Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (44 page)

Lauder was then called in as firefighter on Marianne Faithfull’s follow-up to
Broken English
—a wilted tulip of an album titled
Dangerous Acquaintances.
“The producer had a nervous breakdown and she was in really bad shape,” Lauder remembered. “Work was just not getting done. I came home every night at 5:00
A.M.
having been sitting on the stairs just talking to Marianne trying to keep the thing from going off the rails … Then a few weeks later, someone in the corridor asked me, ‘Are you going to the Marianne Faithfull release party tonight?’ And I’m standing there, ‘What, uh, is there a party?’ because nobody had told me anything.” Just as Lauder had feared, he was playing the role of A&R butler.

The previous year, Island had signed a young postpunk group called U2. So Lauder was sent to Dublin to report on the final stretch of their second album,
October.
“It looked so obvious to me that this group could be huge. They’d just come off the road touring their first album,
Boy,
and of course they were struggling with that difficult follow-up. I thought, why is Island pissing around with some of the things they’re doing, instead of giving a big push behind this group that any bozo could see was gonna do something … I remember Chris always having reservations. He was always going ‘yes, but…’ about U2.”

Lauder came up with the idea to include a free copy of the single “Gloria” inside the album sleeve as a release-only special edition. “It was a trick we used to do at United Artists. It got all the fans to run out and buy the new album on release. Chris was against the idea; he thought it would just make a quick stir then the record would fall away. We did it anyway, and sure enough it charted, then fell away. He said, ‘Look, I told you so.’ And I said, ‘It got them their first chart position. What’s bad about that?’”

In every department, Lauder noticed “it was very difficult for anyone to make any meaningful decisions without bumping into the ol’ ‘What does Chris think?’ No matter what you suggested or gave them, it always came back as ‘Well, what does Chris think?’ And after a bit you start to say, ‘I don’t know. I haven’t asked him. But this is what
I
think.’”

Island Records at the time was employing a staff of about 120, a costly operation to keep fed without a major act. Inevitably, under the weight of such an absent, cultlike figure, office politics were rife. Despite the label’s origins in the late sixties as a gang of kindred spirits, Island Records in the early eighties had turned into a sort of third-world monarchy—run-down, absolutist, unfair. To get ahead one had to play the game according to local rules, or emigrate.

By 1982, the British market was taking a giant leap into pop. The biggest names of the New Wave, like the Police, Madness, the Jam, the Stranglers, the Clash, Adam Ant, and UB40, were still scoring hits, but their sounds were softening. Usurping them at the top of the charts was this new generation of synth-pop groups: the Human League, Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, Yazoo, Culture Club, Soft Cell, Eurythmics. It took one of Island’s affiliate labels, ZE Records, which symbolized New York’s so-called
no-wave
movement, to supply Island’s only significant hits in 1982—the album
Tropical Gangsters
by Kid Creole & the Coconuts, whose salsa-infused hit singles included “Stool Pigeon” and “Annie I’m Not Your Daddy.”

The very fabric of demand was changing. As Island’s head of publishing, Lionel Conway, noted, “We had career bands in the seventies. It all just changed in the eighties. It basically became more like a singles market. There were a lot of one-offs, and we weren’t equipped for that.”

Others were, however—in particular, clued-in New York deejays whose job was to spot and test individual tracks from all over the world. “It all grew out of the record stores,” Craig Kallman believed. “I lived in those stores and I’d bump into Rick Rubin, the Beastie Boys, Larry Levan, Jellybean Benitez, Afrika Bambaataa. There was truly a revolution happening with so much exciting music coming out of New York, L.A., and Miami. The U.K. scene was hot, too, so there was this huge wave of seven- and twelve-inch imports, especially from the big importers like Rough Trade and Important. The club scene was exploding with so many new sounds, dance and hip-hop mixed with U.K. alternative music and U.S. indie rock. And in the record stores, deejays were fighting over new releases as they were coming in—because there were never enough copies to go around.”

In May 1982, Tom Silverman’s fledgling label, Tommy Boy, released “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa, a classic hip-hop record notable for its use of a drum machine and sampler. Two months later, Sugar Hill Records released an even bigger genre milestone: “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five. “I don’t think people today can imagine just what a radical departure rap and hip-hop felt like,” said Tom Silverman. “There was this confluence of everything coming together at once: the 808 drum machine, the first Fairlight and Synclavier samplers, break-dancing, graffiti, quick-cut deejay techniques, rapping. It was just such a strange synthesis of so many new things.”

