All about "The Green's" part one

Irvin Green of Palm Springs is still doing what he loves as he turns 90 years old today.



"I like to put something together and build it," he says at his modest office near the Palm Springs Police Department. "It's an interesting activity."


He's talking about the real estate development business. He built 52 beautiful homes in Rancho Mirage last year. He built 18,000 homes in Iran with the founder of Levittown, Pa., before fleeing the country when the Shah of Iran was deposed.


He still goes on weekly site inspections with his project foreman to his Landau homes in Cathedral City.


But history may say Green's greatest construction project was the recording industry, which he molded like multi-colored clay after World War II.


Green started Mercury Records in 1944. It was the fifth major label in the United States after RCA Victor, Columbia, Decca and Capitol. Most significantly, it was the first that didn't depend upon network radio play to promote its recordings. That meant it could have national hits with music the networks couldn't play: "Race records," as the industry pejoratively called the blues and black jazz, and "hillbilly music," as it deprecatingly called country and western songs.


"I think we were very instrumental in breaking down some of the color line," Green said in another interview in the 1936, multi-level, Mideast-flavored home he's owned since the '70s. "We had no color line. Artists like Dinah Washington or the Platters or Clyde McPhatter, we had no color restrictions of any kind."


The Pacific Southwest region of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences will honor Green for his multiracial promotion of musicians April 23 in a ceremony at the La Quinta Resort, it was announced Friday at a birthday party for Green at the Palm Springs Tennis Club.


Board member Robin Montgomery said he will be inducted into its Gold Circle, recognizing 50 years of service to television.


http://gcirm.thedesertsun.com/RealMedia/ads/click_lx.ads/entertainment.thedesertsun.com/clubs/story.html/378714838/300x250_1/OasDefault/GCI_USAT_Doyles_060601_300x250/image004.gif/34373864623032613434383739343430FPRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=" http://gcirm.thedesertsun.com/RealMedia/ads/click_lx.ads/entertainment.thedesertsun.com/clubs/story.html/378714838/300x250_1/OasDefault/GCI_USAT_Doyles_060601_300x250/image004.gif/34373864623032613434383739343430Green didn't serve 50 years in the TV industry, but Montgomery said he convinced his friend, Ed Sullivan, to present jazz and blues on his early "Toast of the Town" variety series, and arranged for his recording star Frankie Laine to become the first white performer to sing with an African American host of a national TV show, Nat King Cole, in 1957.


"In Irv's case, an exception was made as he has never been lauded for the emancipation of African-American musicians onto television," she said.


'Love at first sight'


Recording legend Quincy Jones said Green broke racial barriers with him, too. They met while Jones was arranging songs for Mercury recording artist Dinah Washington.


"It was like love at first sight at a Dinah Washington session," he said in a telephone interview from his Los Angeles home. "That was in the '50s. Later on, I became an artist on the label and in the South of France, we hooked up and started to hang out. It just grew and grew and grew. We started to travel together.


"What he did was show me there's a music business. When I first met Irvin, I said, 'We're going to stay in Europe and we're going to make it because the music is good.' I used to get in trouble with the business side, and he said, 'It's called a music business. I'm going to see to it that you understand all sides.'"


"He said, 'I'll make you to the point where you never fear the corporations again in your life.' And not many people tell young black musicians that. In New York at that time, it was exploitation all the way. Irvin was like my big brother."


Jones said one of Green's many accomplishments was buying the Chappel music publishing catalog for $42 million in 1962 and selling it 12 years later for $110 million.


"It's worth about a half-billion dollars now," Jones said. "He had magazine publishing, too, with Liberty. It's ironic because I ended up being the founder of Vibe magazine. There are just a few people who will teach you what that's about."


But Green said a secret to his success at Mercury was not publishing his artists' music.


"I said, 'I want to stay in the recording business. Let them have their own publishing,'" said Green. "A lot of times the artist got screwed anyway, but not by me. That's what brought some artists to us, I think. They knew we weren't in any side business. That travels in the industry quite quick. I did not publish any of the music we recorded. I just felt, let them own their own and I would show them how to copyright."


Humble beginnings


Green attributes his egalitarian attitude to growing up in the poor west side of Chicago with all types of people.


