Around the Barrel Ep051/Re051 - Nelson Eddy

 

Lucas Hendrickson: When Angelo Lucchesi reached out to his friend Hap Motlow for a favor, he wasn't thinking about making history or being the first at anything. He was merely a guy needing a job. Nearly 70 years later, Lucchesi's name lives on as one of the most important figures in the history of the Jack Daniel Distillery, with the man behind it doing the simplest thing he could muster: being himself.

On this episode, we talk with Jack Daniel's Historian Nelson Eddy about the far-from-predestined path Angelo took to make it in the whiskey world, about how the most preeminent entertainer of his day called Angelo a friend, and about how sampling the wares doesn't have to be a prerequisite when it comes to selling what's in and Around the Barrel.
Welcome back to Around the Barrel, the official podcast from the makers of Jack Daniel's. I'm your host, Lucas Hendrickson.

Nelson Eddy: Hi, my name is Nelson Eddy and I'm the Jack Daniel's historian and have had the privilege of working with Jack Daniel's for 35 years starting this year.

Lucas: Nelson Eddy, welcome back to Around the Barrel. It feels like we just did this a few months ago, but that's all right. I can take every opportunity I can to pick your brain about the history of this particular brand and all the people associated with it. So we appreciate you spending a little time with us again today.
Speaking of people and names and figures that are seminal to the history of this brand, we're going to talk a little bit today and unpack the history of one Angelo Lucchesi, the simplest way to put it, first salesperson ever hired for the distillery, but certainly has a wild and colorful history that goes along with that. Tell us a little bit about who Angelo Lucchesi was.

Nelson: Sure, and I'm privileged to do this having spent time with Angelo and traveled with him to the West Coast where celebrities treat him like the Pope has arrived. We'll talk more about that in a minute. But yeah, Angelo Lucchesi, he was one of 13 children. His parents had immigrated from Italy. His father will be a very successful grocer. He'll own several houses in South Memphis. So Angelo's growing up in South Memphis in a little Italian community.
Yeah, the two things that people talk about the most is he was the very first salesman for Jack Daniel's. We'll get into how that happened. Then the other thing everyone brings up is he was Frank Sinatra's link or tie to Jack Daniel's, and we can talk about that some. But he was so much more.

Lucas: Sure. Unpack a little bit what the whiskey selling world was like when he was brought into the company. It wasn't the situation where you had a specialty beverage shop on every corner. Sometimes you didn't even have one in the county you lived in or even relatively near you. What were the things that brought him to the distillery, and what kind of market forces did he have to deal with in those earliest days as a salesperson directly for Jack Daniel's?

Nelson: Wow. I mean, you asked two things. How did he come to the distillery, and that could fill up a half an hour. I'll keep that part short and then we'll get to the part, what did the landscape look like in 1953 when he joins?

Angelo's born in 1920, and interestingly enough, he gets through high school at St. Bernard's and then decides to go to a monastery in Cullman, Alabama, where he is going to be a Benedictine monk. He spends two years there, and they're getting ready to take what they call the simple vows, and he really doesn't think he could do it. Rather than not keep his vows, because that's the kind of guy Angelo always was, he decides, "I'm just going to have to leave." So he leaves, and he ends up being a clerk at a retail establishment called Circle Inn there in Memphis. Then a gentleman comes by and talks him in – He's about 24 years old at this time – talks him into being a salesperson for Southern Host, which is a liqueur that's very much like Southern Comfort. So Angelo says, "Okay," gives it a try. So he goes to the warehouse. One day he's at the warehouse, this gentleman comes walking through and he says, "I'm D.E. Motlow, I'm president of Jack Daniel's. Angelo's kind of going, "So what?"

Lucas: What's Jack Daniel's?

