Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (41 page)

Despite all the cultural changes happening in New York and London, the underlying laws of the business hadn’t changed since the British Invasion. “The U.K. was really a loss-making shop window,” explained Green. “In the seventies,
Billboard
was the chart that mattered most to English record men and artist managers like Chris Blackwell, Terry Ellis, Chris Wright, Tony Stratton-Smith, Bill Curbishley, and myself. Our overheads and egos needed worldwide sales. We were entrepreneurs who knew how to befriend the market makers in America, unlike many of the eighties guys, whose attitude of being ‘punkish’ was never going to get the job done. I, for instance, would have signed the Jam for the U.S. if Paul Weller’s dad hadn’t been a manager who took the artist’s view that touring America was unnecessary.”

Another example was Ian Dury, who confessed, “You’ll never find me in Malibu, darling, because I don’t like America.” Dave Robinson secured him an American tour as supporting act for Lou Reed—on paper an irresistible bill. Alas, with Ian Dury convinced his Cockney poetry wouldn’t work on American audiences, the expedition was doomed. “I hate America,” announced the long-faced Dury to his PR aide Kosmo Vinyl when they landed at JFK. Six weeks later, following a disappointing tour on which the moody Lou Reed ignored him backstage, the crippled poet boarded the plane home. “I told you so” was all he said.

24. SODOM & GOMORRAH

Sneering punks got all the bad press, but beneath its glamorous veneer, disco was probably lewder and grimier. Nile Rodgers, the Chic guitarist who co-wrote “Le Freak”—the monster anthem of disco wonderland—spent those magical years in a toilet.

“I can still remember how exciting it was the first time a girl brought me inside,” reminisced Rodgers of his favorite niche inside Studio 54. “I spent most of my time in the women’s bathroom—which came to be known as my office.” His reasons were entirely pharmaceutical. “I had lots of blow. I was never asked to leave … All my drinks were brought to me, friends met me there … If someone had to use the toilet, I’d let her come in and she’d just go in front of me, even if we were total strangers.”

The game of influencing the charts was even dirtier. Casablanca VP Larry Harris had been assigned the job of lobbying probably the most important individual in the record industry, Bill Wardlow, the man who managed
Billboard
’s charts, which in turn determined orders from America’s biggest retailers. By showering Wardlow with disco gifts, gossip, and visits to the film set of
Thank God It’s Friday,
starring Donna Summer, at one point even Kiss managed to get no less than four titles on
Billboard
’s album charts.

In April 1978, Casablanca treated Wardlow to an unforgettable night in the “restricted area” at Club 54. As described by anyone lucky enough to have seen it, the forbidden zone was a hedonistic underworld where party people had sex in the shadows and celebrities sat at tables covered in cocaine. Although Bill Wardlow was in his midfifties and looked completely out of place, his hosts spoiled him as if he were a sultan in a harem.

RSO’s master salesman, Al Coury, also knew how to play the game. In May 1978, he was mysteriously spotted in Venice showing Bill Wardlow the magnificent aquatic city by gondola. The following week, RSO’s next big single from
Saturday Night Fever,
Yvonne Elliman’s “If I Can’t Have You,” was No. 1 on the
Billboard
singles charts. Others didn’t bother with flowers. Grateful for KC and the Sunshine Band’s five
Billboard
No. 1s, TK Records owner Henry Stone gave Bill Wardlow the down payment for a house in Palm Springs. “I threw him a dolla here and there,” admitted Stone. “He kept me wherever I told him to on the charts.”

Laughing at the top of the food chain was PolyGram, the European major then co-owned by manufacturing giants Philips and Siemens. In what at first seemed like a brilliant move, PolyGram spent $23 million acquiring both RSO and Casablanca. Throughout 1978,
Saturday Night Fever
and
Grease
yielded nine No. 1s held for a total of thirty-one weeks. Over at Casablanca, the Village People and Donna Summer provided another four platinum albums. Posting a $407 million turnover in America, PolyGram in early 1979 began planning a lavish party to celebrate becoming America’s third powerhouse, breathing down the necks of WEA and CBS.

In all the excitement, it never once occurred to PolyGram’s Dutch and German executives that film soundtracks are one-offs. Nor that Casablanca was a drug-frazzled liability that had just shipped a total of 5 million solo records from each of the four members of Kiss—a contractual obligation forced on Neil Bogart by Kiss’s managers in the hope solo projects might deter the strung-out band from breaking up. They were released the same day in September 1978 with a $750,000 promotional campaign, a four-way gamble that was the record business equivalent of self-mutilation. The average Kiss customer was never going to buy all four solo albums.

