Born in the USA: Bruce Springsteen, a regular on Cash Box covers, was artist of the year in 1985.
I first wrote about Cash Box, a music industry trade magazine, in my post William Colby’s Computer Game. Cash Box was largely responsible for the success of music promoters Phil and Leonard Chess, as Nadine Cohodas describes in Spinning Blues Into Gold: The Chess Brothers and the Legendary Chess Records:
By now either Leonard or Phil or the company were regulars in Cash Box. It was rare to find an issue that didn’t have some piece of news about the brothers’ comings or goings or some mention of a new release, either as an “award-o’-the-week” or a “sleeper”. Other label owners and their records were mentioned– the Biharis, Syd Nathan at King, Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic, Blaine at Jubilee– but few, if any, with the frequency of the Chess brothers. While Chess and Checkers records were reviewed regularly at Billboard, gossip about the company was much rarer…
Cash Box was devoted to the jutebox industry and paid particular attention to the small, independent labels. The free publicity for Chess and Checker in chit chat columns came from Leonard’s boldness in pushing Chess records and as well as the interest of young, ambitious writers at the magazine looking for copy to fill their weekly columns.
In an industry built on hype, Cash Box’s patronage was invaluable to the Chess company; you can read about Chess Record’s likely intelligence connections here. In short, the Chess brothers managed Jazz talent like Muddy Waters who was active in Europe during the period of CIA-backed Jazz events which were designed to counter Soviet propaganda on the continent. The heir to Chess Records, Marshall Chess, would go on to run Rolling Stones Records. The Rolling Stones have a number of suspicious ‘intelligence community‘ and organized crime ties too.
So, what about a “murder”? Cash Box made headlines in 1989 when one of their employees was gunned down after showing reluctance to continue to rig music industry charts. The victim, Kevin Hughes, was the son of a Baptist farmer out of rural Illinois who dropped out of college to work at Cash Box. After an initial attempt at a cover-up involving police Lt. Tommy Jacobs, the chief suspects emerged as former Cash Box Nashville director Richard F. “Tony” D’Antonio and business partner Chuck Dixon, whose clients dominated Cash Box’s independent country music charts. Dixon was a 1980s version of the Chess Brothers. Both Dixon and D’Antonio put forward that they had links to ‘mafia’ style organized crime. In 2003, a grand jury found D’Antonio guilty of first-degree murder, but Dixon had died by that time. How could a music trade magazine have become involved with crime of this nature? Let’s investigate where, when and who started Cash Box.
Cash Box magazine was “formally launched” in 1942 in Chicago, which was the Chess brothers’ base as well as that of The Nielsen Company, which at some point owned Billboard magazine, the other big music-trade publication out of New York City. The Nielsen Company expanded dramatically during WWII. Note that by 1947 Cash Box was a respected industry publication and handing out obscene amounts of free advertizing to the Chess brothers.
In William Colby’s Computer Game, I wrote that Cash Box was Billboard’s main competitor. While this is the standard story given by music historians, on further inspection it’s not true. Billboard was the advertizing vehicle-of-choice for the major labels, while Cash Box was the budget alternative for the ‘independents’. Between the two publications, they cornered both strata of the music industry. Billboard was the more prestigious because of the greater sums of money involved, but the two magazines shared editorial and writing talent– in fact it would be easier to count the Cash Box honchos who didn’t also write/work for Billboard at some time. The organizations were close professionally… and politically.
According to John Broven in Record Makers and Breakers, Cash Box was the brainchild of Bill Gersh, a coin-operated jutebox marketing expert who would later spearhead coverage of the coin-operated video game industry. Readers interested in Bill Colby’s connection to Activision will be glad to know that Gersh’s Cash Box and a separate publication started by Gersh, The Marketplace, were premier publications covering coin-operated video games such as ‘Pong’ made by Atari, the firm from which Activision poached their initial stable of programmers. These programmers were managed by an old GRT/Chess Records hand, Jim Levy. Cash Box was instrumental in starting the video game industry.
Cash Box is among the best sources for information on the early video game industry. 1972 ‘Pong’ ad, thank you http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com.