In fairness to the experienced Chris Blackwell, even at Island’s lowest point, he was barking up the right trees. As well as starting a dance sublabel, 4th & B’way, named after the address of Island’s New York office, he was considering hiring Danceteria deejay Mark Kamins as a talent magnet. When Seymour Stein heard the news, he was laid up in the hospital undergoing treatment for a heart infection. Going stir-crazy listening to demos while penicillin dripped into his arm, Stein immediately telephoned Kamins, to whom he had given $18,000 to produce some recordings. Unbeknown to Stein, Chris Blackwell had already turned down Kamins’s latest discovery—a singing, dancing pop-doll named Madonna Ciccone, whose first effort, “Everybody,” Kamins had been spinning at Danceteria. “Can I meet her?” asked Stein—who had, after all, paid for the experiment.

At about three in the afternoon, Kamins called back warning that Madonna would drop by the hospital at eight o’clock. Unbathed, unshaven, with his backside protruding from his hospital gown, Stein worked the telephone all afternoon. His secretary delivered a pair of pajamas; his barber arrived for an emergency grooming; his doctors allowed him to wash. “I figured that I had to look healthy,” Stein remembered, smiling. “It was the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, and I didn’t want Madonna to think that she was signing with someone who wasn’t going to be around much longer.”

Stein knew that to produce and market a pop artist, he would need Warner funding. Because Mo Ostin tried to torpedo the deal, he took Madonna’s case to Nesuhi Ertegun, still head of WEA’s international division.

“My brother tells me you’re in hospital,” said Nesuhi Ertegun. “Just listen to the doctors and I’ll give you what you need to sign her.”

That night, Madonna walked into Stein’s ward. “I could have been lying in a coffin,” he said. “It didn’t matter to her. All she wanted was a deal.”

26. CYCLOPS

For hot independents, the eighties began sometime around 1978. For certain majors, the seventies lingered on until about 1983. Moguls like Walter Yetnikoff and David Geffen were, for the most part, blind to the synth-pop, postpunk, and hip-hop sounds stirring up the New York club scene. In fairness, so was most of America. As if disco and punk had never happened, the biggest-selling album of 1981 came from seventies rock group REO Speedwagon, on CBS sublabel Epic. The following year, a supergroup of aging British progressive rockers, Asia, scored America’s biggest-selling album—a whopping 4 million copies for Geffen Records. Anyone looking at the bottom line was seeing that established names producing high-quality adult-oriented rock remained the most bankable commodities on the market.

Those with ears knew better. In 1981, A&M boss Jerry Moss took his future wife, Anne, on a trip to London via the Concorde. On arrival, the taxi took them to Derek Green’s house, where, as coincidence would have it, the Police were on the TV screen, performing on
Top of the Pops.
Discussing which restaurant to eat in, Moss’s attention was drawn back to the television a few minutes later. It was “Don’t You Want Me” by the Human League. He shared a knowing glance with his girlfriend. “We just couldn’t get it out of our heads,” said Moss, who the very next day tracked down the infectious tune to familiar faces at Virgin. On Richard Branson’s houseboat, Moss negotiated the Human League’s North American rights.

Returning to Los Angeles with a copy of the accompanying album,
Dare!,
Moss played “Don’t You Want Me” to his head of sales and promotions, Harold Childs. An astute character who only wore white suits and a Panama hat, Childs started making calls in his customary manner—always standing up in his office, no chair, television permanently on. “I recall a promotional trip with Harold to all of A&M’s field staff,” said Martin Kirkup, the company’s artist development VP. Despite the unfamiliar synthesized sound, “the enthusiastic reaction it got everywhere was partially due to the narrative of the lyrics. The promotion guys could relate to ‘you were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar.’ The story arc of
A Star Is Born
gave it great depth.” However, the record’s momentum was slow; starting on the progressive Los Angeles stations, it eventually won over Top 40 radio, city by city, reaching the Midwest. The single climbed to No. 1 on
Billboard
’s
Hot 100
as the album peaked at No. 3.