Nelson: Nobody had really not heard of it. He wasn't familiar with it, and no one really knew Hap Motlow at this point. So he thinks nothing of it. About two weeks later, Angelo is taking his first business trip as a young man for his company. Comes to Nashville to meet with Lipman Brothers, and he stays at the Andrew Jackson Hotel unknowing that this is the permanent residence of Hap Motlow. Where Hap lives is at the hotel there in downtown Nashville. So he gets there, and guess what? He checks in, but they don't have a room for him. He'd already set up to have a room. He'd made reservations. They don't have a room. They said, "Why don't you sleep on the couch?" He's kind of frustrated. He's a young guy, his first kind of sales job here, and he's going to be forced to sleep on the couch.

He doesn't think much of it. So he just gets on the couch. They send him a cover. They send him, as he talks about, a ham sandwich and a Coke, and they tell him they'll get him a room at 6:00 a.m. Well, about 11:30 p.m. that same day or that night in comes walking this gentleman, and he kind of throws up a hand. Angelo doesn't know who it is, but he's polite and waves back. That gentleman goes to the front desk and he asks the clerk, "Does that gentleman have one arm?" The guy says, "Yes, he does." He says, "I met a one-armed gentleman somewhere. Send the kid up to my room with a cot, and he can stay with me." As Angelo likes to put it, "He never got rid of me." Hap and Angelo were great friends.

Hap Motlow now is the son of Lem Motlow. After Lem passes away in '47, the four Motlow brothers will run the distillery, and Hap is the president. They spent all kinds of time together because at the time that they meet, Angelo isn't married yet, and Hap will be a confirmed bachelor for life. But they meet up and they start traveling together. They make fabulous trips across country on a train to San Francisco. At the time, they're making Jack Daniel's and Lem Motlow Brandy. They go together to find apples for the brandy, and they're traveling together. So they're great friends.

That's the one thing about Angelo. He was never really a salesperson. He just knew how to make friends. This was the first friendship that did him quite well. So they make friends. It's about 10 years later. Most people think he got hired on to Jack – He was friends with the Motlows for 10 years. He calls up Hap, he's got a couple questions and he asks Hap – this is 1953 – he says, "Can I get some tickets to the Vanderbilt-Alabama game?" It's going to be played in Nashville that year. Hap says, "Yeah. Anything else you need? I'll give you two tickets, one for you and your wife. Anything else you need?" He said, "How about a job?" There's a lull, as Angelo describes it. He goes, "Are you there?" He says, "We're not ready to be hiring anybody." He said, "Well, let me be the first. I can be your very first salesperson." So Hap doesn't say anything else.

But after that game, they kind of see each other after the game and Hap says, "Come by on Tuesday. Come back here to Nashville on Tuesday. We're going to make you Jack Daniel's very first salesperson." So at that time, there was no marketing department, there was no sales department. If you can imagine this, the Motlow brothers kind of did it all. It wasn't really much out of Tennessee.

Lucas: I was going to ask, what was the footprint of distribution at that point? I mean, Angelo hadn't heard of it and lived in the far western corner of the state and Lynchburg being in the south central portion of the state. Yet that name at that point didn't mean anything to him.

Nelson: No.

Lucas: So the footprint around which Jack Daniel's was existing at that point was not very wide.

Nelson: Well, and coming after World War II, and we talked about that in an earlier episode, coming after World War II, distribution was beginning to pick up because the GIs come back from World War II, and they're asking for Jack Daniel's all across the country. But they can't get it or they can only get a bottle and not a case. So distribution may have been kind of wide, but–

Lucas: It was spotty.

Nelson: Availability – it was spotty for sure. A lot of people– So in '53 when Angelo joins, it's about 100,000, maybe north of 100,000. Three years later, it'll be about 200,000 cases when Brown-Forman purchase it. So yeah, it's a totally different landscape. His territories were Memphis, Chattanooga and Nashville.

At that time in the '50s, Nashville still doesn't have liquor by the drink. So there's not a whole lot of action in this territory. He'll later go up to Chicago, and there's some interesting stories of what happens when he goes to Chicago, but that's kind of the footprint. It's not a big deal. He needed a job because the company that was distributing Southern Host was merging with another company, and he didn't see his name in the merger. So he didn't even know he was going to stay there. He's just hopping onto a job, and his friend helped him out, but he remained there 60 years.

