Now a days record buyers and young music fans are accustomed to a really integrated music picture, ah, some like, like Bruce Springsteen might have a black saxophone player, somebody like Eric Clapton might and does have a black drummer. Audiences are intermingled. Certainly rap has escalated and has come out of the inner-city and now is a universal music for white people. And it's probably unthinkable to some of the current generations that there was a time when music was very segregated: black people went to see black music, white people went to see white music. But one of the liberating factors and one of the seminal factors leading to rock and roll which was a blending, was some of these bus tours in the South whereby you'd have maybe Fats Domino's band, Ruth Brown, the Clovers and Sam Cooke, a huge package show making huge one night jumps to play in so, what they called - colored theaters - back then or colored dance halls. Well, what happened which a lot of people don't realize that occasionally in some of these performances whites would be permitted but they'd have to be in the balcony, sort of a Crow Jim arrangement. But these were dedicated fans of the music and slowly they came down from the balcony and slowly the ropes that segregated, separated the crowds were removed and the music began to come together. Ah, one of the, of course the most important vector in moving the phonographic record is radio play, it was then and it is now, maybe with some few exceptions such as dance hall music and so on. And the radio stations were then and still are as a matter of fact separate, they were categorized as neither pop or R and B and within that there are many sub-categories which is of no point to go into now. But in the, the early days, let's say of my years in ra… with Atlantic Records, we were dealing with black music only until maybe 1960 when a young man named Bobby Darin became the bellwether for a lot of our subsequently white acts. We couldn't get our records played on a pop radio station. We had to go to the so-called black radio stations which were black only in the sense that the records were programmed for black audiences very often with black disc jockeys. However, at the time, there were many, many white disc jockeys broadcasting on black radio stations and not necessarily assuming a, a black dialect or a black style but in general a low down funky southern style. And the audience presumed that they were black. It's just amazing how many of these people there were; Daddy Sears in New Jersey and later in Atlanta, Gent., Gentleman George Oxford in San Francisco, of course the ineffable Alan Freed in New York. Of course everybody knew that he was white, that wasn't the question. But many, George Laurens, the Hound Dog in Buffalo, Jiven Gene in Charlotte, the audience, the black audiences thought that these people were black. And certainly nothing was done to discourage the notion because the idea was to hold these constituencies. And there was great __ and of course there was the great Nashville grouping of, of people like Horse Allan, uh, and John Richberg and Gene, ah, Gene Nobles who broadcast 22 channels, 22 states, clear channel and was sending this black music out into white America, very important contribution toward the melding that became rock and roll. And then the other important phenomenon which was really a sub-grouping of this particular, ah, drill was the so-called beach record in the Carolinas. This was a function of two things; the development of the transistor radio which kids could take to the beach and these broadcasts from these powerful stations in Nashville, Cincinnati, Chicago and New York so that young white high school kids would go to the beach with their transistors and on one station there'd be Patti Page and Perry Como, they'd switch the dial and suddenly say, what this? Fats Domino, Lavern Baker, Clyde McPhatter and The Drifters. And it was like somebody who had been subjected to a diet of fudge sundaes coming across a really good tangy, chewy Mac, a good, honest hot-dog. So the, I take it as a given 'cause I think history has proved it that there is a tropism for black music that is undeniable, that black music has shaped all of our popular music and it was kept, you know, categorized, separated and in a, ah, in a hidden corner, so to speak, it was parochial only because white people didn't know about it which leads me to the role of the great enunciator - Elvis - because he delivered us the greatest cultural boon. Nobody ever did more for the American people. He gave them the great present of black music transmitted through his own sensibility, his own sensitivity. Of course Elvis was a different kind of white purveyor of black music because it was naturally black even though it was conveyed through him, it was not a white man doing a version of black music a la Pat Boone or the Hilltoppers, it was real and he was, I just view him as a conduit. And, ah, America was really changed. I'm talking about American music and our culture in general. We owe far more to Elvis Presley than all the British groups put together.

And spea… speaking of Elvis Presley when I was at Atlantic in the fifties we were very well aware of him, long before he became a national phenomenon on the Ed Sullivan Show. And we had a pretty fair notion that he would have been a magical signing for us because we didn't know nor could be predict that he was going to become the phenomenon, you know, the king of kings but we tried to sign him because we had heard, we had understood that he might be available, for sale from his Sun Records contract with Sam Phillips who was a very good friend of ours by the way. And so we made a pitch and we went as high as 30 thousand dollars which we didn't have and, ah, if they'd said yes we probably would have gone out begging or held up a bank. But RCA beat us out with a price of 40 thousand dollars. And by the way it wasn't their money, the money was Hill and Range's money, the publishing company who as the interceder brought the contract and then presented it to RCA in return for which they got the no small benefit of the publication of Elvis Presley's songs. And as a matter of fact, for many years in the beginning, controlled his recordings. They brought the songs to him and what he was offered by Hill and Range he was permitted to select from and those are the songs he recorded which was a great move on the part of a couple of fellas named Averbach.

Who were the most influential of those guys? Does LAC stand out because of that huge …? Were there others like that?

Now LAC stood by itself because of it's signal and it's power.

