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Elektra Entertainment

The History of Elektra Entertainment

The ruby is a stone of telepathy. Prized as talisman and divinatory tool it dispels nightmares when placed under a pillow and guards against storms if touched to the four outside corners of a house. The Alumina of its blood line projects rather than receives energy; a double refraction that according to arcane lore harmonically vibrates to the note E.

An E for Elektra: She of the seven Pleiades daughter of the Oceanus mother of the Harpies. The bright and brilliant one: A muse transformed four decades ago to celebrate music that most mind-reading of the arts.

A record's label is hardly as important as the artisans who give it reason for being: yet with few exceptions, it helps to bridge the chasm between creative impulse and realization offering continuity with an oversoul and family tree all its own. An emotional geography spread over time, place and sheer chance it stands like a great center of trade at the crossroads of inspiration and commerce merging in a marketplace of ideas. Our Town: Folks move in, folks move out, humming and hymning life's soundtracks.

On October 10, 1950, Jac Holzman made the first entry in the Elektra ledgers. He was a college student at St. John's at Annapolis, Maryland, nurturing a twin fascination with audio engineering and music. The invention of the long-playing record by Dr. Peter Goldmark at Columbia Records in 1947, and the advent of the truly portable tape recorder, allowed him the wherewithal to pursue his passions. That December when composer John Gruen and singer Georgianna Bannister visited the St. John's campus for a recital, Jac asked if he might record their modern lieder.

The resulting 12-inch disc released as Elektra 101 (the Sophoclean Electra was given a harder sound by Jac who perhaps donated his own missing "k") was pressed in an edition of several hundred copies. The fledging company was so short on borrowed cash that, to provide the first logo with a suitably Greek look an "M" had to be turned sideways for the all important "E". It sold none, a prospect that Holzman describes today as "daunting."

Still by the second release, a collection of Appalachian mountain ballads sung by the incomparable Jean Richie, Elektra became more than hobby. Rethinking his approach and advised by Edward Tatnall-Canby, a music critic for Saturday Review who was a fellow engineering buff, he turned his attention to folk music. It was inexpensive to record, and utilizing one of the first binaural Magnecord tape recorders and an Electro-voice (of course) model 650 microphone, Jac liked the ambiance of capturing sound alive.

The company set up shop in the fringes of New York's Greenwich Village, first operating in the back of a record shop at 189 West 10th St., and later moving to 361 Bleecker. "To own a record company in those days was pretty exotic," he remembers, but releasing three to six records a year in the ten-inch format, "hoping they'd find their audience," he began learning the ways and means of the music biz-ness survival, often hand-distributing his latest release via Vespa motor scooter.

Elektra's earliest releases were a grab-bag of worldly styles representing music from Italy, Russia, Turkey, Spain, France, Great Britain, Nova Scotia, Israel, and Mexico. The emphasis was on folk, sparked in part by Jac's interest in older instruments (I especially liked harpsichords," he once recalled. "Harpsichords led to lutes, lutes to guitars, to folk music, folk music to Elektra Records"), and included artists such as Cynthia Gooding, Ed McCurdy, Shep Ginandes, Theodore Bikel. Susan Reed (who owned an antiques shop a few blocks from Elektra's headquarters), Alan Arkin, and Oscar Brand. Blues singer Josh White despite having been unofficially blacklisted for his political beliefs found a home with Elektra; and illustrator Maurice Sendack was among Elektra's first cover artists.

The company was hardly lucrative. Holzman did hi-fi installations to stay alive while the record sales trickled in, but he was able to pay off a debt of 90,000 dollars with the success of Ed McCurdey's When Dalliance Was In Flower (And Maidens Lost Their Heads) series featuring bawdy but "tasteful" Elizabethan broadside ballads. Along with a large profit margin on his budget folk samplers, Elektra could now begin to take itself seriously.

Perhaps too seriously. By his own admission Jac moved cautiously over the next few years. Though the late fifties Elektra roster sported such luminaries as the Delta Rhythm Boys, the Limelighters, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Glenn Yarbrough, flamenco guitarist Juan Serrano, and one of the first popularly recorded collections of Bulgarian folk music (a prescience later to take root in a 1990 Grammy for Nonesuch's Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares), the company stuck with what it knew. Which in the end wasn't pop music.

