THE DICK JAMES ORGANISATION
Billboard
by Nielsen Business Media, Inc.
Publication date 1971-09-18
It is just a happy coincidence that the London headquarters of the Dick James Organisation is built over a bank; therefore, rumors that Dick had it incorporated in the building so he’d have somewhere to keep his spare cash are (entirely) without foundation.
What is incontrovertibly true, however, is that in ten years Dick James has built up a highly profitable and powerful group with worldwide ramifications and an unswerving commitment to what Dick calls “creative publishing.” What is also true is that Dick himself fails quite spectacularly to measure up to the conventional image of the publishing tycoon. He is disarmingly modest, makes no claims to have a dazzling flair for finance, and pays constant tribute to his business associates—and to sheer luck—when it comes to explaining his success.
Dick James will wince at this—but all the many people he can count as his friends in the business will concur: he has succeeded largely because of his utter integrity, his conscientiousness and dedication to high aesthetic and ethical principles, sound common sense, his great personal charm, and, certainly not least, his educated ear for a potential hit.
And the ten-year success story of the Dick James Organisation can be summarized pretty strikingly like this: 1961: One company, two staff, three copyrights. 1971: Forty companies, forty staff (London alone) and 7,000 copyrights. Or take the case of the £100 company, Northern Songs, which after seven years' existence and with fewer than 200 copyrights, was sold for £10 million.
Dick James’s first involvement with the music industry dates from 35 years ago when he sang with a North London dance band at the age of 15. He turned professional at 17, working for $1.20 a night, and made his first broadcast in 1940. Called for army service in 1942, Dick continued to sing and make records and after the war appeared with all the major British bands—Geraldo, Billy Tement, Cyril Stapleton, Stanley Black, and many more.
“But by 1953 I was ready to look for some other kind of living,” says Dick. “I was 32 and couldn’t see much future for a fat, bald-headed singer. It was a choice between becoming an agent or becoming a publisher—and as songs can’t answer you back I decided to become a publisher.” So in the summer of 1953, Dick gave up touring and joined the publishing house of Sidney Bron. He continued to take on some singing engagements up to 1959, and in 1955 recorded the theme song (produced by George Martin) for the Robin Hood TV series—a song which, he says, “made me one of the world’s most famous unknown singers.” He got paid £100 for recording the song and it eventually sold half a million copies. “Now,” says Dick, “I don’t even sing in the bath.”
With Sidney Bron things did not exactly get off to a flying start. “It was tough,” Dick admits, “and it took me almost 18 months to pick up my first hit song. That song was ‘Idle Gossip’ sung by Perry Como—and once that one made it, things became much easier.” In his eight years with Bron, Dick chalked up 28 hits, five of them No. 1s—a record which convinced him that he could make it on his own.
“I had enough money to stay in business for a year or 18 months provided that I took things easy,” Dick recalls. “Of course, I couldn’t afford to pay any advances or do any lavish entertaining.” The value of making—and keeping—good friends in the business was underlined on the very first day (Sept. 18, 1961) that Dick James opened his office at 132, Charing Cross Road on the corner of Denmark Street, London’s Tin Pan Alley.
Tolchard Evans, a songwriter who had had a number of hits with us at Bron Music, came into the office and threw about 20 manuscripts onto the desk. He told me to take what I wanted and to pay him the royalties whenever I could. That was a really magnificent gesture in helping me get started.
The Dick James headquarters at this time consisted of two rooms, rented at $22 a week, in a suite of offices, with use of the reception area. “My secretary occupied one room and I had the other," says Dick. “I also had the recording gear in my room—a tape recorder, and a disk cutter which was essential for demos. There was already a piano in the room—though I never found out whom it belonged to. We really started on a shoestring.”
Another friend ready to offer a helping hand was Dick’s former recording manager George Martin, whom Dick knew to be a talented composer. “I genuinely wanted to publish his material and to develop it, but he was unassuming about it all and did not rate his compositions very highly. Anyway, I badgered him enough to get him to give me a composition called 'The Niagara Theme' and with this and one of Tolchard’s compositions, ‘Wherever I Go’, I managed to operate for several months. I even published some of my own songs—although
I didn’t have much confidence in them. Quite rightly, as it turned out, because nothing happened to them. But I had empty filing cabinets in those days—empty not only of correspondence but also of songs. I had to fill them with something!”
With his eight years of experience in publishing and his sharp ear for a commercial song, Dick James would undoubtedly have gone on slowly building up the business to give him “a day’s living for a day’s work” even without the phenomenon that was to come. He says: “I never doubted that things would go right—though things were tougher for a little longer than I would have liked. The Tolchard Evans song was quite a hit and while it didn’t sell many records, it did well in sheet music form. In those days you could earn ten times as much from a song copy as you could from a record. This meant regular income every month from the sheet music distributors.”
But the real turning point in the history of the Dick James Organisation came soon after the advent of what Dick, with a rather felicitous turn of phrase, calls, “those four magnificent components, the Beatles.” And this is how Dick tells it: “A young songwriter called Mitch Murray came to me with some songs one day and there was one, ‘How Do You Do It,’ which I very much liked. He’d been walking it round Denmark Street for about six months without success.