In the fifties, New Orleans was really, you know, a hot bed of, of talent for both jazz and rhythm and blues. And there were so many hot artists down there that I mean it just behooved you to go down there and look around and see what you could do. People like Little Richard, Fats Domino, Smiley Lewis, Frankie Ford who was a white man doing rhythm and blues, James Booker and later on Doctor John, Malcolm Rabinet. Of course New Orleans music had its own style, its own sound, it surely had its own beat. And it yielded some terrific music. So my partner Armand Ertigan and I would fly down in Convairs, twin engine Convairs, it took forever to get there and then we'd settle in and look around. One great place to hear music was at Frank Panya's Dew Drop Inn. There have been many Dew Drop Inns all across America, you know, in the inner-cities and in general they conveyed the same sort of attractions: there'd be food, there'd be music, there'd be, ah, proscribed substances and there'd be places maybe to sleep and so on. And we'd go there to have a party and so on. Ah, there were certain problems in those days in getting around because of the segregation which affected transportation. They had so-called colored cabs and so-called white cabs. This then hadn't anything to do with the paint job on, on the taxi but had to do that by custom certain taxicabs, let's say, for example, driven by black drivers would only pick up people at black addresses and deliver them to black addresses and conversely with white people. For example, one time I had dinner with Okey Dokey who was a famous New Orleans disc jockey about whom the famous rockabilly song - "Okie Dokie Stomp" which you know very well, ah, was written and I was at his house for dinner and he had picked me up and taken me there. He left after dinner, he had to do, go into a commercial they used to sell beer and do beer commercials at retail stores and I was there with his family and I had no way of getting home. I walked maybe six or eight miles to a bakery which had a telephone, I was picked up there. Now, when Armand Ertigan and I would go back in town to see a show, to go to a nightclub, the only way we could get back to the, ah, downtown or we used to stay in the Quarter at some of the Quarter hotels like the Monte Leone or the Joan Hotel was to get a so-called colored taxi driven by a black man and as soon as we crossed Clayburn, Clayborne Avenue, we would lie down in the back of the cab so we couldn't be seen and they'd let us off at the alley in, in back of the Joan Hotel. Well one time, ah, I remember there was a birthday party for Joe Turner and he had his driver and his cook Ernest, Ernest go prepare a fantastic meal at Frank Panya's Dew Drop Inn. Armand wasn't feeling well that night and so he was home with a cold and was back in the hotel. And I was there and I got really, you know, schnozled. And the next thing you know I wake up in the morning and I slept over. That was a great scene because it was maybe 10 or 11 o'clock, there was Joe Turner with his suspenders, you know, and, and his, ah, and, his, ah, ah, Al Brigham underwear and there was Smiley Lewis and they're having spaghetti for breakfast. And somebody goes to the piano and here's Smiley playing and singing as Joe Turner joining in, it was an incredible scene. And as Frank Panya said at the time, he said to me, Wexler you and Lash LaRue are the only offays of who ever slept overnight at my saloon.

One of the psychological human and socioeconomic reasons for the development of rock and roll was, as I said before, the exposure of white people to black music. They began by listening to it. The next thing they did was attempt to play it quite poorly, but the ones who persisted managed to learn their instruments and soon became perhaps as proficient as their black role models, maybe not with the same gravamen of authenticity and so on it became something else. And in the beginning and the idea is this, why was rock and roll necessary when the black originals were available? What was the thrust that caused that? Well it's a sort, it's a very curious little aspect of racism in my opinion which is this, to hear Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf deliver and impassioned Chicago blues is one thing. For a little white girl from Teaneck or Scarsdale to hear this and to be absolutely taken with the music is one story but then to see these huge sweating black men with strange looking hair and different skin and great patches of perspiration in their blue work shirts was not enticing to them. So this sort of was a vacuum. Here's some music that people could like but the players, we had to substitute some different players. Now we get androgynous British boys, we get white country people, so-called hillbillies. Cotton bottom people, share croppers who now became presentable because we come now to the sexual imagery of rock and roll. The little white sensual girl who, who's imagination, who's fantasy went just as far as it could go short of penetration had to substitute now a suitable fantasy partner and it would have to be a acceptable Caucasian of their own particular background, their own social status, their own class. This to me was the big genesis 'cause rock and roll is surely about sex because that's what it originally meant when it was the property of the black musicians and the black, ah, ah, audiences. Rock and roll on Saturday night, as I said before, it had to do ultimately with a sexual experience.

In the South this thing between southern white kids and black music. They loved the music but they didn't want to mix with the artists. Do you think that tied in any way with … reactions to rock and roll ... authority figures in the fifties - record bandits, payolas, scandals?

Ah, the, ah, tre… tremendous reaction and attempt to censor rock and roll which came from administrators in cities, mayors, police chiefs, alderman maybe even governors of states. Ah, the, there's tremendous animate version toward this music because it was going to seduce the innocent young girls, it was going to break down moral codes, it was going to break down the very structure, structure of white European morality and so on. It was a form again of racism because it was so-called - unquote - black music. And again, I don't know how much there is to this but it's always been taken as a given that the real impetus behind Jim Crow and the southern whites antipathy toward the black was the notion that the black man was going to take their white woman. Ah, you don't need me to inform you that's one of the big lies that we've ever had in history but that's how this thing was kept going for many years.