The Mad Russian of Hastings Street
‘A GREAT EAR FOR SMELLING A HIT’
Last week’s blog about Motown’s Number One albums was the longest to date: around 4,000 words (please forgive). This week’s edition will redress the balance.
Mostly because it’s a tale of mystery, a glimpse at a Detroit music enterprise mentioned in few books, and only occasionally elsewhere. Actually, I’m hoping that this snapshot of Aaron Harris’ State Song Shop at 3419 Hastings Street will encourage readers to offer additional information or recollections.
Despite its name, the business appears to have been primarily a record wholesaler, cited by no fewer than three former Motown presidents as one of the most important in the city. In fairness, “wholesaler” makes Harris sound duller than he was, and State Song Shop was better known as a “one-stop,” where “record store owners could purchase all of the different distributors’ merchandise at one place.”
That definition came from the pen of Berry Gordy, remembering in To Be Loved the woes of his 3D Record Mart retail venture circa 1953. “One week,” he wrote, “the Midnighters, Fats Domino, Louis Jordan and Jimmy Reed were all hot at the same time and our store was jammed with people asking for their records. Nobody had any, not even the distributors. That is, nobody except the Mad Russian. After scrambling around everywhere trying to find them, I heard about him, a guy over on Hastings who always had the hottest records.”
Hastings Street at Mack Ave. in the 1950s
This was Harris, whose nickname suggests that he was an émigré, and whose one-stop had been in existence for several years when Gordy needed his services. “The Mad Russian had a great ear for smelling a hit. He bought them all up as soon as they came out and then sold them out of his store.” The Motown founder added that Harris charged a nickel more than record distributors. “So if you wanted the record first, you had to deal with him.” Doubtless, he would have stocked the R&B hits that 3D needed, before the jazz-favouring store went bust.
State Song Shop was always crowded, according to Gordy, and that stands to reason. Hastings Street was the bustling thoroughfare of black Detroit, home to commerce and pleasures of every sort before the city’s government gutted the area (known as “Black Bottom”) in the name of urban renewal in the late 1950s, and built the Chrysler Freeway. One of the many magnets on Hastings was Joe’s Records, owned and operated by influential music figure Joe Von Battle; the store also had a small studio used by the likes of John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson and Little Willie John. “Proprietor Joe Von Battle kept recording equipment in a back room that he would turn on when musicians stopped by to play,” noted Susan Whitall in her essential Fever: Little Willie John’s Fast Life, Mysterious Death, and the Birth of Soul.
The late Von Battle’s daughter, Marsha, remembered the Mad Russian. “I used to go there with my father to buy records,” she wrote on her insightful Marsha Music website not long ago, “even after most of Hastings was gone, and there was just a lone strip of storefronts remaining on the banks of the Chrysler diggings.” She added, “We’d go there before going to our record shop in the mornings and I’d try to steer my daddy to the new Motown and soul sounds, away from the old blues records that didn’t sell much anymore.”
‘GET ME THOSE 78s’
Barney Ales, too, was acquainted with State Song Shop. Years before joining and advancing at Motown, he was a sales rep for Capitol Records in Detroit. “Aaron was the first guy I knew when I got into the record business,” Ales told me. “The little black stores would go to him to buy, he would give them credit. I sold him 78s. He had been getting those in from Capitol in Chicago, but this was my territory. One summer, I stopped in to see him, and he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s snowing outside, and they’re standing in line to get your records.’
“But after the wisecrack, he said, ‘Look, the thing I need from you the most are 78s. Your branch in Detroit doesn’t carry 78s.’ I said, ‘You tell me what you want, I’ll get them, don’t worry about it.’ He wanted Nat “King” Cole, Sinatra, Dean Martin – the ones black audiences wanted. So I took care of him, and we became close. Then when I was with Motown, I used to call on him. He’d say, ‘Got anything on 78?’ He had 45s, too, but nobody was carrying 78s by then.” Harris had another nickname, but Ales couldn’t recall it. “But he must have had one. I don’t remember calling him Aaron, and I wouldn’t have called him the Mad Russian.
