GATES: Astounding and that is a nation. Well, you are a nation, too. One of things that is interesting about you is that you had the foresight I mean even in the ’50s to get control of your own commercial self. In 1954 when the famous Brown V. Board Supreme Court desegregation decision was announced, you already owned the rights to publish your own music. How did this come about man, and where did this come from? How come you are different?
JONES: Like Duke Ellington said sometimes it’s nice to have the right people give you just one sentence of advice, and a couple of people told me that I remember things and I start — you’re in a situation. When I first went to New York, you’re just barely trying to survive and so you’re starting from the [NAME OF CLUB] or wherever you think you can get work, as a songwriter, arranger, whatever and New York was slick because we’d hang with out with four guys, from New Yorkers, and I’m the only outsider and we’d met at ten or 9:00 and [NAME OF CLUB] and hang out and talk and stuff and about 12:30 one dude would say oh, I got to go do my thing and he’d disappear for about an hour and a half and he’d come back, then another one disappear. They were all going home to eat. It was 10:00 at night and I hadn’t had a bite. It’s slick in New York, though. And so you were on that side where you’re just from hand to mouth survival and so when somebody said they’re publishing Lionel Hampton’s band or I write for Basie and the Morris Levi dynasty at that time, Teddy Reed and those guys would say OK, the publishing goes to Basie’s company, it goes to Morris Levi’s company. Somebody else always wanted, which is really saying it’s half of your song. If you write a song, the publishing is 50% of that. So they’re saying I want 50% of your creation and sometimes they would put their name on the composer side, so that means you get 25% of your own creation. That was normal.
GATES: That’s terrible.
JONES: That happened all the time in the 50s and 60s so in terms of exploitation, Charlie Parker would record for X record label and Charlie Parker was addicted and they’d have the dope dealer, the connection, standing out in the lobby and before each song they’d take him in the bathroom and shoot him up before he would sign a contract to give up all his publishing royalties, his composer royalties which is immoral, and his performance royalties as an artist, just to get that next fix. And so there were too many things like that happening. They had scenes back then, Skip, when managers used to have life insurance policies on that artist. They record him, send him to Vegas, record him, tour him and smoke him.
GATES: Really?
JONES: Oh, yeah. Big time. We’re doing a movie about this. That was the rule of thumb. The funniest one was when they’d see, you’d look up on Broadway and you’d see Jackie Wilson held by his heels out a 30 story window and they’d say what’s going on, they’d say is he re-negotiating his contract? It was terrible. It was awful.
And we all saw it, we felt it, we experienced it and everything else so it’s very hard for me to say that the 60s — the 60s started to change because I remember that’s when I went in as A&R and vice president. I’d lost so much money I had to go with a record company when I had my band in Europe and that’s when I said I better pay attention to the other side because it is a music business and fortunately people like Billy Taylor and Irving Green and Steve Ross and people like that would pull my coat and say hey, if you don’t own at least a piece of your masters, negatives and copyrights, you’re not in the music business, you’re just a gun for hire and you’re not in the business. You’ll always be a gun for hire.
And so all the young kids know that now because they have attorneys that they pay. They walk in the door at 16 years old with a publicist, a business manager, a PR man — actually that is a publicist — and everything when they walk in for a record contract. Have not sung one note or made one record and they’ve got all this protection that Michael Jackson and Prince and all these people invented, but they didn’t have that kind of protection then. They didn’t have it at all so there’s a gigantic difference now in terms of what that’s about. And one step leads to another.
After Steve Ross did almost a revolutionary thing with our relationship in terms of a joint venture between Time Warner and Quincy Jones Productions it was that at first, it was major stuff. Major stuff. I mean we are co-owners of what we acquire and that’s a huge company. You’re talking about a company that grosses $21 billion a year. Not to that me share that but in our own little joint venture, though, you have a right, and Steve says you have to be an asset player. You have to be where you can call the shots, and that part is growing, part’s growing all the time. More and more you see Latifah’s got a production company, Denzel Washington’s got one, everybody. Wesley Snipes, my ex-secretary runs his company now and a lot’s happening so when we were having the conflict last year when I produced the Oscars with Jesse, the Oscars was the wrong target. That’s not where we need to go. That’s just a receptacle for what’s already happened. That’s a consequence, that’s not a cause. We have to go to producers and writers and studio heads and directors and stars that have muscle to make sure that the right things go in because all we get there is the best of what’s come out, at the Oscars. Hopefully.