Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (33 page)

The lunch host physically restrained Wexler from mauling the terrified Geffen. Steve Ross stood up. “We can’t have this,” he said, then exited to the nearest bathroom. Mo Ostin, shaking his head in disapproval, followed the boss outside.

When the party adjourned to the dining room, Joe Smith’s wife, who had not heard the shouting from her kitchen, presumed her choice of menu was responsible for the deathly silence around the table. Staring into his cheese soufflé to the sound of forks and knives, Stan Cornyn “felt puzzled by the change in the room … Was it David, who seemed to bring an odd attitude to what we did, who seemed to care less for the boogie and more for the cash? After the pee-break, no one observed that, with his Dylan-signing methods, David Geffen had changed the way record deals worked … David evangelized that record companies, like his own, were to
serve
their artists … Artists became, in appearance at least, kings, queens, tyrants, though so far very little the richer for it … Only later did I realize that this day had been spent with no talk about music. Of the executives in that room, only one still spent time in studios producing music, and that day he, Jerry Wexler, had felt the least comfortable. Among these men of purpose, opportunity, and spritzing, only Jerry Wexler had, for the moment, lost his way.”

Whatever the personal, moral, or musical permutations, for Steve Ross, business remained a game of picking winners and calculating odds. “He was a card counter,” explained Jac Holzman. “He’d go to Las Vegas, he could count cards. He’d make a modest amount of money and leave the table.”

Looking at the Dylan saga through gambler’s eyes, Steve Ross dismissed any need for procedures or arbitration. “If
you’re
going after him and
he’s
going after him,” Ross, grinning, told the shell-shocked faces, “we have
twice
the chance of getting him.”

20. PSALMS

On the garbage-infested streets of downtown New York, a brand-new species of record man planted a seed. David Mancuso was an ascetic on a crusade to bring people together in dance-party gatherings that as yet hadn’t acquired a name.

The history of New York’s dance scene is both complex and hotly disputed. We know for sure that the original
discotheque
format was, by then, an almost extinct French import from a bygone era. The double-turntable, multicultural
disco
of the future, drank from a different source: David Mancuso’s memories of his childhood in a Utica orphanage in the late forties and early fifties, where every week the kindhearted Sister Alicia threw parties for the children. They jumped around chasing balloons to the sound of music from records on a little turntable.

Without realizing the connection until much later in life, Mancuso as a young man was drawn to
rent parties
, then popular especially among African Americans. “I would go to the Village, I would go to Harlem, I would go to Staten Island, I would go wherever I heard there was a party going on,” said Mancuso. “I’ve always had all sorts of friends, which probably has something to do with growing up in the orphanage.”

Falling under the spell of Timothy Leary in the midsixties, the introverted and intensely spiritual Mancuso first began hosting LSD rituals around a shrine inside his spacious apartment at 647 Broadway. From playing records on a high-definition sound system, his private gatherings got progressively bigger and more dance-oriented. Rejecting possessions, meditating naked, surviving on stolen food, even taking his front door off its hinges to provide homeless people with a place to sleep, David Mancuso by about 1969 reached so far inside the immaterial world in search of his true identity that concerned friends, seeing his weight loss, convinced him to be hospitalized. It was while standing at the edge of the sane world that he realized his mission in life.

With the help of friends, he re-equipped his apartment with Klipschorn speakers, Mark Levinson amplifiers, and two turntables. The result, at what was increasingly referred to as
the Loft
, was private, balloon-filled parties like nobody had previously experienced. Mixing brilliant musical storyboards of percussive rock, psychedelia, and R&B, Mancuso interlaced his records with sensory special effects—lights, moments of total obscurity, wind fans that blew up to the sounds of tropical storms. “There was something intangible—magical—that wasn’t happening in other places. I hadn’t taken any drugs, yet I felt like I was tripping,” said one eyewitness, Danny Krivit. Although LSD and other drugs were common, Mancuso forbade dealing. It was the sound, music, and collective spirit that made these nights such epic emotional experiences.

“No way did I want to be a disc jockey,” stipulated the purist Mancuso, who still prefers the more socially conscious title of “
musical host
.” He invited only friends and music lovers to the Loft—black, white, Hispanic, obese, old, homeless, straight, gay. “We were like a family. There didn’t seem to be any conflicts. Music helped us reach that place. Music was the key to going back home.”