The important thing to remember about Gersh is that if you wanted to know how to reach regular people (especially men) through low-brow, coin-operated entertainment during WWII and beyond, he was the expert to go to. Gersh was a premiere source for ‘competitive intelligence’, or industrial espionage. (Readers interested in the propaganda value of pornography may like my post Ron Jeremy: OSS Brat.)
Billboard May 12th 1962 ad for a coin-operated entertainment device.
Bill Gersh’s coin-op expertise was widely recognized. According to pinballcollectorsresource.com:
Bill Gersh was a long time participant in the Coin Op Industry. He originated Cash Box a publication that out lived him. After selling Cash Box he began publishing an industry newsletter called Marketplace that was aimed at the coin machine operator. With a gigantic resource of historical information, in addition to publishing current news and opinions with in the industry, he would occasionally add a Pictorial History section to his publication.
And according to Dick Bueschel in The Coin Slot Magazine #087, 1982:
… Bill Gersh (the best known reporter of the coin machine industry for over half a century, a feature writer for The Billboard [Billboard– a.nolen], and later Automatic Age and The Coin Machine Journal since 1929, and today the editor and publisher of The Marketplace, the highly respected Pinball and video game newsletter)…
In 1946, at about the same time that Cash Box began its promotion of The Chess brothers’ company, they hired a sales and advertizing veteran from Billboard magazine named Bob Austin, whose contacts put the magazine on the map and drew in significant ad revenue. I was unable to find out about Austin’s career prior to Billboard, but he certainly knew the right people at Playboy Enterprises.
From Jet Magazine, Dec 19 1968. The award winners were Wes Montgomery, John Coltrane (both deceased by that time), Duke Ellington, Cannonball Adderley, Oliver Nelson, James Brown, Lalo Schifrin and Odell Brown. Austin and Parnes, both former Cash Box executives by 1968, started Record World in 1964. Record World was famous for its coverage of the drug-addled Disco phenomenon, and ranked 3rd after Billboard and Cash Box in terms of music world influence.
Playboy magazine, a CIA front, made a point of promoting Jazz music from its earliest days, which corresponded with the US intelligence community’s anti-Moscow Jazz promotion in Europe during the Cold War.
While Gersh was Cash Box’s industry guru, and ad sales were done by Austin, the magazine’s promotion was done by Joe and Norman Orleck, president and vice president, respectively. The Orlecks liked to combine business and charity work, and their legacy shows how closely Billboard and Cash Box were aligned politically.
Billboard May 12 1962 article featuring Joe Orleck.
Billboard June 16th 1962 article. ‘BMW’ is Billboard Music Week, i.e. Billboard.
In 1962 Billboard treated its readers to play-by-play coverage of Joe Orleck’s, and Billboard publisher Roger Littleford’s, work for the United Jewish Appeal on behalf of Israeli democracy. Considering the politics of Cash Box’s founders, the magazine’s support of the Chess brothers is less of a mystery, because Phil and Leonard Chess came from the same Chicago community.
While Gersh and the Orlecks were based out of Chicago, most of the editorial talent came from NYC, and later from one university in New York City. The big three Cash Box editors, Marty Ostrow, Ira Howard and Irv Lichtman, were all hired in the mid 1950s “by way of a senior year work experience program that involved college graduation credits from the Baruch School division of City College in downtown New York” according to John Broven. (Cash Box already had at least one editor from City College at the time of their hiring, Sid Parnes.) A recurring theme throughout Cash Box’s history is that important hiring decisions are made out of NYC, not Chicago, nor L.A., the home of future Cash Box owner, George Albert. A shocking number of famous popular music concerns all found their genesis in Manhattan following WWII– just like Cinema 16, Signet Books, The Living Theater and Magazine Management Company.
Cash Box’s operating methods were never very transparent, and there was always corruption in the charting process, according to Broven’s interviews with Cash Box editors. However, things got even worse in 1956/57, when ‘financial troubles’ necessitated help from George Albert, who according to Irv Lichtman, had ties to organized crime. By 1959 Cash Box was embroiled in congressional hearings on music-industry-wide corruption, called the “Payola Hearings”. (Alan Freed, a Chess Records business partner and exploiter of The Coronets, was exposed for his massive corruption during these hearings, though these days the industry is disposed to view him favorably.)
