And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records (11 page)

We were doing everything we could to distinguish our artists from those of other labels. When it came to album artwork, for instance, we insisted that the album title be in the top third of the cover so a customer flipping through a record store bin could read it easily. Also, Neil had the mastering lab cut our records much hotter (louder) than normal. This mastering ploy would help make our records sound more sharp and alive on radio. For my part, I insisted that the titles and artist names on the spines of our albums be maximized so that when one of our records was sitting on a radio station shelf with only its spine visible, it would be easier to read than the competition’s.

Neil and I could only do so many things at once, and we needed help. Our first hire, made sometime in mid-September, was Mauri Lathower, a man with a sterling reputation developed during a seventeen-year career with Capitol Records. Mauri would handle international deals for us, and he had witnessed it all, from Sinatra to The Beatles. He was a small, charming guy with a white Van Dyke beard, and he was a jazz musician in his own right. He began with us at a lower salary than he’d had at Capitol, and he was refreshingly willing to tackle all the new-record-label challenges that he knew lay ahead. We trumpeted the hiring to the industry press and also announced that I had become vice president, even though I had been VP for well over six months at that point. It didn’t matter. Any excuse to get our name out there was an opportunity we never passed up.

A few weeks later, we hired Dick Sherman as our national director of marketing and sales. He knew everyone in the distribution arena and always had a joke at the ready. Dick had played professional basketball with the New York Knicks for about three seconds when he was a lot younger and a lot thinner. He was a very funny guy who rarely had a good word to say about anyone, but he was a true character, so he fit the Casablanca mold.

Both Dick and Mauri were a generation older than the rest of us, but we all worked and played together without age becoming an issue. If it bothered them when we told clients that they’d been around since before radio was invented, they did a good job of hiding it. When it came to some of our more questionable activities (like smoking grass or other drug-related pursuits), Dick was an old-line conservative; but owing, I assume, to his experiences as a jazz musician, Mauri was much more open to such things.

Neil always tried to make everyone feel that they were part of the company. In all the years I was at Casablanca, and over the ensuing decades, very, very few people who worked for the company ever said to me that they didn’t love working there. Neil wanted Casablanca to have a family atmosphere, and, accordingly, we would have birthday celebrations with crates of Dom Pérignon and lavish cakes for everyone, from the top-level employee to the lowliest mail-room worker. We always tried to make tickets available for our artists’ shows to everyone who wanted to go, until the company became so large that holding back several hundred tickets to each show became unwieldy and expensive. We also gave out lots of T-shirts and other promotional stuff—Neil had satin Casablanca jackets and very nice leather briefcases made for everyone in promotion, PR, sales, and legal.

One Monday morning, after returning from a weeklong trip, I walked into the office to find it populated by new people: bookkeepers, secretaries, and other staffers, including Randee Goldman, who would become Neil’s personal assistant. Neil, beaming, shot me a glance as if to say, “Look at all the new stuff I bought for us!” I could envision him hiring people as if he were on a shopping spree: “I’ll take three accountants, two of those secretaries over there, one of those, a dozen of these.” Neil had hired so many new people that we had no office space for them. The dining room between Neil’s office and the kitchen was filled with people, desks, and phones.

As I entered the room, I encountered the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. I took a deep breath, and, with as much cool as I could muster, I walked over and introduced myself to Mary Candice Hill, whom Neil had hired to handle production for us. To this day, I’ve no idea why she didn’t burst out laughing at me. Here was this tall, lanky guy standing in front of her—sans shoes, for some reason, but wearing ridiculous socks with individual slots for all ten toes, each slot a different color. What possessed us to think that any 1970s attire was cool I have no idea. A grown man wearing toe socks? Really, I have no explanation.

