© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
Talk about being at the right place at the right time, Carlos Gastel was in Hollywood in the early 1940s during the formative years of Capitol Records, got to know Johnny Mercer, Glenn Wallichs and Buddy DeSylva who formed the label and then went on to represent most of Capitol’s major artists including Stan Kenton, June Christy, and Nat King Cole - his most successful commercial artist.
The details about how the relationship between Carlos and Nat came about are recounted in the following excerpts from Will Friedwald’s Straighten Up and Fly Right: The Life and Music of Nat King Cole [Oxford 2020].
“For a brief time around 1941, both Cole and Louis Jordan [Tympani 5] were being booked by Berle Adams, of GAG (General Artists Corp.). But even then, Cole knew the man he wanted to work with: a giant, Hispanic bear of a manager named Carlos Gastel. The two had their sights on each other from 1938 on, when Gastel first heard the Trio at Jim Otto’s Steak House. Nat and Carlos couLd literally see eye-to-eye; they were roughly the same height, about 6' 1", although Gastel, being chronically overweight, was many pounds heavier.
Gastel's father, so it's said, had been a diplomat from Honduras, and his mother was from Germany. He was born on March 21, 1914, in San Pedro Sula. He grew up mostly in Honduras, occasionally joining his parents on trips around Europe, and then, when he reached high school age, he was sent to the LaJolla Military Academy in California. Anyone who knew of Gastel’s insatiable appetite for liquor, food, tobacco, and general carousing — which helped put him in the grave at the age of fifty-six — would have had a hard time envisioning him lasting very long at a military boarding school. But at least it brought him to California, where he got his first prolonged taste of American music and showbiz.
From the time he heard his first North American swing band, he knew this was a world that he had to be part of. He started by managing dance orchestras, although neither of his first two clients exactly set the world on fire: Sonny Dunham, ace trumpet soloist from the Casa Loma, a brilliant musician who had little actual star quality or skill as a bandleader, and Max Baer, the heavyweight boxing champion. In an era when even Chico Marx, who at least was a musician, could lead his own swing band, this might have seemed like a good idea. (Needless to say, it wasn't.)
Cole also might have liked the idea of working with the affable Gastel, who was an outsider, an immigrant and somewhat "swarthy" as he was often described at the time, in an age when nearly everyone in the music business was white or Jewish, even those booking, recording, and publishing the work of African American talent. Louis Armstrong, one of Cole's own mentors, had a career-long mantra about how a black artist needed a white man or a jew to intercede for him in the showbiz world. Cole had said as far back as 1935 that he felt "he could make better progress under white management," and by the start of the Capitol contract, he decided on a representative who was literally halfway between him and the white world.
When the Trio's first manager, "Hap" Kaufman, was drafted, probably in late 1941, Cole turned to his friend Claire Phillips, who at that point had a talent booker's license and was cautiously considering a career path as a personal agent. But she wisely declined; she knew she didn't have the firepower and chutzpah to get Cole to the next level. In 1940, Down Beat had announced that the William Morris Agency was interested in the trio (that would have changed the course of history—they might have gotten famous much earlier) but that never happened. The Trio was affiliated with General Artists Corp. at least as far back as 1941; when Ralph Watkins booked them at Kelly's Stable, he had gone through Frank Henshaw of GAG, based in Atlanta. In 1943, one Gene Andes insisted to Down Beat that he was, in fact, the present manager of the King Cole Trio.
But well before then, Gastel had already worked with the Trio at General Artists Corp., and in 1943 they were ready to commit to each other as manager and client in a permanent relationship. Yet Adams was still in the picture; he had been very helpful in the past and had gotten the Trio some of its best bookings, helping them conquer the well-paying world of cocktail lounges [“... much larger than intimate Jazz clubs with a capacity on average of 250 people, people came to talk and drink and not incidentally to listen to the music.”]. Adams had recently left GAG to manage Louis Jordan full time, and he wanted to add Cole to his roster as well. As Adams later told the story," he suggested the idea sometime in 1943, and Nat agreed. Then, a week later, to Adams's surprise, Carlos Gastel, who like Cole was based in Los Angeles, showed up on his doorstep in Chicago. Gastel proposed that they work together: Adams knew every room in Chicago and the Midwest, whereas Gastel's strength was everything west of that. Between the two of them, they covered the vast majority of the venues where the Trio would work, so they could share the management of the group. Although slightly suspicious, Adams had to agree that it was a great idea.
But then, all of a sudden, absolutely nothing happened. Berle never heard another peep from either Nat or Carlos. Upon investigating, Adams soon learned that Gastel had simply gone ahead and cut him out, and he was outraged. "Gastel snookered me and stole my client," Adams thundered, but he realized that there was nothing he could do about it. "I treasured Nat's friendship, so I decided not to press the issue. For years I puzzled over Nat's decision." He continued to hold a grudge against Gastel: in 1950, when Adams was working for the Music Corporation of America (MCA), he ran into the Honduran at Lucey’s Restaurant on Melrose Avenue, and the two agents literally had to be held back from a fistfight. (It wouldn't have been much of a contest; Adams, as he described himself, was a "little shrimp" while Gastel was very literally a heavyweight.) Finally, about twenty years later, at a Christmas celebration, Adams finally came out and put the question to Cole directly. The answer was obvious to everybody but him. "You know why I didn't sign with you?" Cole responded, "Carlos told me that your first love was Louis Jordan and that I would always be second fiddle. That was it."
