Pass That Peace Pipe

Through Tin Pan Alley (which isn’t an alley but a scattered industry), the good news spread. Publishers who had been hoarding their best tunes for months, trying to keep them out of the “corn belt” (i.e., giving them to harmonica outfits to record), were riffling through their desk drawers. Bandleaders were set for hurried rehearsals; Crosby, Como and Sinatra weren’t straying too far from their telephones. Last week, after ten months, it looked as if the record ban was about to end.

Jimmy Petrillo’s lawyer had gotten together with RCA Boss David Sarnoff, representing the record makers. The compromise was simple: the union musicians relaxed their demands for royalties on all records sold since the Jan. i ban, in return for fatter royalties to come when the presses start cutting records. The new rates: 1% of the retail price of all records selling under $1 and a “slight increase” in royalties on records costing more than $1.

Actually, both sides had been willing to get together all along, if a nice legal way could be found to do it. In the old days, record makers paid royalties directly into the union’s welfare fund, which Petrillo controls. The Taft-Hartley Act stopped that: it forbade the union to have the sole say-so on the fund. Now that everyone was friendly again, neither side expected any trouble in finding a neutral trustee to handle the money, acceptable both to Uncle Sam and to Little Caesar Petrillo.