Machers and Rockers: Chess Records and the Business of Rock & Roll

ON THE SOUTH SIDE of Chicago in the late 1940s, two immigrants--one a Jew born in Russia, the other a black blues singer from Mississippi--met and changed the course of musical history. Muddy Waters electrified the blues, and Leonard Chess recorded it. Soon Bo Diddly and Chuck Berry added a dose of pulsating rhythm, and Chess Records captured that, too. Rock & roll had arrived, and an industry was born. In a book as vibrantly and exuberantly written as the music and people it portrays Rich Cohen tells the engrossing story of how Leonard Chess, with the other record men, made this new sound into a multi-billion-dollar business--aggressively acquiring artists, hard-selling distributors, riding the crest of a wave that would crash over a whole generation. Full of absorbing lore and animated by a deep love for popular music, "Machers and Rockers is a smash hit.

"In a postscript to his dynamic history of Chess Records, Cohen (Tough Jews) confesses that its tale is one he's been telling since adolescence, 'using whatever was at hand to make the case: not only does this song rock, it also has something big to tell us.' Cohen's book has something big to say too — about how the unlikely marriage of the shtetl and the plantation produced Chicago blues and rock and roll. The music that exploded into the living rooms of America and the world might have remained in the juke joints of the South if not for 'record men' like Leonard Chess, whose label is rivaled only by Atlantic for its influence. Sensing an audience where the big labels didn't, Chess carted unvarnished recordings of artists like Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry in the trunk of his Cadillac, getting them in stores and on the air by any means necessary. Cohen weaves the story of the mercurial, lovable but not always entirely ethical Chess with the stories of the artists he recorded and well-judged glimpses of social history. Though written with the energy of his teenage bull sessions, Cohen's history avoids the rhetorical excess nearly endemic to rock and roll books, offering instead a punchy and driven but also sturdy and careful narrative. Agent, The Wylie Agency. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Cohen tells the engrossing story of how Leonard Chess made rock and roll into a multibillion-dollar business--aggressively acquiring artists, hard-selling distributors, and riding the crest of a wave that would crash over a whole generation.