Lucas: Well, again, you talk about he was in the back of Motlow head, "I met this kid with one arm." What was the situation of Angelo's single-armedness, for lack of a better term?

Nelson: You wonder how much him only having one arm contributed to his character. When tragedy happens to you, some people just, it becomes woe is me. Angelo, it was just, he never had a handicap. In fact, he used it to his advantage in that instance. He was completely memorable.

His father, as I said, had a grocery, and of course they had a meat department. Angelo's under five years old when this happens.

Lucas: Oh my.

Nelson: The kids were forbidden to be in the store when they were grinding sausage. But Angelo under five just goes poking around, ends up with his arm caught in a meat grinder. The family saves his life. They didn't even know it at the time because they not only took him in, they took the grinder in with him. That really cut off the flow of blood and kept him from bleeding to death. But like I said, the way he made friends is he was so positive around you. You just liked to have the guy around. He was so gracious and kind and all of those things. He never met anyone in his life who didn't ultimately become a friend.

Lucas: All of those characteristics, but also had a lot of sticktuitiveness, a lot of loyalty, certainly to the brand and to the people that he was working with. What were the other kind of characteristics that made him decide to stay with Jack for his whole life and watch that growth as that name and that brand and that whiskey became world famous?

Nelson: Well, like I said, he worked with them for 60 years, and I probably worked with him– He died in 2013, so I worked with him for over 20 of those years. Whenever I watched him with young people, he would begin by saying, "Look. This isn't a brand to me. I knew the people that made this. I knew the company. The Motlows were really good friends of mine," and he felt like it was his duty. And I will tell you, the Motlows were very good to Angelo.

Angelo likes to say he had a bad habit of gulping his whiskey instead of sipping it, and that habit got him into trouble. Very early on in his career Angelo comes to the Motlows and says, "Look, I cannot stop drinking." They say, "Angelo, we're going to take care of your family. We're going to get you into a facility to take care of this." When he got out, he never had a drink again.
He knows the lot of whiskey and would talk about Jack Daniel's every day of his life going forward from that point. But he didn't have a drop of whiskey. It was just interesting to me – two things – that the Motlows would stick by him. And at an early point in the history of the liquor business, you could get by selling something that you just never had to drink. That's pretty incredible. He was extremely loyal, and the Motlows were loyal to him. It's that loyalty, too, that –there are still stories to this day that he will allude to, but he won't tell because he knew Frank Sinatra gave him the story in trust.

From one of Frank's wives, I believe it was Barbara Sinatra said, "The reason he tells you those stories, Angelo, is he loves you and he trusts you." He had over his relationship with Frank, he had 20 letters he'd received from Frank on the road. He got a letter shortly after Frank's mother suddenly died in a plane accident. To this day, he kept that letter all to himself. Nobody else ever saw it.

Lucas: You led me into my next conversation piece of he was the conduit, the liaison, whatever you want to call it, between Sinatra and the distillery. How did they meet? How did they come across each other? What were the other things that kind of led to them being as close as they were as people, as opposed to, "Here's somebody that can get me the whiskey that I love."

Nelson: People always said, Angelo turned Frank Sinatra onto Jack Daniel's, and Angelo would say, "I didn't get him on it. I just kept him on it." By that, he meant he made sure wherever Frank Sinatra traveled, there were always five to 10 cases of Jack Daniel's, which was unheard of in that day, waiting for him.

This is the way it happened. Again, you go, wow. He was destined to become a monk and he ends up a whiskey salesman. How does that work? Well, in Angelo's case, it worked to his advantage. Almost every day of the man's life, he would go to mass in the morning before going to work. One of the people that would take him to mass in Nashville was Mike Figlio. Mike Figlio is a nephew of Jilly Rizzo, and Jilly is Frank Sinatra's right-hand man.

