Machers and Rockers: Chess Records and the Business of Rock & Roll (Enterprise) [Hardcover]

Rich Cohen (Author)

Book Description

Series: Enterprise (W.W. Norton Hardcover) | Publication Date: September 1, 2004

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

More acclaim is rendered to Chess Records and Leonard Chess, in particular, in Cohen's engaging book based on the proposition that "Leonard Chess, along with a handful of the musicians he signed and promoted and coddled and fucked over and enriched, invented the very idea of Rock & Roll." The musicians Leonard and his brother, Phil, signed and so forth included Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, and the rest of the Chicago blues elite, and this is inevitably the story of black musicians and Jewish businessmen coming together to almost inadvertently create timeless rhythm and blues and inspire the development of rock. Cohen blends the artists' stories with the upward progress of Leonard Chess' family, notably including son and eventual rock mogul Marshall, who called Muddy Waters grandfather. The Chess story hasn't languished untold, but Cohen's version of it, centered on the savvy businessman who moved to "an old money town" as his business grew but kept commuting to the south side to make it work right, is utterly fresh. Mike Tribby
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 222 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (September 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039305280X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393052800
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 8.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #945,194 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Machers and Rockers, October 16, 2004

By 

Mystery Fan (Elmhurst, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Machers and Rockers: Chess Records and the Business of Rock & Roll (Enterprise) (Hardcover)

Machers and Rockers is an embarrassment to the publishing industry. Just about everything the author knows about Chess Records and the Chess brothers was lifted from Nadine Cohodas's vastly superior book, Spinning Blues Into Gold. Cohen manages to insert a mistake onto every other page of his book, even to misreading Cohodas's book. For example, the address of the Macomba was 39th and Cottage Grove, not 47th and South Karlov, Muddy Waters was NOT pioneering his new sound in the Checkerboard (a club that came way after the 1940s), Chess was not recording in makeshift studios early on, but in the top-notch Universal Recording, he has Sam Phillips selling Evis's contract to RCA for 30K in one place and 35K in another, he has Etta James singing "Don't Go to Strangers" instead of Etta Jones and then pretends to have listened to it with an evocative description, he has 2120 the last address of Chess when the address was it was 320 E. 21st, he has Ben E. King leading the Moonglows when it was Bobby Lester, and on and on and on. Not only can Cohen not get the facts right, he has absolutely no understanding of the label and its recording legacy. This is a dishonest book written by an author who has absolutely no quams on foisting a worthless book on the public.

If you plan to spend money on a book about Chess Records and the Chess brothers I emplore you to invest it in the tremendously researched and far more interesting Spinning Blues Into Gold. Books like Marchers and Rockers need to be ground up into pulp as fast as possible to avoid infecting the public discourse on this famous label.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Book, October 16, 2004

By 

J. Case "Case" (Lincoln Park, Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Machers and Rockers: Chess Records and the Business of Rock & Roll (Enterprise) (Hardcover)

This is a book about American Pop Culture. About music, yes, but also about a certain type of person, and and a certain time, and a certain culture that is on its way out. Or already gone. I think it is really like a Chicago version of that Irving Howe book, "World of Our Fathers." It is about Jews, blues and the old city of Chicago. I reccomend it highly.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars like a clean guitar line, October 16, 2004

By 

Barry Wood "BW" (Kansas City, Mo.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Machers and Rockers: Chess Records and the Business of Rock & Roll (Enterprise) (Hardcover)

this book reminds me of a great old rock and roll song. more than any other book or movie i know, it makes clear all the connections, where the blues turns into rock and roll, and where the businessman becomes the rock and roll executive. it is also the bigger story of race and culture, and how that old nation became the new America.