Mr. Big

Of the 50,000,000 phonograph records made every year in the U. S., most are put out by three companies: Victor, Columbia and Decca. Year ago, a big-jawed, 39-year-old Victor official named Eli Oberstein decided there was room for a fourth. He resigned his job as Victor's recording manager, took a sheaf of contracts for Victor artists with him, rounded up $500,000 worth of backing, bought and refurbished an old six-story plant in Scranton, Pa. and launched U. S. Record Corp.

By September his U. S. records had begun to muscle in on the 35-c- juke-box trade, where Decca had been making hay. By last week U. S. Records (Royale and Varsity) had ended its first six months with an output of 1,500,000. Its biggest hit to date, Johnny Messner's suggestive She Had to Go and Lose It at the Astor, had sold more than 150,000 copies.

Chief cook and bottle-washer is Eli Oberstein. He is vice president, general manager of his own company, raises its capital, signs its artists, tells them how and what to play. Himself a former pianist, trumpet, trombone and tuba player, he chooses his performers with a canny ear, is well able to and does give them pointers on how to toot their own horns. He spends all his evenings In night clubs, cabarets, bars, movies, musical shows, on the lookout for new bands and new tunes. His admiring associates think he can pick a hit more unerringly than any other man in the business.

"It's what they pay me $25,000 a year for," says Manhattan-born Eli Oberstein. "But it's not instinct, it's economics. When I find out that one song has $50,000 behind it for promotion and another has nothing, I forget about the quality of the music and bet on the song with the $50,000."

Proud is he of the fact that he scooped the rest of the market on records from Walt Disney's Pinocchio by a month, on Broadway Melody of 1940 by six weeks. During his days with Victor he claims to have skyrocketed most of the big name bands to the top, including such best-sellers as Eddy Duchin, Fats Waller, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Shep Fields, Larry Clinton, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller. Says he: "I told them how to develop an individual style. A band must have a recognizable style so that when kids start to play a record, they can listen for a minute and then say 'Why, that's Benny Goodman--or Tommy Dorsey or Guy Lombardo.' Dorsey used to hold his trombone solo until the third chorus. I saw to it that every record he made for me started with a Dorsey solo."

Oberstein, who claims to have invented the idea of "swinging the classics," now believes that swing is on the way out: 1) because "you can't make love in a noisy place"; 2) because "improvision [sic] could never last. There isn't enough permanence to it. We have now," says he, "reached the double-entendre era." Rivals in the record business regard Eli Oberstein as a bumptious upstart. But to U. S. Records he is Mr. Big. Says he: "Everybody who is working with me loves me."

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