Mike Figlio was also working at Capital Records at the time. So he's taking Angela to mass, and he says, "My uncle called me last night, and Frank's in a tizzy. He's at the Copacabana. He can't find any Jack Daniel's anywhere. I'm reaching out to you as one good Italian to another. Can you help me?" Angelo's going, "What can I do?" The next day when he is at work, he goes in to see Hap Motlow. Says, "Hap, Frank Sinatra really likes our whiskey, and he can't find it."

Hap Motlow goes, "Talk to Winton Smith," who is the president of Jack Daniel's at this time– He goes, "Talk to Winton Smith. He likes Sinatra. Maybe he can figure it out." So Angelo goes to Win Smith. Win Smith says, "Just wait a minute. Wait a minute, I'll be right back." He comes back and he says, "It's taken care of." That's the only answer Angelo gets. So he goes home not sure what in the world has happened. This is 1967, and the brand has already benefited big time because Sinatra's getting up on stage going, "Jack Daniel's, nectar of the gods. Best booze in the world."

Two weeks later, he's at home in Memphis with his wife, and the phone rings. And he picks up the phone and there's this voice on the other end that says, "Paisano. I love you. You're my friend for life." Angelo just goes, "Mr. Sinatra!" Sinatra goes, "How do you know it's me?" Angelo, just, he says he thought it was a silly answer, but it's actually a pretty good one. He goes, "No one sounds like you, but you." From that time forward, they had a constant correspondence. They would meet together once or two times a year. At one point, Sinatra will bring to Las Vegas, Angelo and his wife backstage at a concert. Whenever he saw him, those one or two times a year, Sinatra, it would be a closed door thing. It would just be the two of them in a dressing room before the concert, and they would just talk. Angelo says, "It was personal in nature, and so it's better left unsaid."

Lucas: Do you have any sort of, aside from the personal nature of that, did he have a visible business relationship? Did he have official duties, if you will, as far as maintaining that relationship? Or was it just that they were comfortable with each other and both loved the same whiskey and just built that friendship that way? Was there an official, or an unofficial, direct link between the two in relation to the distillery?

Nelson: This is pretty interesting. In this day and age if a celebrity gets on board with the brand because they like it, not because they're paid, which I don't hear much of that.

Lucas: Not so much.

Nelson: But if they do, well, the top executives are all over it. Winton Smith, to his credit, and one of the reasons Jack Daniel's has always been extremely genuine as a brand, it is what it says it is. It goes back to people like Winton Smith who liked Sinatra. It's the reason he got the whiskey. But he would never stand in the way of that relationship. It was always the relationship, not with president of the company, not with the head of marketing, with a salesperson and Frank.

In fact, there was at one point in this, there was a vice president, and this vice president of the company really wanted to get in with Sinatra. So he showed up at a concert and was backstage with Angelo and Sinatra and kind of inserts himself. Frank just kind of goes, "Who's this guy? I don't know him." Soon after that, we don't know exactly why he was let go, but he was let go. I mean, maintaining that relationship was really important to the brand, and it was in Angelo's hands. Nowadays, would we leave that in the hands of a salesperson? But it was a genuine friendship.

Lucas: Or even just one person. It'd be a whole team of people kind of micromanaging that relationship. So that was an interesting day and age in which two guys get in a room, you figure out what needs to be done, or just have a conversation and let that relationship live as it does.

Nelson: Well, and it was no small trick keeping Frank Sinatra in Jack Daniel's.

Lucas: Well, yeah. There's that. You had to have it wherever he was in the country, and a distributor might not be near. We didn't have international distribution, and he was flying around the world. So when he would take off, it was always there were cases of Jack Daniel's loaded in the plane. That was to the brand's benefit too. You have the Prince of Monaco entertaining at home, Frank Sinatra, and lo and behold, he ends up a friend of Jack Daniel's. That's no coincidence. It's because Frank had that kind of influence over a lot of people.