In retrospect, I realized that I was largely responsible for hiring Candy (she preferred that name to her given one). A few days before my trip, I had walked into Neil’s office, sat down, and started to make small talk. Part of the joy of working in a completely independent company without adult supervision was that we could kill time like this whenever the hell we wanted. Despite the fact that each of us was handling several jobs, there wasn’t all that much to do because we had such a small roster, so whenever we got sick of what we were doing, we’d while away the hours bullshitting, or smoking grass, or dreaming out loud. As we sat there talking about nothing in particular, I was leafing through a copy of
Billboard.
I ran across a story about Blue Thumb Records going out of business. One of the people they referred to in the article had production experience, so I mentioned it to Neil. Never one to hesitate over a good opportunity, Neil picked up the phone and called Bob Krasnow, president of Blue Thumb and an old nemesis of his from the Buddah days. Bob had left Buddah shortly after Neil arrived as they just did not see eye to eye, but they eventually buried the hatchet. Neil asked Bob about this production person, and Bob gave her a glowing recommendation. Neil hired her a few days later.

I eventually summoned the chutzpah to ask Candy out to dinner, and she accepted. As we drove to the restaurant she had chosen, Candy explained to me that she did not like Neil. I was dumbfounded. She was comparing him to her former boss, Bob Krasnow, and she apparently felt Neil didn’t measure up. In her eyes, Neil was a glib snake-oil salesman—nothing more, nothing less.

Candy’s relationship with Krasnow was interesting, to understate things a bit. When she had begun working at Blue Thumb, one of her responsibilities had been to make sure that Krasnow’s office was clean in the mornings. He would frequently hold meetings with artists and managers that ran late into the evening, and he’d leave the place in a state of disarray. One morning, Candy had entered Krasnow’s office and noticed that his desk was covered with dust. She dutifully cleaned the desk with Lemon Pledge and straightened up the office. Of course, it hadn’t been dust on the desk, and when Krasnow came in he went crazy. Bob Emmer, another music industry vet, walked into the office to find Bob on his hands and knees, desperately trying to inhale the coke that had been brushed onto the floor and screaming at Candy that she was fired. He hired her back a few minutes later. This kind of thing was typical of the music business in the 1970s. Krasnow went on to create a viable black music department at Warner Brothers (signing Funkadelic, Parliament’s alter ego) and later played a major role in resurrecting Elektra Records. He was an excellent records man—the Pointer Sisters were also among his signings.

I told Candy that she had Neil completely wrong, and that, oh by the way, I was his cousin. To my surprise, she didn’t care at all that we were related. After dinner, we went back to my place, dropped a few ’ludes, and stayed together all night. The next day, I took her back to her apartment, and she introduced me to her cat, Sally, a beautiful white feline. I fell in love with Sally. In fact, I fell in love with them both. Candy was not only beautiful but also smart and funny and, most importantly (as I would find out later), she was in love with me, too. We were together almost every night after that, and working with her during the day and being with her at night, I found myself in the kind of relationship I never thought I could have.

Candy initially split her time between working with Mauri Lathower on international deals and handling production. Both the international and production departments began to grow so quickly that she soon began to focus on production alone. She and Mauri shared their office area with our TWX machine—a bizarre contraption that looked like a typewriter glued to a stock ticker. The TWX was AT&T’s answer to the Teletype. If you’re wondering what a Teletype is, remember the amusing scene in
Almost Famous
where Ben Fong-Torres from
Rolling Stone
magazine excitedly tells the Cameron Crowe character to submit a story via Teletype, as “it only takes eighteen minutes to send one page.” That gives you an idea of where our communications systems were at during the Casablanca era. Neil conducted all of his overseas correspondence via TWX.

Candy was phenomenal in many regards. She could type very quickly, knew the TWX, and had a strong grasp of grammar and writing; she helped out with our overseas correspondence. Her overseas production responsibilities consisted of making sure that all audio and art were sent and received by our licensees and distributors—if one piece went missing, all hell would break loose. When she transitioned out of the international department, she recommended her sister, Christy, for the job. Neil replied, “Great. Hire her now.” Casablanca was family, literally and figuratively. Christy was outstanding at the international stuff, especially in her dealings with the new overseas artists and producers we began to sign, and she became close friends with many of our overseas distributors.

