Interview with Marshall Chess
Brothers Leonard and Phil Chess were responsible for creating the preeminent blues label of the fifties and sixties. Polish immigrants who settled in Chicago, the brothers formed Aristocrat Records in 1947 before launching their eponymous label two years later. They assembled an unparalleled roster of blues, R&B and rock and roll artists, including Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Willie Dixon, Etta James, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. While Phil focused on jazz, Leonard honed in on roots music, making Chess the greatest repository of blues music by the late Fifties. It was under Leonard's tutelage that Muddy Waters’ electric blues fomented a revolution that led directly to rock and roll in the person of Chuck Berry.
The reach of the label's music extended far across the Atlantic, where a band of impressionable twentysomethings billing themselves as the Rolling Stones sought to emulate the hard-driving R&B sounds they heard on songs like Waters' "I Can't Be Satisfied," Big Bill Broonzy's "Tell Me Baby" and Berry's "Around and Around" — all songs the group covered when Leonard's son Marshall Chess allowed the band to record at the label's 2120 South Michigan Avenue studio in 1964. More trips to Chess followed, including sessions in 1965 that would lead to "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction."
After working alongside his father Leonard and uncle Phil for more than 16 years, Marshall eventually came to be president of the family's namesake imprint in 1969, while continuing to produce albums, including Muddy Waters' Electric Mud (1969) and Howlin' Wolf's The Howlin' Wolf Album (1969) — both released on Marshall's Cadet Concept label, a division of Chess. Shortly after his father passed away, Marshall left Chess in 1970, and was hired as the Rolling Stones' manager and president of Rolling Stones Records, which was created after the group's Decca contract expired.
In this 2005 interview with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Marshall Chess discusses Chess Records' role in the British Invasion, the "Swinging London scene" and exposing English audiences to Howlin' Wolf and Chuck Berry. "Keith Richards, he knows that Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf are just geniuses, musical geniuses."