“I took the song and showed it to George Martin who also liked it and said he’d try to get it recorded by a new group from Liverpool. ‘What’s from Liverpool?’ I asked, giving him a sick look. And George told me about the Beatles. I agreed a little reluctantly to let them try the song but when I heard their version both George and I agreed it wasn’t very good.
“George offered to put it on the B side of ‘Love Me Do,’ the first Beatles’ single, but I thought the song was too good for a B side. So George said he’d try to make it the A side of their next disk. After this, however, nothing happened for about four months. Then one day George called me up—this would be in late October, 1962, and that telephone call was really the turning point. Though, of course, I didn’t know it at the time.
“Said George: ‘I’ve got bad news for you.’ I told him I was getting used to bad news by this time and he explained that the Beatles didn’t feel they could do much with my song. He also said they had some very good songs of their own which were more right for them. So I told George to forget about ‘How Do You Do It?’
“Then George gave me some good news. He told me the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, was looking for a publisher to work with him full time because he had a number of other artists he wanted to launch. He wanted a publisher who would really work for the song, the artist, and the record—and George had given him a strong recommendation for me. Brian and I were then introduced over the phone—and that was the start of it.”
The start of what must be one of the greatest publishing success stories of all time. Epstein came to the Dick James office the next day and played Dick “Please, Please Me,” the Beatles’ second single. “And I hit the ceiling,” says Dick. “I said, ‘That’s a No. 1 without any doubt,’ and I then played the record over the phone to Phil Jones of ABC-TV who was then producing the weekly pop show, ‘Thank Your Lucky Stars.’ He flipped, too, and booked the Beatles onto the show for Jan. 12, 1963, the day after the release of the record.
“At this point I didn’t even have the song—but my Enthusiasm apparently impressed Brian Epstein, and I was certainly impressed by his enthusiasm. So the deal was done, and we went to lunch. And over lunch, Epstein told me that the Mitch Murray song was going to be recorded by another of his groups—Gerry and the Pacemakers.
At last, our faith in the song was justified. Not only did “Please, Please Me” make No. 1, but so did “How Do You Do It?” and, in fact, we went on to chalk up seven No. 1’s in seven months—a record which I don’t believe has ever been surpassed. The other No. 1’s were “From Me to You” by the Beatles, “I Like It” by Gerry and the Pacemakers, “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” by Billy J. Kramer, “She Loves You” by the Beatles, and “Bad to Me” by Billy J. Kramer.
With the proximity of the bank preferred to above, Dick James doesn’t have time to shed many tears on his way to it—so perhaps he cannot give the time-honored response to the cynics who see his success entirely due to having had the luck to publish Lennon and McCartney. He has the grace to recognize that the Beatles played a tremendously important part in the prosperity of his organization; but he is not so fanatically self-effacing as to deny himself any credit at all in the hit-making heyday of the group.
“In the early days,” he says, “Brian Epstein was brand new in the business and knew virtually nobody. So from the moment when I picked up the phone to fix the Beatles’ first television show, it became the order of the day that I fix all radio and TV appearances. All the business side was taken care of by Brian and the recording side of things was handled by George Martin. That was the way things worked. Brian used my office in the early days as a London base, and while he was in London I spent two or three hours a day with him.”
With this spectacular breakthrough, Dick James could now afford to expand and take on more catalog deals.
“It would have been easy for me—and this, I think, is terribly important—to have taken the view that I had now got it made and just put my feet up and count the profits. But that would have been a very short-term outlook and, furthermore, it just did not appeal to me because it was not creative. It was my intention to create a very important music company.”
He opened up subsidiaries in the U.S., France, and Australia, but while the James copyrights—through recordings by Petula Clark (“Please, Please Me”) and Claude Francois (“How Do You Do It?”)—did well in France, it was tough to get a break in the U.S. It was particularly tough to get it in the way Dick wanted it. “I didn’t want cover records. I felt that we should try to break British artists as well as British songs so as to establish British talent in America. It may be good publishing to get songs covered by American artists, but it is contrary to my philosophy, which is based on the kind of arrangement that existed between Brian Epstein and myself, and it was only fair to George Martin as the original producer.
“I was determined to break the artists as well as the songs—and several publishers told me at the time that I was out of my mind. I maintained that if we took the long-term view and sought a breakthrough for the artists as well, the rewards in the end would be far greater.” One publisher, whom Dick prefers not to name, bet him £1 that he would not get the Beatles in the U.S. Top 50. Dick answered that by betting that he’d get the Beatles in the U.S. Top 20. “That was optimistic enough and I had to wait a whole year to win my £1,” Dick recalls. “‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ finally broke in the States and the rest is history. British songs and artists started to reign supreme.”
Brian Epstein and his artists, recording manager George Martin, and publisher Dick James spearheaded this historic movement and the James concept of coordinated exploitation of song, singer, and record became established practice. James has always fought for British talent—partly from patriotic pride and partly, as he readily admits, because it makes good economic sense. He has also shown an uncanny knack in the matter of predicting hits, having prophesied No. 1 spots for most of the 27 house copyrights that have achieved this status.