According to Nadine Cahonas in Spinning Blues into Gold, The Coronets were forced to hand over undue writing credits and royalties to Alan Freed, because of his “necessary influence” in the music business. Freed was a close family friend to the Chess brothers.
While George Albert had a distinct mafioso flavor, he doesn’t appear to have been in control of the Cash Box operation, because important hiring decisions were still being made via the NYC crowd. According to Rob Simbeck, writing for Nashville Scene, when Nashville-based Cash Box editor Jim Sharp left, a former NYC Cash Box staffer named Tom McEntee took his place after several months of leaderless chaos.
Tom McEntee had been a New York Cash Box staffer in the 1960s, when the magazine was at its peak of power and prestige. He had moved to Nashville and opened an industry tip sheet called The Country Music Survey—founding as an adjunct the annual conference that became the Country Radio Seminar. He then promoted for both major and independent labels. As the mid-’80s approached, though, he was between gigs, playing the Pac-Man machine in the lobby of the United Artists Tower on Music Row to kill time. D’Antonio started hanging around the machine as well, and the two became friendly.
Cash Box Nashville vice-president/general manager Jim Sharp had just left the magazine, and owner George Albert hired McEntee to replace him. One of his first acts was to hire D’Antonio.
“It was my first day, and I needed bodies,” McEntee says. “Tony had worked in Vegas. I think he told me he had worked the crap tables and knew numbers. If somebody puts down a $6 bet and it’s 35-to-1, you’ve got to be instantly figuring the payoff, and there are a lot of bets going around, so you had to be good with numbers. I said, ‘Come on, I’ll teach you how to be the chart man.’ He worked his ass off seven days a week.”
Six months later, D’Antonio was handling the charts more or less himself. The paper had added more reporting stations and “he was overwhelmed,” McEntee says. “He needed help, and I didn’t have the budget to hire. I told him to call the colleges—MTSU, Belmont—and ask for interns. He interviewed this kid and said, ‘I like him. Can we put him on?’ I interviewed him too and thought he was fine, so I said, ‘Go ahead.’ ”
The unpaid intern, who would later drop out of Belmont when the job became full-time, was Kevin Hughes.
Readers will remember that it was United Artists who set up Richard Condon’s career as a CIA propagandist through writing such as The Manchurian Candidate. Who was Tom McEntee?
Tom McEntee was a sergeant in the U.S. Special Forces during the Vietnam War, who distinguished himself in translating code. He also had a marked interest in music and psychology. McEntee would go on to found the Country Radio Seminar in 1970, immediately after 1) his Vietnam service and 2) moving to Nashville. CRS is an influential non-profit dedicated to promoting its own vision of country music, one of the best-selling musical genres in the USA. I am unaware of any major country music organization which doesn’t participate in or support this Nashville-newbie’s out-of-the-blue non-profit.
McEntee’s non-profit logo, courtesy of their website.
McEntee’s CRS would become a carrot in the new ‘payola’ scandal surrounding Cash Box magazine under D’Antonio’s control in the 1980s:
The idea, Gentry says, was to shower the jockeys with gifts—free trips to Nashville, free hotel rooms, registration to the Country Radio Seminar, even whores and drugs. “That’s what we did,” he says. “You had to keep them in your pocket. And then when they didn’t play ball, you came back and said, ‘In the last year from me alone, you accepted over $8,000 in gifts and cash. I wonder what your boss or the FCC would say about this.’ ’Cause now you own ’em. You get ’em in deep enough, and then you own ’em.”
While Cash Box was stacking its charts this way, they were also getting creative about ripping off struggling artists…
The bottom-line payoff was supposed to be a buzz and a chart presence irresistible to the major labels. “The pretense of the promoters,” Bradshaw says, “is that if you do well on the independent charts, the majors will suck you right up, which was in fact just the opposite. Most majors wouldn’t touch somebody on those charts.”
Working the independents, Gentry says unequivocally, amounted to “just screwing them [struggling musicians] out of money.”
You can read Simbeck’s full exposé of the Cash Box scheme here.
Why would a Vietnam Special Forces veteran be interested in a tacky venture like Cash Box? There is evidence which suggests that the US Armed Services have made significant capital investments into the Nashville music scene.
