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Who Do You Love

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story :The life story of legendary record producer Leonard Chess, founder of Chess Records, the label that helped popularize Blues music during the 1950s and '60s.

Opened April 9, 2010

Runtime:1 hr. 32 min.

Interview with Actor Alessandro Nivola

(Q): Leonard Chess hasn’t actually had that much music background. Did you research into how he convinced musicians into signing into the label?
 
(Alessandro Nivola): What’s interesting about him is he got into the music business really purely to make money. I don’t think that he had really that much interest in the music at all; I don’t think he understood the music that well. I think what happened, from what I understand from talking to his son and the things I’ve read, he had a bar in the black neighborhood in Chicago and there was room in the back of it for a little stage, and he realized that some of the bars on his street that were doing better business than other bars were the ones that had musical acts playing there at night.

It kept people later staying in the bar and buying booze and everything. And so he initially started bringing little bands and things in to play just to try and boost the patronage of his bar, and then slowly, through that he got some people who were involved in some of the early recordings and he started to segue into the recording. I think even in the beginning of that it was just purely to see if he could make a buck.

He comes from such poverty and everything that he really saw an opportunity, and then slowly, I think from his relationship with Muddy Waters, he really got a musical education. Towards the end of the time that he was recording those artists I think he really became someone who knew quite a lot about music and fashioned a whole sound that we now associate with Chess Records, which all of the recordings shared, even recordings that the Rolling Stones did there years later. And that was I think just to do with the kind of musical education that he acquired on the job.
 
(Q): When Leonard established a club called Macomba Lounge, what was the reaction back then in the area? Were they against white people owning nightclubs?
 
(Alessandro Nivola): It’s a good question. My impression is that they were sort of some of the first white people to have business establishments in the black neighborhood. Those places were dangerous; I think Leonard carried a gun, and his son Marshall told me that when he was young and he would come to the Macomba Lounge that these gun shots would go off and he would find himself lying flat on the floor behind the bar with his dad on top of him, waiting for the gun fight to stop.

And there were drug deals in there. But Leonard and Phil were tough guys; they were Polish Jewish immigrants who grew up in working class neighborhoods, they knew Al Capone, they were tough guys. I think slowly Leonard started to make inroads into the black community, and I think he felt in some ways more comfortable around black people than he did around white people because he was a second class citizen himself, having been an immigrant and Polish and Jewish. So he I think in some ways felt more comfortable in the black community.
 
(Q): Why was the Etta James character named Ivy in this film?
 
(Alessandro Nivola): That character was the one fictionalized element of the story. I think that she wasn’t necessarily Etta James; I think they created her to try and embody all of the different affairs that Leonard had over the course of his life. In my opinion I think it was a mistake because it’s the only fictionalized part of the story, and it makes you question the reality of everything else.
 
(Q): Yeah, that’s what I initially thought.
 
(Alessandro Nivola): Yeah, so I wish they hadn’t done that. But on the other hand, I think he had a lot of different relationships with a lot of different women and they wanted to create a dramatic situation where one of them really mattered in a way that was threatening to his family life. That may have been true at certain moments, but it was hard to pin down one particular person who was responsible for that, so they created a character to represent that. And also they wanted to tie his romantic life in with his experience of the music and the recording, so I think that was what they were thinking. But when everything else is so true to the real story it’s tricky when you have one element that’s not.
 
(Q): Do you think that Leonard stuck around with Etta James back then not just because he was in love but because he knows that with her addiction to drugs that somebody has to help her?
 
(Alessandro Nivola): Yeah. He was a very paternal figure to a lot of the musicians. My understanding is that he was both a record producer and a business manager to a lot of them, and that was where some of the confusion about their financial compensation came in. As you know, there’s all this controversy about whether the Chess brothers screwed over all the artists in their record contracts and everything, and I think some of the confusion about that came from the fact that a lot of these artists were totally uneducated and came from really poor backgrounds and suddenly had a lot of money but didn’t know how to handle it.

So Leonard and Phil were acting almost as business managers where if Muddy Waters would call up and say he needed a new car, Leonard would go and buy him one with Muddy’s money and then give him the car, and then it was sometimes probably not clear who was paying for it. So I think there were probably a lot of situations like that. I think his relationship with these musicians was very complicated and confusing.

They were good friends, they had a great rapport; I think the scenes in the recording studio that we did are some of the most accurate in the film in terms of getting across the feel of what they were like together. But then he was also a sort of authority figure and was in the position of being able to record them or not. He was their link to success and then also kind of looking after them when they had problems, and then there was a lot of grey area in terms of the money.
 
(Q): There’s a funny scene in the film. At one point I guess the musician Walter left the recording session because of a meat pie? Did you hear any funny stories like that about musicians ditching a recording session?
 
