„Everybody’s got their little come-on. The day that I signed with Chess Records, part of their come-on to me was a cheque laying on the desk that was made out to Chuck Berry and Alan Freed for $167,700. And I looked and Leonard Chess said, ‚See, this is the kind of money our artists make.‘ I said gosh!
„The next cheque I saw was made out to the Moonglows, Harvey Fuqua and Alan Freed; it was about $70,000 royalties for the record Sincerely. Alan Freed’s name just happened to be on all of those cheques, y’know. Alan Freed and Leonard Chess, boy, they were the very best teachers.
„After that, after I had the hit with All I Could Do Was Cry, when Leonard handed me my very first envelope that said ‚royalties‘, I opened it up and there was no cheque in there, just a little piece of paper saying, ‚You’re $14,000 in the red.‘ ‚But,‘ he told me, ‚don’t worry about that. You need some money? We’ll let you have two thousand.‘ That was always the way it was. You’d get a Cadillac or a fur stole or a ring, something like that. That was your royalties.
„But bitter? No. After all, what did I know? I didn’t have any lawyer or a good manager or nothing, so what the heck? Long as I was riding in a big Cadillac and dressed nice and had plenty of food, that’s all I cared about.“
Schön auch die Passagen zu den Stones im Interview von 1978.
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #151: Neuheiten aus dem Archiv – 09.04., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba