Growing almost as rapidly  as a new born panda, there is a new retail industry that is considered revolutionary.

Starbucks is going after it with the same fervor that they did in those early days in Seattle when coffee was just beginning to gush forth as the  universal  panacea.  Now that they have managed to locate a Starbucks s on almost every corner in the country, they are expanding in new directions. 

Walk into some of the new Starbucks and you will find an array of music CD’s, displayed in large wire racks. Pluck a CD from a rack, don a set of headphones and sample it. 

Starbucks is rapidly becoming a music store in which coffee happens to be sold.  Paul McCartney has designated Starbucks as his official retail outlet.  

Wal-Mart is also displaying music in prime traffic locations. There, you can find hundreds of CD’s, even The Eagles latest, because they just made a deal similar to the one done by McCartney. 

My favored Starbucks displays CD’s by the cash register as last minute impulse items  and also, in rotary racks throughout  the store. Any spare square footage, it seems,  is occupied by a CD rack. 

There is a mega-Target near me that sells 4,000 CDs a week. Music is their highest grossing item.  

This is all ground breaking, right?  “WRONG!” as Dennis Hopper would  dissonantly intone. 

Don’t tell that to Herb Siegel, the mega media man. He originated this concept over fifty years ago. “A story goes with it,” as Damon Runyon used to write. 

In 1953, I was just out of the army, and had come up empty in my desperate attempt to re-engage myself with the Hollywood radio scene  My  friend, Paul Weston, Columbia Records head of A and R, had  watched me dangle for a couple of fruitless months, then called me to his office. 

There,. Paul laid out a plan for me that was to consume an entire year in the east before returning to California and taking over the west as the manager of their dynamic new venture, the  retail of phonograph records in super markets. 

At the meeting, he introduced me to Mike Nidorf, a king maker in the  music business. Unbeknownst to me,  Mike had been judging me at a few social  events and lunches to which Paul had invited me. 

It turned out later  that he had asked Frank Sinatra about me. Paul had told him that  Frank and I  had connected  before I entered the army. Paul told Mike that Frank liked me. I had been approved  not only by Frank, but Nidorf himself. 

Mike was  the manager of Paul’s. wife, Jo Stafford. He was more than that. He had had a hand in positioning Jim Conkling as the president of Columbia Records Now, apparently, he was  anointing me as a major force in music retail. 

The meeting was almost clinical. “Harry,” said Paul in the pleasant low key way he had of doing big things, “Mike and I want you to go to Philadelphia and join a young man whom you will like, Herb Siegel. Herb is launching a new business called Music Merchants”. 

The drill was: I would go to Philly, and learn this business dedicated to selling phonograph records in super markets.  Paul told me that I would start out as a route man, learn the business, and graduate in three months to the managership of Baltimore-Washington, a  territory that retailers call  “Balto-Wash.” and later, the west coast. 

I was out of moves in Hollywood. It had not yet occurred to me to drop down to San Diego and forage for a gig. Besides, anything involving “ running the west coast” had a nice ring to it. We sealed it with a hand shake. 

When Paul shook my hand,  he passed a wad of something to me  Figuring it was money ,I refrained from looking until I was out of the room It was a check for $3,000,  Lots of money in those days . Maybe, even these days. 

Music Merchants was headquartered in the warehouse district of Philadelphia. The area was rumbling with trucks, laden with merchandise bound for retail.

The streets were filled with grimy working stiffs, dressed in scruffy clothes. 

I found the Music Merchants warehouse and walked into a bustling atmosphere. This time there were men pushing dollies stacked high with  packages of  78 and 45 rpm records freshly pressed  from  RCA, Columbia, Capitol, Mercury, and more  obscure labels. 

My instincts told me that these were recent hits on the way to the supermarkets , Good! I had my first handle on the way things were done in this new business. 

I was not prepared for what happened  next. There standing in front of me, smiling as if we were old friends was a man near my age, but there the comparison stopped.  He was splendidly dressed  and gripped in his hand was a thick leather briefcase. Bonus! Bonus! He was perfectly turned out, including glossy fingernails that could only have been buffed that very morning. 