“
I think of David as the acorn that the tree grew from,” said Krivit, who, like so many other Loft regulars, later became a professional deejay. At the time, there were other dancing clubs sprouting up, in particular the Sanctuary, which, despite playing the same types of records courtesy of deejay Francis Grasso, was run as a business. As a social gathering, it leaned more toward trendy pickup joint, reliant on the requisite drugs-and-alcohol formula. These were the two blueprints for most of the nightlife that followed.

In keeping with the communal, nonprofit ethic in which the hundred or so Loft members paid a token $2 at the door to eat proper meals and dance all night, Mancuso actively helped a wave of lofts and dance clubs in its wake. “It was like a good joint. You passed it,” reasoned the uncompetitive Mancuso. “We were like bees and could pollinate.”

From more gay-oriented imitations such as the Tenth Floor and the Gallery, all the heavyweight deejays of New York’s nascent dance scene ventured forth in Mancuso’s shadow—Larry Levan, Walter Gibbons, Nicky Siano, Frankie Knuckles, and David Rodriguez. Competition and increasingly exhibitionist mixing techniques turned some deejays into performers. It became a “quest to find new records!” exclaimed deejay Steve D’Aquisto. “We had this thing and we had to keep moving it along.”

In New York, the proliferation of specialist record stores owed a great deal to independent distributors, who, having been squeezed out of the mainstream rock market, increased their supply of imports and other jazz, soul, funk, Latin, and indie rarities. This motley marketplace was centered around Tenth Avenue, where several independent distributors fed a growing network of specialist record stores. For the new generation of deejays, the main suppliers of rare, danceable vinyl were Colony Records, located in the Brill Building, and Downstairs Records, which had two outlets in the subway. Both stores allowed customers to listen to records before buying.

“It was already starting to change by the end of the sixties,” noted Krivit, the son of a club owner. “There weren’t any superclubs yet. This was a time when there was no admission charge, so things were pretty lax money-wise. All the places with jukeboxes were stuck with the same records that everyone else had. The company just said ‘choose from this Top 100.’ My father, however, who had the Ninth Circle, would go up to Tenth Avenue and they would actually cut an individual record—it wasn’t an acetate or vinyl, it was a clay substance, and he could get any jazz record or album cut put on a seven-inch. So he loaded his jukebox with all this hot music. Those distributors really had a wide variety of stuff—they were opening the doors.”

In 1972, disco pioneer David Mancuso experienced something strange at a place called Blue Hole near Mount Tremper in upstate New York. “There was this little stream that went into a quarry. It was maybe five feet wide, and there were these little whirlpools that looked like speakers, so I leaned over and got as close to them as possible without getting wet. The sound was incredible. It was the cleanest I have ever heard, and there was all this information. It was almost as if I could hear the history of life. Not in words, but in music.”

To re-create what he called “the spirit of the babbling brook,” Mancuso got a former musician and stereophonic sound engineer to construct a flower-shaped cluster of tweeters that could hang from the center of his loft space—the idea being to transmit crystal-clear stereo in every direction. Alex Rosner was one of New York’s specialists in club sound systems; as a boy he had narrowly escaped the gas chamber thanks to a musically sensitive Auschwitz commandant who recognized him and his musician father from a concert. “When I walked into the Loft,” said Rosner, “I just tore off my shirt and started to dance. David was very idealistic, and that idealism caught me.”

Pushing the science of club sound systems further into uncharted territory, Rosner augmented his prototype of Mancuso’s brainwave by a set of Vegas subwoofers on both sides of the dance floor. When people walked in, they literally entered the music. Although still an underground wave known only to a few hundred New Yorkers, the nascent dance scene was charging forward—Mancuso out front and, compared to his numerous imitators, always that little bit closer to the very source.

A new moon was on the rise. Although Los Angeles was still, at face value, the boomtown of the music business, the superstars of counterculture were retreating into their Laurel Canyon palaces as hungrier souls were chasing their muse down the streets of New York City—by now stirring from its five-year slumber.

