Sad news concerning Jerry Wexler.

[Harold_Z]

I've heard from a reliable source that Jerry Wexler had Hospice with him for a couple

weeks and that they are turning off all life support today.

[ValerieB]

it seems that every week, another legend/giant is leaving us. sometimes more than one. this is an especially difficult time for people of a certain age who grew up with these people.

[Alexander]

At least he, Ahmet and Ray will all be together again. They can lay down some new tracks...

[Christiern]

During the intermission at the MJQ's first farewell concert, Jerry took me aside and suggested that we "soon" get together at his place and listen to Lester Young, who, he added, represented the music he really likes. It never happened, but I thought his choice of listening material was a good one.

Sad to hear that he is leaving us this way.

[Dan Gould]

At least he, Ahmet and Ray will all be together again. They can lay down some new tracks...

Alex has changed his view of the afterlife?

[Christiern]

Atheists don't go to heaven or hell. We go to Weehauken, NJ, which is also open to y'all.

[7/4]

Weehauken - that's how I sneak up on the Lincoln Tunnel.

.

[Alexander]

Atheists don't go to heaven or hell. We go to Weehauken, NJ, which is also open to y'all.

Maybe YOU go to Weehauken. I'm going to Englewood Cliffs!

[Alexander]

At least he, Ahmet and Ray will all be together again. They can lay down some new tracks...

Alex has changed his view of the afterlife?

It's an imaginary afterlife, but it's a nice afterlife to imagine.

[JSngry]

What, is Vermont full?

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I'm very sad indeed. Jerry Wexler was much more my man than Ahmet. Someone said Ahmet was always interested in great singers, great musicians, whereas Jerry was interested in representative singers and musicians. (Of course, sometimes they were the same people - Ray, Aretha, Joe Turner.) But it was Jerry's ideas and implementation that made me grow as I did.

MG

[J.A.W.]

Just heard on the news that Jerry Wexler died this morning.

Another sad day for music.

Edited August 15, 2008 by J.A.W.

[7/4]

August 16, 2008

Jerry Wexler, R&B Impresario, Is Dead at 91

By BRUCE WEBER

Jerry Wexler, who as a reporter for Billboard magazine in the late 1940s christened black popular music with the name rhythm and blues, and who as a record producer helped lead the genre to mainstream popularity, propelling the careers of Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin and other performers, died on Friday at his home in Sarasota, Fla. He was 91.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his son, Paul.

Mr. Wexler was already in his 30s when he entered the music business, but his impact was immediate and enduring. In 1987, the Rock and Hall of Fame recognized his contributions to American music by inducting him in only its second year of conferring such honors.

Mr. Wexler actually didn’t care for rock ’n’ roll, at least as it evolved in the 1960s and ’70s. Though he signed a British band called Led Zeppelin and eventually produced records by the likes of Bob Dylan, Carlos Santana, Dire Straits and George Michael, his main influence came in the 1950s and ’60s as a vice president of Atlantic Records, working largely with black artists who were forging a new musical style, which came to be called soul music, from elements of gospel, swing and blues.

“He played a major role in bringing black music to the masses, and in the evolution of rhythm and blues to soul music,” Jim Henke, vice president and chief curator for the Hall of Fame, said in an interview. “Beyond that, he really developed the role of the record producer. Jerry did a lot more than just turn on a tape recorder. He left his stamp on a lot of great music. He had a commercial ear as well as a critical ear.”

Mr. Wexler was something of a paradox. A businessman with tireless energy, a ruthless streak and a volatile temper, he was also a hopeless music fan. A New York Jew and a vehement atheist, he found his musical home in the Deep South, in studios in Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Ala., among Baptists and Methodists, blacks and good old boys.

“He was a bundle of contradictions,” said Tom Thurman, who produced and directed a documentary about Mr. Wexler in 2000. “He was incredibly abrasive and incredibly generous, very abrupt and very, very patient, seemingly a pure, sharklike businessman and also a cerebral and creative genius.”

The title of Mr. Thurman’s documentary, “Immaculate Funk,” was Mr. Wexler’s phrase for the Atlantic sound, characterized by a heavy backbeat and a gospel influence. “It’s funky, it’s deep, it’s very emotional, but it’s clean,” Mr. Wexler once said.

Though not a musician himself, Mr. Wexler had a natural rapport with musicians, who seemed to recognize his instinct for how best to employ their gifts. In 1950, while he was still at Billboard, he encountered the young singer Patti Page and hummed for her a 1947 song he liked, “The Tennessee Waltz.” Her subsequent recording of it sold three million copies in eight months.

A few years later he was a partner at Atlantic, presiding over the 1954 recording session of Ray Charles’s breakout hit, “I’ve Got a Woman.” He said later that the best thing he had done for Charles was to let him do as he pleased.

“He had an extraordinary insight into talent,” Charles, who died in 2004, said in “Immaculate Funk.”

