Welcome to part two of my interview with Bob Koester, founder and owner of Chicago's Delmark records, probably, at fifty-five years, the oldest independent record label in the United States. They've been recording and releasing jazz and blues records since 1953, first in St.Louis where they first opened, and since 1959 in Chicago. We pick up in Part Two where we left off in Part One so you might what to go back and read that first if you haven't yet.
I know it wouldn't have been for you but others might have wanted to make it one. Was race ever an issue, considering the climate in the sixties and the fact that most of the people you were recording were black?
Chicago wasn't the south, so the prejudice wasn't out in the open. It was there in the fact that Blacks weren't welcome in certain neighborhoods and there were restaurants downtown that wouldn't serve black people, but you learned to avoid them. Once I found out which they were, I stopped eating at them all together. They didn't have signs up saying no blacks, or anything like that, but it was known they would serve them.
Most of the jazz and blues clubs were on the south or west sides, which were black neighborhoods. When a white guy showed up in a black bar it was assumed he was either a cop, a bill collector, or looking for sex. When they found out you were there to listen to the music and for no other reason you were a friend.
The worse time I had were from white cops who would try and throw me out of the bars. They probably thought I was there dealing drugs or something. But aside from that I've never had any other problems.
You know a lot of the problems were about money in the old days, cause there's no denying that people were screwed out of money owed to them because they were black. Because I didn't do very many royalty recordings, and always paid what I said I would, there was hardly any of that problem.
You have a reputation as hands off producer, letting the musicians have their heads. What do you see as your role in the recording process? Is there ever a time when you do have to step in and nudge things in a certain direction?
First of all I'm not the producer anymore, Steve Wagner handles the day to day stuff. But if I made one suggestion during a day's worth of recording that would be it. I'm not a musician, so I'm not about to tell somebody what to do. I don't believe in production. I'm not about to bring in a bunch of stuff that you can't hear a guy doing when he's up on stage in a club, for instance. Even if we did bring in horns or strings or something like that, I'm not going to be the one doing the arrangements.
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