Biography

Before the advent of rock and roll, the term producer wasn’t even part of the recording-industry vocabulary. “No one really knew how to make a record when I started,” Jerry Wexler has said. “You simply went into the studio, turned on the mike and said play.” However, with the proliferation of independent record labels in the 1950s came a new breed of hands-on music-industry entrepreneurs. Among the most influential and important of these was Wexler at Atlantic Records. His entree into the music business came at Billboard magazine, where he worked as a reporter and helped change the name of ...