OLD SCHOOL RECORD MEN

Dave Clark and Joe Medlin lived blues, jazz & soul and got it played on the radio

Last Friday in Los Angeles I was one of nine honorees of the Living Legends Foundation, an organization that recognizes music industry vets, provides financial support in times of need, and gives scholarships and internships to young people. In my acceptance speech I gave props to two men, both in the inaugural class of LLF honorees back in 1992. I spoke briefly about the late Joe Medlin and Dave Clark at the event , but wanted to give these music biz OGs a more formal shout outs. It may be the 50th anniversary of hip hop, but the blues and jazz that animated the careers of Medlin and Clark are the foundation of all American music, including today’s beats and rhymes.

I came to know Joe Medlin and Dave Clark, two of the legendary r&b record men, in the lobby of a hotel in Century City in (I believe) 1982 or ‘83. Medlin was a large shouldered, intimidating man who, in the ‘80s, still dressed like a film noir character — wide brimmed fedora, large suits with a cigarette or a cigar in his hand. (I actually have no recollection of Medlin’s hair since his fedora seemed ever present.) His smooth, low tenor voice had graced bandstands as a big band singer for the Buddy Johnson Orchestra and later with doo top groups like the Ravens. He’d even enjoyed a minor hit with the sentimental ballad “I Kneel at Your Throne” in 1959. By the time I met him Medlin’s once voice sounded like gravel, sanded hard by long nights of smoking and alcohol. It was a voice that commanded attention and, if so inclined, fear. I’d hear rumors that Medlin could be, in old school slang, “a heavy cat,” but he was always cool with me. In the movie of his life Danny Glover in his devious To Sleep With Anger mode would play Medlin.

JOE MEDLIN AS BIG BAND BALLAD SINGER

In that same vein I can’t tell you what the top of Dave Clark’s head looked like since he usually wore either a straw fedora or a Kangol cap. Unlike Medlin, Clark’s wardrobe had adapted to the times. Boney and so slight a strong breeze could have sent him tumbling, Clark regularly wore silk shirts (often three buttons open with white chest hair showing), multiple thin gold chains, leather pants and Bally shoes. Without fail these fashion choices were colored coordinated (beige, white, brown), not just with each piece of clothing, but sometimes with his Cadillac, a vehicle he was proud to tell you which he replaced every year. If Clark’s style didn’t catch your eye his voice would: a wry, high pitched whisper that rose up to falsetto when excited. In the movie of Dave Clark’s life Spike Lee circa Malcolm X would play Clark minus the zoot suit and plus leather pants.

DAVE CLARK AT MALACO RECORDS

My introduction to Clark occurred at a panel on record censorship in 1985. He stood up a panel in his suede ensemble and began, “I’ve had more records censored than anybody in the world,” which made many of the younger people in the audience, including myself, go “Who is this old dude?”

“I can remember when there was no radio stations. We were doing on business on jukeboxes. In the black neighborhoods the top record was ‘There’s a Mean Black Snake Sucking on my Baby’s Tongue.’ Cross the tracks uptown they was singing ‘My Blue Heaven.’ Downtown they didn’t care about ‘My Blue Heaven.’ ‘Uptown they didn’t care about ‘Mean Black Snake.’ So something happened. I think it began with urban renewal. See when they moved the neighborhood there and they started hearing that black music coming from next door, there come censorship.

“Before they didn’t care about what you sang and what you do. But when you moved next door, brother they began hollering, but here’s the thing: we gotta keep on writing. I’m gonna write what I wanna write. Put me in jail. I been to jail. They put me in jail. They put me in jail in Mississippi for writing a song a long time ago about Bilbo [Theodore Bilbo served as a Senator from Mississippi from 1935 to his death in ’47.] Bilbo was a racist. I wrote a song called ‘I Believe I’ll Go Back Home (Because Bilbo Is Dead).’ Sheriff heard that song and put me in jail. Gave me 48 hours to get out there and I got of there too.” He paused and then added, “But I went back. So just keep on writing and let them keep on hollering.”  

