Mercury Records

• 1. Introduction

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  Mercury Records was born in Chicago in 1945, founded by Irving Green, Berle Adams, Ray Greenberg, and Arthur Talmadge. It was not a company that played by the rules of the music business. Where RCA Victor, Decca Records, and Capitol Records depended on radio airplay to sell records, Mercury's co-founder Irving Green made a different bet. He pushed new releases through jukeboxes instead. That move slashed promotion costs, let Mercury compete with labels that dwarfed it in resources, and set off a run of success that would last for decades. What began as a scrappy Chicago upstart would eventually release the first cassette tapes in the United States, pioneer a recording technique that critics called "living presence," and host artists from Patti Page to Def Leppard to U2. The story of how it got there runs through a dwarfism-related baseball stunt, a budget too tight to hire two singers, a single microphone pointed at an orchestra, and a Dutch electronics company that changed everything.

• 2. The Jukebox Gambit

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  Irving Green's decision to route Mercury's promotion through jukeboxes rather than radio was the engine behind the label's early rise. Two promoters, Tiny Hill and Jimmy Hilliard, were hired specifically to work the pop market, and they delivered. Artists such as Frankie Laine, Vic Damone, Tony Fontane, and Patti Page became early Mercury names. In 1946, Mercury hired Eddie Gaedel, an American with dwarfism later famous for appearing in a Major League Baseball game, to play the "Mercury Man" in a winged hat that mirrored the label's logo. Some early Mercury pressings used a caricature of him on the label itself. The following year, a budget problem accidentally produced a historic moment. Manager Jack Rael persuaded Mercury to let Patti Page record a song originally planned for Vic Damone, called "Confess." With no money left to hire a second singer for the answer portions of the song, Rael suggested Page simply sing both voices herself. The technique was not entirely new, as overdubbing had appeared on 78-rpm discs in the 1930s for recordings by Lawrence Tibbett among others. But Page's 1947 session became the first documented use of overdubbing on tape. Mercury also opened two pressing plants early in its history, one in Chicago and one in St. Louis, Missouri, giving it production independence that supported its aggressive output.

• 3. Jazz and the EmArcy Years

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  John Hammond served as a vice president of Mercury Records from 1947 to 1952. Under the EmArcy sublabel, Mercury released albums by a wide range of post-swing and bebop artists: Clifford Brown and Max Roach, Kenny Drew, Dinah Washington, Nat Adderley, Cannonball Adderley, Ernestine Anderson, Sarah Vaughan, Maynard Ferguson, Walter Benton, and Herb Geller all recorded for the imprint during that period. In the late 1950s, Mercury's jazz catalog expanded further with records from Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, and Buddy Rich appearing alongside continued releases from Max Roach. Through the 1960s, Mercury pressed albums by Gene Ammons, Quincy Jones, Paul Bley, and Jimmy Smith, among others. The breadth of that jazz output was substantial for a label that had started with jukebox pop. Mitch Miller, using his full name Mitchell Miller, even made several recordings as a featured oboe player for Mercury in the late 1940s, before later becoming a recording director and helping develop the single-microphone technique that would define the label's classical ambitions.

• 4. Living Presence

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  In 1951, recording engineer C. Robert Fine and recording director David Hall set Mercury on a path that would separate it from every other American record label. Their method was radical in its simplicity: one microphone, positioned in front of a symphony orchestra. The first record produced under what became the Mercury Olympian Series was Pictures at an Exhibition, performed by Rafael Kubelík and the Chicago Symphony. New York Times music critic Howard Taubman described the resulting Mercury sound as "being in the living presence of the orchestra," and the label eventually named its entire classical line after that phrase. The Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, led by conductor Antal Doráti and later Stanisław Skrowaczewski, became the best-known ensemble to record using the technique. Doráti's recordings included the first-ever complete recordings of Tchaikovsky's ballets Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker. His 1954 monaural recording of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture (Mercury MG 50054) and his 1958 three-microphone stereo rerecording featured dramatic overdub recordings of 1812-era artillery and the bells of the Yale University Carillon. A 1960 stereo release substituted new cannon recordings and the bells of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Carillon at the Riverside Church in Chicago. Of all classical albums released in the United States during the 1950s, only one other besides Mercury's versions of the 1812 reached gold-record sales. Wilma Cozart served as Mercury's vice president and took over recording director duties in 1953; she later married Bob Fine and in the 1990s produced CD reissues of more than half of the Living Presence catalog. In late 1955, Mercury expanded from a single microphone to three omnidirectional microphones, recording onto three-track tape to achieve stereo. The original LP releases of those classical recordings ran through 1968.