What were the other kind of relationships and goals and expectations that Angelo had as a salesperson in the midst of the growth of this kind of brand? He was not just Frank's guy, but was involved in a lot of other kind of things with the distillery as well.

Nelson: Yeah. He would laugh. I think towards the end of his life, we might have been 17 million cases. He saw it from 100,000 cases to about 16, 17 million at the time he passes away. But he talks about those early days and he says, "Boy, things changed."

For example, whenever you made a deal, you're expected to have a drink of whiskey. He talks about going to Chicago. He's going to Chicago for the first time, and Hap comes to him and goes, "We need to sell some whiskey to Italian folks in Chicago. You're the man." Angelo's going, "You think just because I'm Italian I know every Italian?" He's going, "Well, I didn't." But his brother, Johnny knows some lawyers in Chicago. So he goes up to Chicago, meets with the lawyer, the lawyer's going to drive him around to these different distributor houses, and the lawyer's going to take the orders. So they get to the first one, and the lawyer looks at him before he gets out of the car and says, "This is mafioso." Angelo goes–

Lucas: And?

Nelson: "Should I be worried?" He goes, "No, just go in." Well, Angelo does get worried because he goes in, the guy's packing a gun, and he's all upset. Angelo's going, "How can I help you?" The guy's going, "I haven't seen anybody from your brand for three years." Angelo goes, "And that's why I'm here to help." The guy takes his gun out of his coat pocket, puts it in a drawer, shuts the drawer, sits down with Angelo and says, "Let's have a drink to seal our friendship." So he pulls a bottle of Old Grand-Dad because they'd sold all the Jack Daniel's at this point, pulls out some Old Grand-Dad, pours it, and they have a drink. Angelo says, "We saw eleven places that day. Eight of them were mafioso, and I had a drink at every one of them."

Lucas: Oh my.

Nelson: He says, "By the end of that day," but that was just what was expected in that day. It's not the kind of way we do business today by any stretch. And later, Angelo wouldn't be either, but that kind of illustrates what it was like.
He saw it take off. The prime reason, we've talked about this before, and people can listen to earlier podcasts about it, but in the '50s you have the soldiers coming back after World War II, you have Frank Sinatra. If you had to put it on one guy that made this brand– In the '60s, sales went up 100% in a single year, which you can't catch up to that. In fact, they didn't catch up to that kind of demand that they were getting until like 1979.

Sinatra's key to all that, and Angelo's key to Sinatra. So yeah, he watches a lot of things happen. He watches the city of Nashville open up and start serving liquor by the drink in the '60s. So yeah, he's a witness to all that. It wasn't just Frank Sinatra. Frank would introduce Angelo to a world of celebrities. Sammy Davis Jr. was a big friend of Jack's. He would meet Frank, he'd meet all the members of the Rat Pack of course. Then people like Dinah Shore he'd meet, he'd meet, oh, I don't know, Peter Lawford, Joe Mantegna, Dinah Shore, I said that one, Robert Stack, Tony Bennett, Danny Thomas.

The other thing Angelo was big in, and this goes back to his religious roots, is charity. St. Jude has received untold money from Angelo Lucchesi and because of the friendship with Danny Thomas. That was key. The other charity that has received a lot of Angelo's time and attention over the years was Barbara Sinatra's charity, and that was the Sinatra Children's Center. It was a hospital for children that had been abused. Frank and Barbara had a great heart for that. It was really Barbara's charity, and Angelo was part of that year after year. There was a Sinatra golf tournament, and Jack Daniel's would help sponsor that. All of that's because of Angelo Lucchesi and his heart as well as his ability to make friends.

Lucas: It's such a great story of how he got to be involved in the growth of this brand over the years and get to see it flourish and make these friendships that you can only kind of dream of, an Italian kid coming from Memphis. He got to enjoy that part of his legacy as he was living it. How did the end of his life play out, and what is his ongoing legacy with the brand today?