“Hi, Harry”  He said with sincere warmth.. “Welcome  to Music Merchants. I’m Herb Siegel.. Mike and Paul tell me you are something special and that is good enough for me.”  Most people have to earn my  respect.  Siegel commanded it from the first moment I met him.  

Siegel took me around to meet the core of the Philadelphia operation. There was his manager and buyer of the music, Elliot Wexler, a giant of a man, who had managed Benny Goodman and Buddy Greco in another era, but now was firmly ensconced as the man responsible for choosing and buying the records. He extended a beefy hand and gave me a tentative smile. Like, “so you you’re the guy they are talking about. Ok, prove it.” 

Wexler’s skill was vital The record companies only allowed a five percent return privilege on any records Music Merchants bought. Make a few mistakes in the buying and you wound up eating the profits. Buy a million dollars worth of records right and misjudge only fifty thousands dollars worth of records and the million meant nothing. Wexler had a lot riding on his massive shoulders. 

Columbia Records had granted a ten percent discount to the new firm. RCA gave away five percent. No one else budged in helping this fledgling company survive Apparently, It did not matter to them that this was a cutting edge company that could open up a whole new vista to the record business. 

The third man is the office was Charlie Abraham, a good natured man with the straight ahead task of delivering the record racks and stocking them.  His job was endless.  Three hundred stores in Philadelphia and several hundred more in the outlying area. Charlie stocked them all. 

It was not  his job to question where they sent him He had once delivered records to several Amish stores without mentioning to Herb that this might not be the place for pop records. They  lay there motionless in the racks until someone noticed that they weren’t moving. I went out troubleshooting and found no one but Amish,  people who considered  pop records to be  tools of the devil. 

Siegel wasted no time in assigning me to a truck full of records and sent me on my way to find the stores on my own in the sprawling city. The Giant chain had just given Music Merchant fifty more stores and it was my job to find  and service them.  I set out the next morning with a truck full of stock and a map. 

The paperwork was simple. I had an invoice  and a credit form. I would stock the records in the racks  and make out an invoice. The following week I would show up and  count the records sold, take out the surplus ones and  restock the sellers.

We always gave them a two week supply until  the sale on that particular title  began to slip. 

The idea was to move the records around to those stores where the records needed to be replaced, and finish up with no unsold records. These days, the inventory would be tabulated daily on computers. 

Herb Siegel was boundlessly pleasant to me. He came to visit me a couple of times per month, apparently just to say hello He never complained but gave me straight “A’s”. 

He maintained his sartorial perfection..His dark blonde hair was always combed and brushed and his pants creased. He could have been a shirt model.  

I assumed he was making calls to the upper management of the Safeways and Giants in the area. I never met them but they were reported to have been delighted by the brisk sales of the music.  

Fast forward three months to my new assignment, managing the Balto-Wash district,  200 of which Herb had pre-sold.  The  word was getting around.  Supermarkets were ripe for selling records. 

It was my job to hire two route men. I called my old army buddy, a jobless Al Heacock in New York and gave him the route in Baltimore. That’s right. The same Al Heacock who went on to manage KDKA in Pittsburgh. I hired another man for Baltimore.  

My job was  to pick up the records at  the distributors in the area, and stock the warehouse that I had selected in Laurel Maryland.. Wexler continued to do the buying in Philly. 

At first, the business ran itself in my district. Then things got more hectic. Paul Weston and Mike Nidorf began asking me to report to them and give them my “take” on the viability of their investment.   

I was ordered to go to New York a couple of times a month, meet with their accountants . I agreed only after being assured that Herb Siegel knew about this. 

Herb not only knew but always arranged to be in New York with me when I made my report. He never asked any questions that would have betrayed my loyalty to Paul and Mike. They apparently were transparent in their dealings with him. They wanted Herb to succeed. 

Siegel not only met me in New York but introduced me to his wife Ann, one of the most elegant women I have ever met. Ann  was an aristocrat in New York circles but treated me as an equal, a stretch at that time because I was still a garnet in the rough.  