• 5. The Philips Era and Corporate Transformation

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  In July 1967, Mercury Records became the first American record label to release cassette music tapes, which it marketed under the name Musicassettes. That milestone arrived at a moment of significant corporate change. In 1961, Philips, a Dutch electronics company, had signed an exchange agreement with Mercury after losing its distribution deal with Columbia Records outside North America. The following year, Mercury was sold to Consolidated Electronics Industries Corp., a Philips affiliate. In 1963, Mercury switched its British distribution from EMI to Philips, and in 1962 the label began marketing a line of Philips-made phonographs under the Mercury brand. By 1969, the label had renamed itself Mercury Record Productions Inc., while its parent became North American Philips Corp. after Philips bought a controlling stake. In 1972, Philips and German electronics company Siemens reorganized their joint record venture into PolyGram, which then bought Mercury from NAPC that same year. Mercury's corporate name became Phonogram Inc. to align with a related UK company. The label's headquarters, long at 35 East Wacker Drive in Chicago, moved to New York City in 1980. From late 1974 to early 1983, Mercury's label design displayed a painting of three Chicago buildings: Marina City, the John Hancock Center, and One IBM Plaza, the last of which served as Mercury's headquarters during that time.

• 6. Rock Decades and the PolyGram Roster

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  By the 1980s, Mercury had absorbed the artists and catalog of Casablanca Records, which brought in hard rockers Kiss, disco star Donna Summer, and the Village People. That acquisition combined with existing signings to make Mercury one of the leading hard rock labels in America. Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, the Scorpions, Cinderella, Thin Lizzy, Rush, and Kiss all recorded for Mercury, while in Europe most of those same bands appeared on Vertigo Records, the PolyGram-owned label that specialized in progressive rock and hard rock. John Cougar Mellencamp, Tears for Fears, Big Country, and Van Morrison also appeared on Mercury during this period, alongside the Oklahoma-based three-piece Hanson. The funk and R&B side of the catalog ran equally deep. Through the 1970s and into the early 1980s, Mercury released albums from Ohio Players, the Bar-Kays, Con Funk Shun, Cameo, Kool and the Gang, and Hamilton Bohannon. Kurtis Blow's "The Breaks," released in 1980, appeared on Mercury, as did records from blues musician Robert Cray. Mercury also released the first three albums in the 1979-86 self-titled series from the Gap Band, via Total Experience Productions, and distributed Cameo through leader Larry Blackmon's label Atlanta Artists Records. After De-Lite Records dissolved in 1985, Kool and the Gang's Mercury albums continued under the new arrangement. In 1997, PolyGram consolidated all of its Nashville operations under the Mercury name, bringing together country catalog from Polydor, A&M, MGM Records, and Motown subsidiaries under one imprint.

• 7. Closure, Revival, and What Survived

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  In late 1998, Seagram bought PolyGram and absorbed it into Universal Music Group. Mercury Records was closed in the reorganization and folded into the newly formed Island Def Jam Music Group. Its pop roster moved mainly to Island Records; hip-hop acts went to Def Jam Recordings; R&B acts shifted to the newly created Def Soul Records; and its country division became Mercury Nashville Records. In 2007, Mercury was relaunched as a label under Island Def Jam, with David Massey appointed as President and CEO. The label was again made defunct in 2015. On the 11th of April, 2022, Republic Records announced it had acquired Mercury Records, continuing it as an imprint. The Mercury name also survives in several other forms: Mercury KX, which focuses on post-classical music and launched in 2016 after beginning life as Mercury Classics in 2012; Mercury Studios, which absorbed Eagle Rock Entertainment after Universal acquired it in 2014; and the Mercury Records division of UMG France, which in 2024 announced a global licensing deal with pay-per-view concert streaming service On Air. In 2024, Mercury Records joined Republic Corps alongside Republic Records, Island Records, Casablanca Records, and Def Jam Recordings. Mercury co-founder Irwin Steinberg died on the 4th of January, 2015, at the age of 94, outliving by decades the label he helped establish in a Chicago office in 1945.