And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records (10 page)

But one opportunity that we were presented with turned into a low-light of my career—I struck out in spectacular fashion. During this time, former ATI booking-agent-turned-manager Ira Blacker pitched me a band he was representing. Ira had been KISS’s booking agent, but he had left ATI to form his own management outfit, I Mouse Limited. We’d enjoyed a good relationship during his short time with KISS, and he wanted to give us first dibs on an act he was representing: a Canadian trio hailing from Toronto who had developed a strong following that far outpaced their bar band status. They weren’t much of anything yet, and Ira even admitted that outright, but he was making a strong case for them nonetheless. At Ira’s behest, I traveled to Canada to see them perform live.

The trip was doomed from the beginning. The flight from LA to Toronto should have taken five hours, but it took closer to ten. The plane had mechanical difficulties at the gate at LAX, the weather during the flight was terrible, and I was developing a nasty case of the flu. To compound matters, the club where the performance was happening was a dark, dingy place called the Colonial Tavern, which had a threadbare sound system that couldn’t come close to keeping up with the band.

Despite the venue and the flu I was fighting, I could appreciate the fact that the trio gave the high-energy type of performance that Ira had promised. Their downfall in my eyes was their look. They were ugly. I say this with a great sense of amusement, because the members of KISS (behind the makeup) were some of the worst-looking guys I’d ever seen. Nonetheless, Ira’s group just didn’t cut it visually. They were all gangly looking, and their front man, the bassist, had a huge hook nose that Barbra Streisand could only aspire to. On a visual level, these three Canadians simply couldn’t compete.

I flew back to LA and gave Neil my impressions. Neil was always so positive about everything that I almost felt compelled to sell him on this band, but something held me back. I told him, “I thought they were decent. They have energy, but their songs are only OK. I just don’t think they’re the band for us, at least not right now.” Had we been a little less cash poor, I would have taken a flier on them, but there wasn’t enough money in the Casablanca coffers to afford a ham sandwich, to say nothing of another recording artist. After hearing my spiel, Neil said, “Look, you’ve seen them and I haven’t. I have faith in your judgment, Larry, so whatever you decide, we’ll do it.” I was deeply grateful that Neil held my opinions and abilities in such respect, but my practical side couldn’t ignore the incredibly tenuous position Casablanca was in. We couldn’t afford to fail. I decided not to make an offer.

I called Ira to let him know that we were passing on his band. He took the news well, and, like the pro he was, he had them signed to Mercury Records in an instant. He did a masterful job of pulling the wool over Mercury’s eyes, too, calling in favors with a distributor in New Jersey, who told Mercury that the trio’s first album was the most-requested import he handled. A nice bit of fabrication on Ira’s part, but it worked.

This was my first big decision on which act to sign, and as the years went on, the wrongness of my choice just grew and grew. Even now I cringe just looking at these words: The band I chose not to sign was Rush.

And to highlight the quality of Neil’s character, never once, ever, did he tell me I blew the deal. That’s exactly why so many of us were willing to run through walls for him.

As our problem with Warner was becoming apparent, a really messy situation was coming to the fore between Neil and Beth due to Neil’s infidelity with Joyce Biawitz, KISS’s comanager. I had first noticed there was something more than business between them at KISS’s showcase the previous year in New York. It probably didn’t help matters that the weekly magazine for the touring industry,
Performance,
ran a blurb saying that Neil and Joyce were seen “looking very cozy together” at an LA concert by one of our former Buddah artists, Melanie.

During the summer of 1974, Neil rented a beach house in Malibu to take full advantage of being in LA. Everyone would go out there on the weekends to hang out, get high, and have fun. On one particular weekend, near the end of the summer, Gail and Dominic Sicilia came out from New York to visit. Gail was the music director of WOR-FM, a Top 40 hybrid station that leaned more toward a younger demographic and came off as more hip than other Top 40 stations. Dominic was a brilliant promoter and entrepreneur who had worked for us at Buddah as a creative director and also managed the band Stories.

Gail was very good friends with Beth Bogart and Nancy Reingold. However, she knew things that the two sisters did not, as she was present at all sorts of music events. Dominic would also tell her what was going on, so she knew about Neil’s various trysts, though she’d always kept mum on the subject. That weekend, Joyce was also at the beach house. Gail couldn’t hold her tongue any longer. She told Beth about this and the many other affairs Neil had had with people Beth knew—his former secretary, and on and on. Beth blew up. She felt betrayed and embarrassed, and rightly so.