Sales, both domestic and international, and production coordination were taken care of, but promotions remained. Neil and I knew it was vital to the company to have the very best promotions people available. Problem was, we couldn’t afford them. But we didn’t care, and we hired them anyway. Neil’s ever-positive, full-speed-ahead mantra was exciting and addictive, and I eagerly adopted it. We all did. But somewhere in the sensible region of my mind, red flags were rising.

Neil and I came up with a short list of the most talented promotions people we could think of and began offering them more money than they were currently making. The results were mixed. We hired Brian Interland, from the Northeast, and we loved him; he had a fantastic rep and seemed to enjoy the challenge of the new company environment. He fit right in. On the other end of the scale was A.J. Cervantes, from the Midwest. Buck was taken with him for some reason, though I was never particularly impressed by his work. A.J.’s father, Al, was mayor of St. Louis from 1965 to 1973, which had provided A.J. with opportunities that he might not have had otherwise. A year later, when I took one of our artists, Angel, to St. Louis to perform for the first time, A.J. arranged for limos to take the group to interviews. Trying to show the band how much clout we had in the market, I mentioned to the chauffeur that our employee’s father was the previous mayor. He remarked that Al Cervantes had left office in disgrace. Lesson: be careful when you drop names.

We did not hire representatives in Chicago, opting instead to use Bedno-Wright, an indie promo firm that had very strong influence with some of the Top 40s in the market. For the Southeast, we got a great promo guy named Wynn Jackson, a smooth-talking, good-looking southerner, and we periodically used Wade Conklin, a Buddah alumnus and close friend of Charlie Daniels, who knew the Nashville scene well. Our team was augmented by staffers at several of our distributors, and as a group we managed to canvas the country effectively.

In the midst of all the human resources chaos, we were still trying to conduct business. Fanny’s debut,
Rock and Roll Survivors,
was released, followed quickly by KISS’s sophomore effort,
Hotter Than Hell.
We also solidified an arrangement with Quality Records for them to become our distributor in Canada, and in short order we had somewhat of a hit with the Hudson Brothers’ “So You Are a Star” from their album
Hollywood Situation,
the last album we’d issued under the original Warner distribution system.

We had to resell the KISS and Parliament catalog titles and begin to work the Fanny and T.Rex product. While I understood Warner’s trepidation when it came to KISS, I never could fathom why they had a problem with Marc Bolan. He had both the T.Rex connection and the all-important English pedigree so favored by the big conservative companies. Even though we only had Marc for one album (until his contract with Warner expired), we were deeply saddened a few years later when he heard that he had been killed in a car crash.

Fanny was on the verge of a monster hit. Their single, “Butter Boy,” exploded onto the Top 40 and pulled album sales along with it. It was one of those songs that seemed to be an automatic hit; once it got played, radio station phones started ringing off the hook, and then the sales began. It had Top Five written all over it. But, just as we were preparing to ride the wave of its success, the song came under heavy attack for having inappropriate sexual references (today no one would bat an eye). Its fast climb was stalled, and it was dead in a matter of days. I found a deep irony in the situation, considering that the band’s name, Fanny, which had been suggested to them by George Harrison, was slang for “pussy” in most of the English-speaking world. Only in North America did it have a more innocent connotation.

Patti Quatro, the lead singer of the group (and sister of musician/ actress Suzi Quatro), provided me with a great distraction from all of this. I was quite taken with her; in plain terms, I thought she was hot, and I developed a crush on her. Soon after, I overheard Neil talking with the band’s manager, Roy Silver, about Fanny. He mentioned not having the money to “pay her royalties for ‘Butter Boy,’” and I assumed that “her” was Patti. Roy told Neil not to worry—she was a sweet girl and would not press the matter. That killed any hopes I had for the two of us. I felt far too guilty about her not getting paid for the song to ask her out.

 

 

We were out of money.