Mr. Wexler wasn’t always a mere listener. In the mid-1960s, at a recording session with Wilson Pickett, Mr. Wexler wanted more of a backbeat in the song “In the Midnight Hour” but couldn’t explain in words what he wanted, so he illustrated it by doing a new dance, the jerk.

In the late 1960s and ’70s, he made 14 Atlantic albums with Ms. Franklin, whose musical instincts had been less than fully exploited at her previous label, Columbia. Mr. Wexler gave her more control over her songs and her sound, a blend of churchlike spirituality and raw sexuality, which can be heard in hits like “Respect,” “Dr. Feelgood” and “Chain of Fools.”

“How could he understand what was inside of black people like that?” Pickett asked in the documentary. “But Jerry Wexler did.”

Gerald Wexler was born in New York City on Jan. 10, 1917, and grew up in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan at a time before the building of the George Washington Bridge, when swimming in the Hudson River was a summer pastime.

His parents were mismatched. His father, Harry, was a Polish immigrant who spent his entire working life as a window washer. His headstrong mother, Elsa, had higher aspirations for herself and especially for Jerry, the older of her two sons: she wanted him to be writer.

Young Jerry didn’t care for school much, however; he frequented pool halls and record stores instead, and he went to Harlem jazz clubs at night. In 1936, as something of a last-ditch effort to straighten out her wayward son, Elsa Wexler enrolled him at Kansas State College of Agriculture and Applied Science (known today as Kansas State University) in Manhattan, Kan. There he first encountered a rural musical sensibility, and 100 or so miles away, in the lively musical scene of Kansas City, Mo., he could immerse himself in the blues.

Mr. Wexler left college after two years, joined the Army, served stateside during World War II, then returned to Kansas State and finished his degree. By 1949 he was back in New York, married and working as a cub reporter for Billboard. At the time the black popular-music charts in the magazine were gathered under the rubric Race Records.

“We used to close the book on a Friday and come back to work on a Tuesday,” Mr. Wexler recalled in an interview last fall with the Web site PopEntertainment.com. “One Friday the editor got us together and said, ‘Listen, let’s change this from Race Records.’ A lot of people were beginning to find it inappropriate. ‘Come back with some ideas on Tuesday.’

“There were four guys on the staff,” he continued. “One guy said this and one guy said that, and I said, ‘Rhythm and blues,’ and they said: ‘Oh, that sounds pretty good. Let’s do that.’ In the next issue, that section came out as Rhythm and Blues instead of Race.”

His work at Billboard attracted the attention of Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records, then a small independent label focusing on black music. When his partner, Herb Abramson, went into the Army, Mr. Ertegun asked Mr. Wexler to join the company in 1953.

Over the next decade Mr. Wexler’s drive, his sales and promotion skills, and, according to the business practices of the day, his indulging in payola — the bribery of disc jockeys to play a company’s records — helped make Atlantic a leader in the recording industry. In the 1950s the company produced records by the Drifters, the Clovers, Joe Turner, Ruth Brown and, in partnership with the songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the Coasters.

In the 1960s, however, Mr. Wexler and Mr. Ertegun began to take different paths. Mr. Ertegun gravitated toward rock ’n’ roll, while Mr. Wexler — though he signed Led Zeppelin to Atlantic — was drawn to the niche sounds he found in places like Memphis, where a small label, Stax Records, had gathered a mix of black and white musicians and produced a sound based on spontaneity and improvisation.

Mr. Wexler brought Otis Redding and Dusty Springfield, among others, to record at Stax’s studio, which was in an old movie palace. Later, after hearing a recording Percy Sledge had made at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, he began producing records there as well, bringing singers like Pickett and Ms. Franklin to work with local musicians.

In his autobiography, “Rhythm and the Blues” (Knopf, 1993), written with David Ritz, Mr. Wexler wrote candidly and self-critically about a personal life that he acknowledged had been intemperate, replete with adulterous liaisons and profligate drug use.

Mr. Wexler’s first two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his son, who lives in High Bridge, N.J., he is survived by his wife, Jean Arnold, and a daughter, Lisa Wexler of Kingston, N.Y. Another daughter, Anita, died of AIDS in 1989.

In the early 1970s Mr. Wexler helped resurrect the career of Willie Nelson with two albums for Atlantic, but he left the label in 1975. (It had been bought by Warner Brothers in 1967.) After the split he worked on his own, and in 1978 he produced Bob Dylan’s album “Saved,” a celebration of the singer’s embrace of Christianity, for Columbia. When Mr. Dylan accepted his first Grammy Award for best male rock vocal performance, for the song “Gotta Serve Somebody,” he first thanked God and then Jerry Wexler.

In the 1980s Mr. Wexler helped Linda Ronstadt with her career-changing album of Sinatraesque standards, “What’s New,” a project begun when she spent an afternoon with Mr. Wexler listening to records and for the first time heard the 1930s singer Mildred Bailey.

“When I said I wanted to sing like that, Jerry said the best way was to get a pianist and learn how those songs are done,” Ms. Ronstadt told The New York Times in 1983. She added, “One thing Jerry Wexler taught me was that if you’ve got a sexy or torchy song, you mustn’t attitudinize on top of it, because it sounds redundant.”