One surprising admirer of the Human League’s quirky sound was Neil Young, who had just moved to Geffen Records for another million-per-album advance. In 1982, Young delivered his infamous album
Trans,
a jarring mix of synthesizers, folk-rock, and ethereal vocoders. When it flopped with an unrecouped advance, David Geffen interrupted the recording of its country-flavored follow-up,
Old Ways,
demanding that Young just make some “rock ’n’ roll.” Picking up on Geffen’s choice of words, the pissed-off Canadian renamed his band the Shocking Pinks and banged out a kitsch satire of Elvis-era 12-bar rockabilly. Called
Everybody’s Rockin’,
the thirty-minute comedy album ended in an equally farcical $3 million lawsuit—in which Geffen’s attorneys failed to convince the court that Neil Young was fraudulently making albums unrepresentative of himself.

Over at CBS, Walter Yetnikoff was also accelerating with his eye on the rearview mirror. Even though Mick Jagger was barely speaking to the tattered Keith Richards, Yetnikoff spent an exhausting year trying to bag the Stones. “It amused Mick to see hungry record execs chasing his skinny ass around the world,” admitted Yetnikoff, who was thoroughly teased and outsmarted by the deceptively shrewd singer. “His image as the prancing prince of rock belied that side of his character that had seriously studied economics.” Following tortuous negotiations,
Rolling Stone
magazine reported that the $25 million deal “shapes up as no apparent moneymaker for CBS.” An unnamed source even admitted what staffers were whispering outside Yetnikoff’s office—“a prestige move more than anything.”

In that difficult year of 1982, CBS’s $1 billion turnover yielded a paltry $22 million profit, forcing Walter Yetnikoff on Friday, August 13, to close two factories and lay off three hundred workers. Few in the postwar record business had witnessed anything like it. In urgent need of a win, he picked up his telephone and called Michael Jackson, who hadn’t released an album since his 1979 disco blockbuster
Off the Wall
. The message was simple: We need another smash—mixed, packaged, and in stores for Christmas trade.

An emergency session was convened in Santa Monica by Jackson’s producer, Quincy Jones, who announced the daunting challenge to his production team. “Okay, guys, we’re here to save the recording industry!” Working flat-out, they delivered
Thriller
just in time for a rush release on November 30. “You gotta remember the time and place,” said keyboardist Brian Banks. “The record business was in the dumps right then. I remember one night, when they were looking at a bunch of proofs, large blow-ups of the centerfold, spread out on the console, and I was just there in the background doing my thing while Quincy was talking.
Off the Wall
sold something like eight million records, and I remember Quincy saying, ‘The record business is not what it was a couple of years ago, and if we get six million out of this, I’m gonna declare that a success.’”

To handle
Thriller
’s marketing, Yetnikoff chose the perfect CBS executive, Frank Dileo, an Italian American who was good friends with Joe Isgro, “the Network’s” main man in Los Angeles. For $100,000 per song, Isgro and his radio promotion colleagues covering other regions pulled out all the stops, embarking on a strategy of blitzkrieg. While “Billie Jean” was No. 1, CBS released “Beat It” as a single. Such a mass assault hadn’t been witnessed since the Beatles invasion of 1964; this time,
Thriller
was a concerted plan. All seven singles from its nine-song track list entered the Top 10, while the album held the No. 1 spot for thirty-seven weeks. Within one year of release,
Thriller
had earned CBS $60 million, immediately wiping away any residual gloom from the previous four years. Conservative estimates begin at 45 million unit sales to date. As monster hits go,
Thriller
was the King Kong of the vinyl jungle.

The industrial renaissance of 1983 had another arm that coincided with
Thriller
. Originally set up in 1981 by Steve Ross and American Express, MTV was a novel channel showing nothing but pop music videos on a twenty-four-hour rotation. When “Billie Jean” was refused by MTV, Jackson’s manager, Ron Weisner, called Walter Yetnikoff to flag what was widely rumored to be MTV’s white-only policy. In an uncharacteristically cautious move by a man otherwise known for shouting into telephones, Yetnikoff consulted the powerful Bill Paley, who personally telephoned MTV and threatened that if the video wasn’t broadcast that very day, CBS Records wouldn’t do any future business with the channel. Fearing the wrath of Paley’s long arms, MTV aired “Billie Jean” hours later.