“Neil could snort a whole table full of coke with one nostril in one breath,” Henry Stone recalled of one unforgettable party during a
Billboard
convention. As one regular visitor from PolyGram’s distribution arm, Rick Bleiweiss, described the atmosphere inside Casablanca at the peak of its commercial success, “Music was blaring, twelve phones were ringing. You never could talk in that building. You had to shout. I think the average person walking in there would have been floored by the electricity and volume.” Down the corridor, promotions men hit an Oriental gong every time a Casablanca record was added to a radio’s playlist.

One new salesman in the company, Danny Davis, settled into his office in 1979 and could not believe his eyes. “On a Monday or a Tuesday, I’d be looking for a secretary and I’d be calling her name. I’d look all over, and there she would be with a credit card in her hand, chopping, chopping the coke on the table … I would be on the phone with a program director, and a certain party would come in. And he would run around with a fucking golf club, squashing things off my desk. And as I was on the phone, he would take a match and torch my desk. I would say into the phone, let’s say to Jerry Rogers of WSGA, ‘Jerry, gonna have to hang up now, my desk is on fire.’”

Meanwhile, on the streets of New York, disco was losing its magic as cheap imitators and tourists arrived en masse. “There was just this huge influx of people,” said Loft deejay Danny Krivit. “There were clubs opening up constantly. Everything was overflowing full. So there just wasn’t enough space—things were getting bigger and bigger. And then you start to refer to crowds as ‘
Bridge and Tunnel
’—people from the outer boroughs coming in. And to us, they seemed a little bit in that
Saturday Night Fever
vision. You know, less hip, the basic crowd—without the flavor.”

Reporting the rapidly evolving scene was a young journalist, Tom Silverman, who in 1978 started the trade publication
Disco News
. He gleaned his information from a nationwide network of deejays, record stores, and radio programmers. “In 1978,” he explained, “the first big station went to a disco-only format and within six months, thirty-five or forty stations followed—some in cities that couldn’t justify it. Everyone was trying to cash in on the boom. Meanwhile, all these really bad disco records were coming out: ‘Baby I’m Burning’ by Dolly Parton, and Arthur Fiedler conducting
Saturday Night Fiedler.
”

The first of several omens occurred in the summer of 1979 when an unknown radio deejay in Chicago announced a bizarre event. Steve Dahl was a disco hater who had recently been forced to walk out of a job when his station changed to a disco-only format. In his new job on rock station WLUP, he met a kindred spirit in Mike Veeck, son of the Chicago White Sox owner. With the approval of Veeck senior, the two deejays hatched an imaginative plan to figuratively smash the disco ball with a giant-sized baseball bat.

Calling their ceremony
Disco Demolition Night
, Dahl informed listeners that for the White Sox game on July 12, spectators would be admitted for 98 cents if they presented a disco sacrifice at the gate. An incredible 50,000 people descended on the stadium to see fireworks specialists exploding stacks of disco records as Dahl, wearing an oversized helmet, scrambled around in an army jeep. For thirty-five minutes chaos reigned as fans stormed the field and turned the pyrotechnics into a bonfire of the vanities. Unprepared for such mayhem, the White Sox had to forfeit the game. Outside the stadium, 15,000 rockers drank beer and chanted, “Disco sucks, disco sucks…”

Soon enough, disco was about to suck the bottom out from underneath PolyGram. Due to a combination of economic recession and disco saturation, for the first time since the 1930s, in 1979 the record industry experienced a tangible shrinkage of 11 percent. Everyone felt it. Teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, Clive Davis’s Arista label had to be sold off to German giant Ariola. The most spectacular casualty of all was PolyGram’s American distribution. “Between Casablanca, RSO, and smaller hits from Mercury and Polydor, we thought that we had entered the big leagues—there was no reason to think otherwise,” explained Rick Bleiweiss. Then came the mother of all flops, Robert Stigwood’s latest folly.