The US military doesn’t like to talk about how much money it spends inside the music business, but in 2010 the Marine Corps did release some figures to Walter Pincus, who published them in The Washington Post— still the CIA’s Own Newspaper. Using the Marine Corps figures, Pincus extrapolated that the DoD forked out an estimated $500 million for music band-related PR in 2010. The Marines employ at least 730 professional musicians, while the Army calls itself “the largest and oldest employer of musicians in the country.” Pincus goes on:
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates … often makes the comparison that the number of people in military bands is larger than the number of State Department Foreign Service officers.
It’s probable that a revolving door exists between the music industry and the military, at least for musicians. However, the military’s reach extends into promotion and distribution as well. Pincus describes how military-produced music is sold commercially through a network of private sector distributors, at least one of which is based out of Nashville:
Al McCree, a retired Air Force fighter pilot, owns Altissimo Recordings, a Nashville record label featuring music of the service bands. He formed it in 1991, after he retired. While serving, he wrote a song in honor of Air Force families that was recorded by an Air Force band. Seeing that service band recordings were not available commercially, he developed a business in which the performance was free and could be pressed and resold once he dealt with getting licenses from copyright owners of the music.
The services got nothing.
“We are very proud of what we do. We are providing fabulous recordings of these magnificent bands to audiences all over the world,” McCree said in an interview.
His company is not alone. The Marine Band Web site lists eight other private firms that sell CDs using the band’s material.
Asked about the service bands, McCree said that they had “long been an instrument of military PR” and that he was aware that there had always been a “debate within the military as to whether they are cost-effective.”
I’ll point out to readers that ‘Country Music’ culture is the only music biz culture where supporting the military is openly fashionable– even a necessity. Remember the Dixie Chicks? Remember how back in 2003 Natalie Maines criticized Bush II’s Iraq war effort and the band was blacklisted by the entire country music industry, and still is to this day? I put it to readers that such a response to popular commentary on an unpopular war is *not a normal* reaction from an industry guided by market forces.
To put Pincus’ $500 million into perspective, country music record sales in 2010 were 43,718,000 units. At $12 an album, that’s approximately $525 million in revenue from sales. $525 million > $500 million… just. If even a fraction of the military’s $500 million finds its way to Nashville, then the US military is a major force in country music.
I’ll also point out that Pincus’ estimate of $500 million takes no account of the Pentagon’s spending on propaganda such as its musical variety television program, ‘Command Performance‘ which has featured the talents of The Black Eyed Peas, Ludacris, Aerosmith, KISS, Def Leppard and GWAR; nor the fabulous sums spent entertaining the troops overseas through ‘USO Shows’, etc. Like so much WaPo reporting, Pincus’s sloppy estimates protect the US government from criticism.
I won’t elaborate much more on the ‘intelligence community’ and their connections to the music business– if you’re interested please see my writing on Jazz or The Rolling Stones. However, in Honorable Men, Bill Colby lets us know that in the early 1950s the CIA was acutely aware of the propaganda value of music: in European countries they even stockpiled “recordings of national music to use when and if the country was occupied by Russian soldiers”, presumably to play on stay-behind, US-controlled radio transmitters.
My point is that the Armed Services have been using music for propaganda purposes for a very long time, and that practice has likely shaped what we know as ‘the music industry’. Tie in unfortunate mob connections with the ‘intelligence community’… and you have a recipe for disaster.
It took nearly 15 years for D’Antonio to be convicted of murdering Kevin Hughes, and charges were only brought after Dixon had passed beyond the reach of justice. I don’t think any of this dirt should be surprising, given the genesis of Cash Box and it’s likely mafia and ‘intelligence community’ ties.
There is a lot of criticism of the music industry and the values it promotes inside the USA, but such criticism is usually poo-pooed by ‘establishment’ journalists and academics on the grounds that the industry is simply giving listeners what the market demands. This argument is an extension of the ‘democratic’ American ideal, where decisions are supposed to be made by the will of the majority. If you don’t like it, you’re on your own, so shut up. I think it’s time that we as a nation recognize that our cultural offerings are no more of a ‘choice’ than the ‘choice’ between Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton…
