MACHERS AND ROCKERS

'Chess Records and the Business of Rock & Roll', Macher is a Yiddish word for a big wheel or an operator. On the South Side of Chicago in the late 1940s, two immigrants, one a Jew born in Russia, the other a black Blues singer from Mississippi, met and changed the course of musical history. Muddy Waters electrified the Blues, and Leonard Chess recorded it. Soon Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry added a dose of pulsating rhythm, and Chess Records captured that too. Rock & Roll had arrived, and an industry was born. In a book as vibrantly and exuberantly written as the music and people it portrays, Rich Cohen tells the engrossing story of how Chess, with the other record men, made this new sound into a multi-billion-dollar business, aggressively acquiring artists, strong-arming distributors, riding the crest of a wave that would crash over a whole generation. The book is full of absorbing lore and animated by a deep love for popular music - it's a big, tough, funny, clever story. Not politically correct, the book begins at a Bar Mitzvar and immediately draws connections between blacks and Jews. 220pp, photos.