Recordings: The Money Side of the Street

Six years ago, young Songwriters Charlie Koppelman and Don Rubin were working for a Manhattan music publisher for $25 a week. It wasn't much, but then, as Koppelman says, "We really weren't that good as songwriters." After a while, they prudently turned to publishing other composers' songs, and eventually went on to produce recordings of those songs. Last week, after having turned out a string of 17 gold-record hits (sales of a million copies) by such performers as The Lovin' Spoonful, Bobby Darin and The Turtles, Koppelman, 28, and Rubin, 29, sold out their publishing and production enterprises to a holding company for a reported $3,000,000.

Their success would be remarkable enough if it were an isolated case; in fact, it symbolizes an upheaval that has churned the entire record industry since the advent of rock music. It began when the established record companies wanted to capture the new sounds for their labels, but found that their over-30 staff producers—the men who select songs, assign arrangers, hire musicians and supervise recording sessions—were not tuned in. As 46-year-old John K. Maitland, President of Warner Bros.-Seven Arts Records, puts it: "Our Brooks Brothers suits couldn't link up with these hippie artists."

Out of the impasse was born a new, freewheeling type of rock producer—usually as young and offbeat as the musicians themselves, steeped enough in the idiom to collaborate on songs, arrangements and electronic effects, and keenly attuned to "the street" (pop music's term for the fast-shifting mass market). Some of them went on record-company payrolls but most have remained independent, sometimes even wrapping up the complete record "package" before peddling it to the companies. Today roughly 70% of the releases that reach the bestseller charts are produced by the 100 or so independents now at work across the country. All but invisible to the general public, these producers constitute one of the most potent influences in pop music. Among them:

> George ("Shadow") Morton, 26, is so nicknamed because he is likely to excuse himself from a business conference, ostensibly to go to the men's room, and not be seen again for four days. Raised in Brooklyn, he had "about 40" jobs (bouncer, ice-cream vendor, hairdresser) before launching his record career in 1964 with a hit song that he wrote in twelve minutes (Walking in the Sand). Now he produces the Vanilla Fudge, the New York Rock & Roll Ensemble and Janis Ian (Society's Child), is training three protégés at his own commune-style firm on Long Island. An autocrat in the studio, he does his own arranging and most of his engineering, proclaims: "I am the greatest producer in the business. I am also an egomaniac."