What if you had the choice to make a Capitol compilation album?

[soulster]

Well Soulster .. I'm going to have to sleep on your response to my post .. as you say there is a big "cultural divide" between the U.S. and U.K. but I don't think that your understanding of the differences [[as far as it concerns Soul/R&B music) it is quite the same as mine.

Well, today, when we both can go on an international internet forum and discuss our shared love of R&B, the differences aren't as wide, but back then, they were apparently different. That is not to say that the then-contemporary U.S. R&B didn't make it in the U.K., it just wasn't very much in relation to what else there was out there.

AND .. I would go along with JSmith in giving the "Prize for Ineptitude" in the mid/late '60s to R.C.A. .. they had some FANTASTIC releases in the 1960's .. all those "Pied Piper" releases for example .. and only seemed to pick up in the early '70s R&B wise with their success with THE MAIN INGREDIENT and THE FRIENDS OF DISTINCTION .. my theory is that they just didn't understand how marketing Soul/R&B records [[in the U.S.) had changed since all of their early '60s success with SAM COOKE.

We could put both RCA and Warner Brothers, and even add Elektra to the list. They had virtually NO soul music artists on their rosters in the mid-to-late 60s. There were few, if anyone at those labels who knew how to break into the market. Labels like Atlantic, Motown, Stax, and dozens of small independent labels had the market. The Harvard Institute published a famous study they did for the major record labels on the state of the R&B market of the late 60s and early 70s, and how the majors could capitalize on it. Some of the labels, like CBS, did follow some of the recommendations. While they didn't buy up soul labels, they entered into distribution deals that were, except for Stax, quite lucrative for both parties. They created soul music divisions which proved to have disastrous effects in many cases. And, as what happens in corporations with shareholders, it became all about profits, the bottom line, and not understanding the consumer.

Speaking of MCA. most of us are now familiar with the story of The Average White Band, right? They were originally signed to MCA in 1973. They did the album "Show Your Hand", a fantastic debut album by this all-White Scottish band who loved soul music, and played it like seasoned Black men. When the album tanked, they recorded their second album and played it at an A&R meeting. The brass at MCA told them that they needed to go "country" because that's where popular music was headed in 1973! At the time, MCA was all about country music. Their second biggest stars were Olivia Newton-John, Cher, and Elton John, plus a bunch of country artists. They had just lost Neil Diamond to Columbia a year earlier. Anyway, AWB asked to be released from their contract, and asked for their master tapes. MCA gave it to them and released them. The band then went to a party where they knew Ahmet Ertegun would be, and hit him up to hear their tape. The band always wanted to be on Atlantic anyway because that's where all their favorite soul records were recorded. We know the rest of the story. But, that goes to show you the extent to which the majors didn't have a clue.

CBS already had their foot in the door with R&B, so when Clive Davis took over, it wasn't too hard for him to enter into deals with The Isley Brothers and Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, Stax, and sign bands like Earth, Wind & Fire, and to let them do their thing. The problems for CBS's Black roster slowly developed when Davis left the label. But, that's another whole enchilada, and I digress.

In the mid-60s, when The Beatles and the British Invasion came in, RCA was kind of twisting in the wind where pop and R&B was concerned. All they really had that was solid was country music and show tunes after Elvis' popularity waned. They had some rock success with The Jefferson Airplane, but not much else. It's interesting to note that the hardest rock band RCA ever had until the 90s[[!) was a Black metal band called Mother's Finest! Of course, one album and they went to Epic and was "encouraged" to record straight-ahead soul music, not what they really wanted to do, BTW.