But it is typical of Dick that he is quick to admit just how often he’s been wrong. And he likes to tell the story of when, as a rather green publisher many years ago, he said to Saul Bourne, the founder of Bourne Music, and, in Dick’s view, one of the finest music men who ever lived: “Mr. Bourne, how do you know what a hit is?” And Saul Bourne answered: “If I knew what a hit was I wouldn’t publish so many goddamn flops.”
Dick James places great emphasis on the luck element in successful publishing, but he also has very firm ideas about the main attributes needed by a publisher today.
“I believe,” he says, “in creative publishing as practiced by people who have a sincere desire to be part of the creative scene, to contribute something to the business—which, in all conscience, is only fair if we are to take something out of it. I think, too, that a publisher has to keep up with new material. For someone of my generation, this means flying blind to a certain extent. But if you have a belief in the quality of an artist and his material—as we have had with Elton John—then you have to back up that belief. Somewhere along the line you’ve got to become maybe a bit dogmatic, even to the point of obstinacy. Equally, in the face of absolutely nothing happening, you’ve got to know when to give up and stop chucking good money after bad.
“With Elton John, we backed our faith to the hilt because we took a $10,000 gamble trying to promote him in the States last year. The gamble paid off, and our belief in the talent of this artist, and of the lyric-writing ability of Bernie Taupin, was fully vindicated. Here again, you find the principle of complete coordination of all elements in one organization—production, publishing, promotion, management. It is essential that all these factions work together rather than operate in a fragmented way.”
For a self-made man who laid the foundations of his thriving organization with much single-handed hard work and little capital, Dick James is remarkably reluctant to bask in the limelight. He constantly gives credit for the success of the DJO to his associates and insists that he is absolutely not indispensable to the smooth running of the firm.
“I would hate to think I was indispensable. I think it would be dangerous for the organization and it would put too much pressure and onus on me. After ten years of building an organization, it should be able to stand on its own eighty feet!”
**ELTON A HIT IN FRANCE - By Michaelway**
PARIS—Gerard Tournier, a specialist in foreign catalogs in France, has represented DJM publishing and recording in this country from the beginning, distributing the records through CBS-France. Undoubtedly, the label in this country means Elton John, enormously popular with younger audiences in spite of the great language difficulties. Three albums have scored well—“Elton John,” “Tumbleweed Collection,” and “Live—17.11.70,” along with singles “Border Song,” “Take Me to the Pilot,” and “Ballad of the Well-Known Gun.”
John also scored with the soundtrack from the Paramount film “Friends” (distributed by Pathe-Marconi), but this is not in the DJM catalog. The artist twice visited France this year, the first time at MIDEM in January where his gala performance was one of the highlights on the same bill as Eric Burdon. This success led to a lightning return visit in March. However, the biggest DJM success in France was Mr. Bloe’s “Groovin’ With Mr. Bloe,” which hit a notable 100,000 copies and also released were the titles “Mr. Bloe” and "Curried Soul” on singles, plus an album.
Jean-Michel Gallois-Mondrun, responsible for DJM at Gerard Tournier’s, said new releases in France from the catalog would be albums by Nigel Olsson, Elton John’s drummer, and Phillip Goodhand Tait.
**Dick James in Scandinavia**
OSLO—As recently as last September, Sture Borjedahl, head of Air Music Scandinavia in Stockholm, secured a local recording of one of Elton John’s compositions. This happened in Stockholm, where Bruno Winzell sang “Talking to Old Soldiers,” translated to Swedish by Hawky Franzen, called “En ensam gammal mann." Franzen, a bandleader in his own right, has also translated other Elton John material, and these songs have been recorded in Swedish by Tommy Koerberg and Mia Adolphson, among others.
Sture Borjedahl has represented Dick James since 1962 when he was head of Sonora Publishing and secured the contract with Northern Songs for Scandinavia. Later, in 1969, Sture Borjedahl opened his own publishing house, Air Music Scandinavia, in close cooperation with Air London and represents not only Northern Songs but also Dick James Music and Cookaway Music, and also the catalogue of Elton John. During the early days, Borjedahl was also successful with another Dick James property, the Troggs.
It is, of course, Elton John who means the most, admits A&R executive Mikkel Aas at Norsk Phonogram in Oslo. Especially following, he points out, the visit by Elton John to Copenhagen, Gothenburg, and Stockholm, which has meant a major increase in the sales of his records in Denmark and Sweden—and eventually also Norway. The Philips record companies in Scandinavia have represented the DJM records since the beginning of 1969. In Stockholm, representation is taken care of by Philips-Sonora, in Copenhagen by Nordisk Polyphon AS.
Other artists whose records the Philips group in Scandinavia is working on include the Daggers, Phillip Goodhand-Tait, and Hookfoot. An LP is also expected by Elton John’s drummer, Nigel Olsson. All three LPs by Elton John issued in Scandinavia are steady sellers, the best being “Tumbleweed Connection.” In connection with the Elton John LP to be issued in November, Mikkel Aas visited London in September to talk with Stephen James and also listen to finished cuts on the record. SEPTEMBER 18, 1971, BILLBOARD
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