Nelson: Well, he really has several legacies. I think it was Paul Varga who said, "A lot of our characteristics as a brand and as a company and how we treat people have been built from people like Angelo Lucchesi." In fact, there's an annual award that's given out in Angelo's name among the sales folks at Brown-Forman, and it's named after Angelo. It's given to salesmen who embody the excellence and the spirit and the heart of Angelo Lucchesi. That's one way the legacy lives on.

When Brown-Forman started a program for employees that was about responsible drinking and really emphasized that you didn't really have to drink to be an employee, who's the person they brought in to lend credibility, to talk to the employees? Angelo was the first speaker, and they said he hit it out of the park.

His legacy, too, is to remind people– The world likes to think Jack Daniel's is this mass produced huge, huge thing. While it has grown and the distillery has grown, and the number of barrel houses in Lynchburg have grown, it still all comes from that single source, still made the same way. Angelo would always remind people of the family who started it, the Jack Daniel's family, the Motlow family, and the importance of that, their commitment to excellence. That kept it small, him being able to talk to it and had spent time with the Motlows and Lem Motlow and whatnot. So that's part of his legacy. To honor that legacy in 2010, they created the Angelo Lucchesi bottle. Now, mind you this, Angelo got a bottle with his name on it before Sinatra did.

Lucas: I was going to say, there are very few people who have their name that are officially on a bottle of Jack Daniel's. Angelo made it to that finish line before his longtime friend did.

Nelson: Yes, he did. That's how much the company thought of him. Angelo joked that now it was up to him to sell all of these cases of whiskey with his name on it. But they went really, really fast because distributors all across the country knew who Angelo Lucchesi was. It went very quickly. It's a 90 proof whiskey because it was a bottle to celebrate his 90th birthday. That's the proof Jack Daniel's was when Sinatra was out on the road and when Angelo started. So it was kind of a nod to both Angelo's birth year and kind of the past of Jack Daniel's that's led to such a wonderful future.

You talk about a salesman and a celebrity, and you go, "They were friends," and people go, "Yeah, right." To give you some idea of the depth of this friendship– Sinatra was aware of Angelo's religious underpinnings. They're at this dinner and it's just guys. It's a bunch of guys. In front of each of their places, they've got a bottle of Jack Daniel's, unopened. That was a big deal to get a bottle at that time period. Angelo's sitting with it, and they're talking and they are swearing a blue streak back and forth, back and forth. Sinatra kind of catches Angelo's eyes to see Angelo is kind of blushing and he stops the whole party. He just stops and says, "Clean up your language. We're embarrassing the kid." That was his nickname for Angelo.

Hap and the Motlows called him Ang. Sinatra called him the kid, even though Angelo was just five years younger. At Frank Sinatra's funeral Angelo Lucchesi is not only invited, he sits with the family. He's the reason that we all know that there is a roll of dimes, a pack of Camels, and a bottle of Jack Daniel's because he saw it being put in Frank's casket. How many whiskey sales folks sit with a family of a celebrity? But Angelo was one, and he was never, as I said, a salesman. He was always your friend.

Lucas: Well, Nelson, again, thank you for your time. Thank you for sharing this story with us. We look forward to, again, picking your brain at some other point in time with the legend and lore of Jack Daniel's. Thanks for what you do with this brand, and thanks for spending some time with us.

Nelson: No, it's been fun. It always is. Especially when I can talk about somebody like Angelo.

Lucas: Thanks for joining us Around the Barrel.

 

 

Thanks for checking out this episode of Around the Barrel. You can find archived episodes of Around the Barrel on all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and more, plus on the web at jackdaniels.com/podcast. And if you like what you hear, please follow, rate and review while you're at it. Cheers y'all and join us next time for more conversations, Around the Barrel.

 

Your friends at Jack Daniel's remind you to drink responsibly. Jack Daniel's and Old No. 7 are registered trademarks, copyright 2023, Jack Daniel's. Tennessee Whiskey, 40% alcohol by Volume, 80 proof. Distilled and bottled by Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee. Around the Barrel is intended for listeners 21 years of age and older.