"I never recorded for the market," says Jac. "I always had chosen what I was interested in and made sure I got listed in Schwann's catalog." Yet Holzman could afford to sit tight. "I expected the folk revival. You could see it begin to happen in the festivals; it was easy music to make, friendly, collegiate."

Kind of like Elektra, you might say, whose definition of folk song could be humouresquely stretched to include Bob Gibson's Ski Songs and Oscar Brand's Song For Doctors; whose international singing couple Gene and Francesca, moonlit as architecture professor at Columbia and novelist respectively: and who would put out magnificent boxed editions of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly's Library of Congress recordings. There would also be the founding of Nonesuch, a budget classical label whose initial release in 1964 included an all-Albinoni selection, a tribute to the Baroque trumpet, and an anthology of obscure French composers from the court of Louis XIV; the Explorer series continuing Elektra's investigation into global music; Morse code instruction; and a sound effects library ultimately to run over twenty vérité volumes.

The explosion of the modern folk song in the early 1960's as a social phenomena changed Elektra irrevocably from small specialty label aimed at the intelligentsia to a player in the international gaming tables of pop. It probably took both by surprise, so much so that Holzman was caught off-balance attempting to prematurely establish Elektra in 1962 California when Dylan swept across the "Bleeker and MacDougal" scene immortalized by Fred Neil. Paul Rothchild made sure he wouldn't miss out again. Revolutionizing Prestige's Folklore line by producing an amazing thirteen albums in six months, he joined Elektra in 1963 to give them a presence away from what Paul called "cabaret folk" toward what Jac called "street." By then they'd started moving uptown, past 116 W.14 St., winding up Broadway (1851) to Columbus Circle. As primal minister, Rothchild helped guide Elektra into the vital singer-songwriter explosion of the early sixties, which set the anti-tone to follow; and the realization of rock as art as pop, which becomes the story of Elektra's flower-power progressives of the late sixties.

The folk scene allowed Elektra to present Phil Ochs; Tom Rush; Tom Paxton; Judy Collins; Koerner, Ray, and Glover; Richard Farina; and Manny Arthurs in a world of socio-protest (song). Folk led to folk-rock, but so potentially dangerous was this combination (Jac had ear witnessed the boos when Dylan strolled on-stage with Butterfield Blues Band at Newport) that as the Top 40 border loomed, the company spun off Bounty records as an experimental scratch-pad, presenting among other debuts, the first recorded efforts by the Beefeaters (née Byrds). The Buffalo Springfield and the Lovin' Spoonful also eluded Elektra (there were never any bidding wars in folk music), and then one night in Los Angeles' Bito Lito nitery, he happened upon Love, Arthur Lee in a pair of sunglasses with one blue, one red lens. The Doors were but a club or two away.

Holzman always knew a good logo when he saw it. Each Elektra band of the late sixties came equipped with its own indelible identity (courtesy of art director Bill Harvey) of trademark as well as sound. The personalities were strong. Tim Buckley, the Butterfield Blues Band, the Motor City one-two combination of the MC5 and the Stooges and the Doors' mastery of concept and execution helped Elektra forge a similar sense of self: Nico, the Holy Modal Rounders, The Baroque Beatles Book the Incredible String Band, The Voices of East Harlem, David Peel and the Lower East Side (the last whispered in Jac's ear by "company freak" Danny Fields).

But an independent record company, as Jac noted in 1969, not only rises and falls on "its senses, its feel of the audience, on its judgement and taste, intuition, and, of course, luck," but also its distribution. As the seventies turned and the stakes became higher, Elektra outgrew its fleet of motor scooters. Like other entrepreneur-driven indie labels, such as Ahmet Ertagun's Atlantic, Holzman felt the need to expand the audience for artists he believed in, and in July, 1970, he sold the company, rataining operational autonomy, to the Kinney National Services Corporation for ten million dollars, including the Sound Effects library.

Three years later, despite the increase in scale, the labels affiliation with Warners and Atlantic, and the newly-won preeminence of Harry Chapin, Bread and Carly Simon, Jac had the impression that Elektra was "beginning to repeat myself." For someone to whom music implied "total immersion...We live this music and we love it," a flagging of energy could only mean a long Hawaii sabbatical. Jack would return to Warner Communications as chief technologist in the late seventies, where he continues today to oversee the scientific implementation of technology (Panavision, High Definition Television, the CD) that translate the artistic impulse, much as did his record company with a small tape recorder and microphone.

