Aug. 22, 1970: Lenny Silver

 

In the spirit of Black Friday, we turn to the business side of the music business: 

Aug. 22, 1970 

Buffalo’s Biggest Music Man –

And How Records Are Promoted 

If you look around the unfinished windowless room for a semblance of order, you’ll find it along the back wall.

Floor-to-ceiling shelving, divided into little square boxes like post office boxes. Over each square are initials. WGGO, WENE, WUSJ, WBUZ. And since the night crew hasn’t been in to empty them, the little boxes are full of records.

When Carroll Hardy isn’t on the road in Syracuse or Rochester or somewhere, he’s in here about 8 a.m., filling the center of the room with empty cartons and dealing records like “Hard Drivin’ Man’ by Dirty John’s Hot Dog Stand into all those little boxes.

* * *

CARROLL was on radio for 20 years, but now he looks more like the jazz musicians whose records he used to play. Longish hair, beard and mustache. Things his last station wouldn’t let him grow.

He comes next to a carton filled with albums. “Moments” by Judy Mayhan.

“Recorded in Memphis,” he says, switching on the record player. “They’re really hot down there. They’ve had a whole string of hits. Let’s see what it sounds like.”

Judy Mayhan’s considerable voice belts out three songs while Carroll finishes dealing records and starts getting things ready to take around to the radio stations.

* * *

THIS includes 15 or 20 new singles that have come in during the past few days from the record labels he promotes – Atlantic-Atco, RCA, Mercury, Roulette, Stax-Volt, Paramount. He packs two cartons of singles and a stack of albums.

There’s a lot of stuff Carroll wants to get done today because the next morning he and his wife are flying to Puerto Rico for an Atlantic Records convention.

He wants to hit WYSL at noon and since he’ll miss the Thursday record meetings at WKBW, he’s got to see Danny Neaverth at 6. WBEN, WGR, WEBR, WUFO, WNIA. And he wants to leave his car at the garage and meet his wife of dinner.

* * *

ONLY ONE thing is going to stop him. An act of God. And sure enough, it begins to rain.

“Well, I’m not getting soaked,” he says. “Let’s wait.”

So Carroll thinks of some things to do out front and picks his way through the maze of the Transcontinent Record Sales Inc. warehouse.

Through aisles of returned defective records, past the guys unloading more records in the shipping area, past the machine that wraps albums in plastic, past the stacks and stacks and stacks of records (there’s still another warehouse down Main Street) and finally into the one-stop room.

* * *

CARROLL snatches one of company president Leonard Silver’s new Billboard magazines and looks over the Hot 100 Chart like a broker checking the financial pages.

Around him there are two rows of tables full of current singles, a row of soul, a row of country and a row of old standards. Plus some albums on the walls. That’s Buffalo One-Stop.

The one-stop was what Transcontinent grew out of. It’s a place where jukebox owners and record store owners could come and do all their wholesale buying in, that’s right, one stop.

* * *

IN 11 YEARS it’s grown and branched into an $18 million wholesale record business with outlets here and in Rochester, Syracuse, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo. It’s one of the biggest in the nation.

“This whole company is built on one thing, really,” says Silver. “And that’s the music business, from manufacturing to getting the records played.

“Probably the most glamorous and fascination end of it is promotion,” he adds. “Promotion is everything. You’ve got to create a demand for the product.

“We’ve owned the Cleveland and Cincinnati outlets for less than a year and already we’ve doubled business. We do it by taking care of our customers, not by underselling. By running the right sales and selling the right items while they’re hot.”

* * *

WITH MUSIC, things can happen very fast. If people hear a record and want it, it should be in the stores. In a couple of weeks, it’ll be like yesterday’s papers.

So the toughest job at Transcontinent belongs to Dave Colson, vice president and general manager. He’s in charge of ordering and on a day like this, when a local discount chain just sent in for $50,000 worth of records, it gets frantic.

Another problem is that record companies release 150 to 200 singles a week. Maybe five or six will be hits. Record dealers have to pick the winners and keep from being overstocked with losers.

Aside from singles, the top 30 albums make up about 80 percent of any record outlet’s sales. Running out of a hot album is just bad business. So is having one that won’t sell.

* * *

CARROLL HARDY, meanwhile, has called a few radio stations long distance and, rain or not, he has to get moving.

First stop is his old station. He plugs “Joanne” by Mike Nesmith and an odd album called “Old Time Bubblegum Music” by The Children of Prague.

At WYSL, he sees Kevin O’Connell and FM man Jack Robinson. Carroll pushes Kevin on “Joanne,” Dusty Springfield’s “Lost” and “Ball and Chain” by Tommy James and the Shondells.

“About this Woodstock idea,” Jack Robinson says. “It’s really far out. We can’t do anything about it this weekend.

“We wanted 72 copies of the Woodstock album, but we could only get 10. Can you get us some albums of groups that were at Woodstock? Jefferson Airplane? Crosby, Stills & Nash?”

* * *

AS HE leaves, two more promo men are waiting. He lunches at one of his old haunts from his radio days, then goes to see WGR’s Larry Anderson.

"I’m going to have to stop back here for a few minutes,” Carroll says, pulling up outside Transcontinent. He disappears, figuring now what he’ll have to do this afternoon to get some Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills & Nash for free. 

And now the box/sidebar: 

Maker of Musical Hits 

Leonard Silver has been in practically every end of the music business. He once even played trumpet in a band and worked in a record factory in California.

He came to Buffalo as an independent distributor after working in a Rochester record store. He also was promotion man for Cadence records and pretty soon hit records began getting their starts here.

One was Andy Williams’ “Canadian Sunset,” which became a hit after Hugo Winterhalter’s hit instrumental version. The Everly Brothers were big in Buffalo before they made it nationwide.

* * *

“IN THIS business,” Silver says, “every time you turn on the radio, it’s going for you. Music is every day with everybody. And, you know, there’s 80 million record players in this country.”

Silver opened Buffalo One-Stop on $900 in 1959 and the company’s grown into an $18 million business. How did it happen? Well, look how he handled the coming of eight-track tape.

“I was one of the first tape people in Buffalo,” he says, “because I felt the future of the tape business. I had 100 some odd thousand dollars worth of stock and I begged stores to stock tape. Nobody would take it. I couldn’t give it away.

* * *

“SO WE OPENED One-Stop Tape Center and started to advertise. And pretty soon we sold all that tape and tape players too. You see, we’re innovators. We create excitement for people to go out and buy.”

Transcontinent Record now covers all of Western and Central New York plus parts of Ohio and sells 3.5 percent of all records and tapes in this country. Of the 750,000 copies sold of the Woodstock album, Transcontinent sold 50,000.