King of Queen City
Syd Nathan had already failed at a couple of businesses when he came up with the idea of a record company targeting the “hillbilly” market. In 1943 he borrowed twenty-five grand from family and set up King Records, taking over an old Brewster Avenue icehouse in Cincinnati’s Evanston district, and signed Moon Mullican and Louis Marshall “Grandpa” Jones. (The nickname notwithstanding, Jones was only thirty.) Knowing that independent labels often ran into major problems, Nathan resolved to be as self-sufficient as possible: he set up his own pressing plant and did his own distribution.
The country stuff sold well enough, and after World War II ended Nathan saw a new trend coming, which wasn’t yet called “rhythm and blues.” To capitalize on it, Nathan hired musician Henry Glover away from Lucky Millinder’s band and put him in charge of A&R for what would at first be called Queen Records, but which eventually became the dominant sound on King — and on Federal Records, started in 1950 with Ralph Bass at the helm.
And then there was this:
Legend has it that King Records owner Syd Nathan, hearing [James] Brown and his Famous Flames working up “Please, Please, Please” back in 1956, demanded that the tape recorder be stopped, then informed producer Ralph Bass that the song was a bunch of crap. Only he didn’t say bunch. Or crap.
Bass finished up the record anyway; Nathan reportedly fired him for insubordination. Brown and his managers eventually persuaded Nathan to issue the track, though it came out on the subsidiary Federal label (as #12258) rather than on King. “Please, Please, Please” eventually moved about a million copies and even hovered just under the bottom of the pop chart; Bass got an apology from Nathan and his job back, though three years later he left King to work for the Chess brothers in Chicago.
Syd Nathan died in 1968, and the company was sold to the country label Starday; it’s changed hands several times since. The old Brewster Avenue headquarters, meanwhile, fell into typical urban desuetude.
For quite some time, there has been a frustrating effort on the part of Cincinnati’s music lovers to install a plaque on the King building, without much interest from civic leaders. However, on Sunday, November 23, a large group of musicians, volunteers, educators, reporters, and prominent Cincinnati citizens converged in front of the old icehouse to join Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum president Terry Stewart in unveiling a plaque designated to honor King Records.
As Little Willie John (on King 5142) once said, “Let’s rock while the rockin’s good.”