Beth and Neil argued about it for weeks, and Neil promised to be good, but Beth finally kicked him out of the house. He stayed at my Hollywood Hills hacienda for a few days while he looked for a place to rent. Neil took the breakup very hard. Each night, he cried himself to sleep. He knew he would see the kids less, and I believe he still really loved Beth—I think he always did. After Beth kicked him out, he was always trying to be around her twin sister, Nancy, so he could maintain the family connection. Neil never admitted publicly that Beth had thrown him out. He would always tell people that he, not she, had chosen to end the relationship.

Neil eventually found a furnished house to rent in Beverly Hills. It was a stern and imposing home, much bigger than he required, but he needed the prestige of a Beverly Hills address. The company was paying the rent, anyway—so what the hell.

I felt bad for both of them. It was hard for me to hear negative things about Beth, as I’d always really liked her, but Neil needed a sounding board, and I was it. I don’t think Neil ever got over the divorce, but he did start dating a few months later. He met and began going out with Lucie Arnaz, daughter of renowned TV stars Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, and a talented actress and singer in her own right. Lucie was married, but she was separated from her husband. Soon after they started dating, Lucie invited Neil to her mother’s house for dinner. Neil came to the office the next day acting like he had gone to the Mount and seen God. All he could talk about was meeting the redheaded legend and how wonderful she was. He was also perplexed. He couldn’t decide whether he should continue going out with Lucie (he was very taken with her), because if he did he would risk losing Joyce. He went back and forth, mentally listing the positives and negatives of the situation. I don’t remember why he stopped seeing Lucie. I guess he just decided that Joyce would be better for him, especially since she would do anything for him—
anything
—while Lucie probably would not.

Then one day, as Neil and I were returning to Casablanca after a meeting at Warner Brothers, Neil said to me in a very emphatic manner, “Whatever you do, and whatever anyone says, do not leave my side, no matter what.” I had no idea what he was talking about. Then we walked into Neil’s office, and I saw tall, gangly, tough-talking Hy Mizrahi and his girlfriend. Along with Artie Ripp and Phil Steinberg, Hy had been one of the original partners in Buddah. Hy began to scream at Neil that he owed him money, and he ordered me to leave. I said no and stood my ground, at which point Hy pulled open his jacket and revealed the handle of a .38 revolver. Neil made a move toward the panic button discreetly located in the fireplace behind his desk, but Hy told him if he pushed it he would shove him up the chimney. Someone from the outer office yelled that they had called the police. Hy and his girlfriend (I think having her there made him more macho) took this as their cue to leave, though Hy continued to threaten us as they departed.

Neil was shaking, and with good reason. He told me Hy allegedly had Artie Ripp beaten up in a parking lot because Artie would not give in to his demand for a kickback. As soon as Hy left the office, Neil called Arnold Feldman, who had been our accountant for years and was rumored to have connections to the New York Mafia. Neil related to Arnold what had happened, and by that evening two really tough-looking Italian fellows had flown in from New York to act as Neil’s bodyguards. I, on the other hand, had no one to protect me, so I went out and purchased a handgun, which I kept at my house. A little while after Hy had left our offices, Buck Reingold, who was not lacking in confidence himself, returned from an errand. When Neil and I explained to him what had happened, Buck became livid and asserted again and again that if he had been there he would have kicked Hy’s ass. And he probably would have.

A few days later, we discovered that Hy had also threatened Art Kass, prompting Art to contact Hy’s old partner, Phil Steinberg. I had never met Phil, but from what I was told, you did not mess with the man. While working at Buddah, I once asked about an empty office that no one ever used. I was told that it was being saved for Phil, who would be coming back from Mexico after the heat over some alleged crime had died down. In any case, Phil loved both Art Kass and Neil, and I guess he was none too happy with Hy. Phil called Hy, but he couldn’t get him on the phone, so he left a message with his girlfriend, saying that if Hy ever bothered Neil or Art again, he would find Hy and break him into little pieces. I guess Hy believed this, or maybe Arnold Feldman’s acquaintances got to him. He called Neil a few days later to apologize profusely.

 

 

As the summer of 1974 wore on, our battle with Warner came to a head. It was time for a face-to-face with someone at Warner who could make big decisions. In August, Neil and I arranged for a meeting with Mo Ostin, cochairman of Warner Brothers. Despite the “co” designation, Mo was the top man in the company. No one questioned that.

Mo was a short, balding fellow who was a good fifteen to twenty years older than us. He had become head of Warner many years before as a colleague of Frank Sinatra’s. As the story goes, Warner had offered Sinatra his own label, Reprise. He’d placed all of his buddies with the label, including Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. Frank had needed someone to watch out for his interests, and that person was his accountant, Mo Ostin. During this period, Reprise became very powerful, driven by the popularity of Frank, Dean, and company, and it proved to be the mainstay of the entire Warner family. Mo artfully worked his way into the position of boss. He did very well for himself, especially when the Warner/Elektra/Atlantic merger came together.