"I was brought up in a mixed neighborhood," he said, "and that stayed with me forever."


Gangsters ran Chicago as Green was growing up in Prohibition, but they didn't intrude on Green's business.


"When they were kids, I was a kid, so they let me completely alone because I was their buddy," Green said. "Anybody who would say something about me - 'Oh, no. That's our friend, leave him alone.' I had no problems."


Green attended two years at St. John's University before having to get a job during the Depression. He worked in his father's paint contracting business and then went into sheet metal with a partner. They made hydraulic presses and pressed records.


"In those days, 10-inch records sold for at least 79 cents," he said. "We were pressing them for others and we decided to press them for ourselves."


When the U.S. entered World War II in December 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt restricted the use of shellac for military reasons. So Green's firm invented plastic records.


"It actually was an unbreakable 10-inch record, whereas shellac was breakable," Green said. "That's what started us in the music business. We knew how to make the record and there was a tremendous shortage of records at the time."


The Chicago-based head of the American Federation of Musicians, Jimmy Petrillo, called a musicians strike in 1942 that halted all recordings except for a cappella vocals through 1944. But, after the strike and the war, Green found a distribution network that didn't depend upon network radio for marketing.


"What I did, I used all the jukebox guys, like Wurlitzer distributors, because we made records and they were the first people to use them," Green said. "I made my distributor the distributor that had a jukebox route. So, if they had a 200-box route, you know the first 200 records went on their boxes. The competition, Victor, Decca and Columbia, they didn't have that privilege."


The big band era died quickly when eight swing bands folded in the first weeks of 1946, but Mercury prospered by signing talent from regional bands that didn't quite fit the swing mold.


Chicago native Frankie Laine sounded black but also sounded convincing on western material. He charted with "We'll Be Together" for Mercury in 1945 and became huge with "That's My Desire" in 1947.


Patti Page was singing for a radio station in Tulsa, Okla., when her manager, Rancho Mirage resident Jack Rael, took her to Chicago and got her signed to Mercury. She also could sing swing or country, as she proved with the mega-hit "Tennessee Waltz." She and Mercury gained fame for being the first to overdub vocals on a popular record.


Mercury's roster soon included bluegrass stars Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, pop singers Vic Damone and Merv Griffin, classical artists and jazz players such as Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Shirley Horn, Nina Simone, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Gerry Mulligan, many of whom he took on tour as a partner on Norman Granz' Jazz at the Philharmonic series. He signed Louis Armstrong just before he had his first No. 1 hit with "Hello, Dolly!" in 1964.


"Irvin has a broad taste," said Jones. "That's why he had all those (vocalist) girls. He had everybody, man. It was across the board and I think that's what we shared, that diversified taste."


Green let Jones lead a dream big band on a tour of Europe in the early 1960s that turned into a nightmare. Jones ran out of money in Finland. Green sent funds to help everyone get home.


After that, Green made him the first black vice president of a major record company. Jones initially just worked with the jazz artists, but, soon answered a challenge to actually make some money for the label.


"They said, 'Why don't you make a hit record?' I said, 'It's not a big deal.' Because jazz musicians, there was a syndrome there," Jones said. "And the first record I had out was (Lesley Gore's) 'It's My Party.' I was trying to get her to change her name and I had to go to Tokyo for three weeks. I said, 'We'll fix it when I get back.' So, as soon as I got back it was No. 1. We did it, man. We had 19 hits in four years. Unbelievable."


Green started his next careers after Mercury merged with Polygram in 1969. Looking back, he admits some mistakes. He passed on Elvis Presley when Col. Tom Parker offered him to Mercury for $35,000, including publishing rights.


But he acknowledges some impact in bringing blues and R&B into popular music. Decca had the first great R&B artist in Louis Jordan before Mercury got him, and Atlantic had the best, led by Ray Charles. But Mercury, including the Platters and the Diamonds, probably did the most to blur the line between white and black groups.


"It all became rhythm & blues," Green said. "That beat was first introduced through the black R&B, and that followed into all the pop records. The whites loved it. It wasn't just that sweet ballad of the year before. We all want to tap our foot."