David Geffen was under no illusion when he took over Elektra in 1973, merging (some would say submerging) it within his Asylum label. An agent and a manager in the 1960's (Crosby, Stills & Nash; Laura Nyro), he started a record company because "I couldn't interest record companies in signing the acts I represented." Sensing a power vacuum in the wake of Holzman's departure, he moved into the Elektra wing of Warner Communications and set about redoing it in his own image.

Asylum had begun under the wing of Atlantic in 1970, soon gathering an intensive array of southern California talent: Jackson Browne, the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits. Where Jack always let the mythology of music sway him (he once likened the Beatles' stereo rendition of "Hey Jude" to "the Sistine Chapel of Rock" in a letter to Rolling Stone), Geffen seemed to delight in the wheel and the deal. David is frank today about what he wanted in a record company. He needed more control over his operation, and with singularity of purpose, Asylum had the best "batting average" and was the "most profitable" until 1975, when Geffen left to become vice-chairman of Warner Bros. pictures. "You can make up all the smoke you want. I don't hold with nostalgia; it's self-congratulatory and I tend not to be self-congratulatory. All that interests me is the present." With few apologies, Geffen caught the wave of a music that seemed to crystallize the image of the mid-seventies as reflexively as Jac's Elektra did for the sixties, in the process expanding a significant place for Elektra-Asylum within the Warner hierarchy. Welcome to the Hotel California.

Elektra became more like a traditional record company and less like an idea during Joe Smith's stewardship in the late seventies and early eighties. An interlocking media had considerably upped the platinum ante, fusing print and movies and music in visions of mega-numbers, adding at least one more zero to the pot of gold at the end of an overnight sensation.

This required a reevaluation of priorities and method, an emphasis on breadth as well as depth, and along with the Cars, not to mention punk-rockers like television and the Dictators, Elektra branched out into country & western (Hank William's Jr., Jerry Lee Lewis, Vern Gosdin, Stella Parton, Eddie Rabbitt) and rhythm and blues (Five Special, Donald Byrd, Patrice Rushen, Grover Washington Jr.).

Like a spiral staircase come full circle, former A&R (King, Warner Bros.) man Bob Krasnow once told Jac he was going to be the next Elektra when he formed Blue Thumb records in 1968. In his view, what this meant was not only a new recording contract for Arthur Lee: "Jac had an ethic that had to be admired. When I came to Elektra, beginning on New Year's day of 1983, I knew there were a lot of ways to run a record company. I wanted to have a record company with ethics."

Krasnow's notion of ethical culture reflects a liberal ideal that inherits its substance from the sixties while acknowledging the truths of running a 1990's record company for what has become the world's largest communications conglomerate, Time-Warner. It is on this tricky tightrope that he delights in keeping his balance.

Formally moving the company back to New York, overlooking St. Patrick's Cathedral and Rockefeller Center, Krasnow pressed the play button on an eighties-and-beyond Elektra. Assembling one of the industry's largest A&R staffs, Bob set out, as he says, "to build something special, something that was nourished by the spirit of the past but whose real purpose was to find the future."

"There was a great entrepreneurial tradition at Elektra," he continues," and my dream was to put together a team of people who understood what that meant." Krasnow drastically shrunk Elektra's artist roster, making an inevitable slip (he let Tom Waits get away) and occasionally venturing too far ahead of his time (Elektra tried unsuccessfully to break Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, one of the first great rap groups, years before rap crossed into the mainstream). But, encouraged by the wide open possibilities, Elektra's A&R team and Krasnow slowly built the new Elektra.

In 1994, Sylvia Rhone became the first African American woman in history to become Chairman of a major record label named Chairman/CEO of the Elektra Entertainment Group. During her career with Elektra she has guided the consolidation of four labels into one of the most diverse companies in the music industry, maintaining a roster that boasts several multiplatinum superstars, including Missy Elliott, Busta Rhymes, Tracy Chapman, Third Eye Blind, Metallica, Natalie Merchant, Natalie Cole, Linda Ronstadt, ACDC, and more. Under Ms. Rhone's watch, Metallica has become the biggest selling band of the decade, with more than 65 million units sold worldwide.

(Taken from an archived copy of the Elektra Entertainment Website)