Warner’s offices were located in Burbank, in the San Fernando Valley, and they were jammed to the rafters with people. Desks were set up in the hallways. The company had clearly outgrown its surroundings. Even Mo’s office was small—certainly smaller than Neil’s—and it was not at all in keeping with his towering status in the industry.

Our meeting with Mo started out very cordially, with Mo expressing his happiness with the label arrangement. Then we started to complain. We told Mo that we felt something was drastically wrong with the sales picture. Our retail contacts were telling us that when they ordered a KISS record, it was not shipped to them. Mo claimed to know nothing about a back-order problem, so he called his head of production into the office and asked him if there were any issues that he knew of with the Casablanca product. He explained that over one hundred thousand of our units were back ordered due to pressing-plant issues. Mo then called in Eddie Rosenblatt, head of sales, and asked him to explain why steps had not been taken to rectify the situation, and why he had not been notified. Eddie apologized, offering some ridiculous explanation, which even Mo did not seem to believe. Finally, he and the head of production admitted that since the plants they were using could not keep up with all the orders, they were pressing Warner-owned product before they pressed the product from the subsidiary labels. This was becoming a tired routine. First, we’d been ignored by promotion, and now we were getting screwed by production and sales.

Mo knew that not having the sales we deserved would hurt our account balance with Warner. Because Warner had thus far paid almost all of our expenses—five Mercedes sedans, office rent and build-out, money to sign and produce artists, tour support for KISS, and so on—we had already racked up a debt to the company of about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars (which would be worth in excess of $3.1 million today). Neil had originally been told that Warner’s investment would be somewhere in the area of a million dollars and that if we did not show signs of scoring a major success, Warner would take us over. The current situation was hurting the development of KISS by negatively affecting chart positions and sales momentum. Mo seemed very embarrassed, and he offered Neil a deal that stipulated that we could leave the label and owe them nothing. Neil took the out, but he refused to allow Mo to whitewash the debt. We paid back every penny of it.

While Mo appeared mostly sympathetic to our plight, it had not been his idea to bring Neil into the Warner family in the first place. It was Joe Smith’s idea. Joe came from the radio and promotion end of the business, and he had become cochairman of Warner when Mo decided he needed someone to cover for him in areas where he didn’t excel. Smith was one of the best speakers in the music industry—or any other industry, for that matter. He had a way about him that was endearing to everyone. He was able to joke about Morris Levy breaking kneecaps in front of industry bigwigs, including Morris himself, and get away with it (Morris was president of Roulette Records and allegedly the Mafia’s music connection). In fact, Morris would laugh louder than anyone else at these jibes. Joe was our main and probably only supporter at Warner. He’d had to lobby Mo hard to make the Casablanca deal become a reality. Because of this, I will always wonder if Mo engineered the exit strategy for Casablanca when we became too much of a pain in the ass.

On the ride back to the office, Neil and I were mostly silent. I glanced over at Neil as he drove. His face had that thousand-yard stare of someone utterly lost in thought. He was trying to convince himself of something. Then his face brightened and he said, “Larry, this isn’t bad. This isn’t a bad thing at all. In fact, this is the best thing that could have happened to us. We were coming to the end of our financial rope with Warner anyway, and they would have pulled the plug on us any minute now. Warner’s not a bottomless money pit. But now we’re free to do whatever we want without answering to anyone but ourselves.”

This was Neil in his element. The circumstances for a neophyte label (just months old, really) that had its corporate umbrella suddenly yanked away were dire. Most companies, most men, would have done the sensible thing and folded their tents. But not Neil. I knew he was very nervous about these new developments—we were now orphans—but by the time we’d reached the office, he had prepared what he was going to say to Cecil and Buck, then Joyce, Bill, KISS, the other groups and managers, and, of course, the press. He immediately began to lay out a strategy for exiting Warner Brothers and shifting distribution over to independents.

Leaving Warner, I felt like we were in this old
National Geographic
special that everyone’s seen. A gazelle is born and falls to the ground in a wet heap. The camera pans over to a pack of hyenas approaching in the distance, looking for dinner. The newborn gazelle has to figure out how to run, to learn something in three minutes that it takes humans two years to do. Either that or be eaten. How daunting was the task of establishing Casablanca as fully independent? Put it this way, I was jealous of the gazelle.

As we found our footing, we took account of what we needed to do to move forward as a self-sustaining company. We quickly realized that we would have to double or triple our staff just to stay afloat. Warner had handled all production, sales, some publicity, all international relations and deals, as well as most of the local and regional promotion. That was all up to us now. But being alone and exposed didn’t mean we had to stop bragging about Casablanca—quite the contrary. We placed full-page ads in several industry publications featuring a drawing of Neil, Buck, Cecil, Nancy Sain (Buck’s assistant), and me walking past Rick’s Café on a Moroccan street and proclaiming, “We’re steppin’ out and comin’ home! Casablanca, we’re now independent!”

