In these days of digital downloads, and multi-national media mergers, record labels have never seemed more characterless and soulless. No one cares what label anyone is on any more, most labels don’t have a recognisable identity today. It’s all been part of the long march towards bland corporatization of the music industry.
But it wasn’t always like that. From the 1960’s to the mid 80s, what label you were on was some indication of the sort of band you were. Labels had a real character and identity often dictated by the person or people who ran it. This is all about those labels, their history and the great records that came out on them.
BLUE HORIZON
DATE OF DEMISE: 1979
The British blues boom that started around 1963 and ran for the rest of the decade was initially a cultish, non-mainstream movement largely fed by merchant seaman bringing blues records back from American to the great industrial ports of the UK, Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow and London. Blues guys like John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson would come to the Uk and tour with a pick up band such as The Yardbirds, Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated or whatever band John Mayall had at the time. It was a roots-up movement that by 1967 had attracted many devotees but there was still no UK label dedicated to releasing blues records to a wider British audience.
Step forward Mike Vernon.
Vernon was a veteran producer with a passion for the blues. Well-connected in the industry, he set up Blue Horizon in 1966 after running a small, and I do mean small, mail order label called Purdah. Purdah released just four singles, one by John Mayall and one by Eric Clapton, which later showed up on Decca's Blues World Of Eric Clapton album.
The first releases on Blue Horizon were licensed blues songs from USA by artists Vernon admired but it was signing Fleetwood Mac - then known as Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac - and hooking up to a CBS distribution deal in 1967 that brought Vernon massive success.
He then began recording blues people such as Champion Jack Dupree, backed with the cream of the British blues scene such as Rory Gallagher, Peter Green, Paul Kossoff and Aynsley Dunbar.
Blue Horizon became the most successful blues label in Britain as the Fleetwood Mac singles charted as did Chicken Shack's I'd Rather Go Blind sung by Christine Perfect, who would leave the band two years later, marry John McVie and join The Mac.
Arguably the finest album of this period on the label was Chicken Shack's Forty Blue Fingers Freshley Packed and Ready To Serve. A killer blues album featuring one of the great unsung heroes of the era, Stan Webb on guitar, it reached 12 on the album charts - a sign of the popularity of blues rock at the time. Its follow up O.K. Ken did even better, peaking at 9.
While other labels such as Liberty had heavier blues bands like Aynsley Dunbar's Retaliation, Blue Horizon kept more pure blues acts on their roster.
Blue Horizon became a hub around which both British and black American artists revolved. People like Otis's Spann & Rush would record with members of Fleetwood Mac, and most of these sessions are now available. The sheer volume of bluesmen who came through the Blue Horizon doors is quite amazing. Long forgotten people like Johhny Shines, Gordon Smith and Top Topham all made records that barely sold at all but with Fleetwood Mac shifting big units and riding high in both singles and album charts, it didn't really matter financially. It really was all about the music. They also took care to create iconic and quirky sleeve art for the records.
Clearly, it couldn't last. The label was so tied to the blues boom that when that bubble burst, and Fleetwood Mac moved on, the end was always going to come sooner than later.
Interestingly, Dutch progressive band Focus provided the final album release in 1971 with Moving Waves, a superb double album. The last release was a single by obscure band Fugi late in '71.
The Blue Horizon names lives on as part of the massive Sony BMG conglommorate and there has been an extensive CD release programme of Blue Horizon sessions and a triple CD set gives you the complete story from start to finish. It's a good place to discover the delights of bands like Jellybread and Bacon Fat along with blues men such as Mississippi Joe Callicott and Roosevelt Holts.
The Blue Horizon label was initially a bright blue, later changed to red and by that final Focus album was white but it is the bright blue one with the boxed circular logo that is the iconic image of that British blues era.
All the records, even the Fleetwood Mac stuff that sold in big numbers, are relatively valuable and always worth picking up if you see it cheap anywhere.
Vernon is a really important man in the history of British blues and rock who was driven by a passion for the music and even after the end of Blue Horizon continued to work with blues based musicians in various roles.
For an indepth interview with him, go to the excellent Blues Matters website.