Given the chance, Mr. Wexler would have produced to the end and beyond.

“I asked him once,” said Mr. Thurman, the filmmaker, “ ‘What do you want written on your tombstone, Jerry?’ He said, ‘Two words: More bass.’ ”

Jerry Wexler, center, with Ahmet Ertegun and Big Joe Turner.

[danasgoodstuff]

Nice article, but there is at least one inaccuracy - Wexler may have brought Dusty to Memphis but it was to American, not Stax, studio. Probably the result of an editor simplifying a more complex exposition. I think the perfect ttribute to Mr wexler would be a Mosaic collecting all the recordings of the allstar band he cherry-picked from the Memphis and Muscle sholes guys and used behing aretha, King Curtis, Wilson Picket and Solomon Burke, the defining combo being Tommy Cogbill (Memphis) on bass and Roger hawkins (MS) on drums. This was really a quite different and better band than any of the regularly working studio crews from which it was drawn.

[mikeweil]

Oh, my ..... another giant gone. R.I.P., and thanks for putting Aretha back into the church, among many other great things.

[marcello]

“Rhythm and the Blues” is well worth picking up.

[Christiern]

I think you are wise to spew your hatred from behind a handle (poor Chauncey Morehose, he must have spun past China by now), but I wonder if you have made any effort to seek help.

[Bright Moments]

i liked Jerry. We first met when I took a picture of him snorting rails of coke backstage during a Willie Nelson show at the Austin Opera House in 1974; instead of being surprised or (S)angry, he offered me some and, it being the '70s, I said sure. Jerry tried and failed to fuck Marcia Ball that night also, not that it was first or last time he'd make such an effort. Was he ever sucessful? I am uncertain but... it's possible.

Those Dough Sahm sessions were very very wasted days and wasted nights, I can say that. In conclusion, for a record biz man, Jerry was almost a mensch but do not mistake him as any kind of altruist. He was less of a scumbag than Ahmet, probably more than Neshui wanted to be but he'd cut your balls off and shove them up your ass sideways if he thought he could get away with it.

The eternal hepcat schtick got a little old, as did Jerry, but he surely wore it much better than a phony prick Orrin Keepnews and he forsook, for the most part, the suave bullshit of Ahmet-- no wonder the equally wealthy, equally soulless at the end scumbag like Mick Jagger was such an admirer.

wtf??!!!

WHO IS THIS GUY?

[7/4]

Not who is this guy, but...yawn...more of the same old shit from ChaunceyMorehouse.

.

[Bright Moments]

DEEP is that you?

[Christiern]

I am no defender of record execs, and I have been very critical of some, but I don't hide my identity when I relate uncomfortable truths. That, I think, is not only cowardly but it also invalidates the finger-pointing.

No, BM, "Morehouse" is not DEEP, although that is the name of a drummer from Chambersburg, PA, and Danny would be very familiar with him. I don't know who this guy us, but he clearly has a problem—let us not make it ours.

[medjuck]

i liked Jerry. We first met when I took a picture of him snorting rails of coke backstage during a Willie Nelson show at the Austin Opera House in 1974; instead of being surprised or (S)angry, he offered me some and, it being the '70s, I said sure. Jerry tried and failed to fuck Marcia Ball that night also, not that it was first or last time he'd make such an effort. Was he ever sucessful? I am uncertain but... it's possible.

Those Dough Sahm sessions were very very wasted days and wasted nights, I can say that. In conclusion, for a record biz man, Jerry was almost a mensch but do not mistake him as any kind of altruist. He was less of a scumbag than Ahmet, probably more than Neshui wanted to be but he'd cut your balls off and shove them up your ass sideways if he thought he could get away with it.

The eternal hepcat schtick got a little old, as did Jerry, but he surely wore it much better than a phony prick Orrin Keepnews and he forsook, for the most part, the suave bullshit of Ahmet-- no wonder the equally wealthy, equally soulless at the end scumbag like Mick Jagger was such an admirer.

wtf??!!!

WHO IS THIS GUY?

Someone too chickenshit to give his real name.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

See, I don't think there's anything wrong with record company proprietors being shits - that's what they're there for.

Jerry changed my life, in changing the way I think about things. He's the most important person in my record collection, because almost none of it would be there but for Clyde McPhatter, Ray Charles and Ben E King.

Thanks is too small a word for this.

RIP

MG

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

why do people consider amhet a scumbag? i know nothing of the history of atlantic records, but everyone always seems to speak so highly of him-- what was their part of the music industry really like?

well ill be good god damned if that wasn't six million miles from what i would have thunk... ....what he was railin' hippo and trying to plank marcia ball?!?! so these guys still liked to party, even into the 1970s??

fill me in a little hear if you could be so kind, because i dont understand! lol

[Christiern]

I had many occasions to see and talk to Ahmed and while I felt a closer bond with Nesuhi, Ahmed was always courteous and helpful. Ask the anonymous creep who posted above to define "scumbag."