One Manhattan morning in May 1972, three miles uptown from Mancuso’s loft, John Hammond, then aged sixty-three and occupying a leisurely position as a Columbia VP, strolled into the “Black Rock” at 51 West Fifty-second Street. As he sat down to his pile of newspapers, his secretary mentioned that a certain Mike Appel was penciled in for 11:00
A.M.
“Never heard of him,” Hammond thought, unaware the manager in question had harangued his way onto his secretary’s schedule.

At the appointed time, two men entered the office. “So you’re John Hammond, the man who is supposed to have discovered Bob Dylan,” said the less handsome face. “I want to see if you have any ears. I’ve got somebody who is better than Bob Dylan.”

“I don’t know what you’re trying to prove,” choked Hammond over his cold coffee, “but you’re succeeding in making me dislike you. Now I haven’t got much time. Who’s your boy?”

“His name is Bruce Springsteen.”

Turning his head to the youngster, Hammond softened his tone, but only slightly. “Why don’t you take out your guitar, Bruce, and start playing before I get any more irritated.”

What happened next, Hammond hadn’t been expecting. Concealing his shriveling embarrassment behind an easy smile, Springsteen took out his guitar and launched into “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City.” Hammond was immediately hooked but, not wanting to show the cantankerous manager his interest, sat poker-faced as Springsteen played two hours of original material. Eventually, Hammond picked up the phone and called Sam Hood, the owner of the Gaslight.

As a favor to Hammond, Hood agreed to let Springsteen perform that very evening during happy hour. Later, as Springsteen played his heart out to the empty club, one of Hammond’s musician friends asked with visible approval, “Hey, John, where did you find this guy?”

“He just walked into my office with his soft-spoken manager,” Hammond said with a smile.

Thoroughly satisfied Springsteen had compositions and a commanding stage presence, Hammond announced, “You’re going to be a Columbia recording artist,” then booked the delighted singer into a small studio for the following day. Although Hammond just wanted to make some demos, he invited
New Yorker
journalist Jane Boutwell, who was writing a piece on the producer. “I’ve found a new artist,” Hammond told her, “and I think something will happen with him, although it may take time … I’d like you to hear talent when it’s really raw.” After two hours of recording Springsteen’s solo performances on a guitar and piano, Hammond wrote “The greatest talent of the decade!” on the session recording sheets. He presented his demos to Clive Davis two days later, and a second meeting was convened in Davis’s office, where Springsteen was officially signed.

In the first proper recording sessions, Hammond urged Springsteen to stay acoustic, whereas the artist himself imagined a rock band sound. Although the final album,
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.,
was an awkward mix of folk and unripened rock, CBS shipped a firm commitment of 74,000 copies—most of them returning unsold. Meanwhile, another seismic power struggle began engulfing the corporation’s top floors. Increasingly disliked by the ghostlike presence of Goddard Lieberson, Clive Davis’s airs and graces had started to consume too much oxygen inside the CBS boardroom, which, in stark contrast to Steve Ross’s court, remained an old-fashioned administration where personality politics tended to trump commercial considerations.

When the group’s chairman, Bill Paley, chose a young outsider, Arthur Taylor, as corporate president Clive Davis became unashamedly condescending in conclaves. He also felt underpaid. Earning $100,000 with a further $40,000 bonus, Davis knew his salary was puny compared to the packages, perks, and private jets Steve Ross gave his barons. “Please, Arthur,” Davis would berate his superior in full view of the wincing executives, “do not question my judgment. You simply do not understand the market. You do not understand the music business.” As one key eyewitness, Walter Yetnikoff, put it, “Clive was right, but Clive was arrogant, and arrogance—he would learn, I would learn, everyone eventually learns—has a way of taking down the mighty.”

Inevitably, the regal Clive Davis was dethroned thanks to a scandal exposed by Jonathan Goldstein, the U.S. attorney in Newark. Code-named Project Sound, the investigation was probably a politically motivated witch hunt by Richard Nixon’s administration, investigating payola in Columbia’s R&B labels. Suspecting what came to be termed “
drugola
,” investigators monitoring a heroin smuggler, Patsy Falcone, noticed a connection with a certain David Wynshaw, an unusual Columbia employee who, when he wasn’t playing butler to Columbia’s stars, handled some of Clive Davis’s personal affairs. Combing through Columbia’s accounts, they found that Wynshaw had helped Davis invoice as company expenses a total of $94,000 for home renovations and his son’s bar mitzvah.