever to gamble. That makes it very easy for him to get indebted.”

In an interview for the Denver Post with this writer in 1990, before he was set to open for Bonnie Raitt as part of his comeback, Brown recalled his Cincinnati/Newport days and how he got an employment offer from Andrews. “Mr. Screw was crazy about me. When he picked me up and wanted me to come there and stay and join the music department, he paid me $750 a week. Anybody I wanted to bring in, I could.”

Brown was Andrews’ house pianist. And one artist Brown brought to town to work with him was close friend Amos Milburn, another seemingly past-his-prime blues pianist and singer (“One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer,” “Chicken Shack Boogie”).

In 1960, word of Brown’s presence in town reached Syd Nathan of King Records. In the 1990 interview, Brown recalled that Nathan asked him, “‘Could you write something as good as ‘Merry Christmas Baby?’ I said, ‘I don’t know how good it will be, but I’ll write.’ He said, ‘You and Amos go write one apiece and let me hear what you done.’ When we brought it to Syd Nathan he fell in love with mine.” Milburn’s “Christmas Comes But Once a Year” ended up as the B-side of Brown’s King single.

“Please Come Home’s” opening was a memorable chiming-bell sound. Philip Paul, who played drums on the record, said that was a gong played by Gene Redd, a King Records musician. “I think that made the recording,” Paul said.

The song became Brown’s first hit record in eight years and reached No. 21 on Billboard’s Top Rhythm & Blues Singles chart. Brown subsequently recorded other singles and even an album of Christmas songs for Nathan, but never had another hit. While Brown claimed he wrote “Please Come Home” alone, the credits listed Redd as co-writer.

Brown told Living Blues magazine in a 1994 interview that in Cincinnati he married an older white woman with children named Eva McGhee, who owned “one of the finest garages in Cincinnati.” He characterized it as a “a friendly marriage – it wasn’t really love.” Brown’s 1999 obituary said he was twice divorced and left no family. (Some who knew Brown say he was gay.)

But he also told of wanting to leave town and being threatened by Andrews. He finally escaped, Brown recounted, when federal Internal Revenue Service agents launched a devastating raid on Andrews’ Sportsman’s Club at 333 Central Ave. on Aug. 22, 1961. The raid was part of the new Kennedy administration’s crackdown, and made headlines for days when it happened.

Fortunately for Brown, one “customer” may have helped him escape both Andrews and the federal bust. He was an African-American undercover IRS agent who infiltrated the place before the raid.

In his memoir “Three of the First,” Hilton Owens Sr. (who died in 2007) recalled, “I struck up an acquaintance with well-known ballad singer Charles Brown who was famous almost everywhere, except at the Sportsman’s Club, where he was merely a fill-in during intermission for the main entertainer. … Brown never discussed why he was trapped in the Sportsman’s Club, and I did not pry.”

In his 1990 interview, Brown recounted those events. “That night we were playing there, this black guy came and asked, ‘Mr. Brown, would it took you and Amos long to get out of there?'”

Brown’s path after that is unclear. Accounts say he went to Los Angeles, but a 2004 CD collection called The Very Best of Charles Brown: Original King Recordings shows he recorded again for King on Oct. 9, 1961, and off and on until 1968 while also recording elsewhere. A booklet accompanying another CD says he lived in Cincinnati awhile in the late 1960s, too.

The 1960s and 1970s were decades of struggle and obscurity for Brown. But his one towering accomplishment was “Please Come Home.” It becomes more appreciated with each passing Christmas.

(Brian Powers of Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County helped with the research.)

CONTACT STEVEN ROSEN: srosenone@aol.com