In order to expand Casablanca, we had to do some restructuring. Though Neil had some unique philosophies when it came to running the business (mostly related to choosing artists and his wildly extravagant promotion efforts), when it came to setting up our new departmental infrastructure, we followed the general blueprint that most record companies employ.

The legal department plays a key early role, as it’s responsible for the language of the contracts that new artists sign, as well as any agreements the record company has (and there are dozens) with various outside companies, such as manufacturing plants, printers, and ad agencies. This department also handles the inevitable influx of legal issues that arise in the course of business (someone is always suing someone).

The production department is responsible for coordinating the manufacturing process. It gets the master tapes for an album from the recording studio to the mastering lab, and from there to the production facility, where the vinyl is grooved and mass produced; and it gets album artwork to the printer that will produce the cover and/or liner. All of this requires a tremendous amount of coordination and patience, and an eye for detail. It also helps to have someone around with a degree in psychology to talk management off the ledge when the inevitable delays crop up.

From there, the publicity and promotions department takes over, designing marketing campaigns, placing print ads, scheduling TV spots, and shipping out press kits by the crate. This department often works very closely with the distribution and sales people, who are responsible for selling and positioning the product (albums, singles, and so on) with retailers, working their list of radio, TV, and industry contacts to get the product on playlists.

Casablanca was still small enough for Neil and me to cover functions that at a larger company would have been handled by an entire staff. Neil ran all the production, working with the manufacturing plants, as well as all the international deals. I worked with the distributors on a daily basis to make sure they were paying attention to our product and knew what airplay and marketing plans we had in the works. I had never done this before, but I had carefully watched Joe Fields perform his magic at Buddah, so I had some idea of what to do. On occasion, Neil would jump in to help me, especially when my lack of experience caused me to be too aggressive and a distributor would call him to complain. But, inexperience aside, I did feel that the distributors could, if they really wanted to, push out more product than they did.

Art and production were just two of our new responsibilities, and in this a company named Gribbit! gave us a huge hand. A Gribbit! rep named Chris Whorf helped Neil develop the artwork for our albums; he also helped us to design our new stationery and implement the changes that needed to be made to our old Warner-distributed product. Early in the relationship, Neil would go over every LP, inner sleeve, and label design with Chris and do several passes if necessary to get the artwork just right. Gribbit! did most of the Casablanca albums, except those of KISS, which is why there’s somewhat of a theme linking the various Casablanca covers.

All of the Casablanca albums distributed through Warner bore the catalog designation “NB,” followed by a four-digit number. “NB” was simply Neil’s initials. The first Casablanca album (KISS’s debut) was labeled NB 9001; the second (Gloria Scott’s
What Am I Going to Do?
), was NB 9002, and so on. With Warner now out of the picture, all future Casablanca albums (excluding special releases, like picture discs) would have the designation “NBLP” and a four-digit number. For reasons I do not recall, we started with NBLP 7001 (again beginning with KISS’s first release) and went on from there.

Our assuming of multiple responsibilities was a prime illustration of the fact that Neil understood all aspects of the record industry. He was a creative genius when it came to knowing what was needed, and he was acutely aware of every step necessary to make something happen. This applied not only to developing artwork; he also knew his way around the recording studio, the mastering lab, the manufacturing plant, and even the mailroom. His broad knowledge of the business made us bulletproof from scams and schemes: no company involved in the production process could cut corners or take advantage of him.

With the influx of new employees, it was vital that we set an example, so Neil and I always came to work early. Furthermore, most LA record companies would begin the business day at maybe nine or ten in the morning, but Neil and I were New Yorkers at heart—we liked to begin early so we could catch up with the East Coast. We’d typically put in a good twelve hours, usually leaving the office at 6:00 or 7:00 p.m., and then we’d go home or out to dinner and drinks at Roy’s, where we would network with other industry types. Roy’s was the only place in LA run by industry people, and the music crowd, and occasionally the film crowd, would fill the bar, hanging out and carrying on. The bar was narrow and small, which made for more intimacy and camaraderie. A night at Roy’s was a rite of passage for newbies at record companies such as A&M, Warner, and Capitol.

Having so much new responsibility on my plate, I required some education (you can only fake so many things at once). I attended as many meetings as I could with Neil and Chris Whorf. I paid close attention to their decision-making methodology. The experience I gained in those few months when we created what Casablanca was to become was ten times more worthwhile than anything I could have learned at business school. Simply attending meetings, hanging out at recording studios, and watching from the sidelines at mastering labs and manufacturing plants was the single greatest learning experience of my life. I absorbed years of book learning inside of a few months.