As Clark’s story suggest his history in black music was long and deep. He’d been a band member, songwriter, record producer and, most famously within the industry, a promotion man. He was born in Jackson, Tennessee around 1910 (he was always cagey about his age) and reared in Chicago by a railroad man father who played guitar and a devout mother who sang in the church choir. He took to music early, learning drums, trombone, saxophone and earning a scholarship to Lane College in Tennessee. His first involvement with radio came when the Lane school band performed evening’s on a local station.

“That’s how black radio got started,” he told back in 1986. “It was local black groups performing live for brief periods during the day or evening on white stations. You’d have them selling pork chops, chitlins, second hand furniture and patent medicine, which was supposed to cure everything from a head ache to an ulcer. They sold thousands of bottles of that stuff.” Upon graduation in ’34 he talked his way into a column with Down Beat magazine, becoming the jazz journal’s first black columnist. He claimed that his obituary of jazz pioneer King Oliver was the first time the seminal trumpeter-bandleader’s name ever appeared in print.

In 1938 he landed a spot in Jimmy Lunceford’s legendary big band as a “utility man” (a musician who could play brass or reeds) before he became an advance man for Lunceford, putting flyers on telephone poles and getting records in juke boxes before the band reached a city. “This was before there was really any black radio,” he told me. “So this was the only way to expose your music. In fact, when the jukebox operators began putting them in every little joint in the city, it sparked the recording of more black acts, because if the boxes didn’t have good swing or blues, blacks wouldn’t play them. Since it took so long for music to travel across the country, a hot record could be big for a year or two.”

Eventually Clark ended up working for a number of booking agencies that worked with black talent such as ABC Booking owned by Joe Glaser. “I dealt basically with the boxes and black newspapers,” he remembered. “The black newspaper was very important to the growth of black music because they were the only ones who wrote about the records and interviewed the artist. Papers like the Chicago Defender, New York Age, the Amsterdam News, the Pittsburgh Courier and the Cleveland Call & Dispatch made my job easier.” For a while in the ‘50s Clark, working on his musical background Clark worked as a staff producer at Houston based Duke/Peacock records for Don Robey (who we’ll meet shortly too).

From 1940 to 1954 Clark traveled by Cadillac and Greyhound bus around the country, hawking records by a slew of emerging blues and rhythm & blues labels (Savoy, Apollo, King, United, Atlantic, Chess) as black oriented radio stations began popping up, all of them headlined by fast talking “personality jocks” with names like Jockey Jack, Poppa Stoppa, Dr. Jive, Butterball and Jocko. “They had great rapport with their audience and had good ears for music,” he said. “They played what they liked and weren’t puppets as they are now. They all had a special style of talk and if they didn’t, they couldn’t get on the air. When I hear these kids rap now I just say it isn’t anything new.”  

“Unless you were a top jock, you’re making no money,” he said of why payola was necessary. “Hadn’t been for payola they (the black DJs) couldn’t have survived. We wanted to help the people who reached the audience and knew the music. This wasn’t evil. They knew how to collect from and who not too… Some of the deejays were so big and strong they commanded a whole lot of money. Guys could get as much as $1000 or more for playing one record. Some jocks who were important but not earning much, you might give a little something every week, almost like a salary. Not just to play any particular record but to alert you to new talent, let you know how your records were doing in the area, and listen to advances to let you know if a record was worth pushing. It was like an investment.”

But this on-air clout didn’t translate into large salaries. Fifty dollars for broadcasting six to seven days a week, air shifts that were six hours long or more, was good money. Unions were a dirty word. There were no contracts, no insurance, and little opportunity for promotion into management at station’s that were overwhelmingly white owned into the ‘70s. Deejays were told regularly by white management that the black janitor could be brought into the studio at a moment’s notice. They were expected to solicit their own advertising, which management got 90 percent of, thus encouraging these deejays to be as much hustlers as rappers. A lot of them earned their keep hosting local dances.

Medlin, Clark and their promo peers were part of a generation of traveling salesmen that existed before malls and shopping centers spread across the land. They were black versions of the men who populated Arthur Miller’s classic Death of a Salesman, Barry Levinson’s movie Tin Men and myriad works by David Mamet. Instead of house hold appliances or insurance policies, they carried crates of vinyl across the U.S.A.