(Alessandro Nivola): I can’t remember exactly if that actually happened or not, but there were a lot of incidents. There was a lot of hilarity in the sessions, and I have recordings of Leonard and Sonny Boy Williamson and Howlin’ Wolf recording and they’re giving each other shit, and they’re joking around, and there’s all kinds of crazy banter. I think there was a sort of joyous sense of these wild characters who were all thrown in together trying to make some sort of magic.
 
(Q): I know those kinds of things happen often.
 
(Alessandro Nivola): On the road with musicians you can’t put anything by them; anything could happen.
 
(Q): It’s so true. Leonard seems like he can’t even take a vacation. Is it just out of responsibility or was he always like that, just to focus on the business like that?
 
(Alessandro Nivola): I think he was a workaholic. I think the most pleasure in his life came from being at the studio and I think he was obsessive about it. I think he was a really determined, driven, ambitious businessman to begin with, and then on top of that I think he really increasingly enjoyed the world of the musicians and the recording studio, and that was where he wanted to spend all of his time. Marshall tells me he would stay there all night sometimes and not come home at all and continue working late, late into the night. I think that’s just what kept him going and that’s where his passion was.
 
(Q): You initially told me that you spoke to one of the family members. Did you discover anything when talking to the family?
 
(Alessandro Nivola): A lot of the things I’ve been telling you now are things that Marshall, his son, told me. I also spoke to his brother Phil a little bit, but Phil’s very old and so I could only really get very little information from him.
 
(Q): How old is Phil right now?
 
(Alessandro Nivola): He’s like in his late 80s or something. But Marshall came to the set and we spent a good week together hanging out and listening to music and drinking in bars together. He told me lots of anecdotes about their time together and that was a lot of the research that I ended up doing.
 
(Q): Is there music you like from Chess Records that you listen to?
 
(Alessandro Nivola): Oh yeah. I’ve been obsessed with the blues for a long time. That was one of the main reasons that wanted to do the role, was that I was going to be able to be in that world. But I grew up listening to Ricky Nelson and a lot of 1950’s white recording artists. When I was in college I had an African American roommate who made it clear to me that all the songs I was listening to were actually first recorded by these black bluesmen.

I was listening to this song by Ricky Nelson called “My Babe,” and he pulled out the Little Walter version and said this is the real thing. Then I started going into all the songs from these bands right up through the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, who had taken these recordings from the blues guys and re-recorded them, and that’s how I came to the blues. By the time I was offered this job I was a big fan of that music.
 
(Q): In the movie Phil doesn’t seem to get that much credit compared to Leonard. Were there any brotherly fights going on?
 
(Alessandro Nivola): I think, from what Marshall says, that Phil was very involved in the business and very involved in the recordings and everything. Maybe slightly less than Leonard but he was very involved, and Marshall was upset that Phil was not invited into the Hall of Fame when Leonard was. And in the other movie that they made about this era, called “Cadillac Records,” they didn’t have Phil in the movie, and I know that Marshall was really upset about that.

So he was happy at least that Phil was a character in the movie. I think that because the movie was trying to focus on Leonard’s character in terms of telling his story, I think Phil’s character wasn’t as rounded out as Leonard’s was in this particular movie. But at least he was in it. From what Marshall says, he was very involved in recording and in finding the musicians and scouting talent and running the business, that they really did it together.
 
(Q): He seems really supportive. I wish he could get more credit; it just seems not fair to me.
 
(Alessandro Nivola): I agree. I think it was really sad that he didn’t get inducted into the Hall of Fame.
 
(Q): I heard that they changed the title? Initially they had a title like “Chess”?
 
(Alessandro Nivola): Yeah it was originally just called “Chess,” but there’s a famous musical called “Chess,” and because of the game they didn’t want people to misinterpret what the movie was about. And then there were a bunch of other titles that were tossed around. At one point it was called “Record Man,” at one point it was called “Can’t Be Satisfied.”
 
(Q): Well, “Who Do You Love” is a perfect title.
 
(Alessandro Nivola): I know. That was one that I had suggested, but anyway they finally landed on “Who Do You Love,” which obviously plays on several different levels because it’s the name of that song but also has to do with the question of where do you find your passion.
 
(Q): That’s why I initially thought that was a good title for it. What are you working on next?
 
(Alessandro Nivola): I have another film coming out in the fall called “Janie Jones,” which is me and Abigail Breslin. It’s about a rock singer who discovers he’s got a 12 year old daughter that he never knew about and their relationship. So that I finished just three months ago, and then I’ve been doing a play here, a Sam Shepard play here in New York which I closed about two weeks ago. So I’m not just resting up after that. I have a brand newborn baby girl so I probably am going spend time with her.

Thank you!

End.