She was one of those women who look into your eyes and treat you as if you were the most important person in her life at that moment.. After all these years of meeting many other women,, she lingers in my mind as extraordinary  Her voice was soft and  musical, enhancing  the effect. I can still hear it in my head. 

Although she never mentioned it, I learned that Ann  had been Grace Kelly’s Maid of Honor when Kelly married Prince Rainier of Monaco. I could tell that Herb worshipped this dark patrician beauty, entranced when she took the lead in our conversations during those evenings.  

Ann died a few years ago, after a life of sponsoring  major charity projects. Herb called her “the wind beneath my wings.” 

My Music Merchants itinerary expanded. Now, I was asked by Weston to meet Jim Conkling, the president of Columbia Records  and report directly to him about Columbia record sales in the business. I saw him in his Manhattan office and began a warm relationship  which  endured for years till his death..  

Conkling  gave me extra homework, Columbia Records was going to begin shipping  the revolutionary new LP’s to me in Washington and I was assigned to evaluate them. There was a  flurry of activity in the record industry, with the majors trying to figure out how best to market the new LP’s.  

I had already concluded that because LP’;s were being sold like magazines on supermarket racks, they should be treated like magazines with as attention grabbing and artful covers as Columbia could come up with. Soon afterward,  Columbia began creating covers with colorful eye catching layouts. 

Mike Nidorf understated it when he predicted Herb’s future to me as a future great.. .Siegel  went on to become the equal of any of the giants you have read about:  Redstone, Diller, Murdoch. More impressive, he successfully dealt with them all, while keeping the respect of those storied  giants.  

Music Merchants failed, because the record companies lacked the vision to grant the discounts that would have made rack jobbing in non-music retail outlets viable Buying perfectly with only a 5% margin for error, was impossible, even for a genius such as Elliot Wexler. 

Big  loss to the music business. Small loss to Herb. Considering where he went in the business world, he would have lost patience and become bored with such a low  rent enterprise, anyway. 

Like most  men who had been happily married,  he recently re-married: to a popular and beautiful social leader, Jeanne Sorenson in Manhattan, at a wedding in which Tony Bennett sang “Because of You.”  Frank Gifford was the Best Man. 

Herb moved into the Sherry Netherlands with his new wife where he knocked out the ceiling, creating a  two floor residence with high ceilings.  

Historic fact: Over fifty years ago, Herb Siegel, was the man whose vision led to the discovery that the retailing of phonograph records in supermarkets was a bonanza, which evolved to the thinking that selling CD’s as an impulse item  in Starbucks, Target, Wal-Mart, and other non-music  traffic locations is the perfect solution for the flagging music industry. The chains love it, because CD’s take up little shelf space and deliver a high unit gross. 

Herb Siegel is now a multi-billionaire, He went on to become the only man ever to own  controlling stock in three movie studios:  Fox,  Paramount ,and  20^th Century Fox.   

He  was a major influence, but I also learned from watching him that I did not have the tools play in the big league. He had raised the bar too high.  

I knew Herb Siegel and I was no Herb Siegel. 

After Music Merchants, Jim Conkling offered me the Sales Managership of the new Epic Records, and Paul Weston steered me toward a plum job in London, American liaison to Phillips, Ltd.   

I shied away from the lush offers, headed west, and dropped down to San Diego where I snared a job at KCBQ, soon to be bought by the Bartells, who showered me with sparkle dust…good move. 

                                  Top 10  1953 Hits  I sold. In the Supers

            Oh My Papa…..                      Eddie Fisher     Till Then        The Hilltoppers

            Doggie in the Window`             Patti Page         Smile                Nat Cole

Don’t Let the Stars                   Perry Como     Little Things    Kitty Kallen

Three Coins in the Fountain       Four Aces        Make Love      Jo Stafford

The High and the Mighty           Les Baxter        Hey There        Rosie Clooney

 
“The rich are not like you and me.”…..Nick in “The Great Gatsby.”