Los Angeles, 1968. Music, rebellion, freedom, and chaos — all under the warm California sun.
In the music business, AM radio had long been king: fast-talking DJs, 3-minute singles and tight playlists focusing on the hits — repetition reigned. But FM was fast changing the game — a cleaner sound, less rigidity — and in a word, Freedom. A mirror of the counterculture of the times where albums and experimentation thrived. Where niche banged on the door of the mainstream.
Not only did FM radio sound better — it thought differently — and soon ruled the land…
Emerging from the primordial ooze of the times was Bob “Kras” Krasnow — who started his career as James Brown’s promotion man (wow) — and who over time sat in the top seat at important and influential record labels King Records and Buddha / Kama Sutra Records (labels of common ownership).
But Krasnow wanted his own thing — and recruited his good buddies, Tommy LiPuma and Don Graham, executives from A&M Records. The pitch: “let’s build our own label. Put out what we like. If it doesn’t work? Screw it — there are always jobs…”
So LiPuma, producer extraordinaire, and Graham — widely viewed as one of the best marketing men in the industry — came together with Krasnow to form Blue Thumb Records.
“If it doesn’t work, what difference does it make? We’ll go back and get jobs. So what? Jobs you can always get.” — Krasnow
And with that, the journey began.
If record labels were judged on their eclecticism, Blue Thumb would walk among the giants. Over the next 10 years as a going concern, they released a genre-defying brew of stuff out of their offices on La Brea Avenue, just across from the A&M offices: smooth jazz, free jazz, straight-ahead jazz, jazz-funk, zydeco, the Blues, singer-songwriter, psychedelic rock, Avant-Garde, Soul, R&B, Comedy, Satire and Spoken word, you name it — Blue Thumb made it!!!
The most eclectic, artist-friendly, what-the-hell-happens-next record label of their time.
“If we thought it was great,” LiPuma said, “we put it out.”
Their lineup was home to Don Van Vliet and his Captain Beefheart happening, Sun Ra, Hugh Masekela, Ike and Tina Turner, Gábor Szabó, Love (for G-d’s sake Love — who released two albums on the label — and featured Jimi Hendrix on one of those records), Dan Hicks and His Hot Hot Licks, Dave Mason (he of Traffic fame), The Pointer Sisters, Junior Wells, T.Rex (then known as Tyrannosaurus Rex), Buddy Guy, Gerry Rafferty, The Crusaders (née The Jazz Crusaders), The King of the Bayou — Clifton Chenier, Jimmy Smith, Ben Sidran, National Lampoon — and on and on it goes.
And the first record they released? None other than Captain Beefheart’s Strictly Personal — a psychedelic blues freakoff. Commercial suicide. Artistic genius. A perfect mission statement.
Kras and crew followed their muses, and other artists signed on, eager to sniff that Blue Thumb vibe in all of its glories.
San Francisco singer and songwriter Dan Hicks was one of Blue Thumb’s most popular artists. His Hot Licks played a campy sort of acoustic ’40s swing music, and it hadn’t clicked on their one and only album for Epic. So they were up for grabs. According to Hicks, Blue Thumb was the perfect label for him. “I guess I wanted just a few guys to deal with,” he said. “A hands-on approach, as opposed to a big company. I liked them; I liked their style.”
For a decade, the Jazz Crusaders had recorded in relative obscurity on smaller labels such as Chisa, where they’d consider a project successful if it sold 50,000 copies. Joe Sample: “If it was known as jazz, you could count on basically no exposure. One of the things we felt, and that Blue Thumb felt, was that we had to get the labeling out of music. That was the main reason we went over to Blue Thumb; it was a very exciting company. We did a Carole King tune, ‘So Far Away,’ and that song was played right alongside Creedence Clearwater and a number of the popular acts of that day.”
The re-named Crusaders cut a handful of albums for Blue Thumb, and each one moved about 200,000 units. “LiPuma and Krasnow were young and vibrant men with tremendous love of music,” Sample said. “And they also had the expertise to back up that love. And they started signing all kinds of bands. It was the new image in music, and I think it was the best kind of image that we ever had in the music business.”
“Anybody who knows Krasnow knows that he’s one of the great gunslingers of the Wild West,” said Blue Thumb recording artist Ben Sidran. “And this was him at the top of his form, making a run at the record business.”
According to LiPuma: “We were all just having a good time, you know? There were a lot of good chemicals going around at that time, and it was one big hang.”
How many records did Blue Thumb release? Who the f*ck knows. Seriously — try to tally up Blue Thumb’s official output and you’ll find yourself spiraling. Depending on the source, they released 60, or 90, or maybe over 100 records. Want a definitive number? Good luck.
This wasn’t just garden-variety record label disorder. This was Blue Thumb disorder — a product of chaos, churn, and a total disregard for traditional cataloging.
Start with the distribution circus: the label bounced from Liberty/Transamerica to GRT to ABC to MCA, and each one did their own version of “releasing” the same titles — sometimes with new catalog numbers, sometimes with new artwork, sometimes not at all.
Then there’s the promo-only stuff: 45s that were never sold in stores, jukebox singles, radio edits, double A-sides, maybe 200 test pressings, maybe one. Do those count?
Some albums got announced in Billboard but never shipped. Others got pulled mid-run. Then there are ABC-era reissues with Blue Thumb logos slapped on like a posthumous tattoo — technically re-released, sure, but not new music.
As a result, discographers can’t agree. Is it 55 core LPs? Is it 80 when you include the lost ones and the label samplers? Do we count the National Lampoon records? (We should.)
Let’s just say this: Blue Thumb released somewhere north of 100 records — LPs, singles, promos, and beautiful disasters — between 1968 and 1978. But the number depends on who you ask, and how wasted they are.
For Krasnow, LiPuma and Graham — it was music, not math.
And then the industry noticed — not just the music, but the freedom. And when Blue Thumb broke an Artist — the majors came poaching. Their success became a curse. They couldn’t compete — not with the infrastructure and certainly not the money. But for that glorious 10 years, between 1968 and 1978, they made records the way records should be made — from the gut. All instinct, no pretense.
So what’s left of Blue Thumb today? Sold to ABC, folded into MCA, now owned by the soulless capitalists @ Universal — a label (barely) in name only. But that Blue Thumb spirit — it’s alive today — encouraging madmen to dream big.
“If Kras liked your idea, he’d say, ‘Okay, do it.’ It’s not that way today, but back then, he was trusting creative people.” — Sidran
Underneath this brilliant essay that you’ve been listening to, you’ve been hearing A Part of a Whole — written and recorded by Hugh Masekela, and released on Blue Thumb Records in 1970. Wholly appropriate as we celebrate the greatness of this label — three men who came together to build something bigger than what they could accomplish individually.
Today is December 19th, 2025 and we’ll be diving into the deep end in our exploration of Blue Thumb Records.
So sit back, relax and unwind. This is Labeled!
Brown Brothers Recordings 