CAPRICORN RECORDS
DATE OF DEMISE: 1979
Formed in 1969 in Georgia by brothers Phil and Alan Walden and their friend Frank Fenter, Capricorn Records was the label without which the Southern Rock genre would not exist. But as well as giving the world one awesome band in the Allman Brothers and several other really good ones like the Marshall Tucker Band and Wet Willie, Capricorn Records, in a small way, had a part to play in the civil rights struggle. Here’s their story.
Phil managed Otis Reading from 1959 until Reading’s death in 1967 and also looked after a roster of R and B acts including Al Green and Percy Sledge. This brought him into contact with Atlantic Records players like Jerry Wexler who, along with Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, was well on his way to legendary status.
Reading’s death in 1967 was a massive blow to Phil Walden on both a personal and professional level. His close friend’s tragic demise in a plane crash was devastating, while the loss of his biggest star was obviously a commercial gut-shot. A couple of years passed, and then Phil met a young guitarist called Duane Allman at Muscle Shoals studio in Alabama. Duane was already a highly accomplished session musician whose star was on the rise for his work on albums like Wilson Pickett’s Hey Jude.
Phil immediately saw the potential and urged Duane to form his own band. With brother Greg brought in on vocals and the exciting jazz talent Jaimoe Johanson on drums/percussion, Dickey Betts on guitar, Berry Oakley on bass and Butch Trucks also drumming, they clicked instantly. They moved to Macon, Georgia to be nearer Phil and the nascent Capricorn Records label, which was set up with Jerry Wexler’s blessing as an Atlantic subsidiary. They chose the name partly because Jerry and Phil shared that star-sign.
Georgia was not, it seems fair to say, an especially progressive place in the late sixties, so a band with both white and black members was definitely an eyebrow-raiser. The Allmans were a big success, real quickly. Their double album ‘At Fillmore East’ – which we talk about in more depth later in our series on that legendary venue – is one of rock’s great live recordings. Capricorn were not slow to see the commercial potential of mixing blues rock with a little country flavour and they soon had a lucrative set of labelmates for the Allmans.
Capricorn developed and released a variety of bands in a similar vein to the Allman Brothers including South Carolinians The Marshall Tucker Band, Alabama’s Wet Willie, Mississippi’s Chaz Van Gogh, the Elvin Bishop Band from Oklahoma and local Georgia boys Grinderswitch. The last-named penned ‘Pickin’ The Blues’ – which John Peel used as his radio show theme song for many years.
Even the tragic death of Duane Allman, aged just 24, in a 1971 motorcycle accident scarcely dimmed the Allmans commercial clout, and Capricorn records enjoyed a hugely profitable first half of the seventies. The empire grew and grew – a studio, real estate, booking agencies, a travel agent (!) and the obligatory private jet.
But the Allmans really knew how to enjoy themselves and their massive spending eventually outstripped even their earnings. Once the fashions started to change and disco became the money-maker, Capricorn’s banker stopped making money. It all turned a bit ugly, and the band sued the label for underpaid royalties and won. The label was no longer with Atlantic, and, having had a spell under Warners, was a PolyGram subsidiary. But PolyGram wouldn’t bail them out and, in 1979, Capricorn was declared bankrupt.
Phil Walden had a titanic battle with drugs for much of the eighties but managed to get clean towards the end of the decade. He had lost none of his flair for a commercial opportunity and launched the career of actor Jim Varney, whose redneck alter ego Ernest P. Worrell became a national star with three successful comic movies. Okay, it wasn’t the Allman Brothers, but Phil was back in the game, and soon he was able to persuade Warner Brothers to back him with a relaunched Capricorn Records.
With the massive early nineties popularity of Garth Brooks and other country acts, Phil’s flair for marketing Southern, country-tinged rock was once again in demand. Acts like Widespread Panic, 311 and the excellent Cake gave the new Capricorn some success up until the mid-nineties. But Phil rather overspent , and as the popularity of the label’s three main acts waned throughout the decade, the new incarnation of Capricorn also folded at the turn of the millennium. Phil Walden died in 2006.
He and Capricorn are remembered fondly as a label that put their artists and the development of the music first, as well as bringing Southern Rock to a wide audience and, of course, showcasing the Allman Brothers.
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