Clearly, Gastel was correct, and Cole was doing the right thing to sign with him. It's the same reason that Cole was better off going with the new Capitol Records rather than the older and more established Decca, where he also would have played second fiddle to Jordan. Another point in Gastel's favor was that, like Cole himself, he was based in Los Angeles, and he already had a good relationship with Wallichs and Mercer — and it was constantly getting better.
Before long, Gastel would represent the majority of the key artists of the early days at Capitol Records, including bandleaders Stan Kenton, Benny Carter, Billy May, and Nelson Riddle, plus singers Peggy Lee, June Christy, Mel Torme, Nellie Lutcher, and Jeri Southern, to name a few.
Pianist Jimmy Rowles, who had met Cole in 1940 at the Radio Room, remembered hanging out with the Trio at Herb Rose's 331 Club, when Gastel—whom he referred to without the least trace of irony as "The Brain"— came in. "We got to talking with this guy, and the first thing you know, Herb Rose says, 'I'd sell his contract for ten dollars.' 'Oh yeah? Right now ?' Gastel asked. So, he whips out the ten dollars and says, 'Give me the contract.' And from that moment, Carlos Gastel owned Nat Cole." But it was nothing like ownership; for nineteen years, Nat and Carlos were a team, best buds as well as business partners.
Cole and Gastel formalized their relationship in spring 1944. Rather than being super-aggressive with each other, as client and agent, Maria Cole later remembered that they were almost overly sensitive to each other's feelings. Nat at first felt the Trio was making too little money to justify any kind of professional representation; in other words, he doubted that they were worth Carlos's time. But Carlos persisted, and they reached an early agreement when Nat insisted that Carlos be paid and Carlos refused to accept any money at all. Finally, they agreed that Carlos would take a cut of their earnings if and when the Trio's fee reached $800 a week.
That happened almost instantaneously with the release of "Straighten Up and Fly Right," Capitol 154, at the end of March 1944. Cole later remembered, "I'll never forget it. One night we closed at the 331 Club in Los Angeles at about four hundred dollars a week" — thus ending a two year run — "and the next day we were making one thousand dollars per at the Orpheum Theatre [Los Angeles]." They opened on April 10, marking their first theater date (at least since 1937), for a one-week stand. "One record seems to be enough, these days, to establish a band," Metronome claimed a few months later. "King Cole has that record in 'Straighten Up and Fly Right' (backed with 'I Can't See for Lookin") both sides of which are currently pulling in thousands of nickels in jukeboxes from coast to coast. And so, finally, a trio that lots of us have been raving about has won public approval, acclaim, and the plentiful gold that goes with it." One thousand dollars a week was a huge leap over the $75 a week they had made at the Swanee in 1937 and the $140 (which had to cover travel and accommodations) they had made in 1941 at Kelly's Stable.
ACT ONE: THE KING COLE TRIO
"Carlos and I thought generally the same way," Cole said in 1957. "This is really unusual in an artist-manager relationship. Generally, an artist signs with a manager because he thinks the manager can do him some good and leaves it at that, Often the manager has very different ideas from those of the artist—basically different, I mean. This wasn't the case here, though. I knew the direction I wanted to travel and realized Carlos could help me. Actually, he was thinking about something very different from his past associations. He'd managed the Stan Kenton band and other groups that were nowhere near our Trio in format. It was a gamble for him, but he was willing to give it a try. I can honestly say that much of the success I enjoy today I owe to Carlos. Our association was — and is — a good one, and it worked out the way I wanted it to."
It's hard to imagine that anybody, including Adams, could have done a better job in guiding Cole's career. Between Gastel and Capitol Records, Cole now had a platform from which he could be heard; a launching pad from which he could take off, straighten up, and fly right. As we have seen, throughout the 1940s, Coles chief rival, or point of comparison, was Louis Jordan; by the 1950s, the only artists Cole could rightfully be compared to were Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, in terms of musical visionaries who were equally gifted in terms of raw talent and street smarts and who parlayed their virtuosity into mass-market success.
Cole also embraced the idea of experimentation and tinkering with his own formulas. He eagerly tried our ten different new ideas to find the one that worked, and he also didn't mind working his way through dozens of songs, new songs and old songs, great songs and, as he once called them, "dog songs" to find the ones that the audiences most responded to. He constantly tinkered with his sound and his music, even when everyone else thought that it was already perfect. Although there is a continuity throughout his career, the Trio of 1943 sounds very different from the Decca years (1940-41) and the earlier transcription recordings (1938-40). And the Trio of 1949-1951 — even before Jack Costanzo made it a quartet — sounds completely different from that.
The relationship between Cole and Gastel lasted almost twenty years, at the end of which Cole was more popular than ever; the relationship between Jordan and Adams lasted nine years, and at its end, Jordan was undeniably in decline. This wasn't entirely the fault of either Adams or Jordan; many of the major hitmakers of the war years would have a hard time transitioning into the next decade, including the Andrews Sisters, Dick Haymes, most of the big bands, and even Sinatra. Yet even as Jordan and the others faded, Cole went from strength to strength.”
Marvellous, thanks a lot, STEVEN
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