Detroit’s Little Willie John rules, July 1956
“If you wanted to know what was happening in the black music market and what records were being sold, he would know it. If a radio station had been smart, they would have contacted him – but I don’t know if he would have taken the call, that’s the way he was. He might have taken the first call, but the second time? ‘Kiss my ass’ is probably what he would have said.”
Another industryite acquainted with Harris was Jay Lasker, when he was running Decca Records’ Detroit branch in the early 1950s. “He basically controlled the black music business [there]. A few of our so-called 48000 Series Race Records we would sell to Aaron, who in turn would distribute to the few stores. As I look back, we were probably selling Berry a few records through Aaron Harris, but I never knew about it.” Concluded Lasker, “His store was probably open and closed so fast that nobody heard of him.”
True enough that Harris kept a low profile; he was seldom quoted in the trade press, for example. One exception was a comment attributed to State Song Shop in Billboard in the spring of 1950: “Prices on records shouldn’t be over 50 cents retail.” But as for his length of time in business, there’s evidence to contradict Lasker. In August 1949, the city of Detroit invited offers for the “lease of commercial space” at 3419 Hastings Street. (Previously, it was occupied by the Religious Recording Co.) Assuming that Harris was the successful bidder, State Song Shop likely opened by the end of that year, or early in ’50.
As for longevity, he was still operating in 1968, long after the Chrysler Freeway’s destructive effects on Black Bottom. When working on Motown: The Sound of Young America, I gained the impression that Detroit’s 1967 riots had put him out of business, but subsequent research suggested otherwise. The premises were damaged, but partially. And State Song Shop was still listed in trade-press directories a couple of years after the riots. (Its street address had also changed by then, to Chrysler Service Drive, further wiping the glories of Hastings Street from institutional memories.)
MONEY IN THE BOXES
Given the Mad Russian’s idiosyncrasies, his longevity may have been all the more surprising. “He used to have money on the shelves where he put the records,” said Barney Ales, “in the little boxes where the 45s would fit. You had to give him cash. I don’t remember if he had a cash register, he would just put the money in one of those boxes.” The store was small, he added, “and he was always playing a Russian card game – or maybe it was Jewish.”
Joe Van Battle: street fighting man
Still, it was Harris’ personality which has lingered in people’s memories. “He talked a mile a minute, mostly incoherent,” Berry Gordy wrote in To Be Loved. “He really acted like his name, a Mad Russian, although I soon found out he was a Jew. At that time, I didn’t know it was possible to be Russian and a Jew at the same time.”
Marsha Von Battle’s recollections were of a big, grey beard and “a cantankerous, crotchety way about him. He used to fuss and fume and putter around when we’d go to buy records, but he’d always have a penny candy or a joke for my little brother and I.” And sometimes more: “The old Russian knew that I was also trying to buy an extra Temptations or Beatles record for myself, and he’d go along with it – with a wink in my direction.”
When I asked Barney Ales whether Harris’ habit of visibly storing cash in boxes on shelves made him vulnerable to robbery, he doubted anyone would dare. “I don’t think they’d mess with him. He must have had guns or something underneath [the counter], and besides, he was well liked.”
That apparently changed one November day in 1968, when a tall, pistol-wielding man held up State Song Shop at noon, robbed its 62-year-old owner, and shot store clerk Edward Leonard in the hand. The assailant escaped, according to the Detroit News. That, perhaps, was when the Mad Russian finally shut up shop.
West Grand Blog is taking a short Easter break, and should be back on the boulevard soon. Stay safe.
Music notes: the evocative album cover pictured above, Battle Of Hastings Street, is that of a 2006 CD release from Ace Records, the U.K. label widely recognised for the depth and calibre of its catalogue of American blues, R&B, rock & roll, soul, pop and more. The album includes tracks by Joe Weaver, Eddie Burns, Eddie Kirkland, Johnny Wright and other Detroit bluesmen. Chances are that the Mad Russian sold records by all of them. The same can be said for the music on this week’s playlist, featuring the Top 10 of the Billboard R&B best-sellers chart for the week ending July 11, 1956, from Little Willie John to the Platters. Aaron Harris’ customers would have stood in line for those, in summer or in snow.