Boogie Man. Charles Shaar Murray

Stalin himself, first as Political Commissar and then as Ukrainian Chairman of the Council of Labour Armies. Not surprisingly, Besman’s family fled in 1921, after the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising put paid to any significant challenge to Bolshevik hegemony. However, it wasn’t until 1926 that they finally arrived in Detroit, having had to cool their heels for a British sojourn in Whitechapel, at the heart of the East End of London.

      ‘I went to school there, at 32 Leman Street, because the quota had closed down for the United States, and I had to wait five years before we could come out. I came from a very musical family, and from the age of three I was playing piano. When I finally got to Detroit I formed a band with another fella, called Milt, and we called our band Milt Bernard. That’s how I went through college, making my money by playing piano. My style was like Eddie Duchin or Tommy Cavallero. That’s dance music, society-type smooth dance music, ball room dancing. We played hotels and resorts. We played jazz as part of the programme, but mainly it was for dancing, because that’s all there was. Later I became a booking agent for bands, and I did pretty well. I made records in 1936. I had a band, and I booked bands, and I made demonstration records because as a booking agent, people would come to get a band and I’d play them these records for them to see which band they liked. When the war came along I had to close up, and go into the service, but while I was in the service I was in Special Services, and I did shows. I was with 5th Air Force, and we’d put on shows, and I had a band. We took care of the dances, scheduled dancers, things like that. So actually, I pursued the music club through the service. About three days after I was discharged, I was waiting for a friend of mine that was in the service with me, and one of our other friends walked by where we were waiting in downtown Detroit. He was in the photographic business before he got in the service and he had some records under his arm and he said, “Say, Bernie, I was just in California and somebody there gave me these records and they wanted me to get into the business, but I know nothing about this business.”’

      Besman’s buddy was carrying an armful of Latin American records he’d been given by a company named Pan American. ‘I didn’t know anything about the record business at first, and he didn’t want the business anyway. I’d only been out of the service three days so I said, “Well, let me check into it and see what happens.” I called those people and they said, “Sure, you can be a distributor, but you have to pay immediately for the records.” I put the money in advance in the bank before I even got the records. So I had about $6,000 at that time; that was my whole fortune. This friend of mine that I met, I told him about this deal and said, “I have $6,000, I don’t know how long it’ll last, do you want to be a partner with me?” He says, “You try it for about three weeks, see what happens,” and later he came up with $6,000 and we became partners. The point was that when I did get the records and went out to sell them, nobody wanted them because they were primarily made in a Spanish vein, or Mexican type of music. But the people I went to see told me that if I had this record or that record, they’d buy it from me. So that’s how I got involved, selling records primarily by black artists, and I was the first independent record distributor using these off-brand labels. The $12,000 didn’t last very long, buying records on credit, and after three months it got too big for the area I rented. I rented this basement in one of the houses to start with, and we’d get the records through the window off the sidewalk, so we moved into much larger quarters at 3747 Woodward Avenue, which was the main street in Detroit. Four thousand square feet, and the rent was up from $30 a month to about $400, and I wondered how the hell we were going to make that, because it was quite a jump. But we were very, very successful. By the time I sold my share of the business to my partner to come to California for some other ventures that I had, we did close to a million and a half dollars a year.’