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14 chapter Tin Pan Alley and Beyond Cast of Characters Irv Lichtman, Cash Box and Billboard Gene Goodman, Regent-Arc-Conrad Music Freddy Bienstock, Hill & Range Music and Bigtop Records Johnny Bienstock, Bigtop Records also featuring Julian and Jean Aberbach, Hill & Range Music It is easy to understand a favorite refrain of the music publishing fraternity: “There is nothing better than earning a fortune while you sleep—like from a good song.” By the mid-1950s, the music publishers’ cozy world of sheet music sales, song plugging, and royalty collections was under threat from the new order being created by the lively independent labels. The ongoing trench warfare between upstart BMI and blue-blooded ASCAP, which in a sense climaxed in the congressional payola hearings, was evidence of that battle. Was the answer to fight rock ’n’ roll or to join the revolution? “Of course, the established publishers were certainly very dismissive of early rock ’n’ roll,” said Irv Lichtman of Cash Box and Billboard, with a chuckle. They would say, “It’s junk, nincompoop music.” The smaller publishers that picked up these copyrights, some of them were just not out there in the hinterlands, like Don Kirshner, Al Nevins, and many others who were creating a stable of great rock ’n’ roll writers that were dismissed by the great old-time music publishers like Chappell Music, Warner Brothers, Harms, E. B. Marks, Shapiro Bernstein, and Bourne Music. Remember, in 1955 through 1960, you still had a tremendous carryover of people: executives, owners, even promotion people who went back to the 1930s. If you were twenty years old i-xvi_1-592_Brov.indd 254 11/19/09 10:44:39 AM tin pan alley and beyond 255 and got into the business in 1930, in 1955 you were only forty-five. You may be running the firm at the time; you weren’t old. And they were totally dismissive. Another group that was totally dismissive was ASCAP. BMI was picking up on the country and blues area and got its feet wet in the music that would be the mainstream music fifteen to twenty-five years later. As the music gained traction, the millionsellers became more commonplace than not. That was unheard of in the era they came from. You had to go along with the trends. If you look up the album charts in ’55, what are you going to see? Sound tracks, Broadway, Perry Como, and Frank Sinatra . . . they were going great guns. That was the mainstream music, even though rock ’n’ roll was making tremendous inroads. I think the old-school publishers didn’t understand aesthetically what the [new] music meant. They were more in tune with what they thought it was. Publishing support, for the most part, consisted of a cadre of often colorful song pluggers, who later were known as professional managers. But it was a lessening of the great standards of old Tin Pin Alley and Broadway, both the lyrics and music. It just broke it apart. Yes, revolution is a good word; it was a revolution. But don’t put [the old-style publishers] down too much. Gene Goodman, Music Publisher: Regent-Arc-Conrad Music Among the earliest music publishers to home in on the potential bounties offered by the independent labels were Gene and Harry Goodman at Regent Music. The Goodman brothers were independents in their business as well but had the inestimable good fortune of being the siblings of Benny, who was the Elvis Presley of his day to the jitterbuggers in the swing band era of the 1930s. The coup de grace for Gene and Harry was to secure the joint publishing rights to the Chess catalog in 1953. This GoodmanChess family relationship has endured for more than half a century. Thanks to Arc Music executive Kenneth Higney, I was able to meet Gene Goodman in 2004. An imposing man with something of an air of former secretary of state Henry Kissinger about him, Mr. Goodman was living with wife, Gloria, at their Huntington summer home on the desirable waterfront overlooking Long Island Sound. Then in his late eighties, he was still driving a car and taking thirty-minute daily strolls to keep fit; in between times, he would digest the stock market reports on CNBC-TV. After summer, the Goodmans would retreat to their Manhattan apartment prior to spending the winter as “snowbirds” in sunny Naples, Florida. These were the trappings of the rich and famous, yet Goodman came from an impoverished...

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