“Dave Clark was never a militant man, but he was not a pussy either,” 1940s black DJ ‘Jockey’ Jack Gibson told me. “He wore a tie at all times. Said he was always on the gig. A low key guy. Not flashy or into bullshit. He was all business. Methodical. If a deejay told him to wait Dave Clark would sit there five hours until the guy had the time to listen to his record. If a guy talked back to Dave Clark, he’d wait and say ‘The wheel go round’ and usually it did. Dave Clark could wait out anybody.”

“Was payola as dominant in black radio in the ‘50s and ‘60s as some say?” I asked Clark one day in Atlana. Medlin sat across the table, amused by my question and by what his comrade would say.

“Well,” he said with a chuckle, “I guess the statute of limitations has run out. Payola was very dominant.”

“Sounds expensive.”

“Well it depended on who it was. Some of the deejays were so big and so strong they commanded a whole lot of money. Guys could get as much as $1000 or more for one record.”

“Was payola considered an investment like posters or parties?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, “it was an investment. You had some disc jockeys you were paying something each week. It was almost like a salary. It was always expensive. We paid a lot of money on Johnny Ace’s ‘Pledging My Love’ [a 1955 hit on Duke records]. We paid black payola and white payola. Only difference is that white payola cost more money.”

When I asked Clark how the money was transferred, he switched from “we” to “they.” As in, “They had ways to them. They always had sense enough to know how to do it so as not to be directly involved. They may go someplace and lay some money under a brick and tell them to go pick up that brick. You pick up the brick and whatever is under there ain’t none of anybody’s fault. The owners didn’t know anything about it. Not gonna pay no owner. We wanted the men who reached the audience and knew the music. This wasn’t evil. They were human beings, man. They knew who to collect from and who not to. They collected from the folks that made the money. Some people they didn’t make anything off because they had nothing to give them.”

Money wasn’t Clark and Medlin’s only tool. Plane tickets, groceries and even shoes were often part of the bargain. But these exchanges didn’t always go smoothly. The story is told of a deejay who, in response Clark’s desire for airplay, suggested he could use a new pair of shoes. Clark got him the shoes, but the deejay didn’t play the requested record. One night Clark went up the station and found the deejay asleep in the studio with his feet up on the control board with the new shoes were on his feet. Clark found some lighter fluid, poured them on the shoes and lit them up. Clark reportedly told him, “I hope you’ll play my records now.”

In the lobby Los Angeles’ Century Plaza Hotel or at a restaurant in midtown Manhattan or at an awards show after party, I’d sit with Clark, Medlin and some of their equally venerable pals — mostly men but quite a few women as well. (I remember Joyce Moore, close friend of Jackie Wilson and the wife of Sam Moore of the vocal duo Sam & Dave, often hanging with us.) These folks schooled me on everything from the ways of traveling the Jim Crow South with a car full of vinyl to the relationship between Jews and blacks in the recording industry to the role of black radio DJs in aiding the Civil Rights Movement.

As the black pop music of the ‘80s became more synthesizer assisted and radio playlists came under the total control of program directors, Clark and Medlin were viewed as relics by the new generation of record people, most of whom worked for corporate record labels or big city urban radio stations. Both men ended their careers associated with niche indie labels: Clark for the blues label Malaco out of Jackson, Mississippi, and Medlin for the R&B company Spring (who would release the Fatback Band’s “King Time III (Personality Jock)” in March 1979.) In many ways the rough and tumble attitude of these older promo men would have more in common with the hip hop generation who would come into power in the ‘90s than the major label staffers of the ‘80s. Both Dave Clark and Joe Medlim are dead now, along with most of their peers, and I miss their spirit.

After I spoke at the LLF event, a middle aged record executive came over to share his memory of Medlin. He said, “Joe used to let me in the room when he and other older cats would chop it up. One day Joe turned to me and said, ‘Do you know why we let you hang around?’ I didn’t know. He said ‘Because you know enough to sit there and shut up.’ I thank him for the education every day.” Me too.