“The
Sgt. Pepper
film was a disaster for us,” continued Bleiweiss. “Everyone expected it to be another
Fever
or
Grease
. We tried holding back account orders for the soundtrack, but the accounts insisted on buying tons of it. It was like the last big wave of a tsunami. First the
Fever
wave hit, then the
Grease
wave hit, and then the
Pepper
wave came. Only this one was destructive.” From their royal boxes, PolyGram’s senior executives looked down in horror as the dance floor imploded into a flaming black hole.

It wasn’t simply returns flooding in. Over the previous two years PolyGram’s distribution network in America had tripled in size. Without enough volume to pay for the company’s huge running costs, all of PolyGram’s international profits were sucked and burned in the disco inferno. For his crimes against accounting, PolyGram fired Neil Bogart, and by the time he died in 1982 of cancer, Casablanca had been all but shut down.

Like the house lights flashing on at closing time, reality was nigh. Cutting an increasingly disheveled figure, in shuffled Bob Dylan with
Slow Train Coming,
a religious record produced by Jerry Wexler at Muscle Shoals. Some wondered if Dylan was undergoing Christian rehab, but the Minnesota bard hadn’t lost his sense of timing. “It might be the Devil or it might be the Lord,” he sang to a hall of record executives at the Grammys, closing a decade synonymous with self-entitlement and hedonism, “but you’re gonna have to
serve
somebody.” Cynics may have been smirking in their bow ties, but in time Dylan’s award added an ironic footnote to the fateful incident seven years earlier, when he chose David Geffen’s gilded asylum over Jerry Wexler’s old school.

Curiously, at the time, Mo Ostin was talking David Geffen back into the music business. Flattered, interested, and wanting more, Geffen negotiated a two-sided deal that set up his billion-dollar future. Mo Ostin would finance a Geffen-run record label through Warner Bros. Records; Steve Ross, through Warner Communications, would finance a movie and theater production company. Aged thirty-seven and very lucky not to have contracted HIV in his Studio 54 days, Geffen was back in Los Angeles to conquer the entire entertainment industry. When he was struggling to find a name for his company, his designer friend Calvin Klein suggested “Geffen Records” because “you’ll get laid more!” For additonal good luck, Geffen chose an office on Sunset Boulevard right beside where his career first took off.

“David, why didn’t you come back to Atlantic?” asked Ahmet Ertegun when he heard the news. “We could have worked together again?”

“Are you kidding?” gasped Geffen. “You’re out of it … Atlantic is finished!”

For all his talk, Geffen had also lost his feel for the times. Convinced he needed established names to launch the label, he splashed out a $1.5 million advance on Donna Summer, who, coming down off her Casablanca high, turned out to be depressed, religious, and burned-out. For the same price, Geffen then poached Elton John, also going through his own creative and commercial slump.

Geffen was still the best star seducer in the game. At the time, John Lennon had just produced his own comeback album,
Double Fantasy.
Hearing that Lennon was waiting for offers, Geffen outwitted all the contenders by addressing a telegram to Yoko Ono, politely requesting a meeting to discuss
the couple’s
musical future. “He’s it,” Lennon said, smiling at his beaming wife. With Yoko Ono acting as manager, Geffen agreed to another million-dollar advance.

Although lukewarm reviews and slow sales greeted Lennon’s midlife comeback on Geffen Records, following his assassination in December 1980,
Double Fantasy
was carried away on a wave of mourning. Fearing accusations of cashing in on Lennon’s death, Geffen halted all advertising, but by then, the new label had its first profitable smash hit.

However, inside the Warner empire, Geffen’s return was not greeted with equal enthusiasm. When WEA’s international division, headed by Nesuhi Ertegun, offered Geffen a modest $1 million advance for the label’s export rights, Geffen was furious. Hall & Oates lawyer Allen Grubman heard of Geffen’s problems and positioned himself as broker in a rival offer with CBS. The timing was perfect; Grubman’s mentor, Walter Yetnikoff, operating solo, had just pitched a film-company project to Warner Communications but had been turned down by Steve Ross. Yetnikoff wanted revenge.

In a New York restaurant, slurping up langoustine and mussels, Yetnikoff agreed to license Geffen’s export rights if Grubman begged like a dog. For his finder’s fee, the flabby lawyer slumped to his knees and whined, “Plee-eeze!” When Geffen walked off with a $15 million advance from CBS, aghast Warner executives spoke of treason. The calm-headed Mo Ostin, however, remained philosophical, arguing that CBS was only supplying Geffen’s start-up with vital cash flow.