The divorce from Warner Brothers and the collateral damage it had caused—it had forced us to hire an army of people to replace those Warner had provided for us—had drained our accounts. We had drastically expanded our overhead, advertising, and payroll, in particular, and our cash flow was still just dripping along. Every dollar that came through the door went toward hiring, or placing a full-page blowout in
Billboard,
or fluffing a prospective artist with a party, or buying some new gadget or first-class airfare somewhere. If Neil saw a dollar sitting on your desk unspent, he knew you weren’t doing the job the way he wanted you to do it.

But the equation still left us nowhere: no money + spend + spend + spend = a bad moon rising. This wasn’t difficult math to fathom. We justified what we were doing by believing that we were following the old adage “It takes money to make money.” And yet we spent money as if the second half of the equation didn’t exist.

As part of the exit agreement we’d made with Warner Brothers a few months earlier, Neil had arranged with Mo Ostin to take a promising and lucrative Johnny Carson album with us. The Carson project was a two-disc set of “magic moments” from
The Tonight Show.
Both Joyce Biawitz and Neil had invested a great deal of time and energy in it over the previous year.

The album had been set up through Richard Trugman, an attorney recommended to us for his experience with these types of negotiations. Neil had come to know him when an associate of Trugman’s accidentally sliced a golf ball through a window of Neil’s house, which was located across the street from the Bel-Air Country Club. Trugman had the added advantage of being a cousin of Henry Bushkin, Carson’s attorney and deal maker, whom Johnny often called “The Bombastic Bushkin.”

At first, Neil was not crazy about Trugman—no one at the office was. This was not an uncommon reaction, as Trugman was somewhere south of cordial. But once Neil realized that Trugman had a lot of Hollywood contacts, he quickly began to warm to him. This was typical of Neil: he would leverage any situation or evaluate any potential relationship in terms of how many players, Hollywood or otherwise, it would give him access to. When we’d first arrived in LA, Neil had joined one of the larger LA temples because he knew that so many of the Hollywood movers and shakers were members. While Neil was a man of faith, he wasn’t all that interested in organized religion; the temple was a networking opportunity, and so was Trugman.

Richard was a very tough cookie who knew how to scam and scheme with the best of them, and Neil liked that type of shifty bravado. When it came to music, Richard tried to fit in with the rest of us and create a cool and hip image for himself. He was anything but. One day, I borrowed his car, and while I was driving down Sunset Boulevard, I noticed that he had an 8-track Beatles tape in the car. I took it from its cardboard slipcase and saw that it was not a Beatles album but a Beethoven symphony. I looked at Richard’s other tapes—they were all classical recordings in contemporary slipcases.

Finding material to include on the Carson album placed an incredible load on Joyce, as she had to sift though untold hours of kinescope reels from
The Tonight Show’
s Steve Allen days, in the 1950s, and then work her way through the thousands of shows from the Carson era. Much of the footage she was seeking, such as Johnny’s early broadcasts from New York, no longer existed. Even when she found a funny sketch or highlight, age and poor archiving techniques would often render it unusable—I clearly recall her complaining to me about the condition of some of the old footage. In many cases, the sound on the old kinescopes was almost completely eroded.

Locating clips was only half the battle. There was also the problem of getting the rights to use them, as NBC and
The Tonight Show
had not always retained (or had subsequently lost) the artist-signed clearances for this kind of use. There were also budget constraints: Carson wanted one hundred thousand dollars up front, and Ed McMahon, who would be the spokesperson for the album, was to receive fifty thousand just for doing the TV and radio spots. In fact, we’d set aside four hundred thousand dollars in TV ad buys to run before Christmas in eighteen different markets. The entire album, advertising included, would cost more than $1.2 million to produce.

When the project had started at Warner, they had some question as to whether Joyce was up to the task. There were singularly few people who were qualified, but Joyce was unquestionably one of them, and in 1974, being one of only a handful of women in the field, she was something of a pioneer.

The project (and Neil certainly understood this well) also gave Joyce a good excuse to spend more time out on the West Coast with him. However, while their relationship continued to grow, Joyce’s relationship with Bill Aucoin and KISS came into serious question. Like many bands then and now, KISS never fully trusted their record company. Sure, they put up a good front for the outside world, and I always believed they sincerely liked and appreciated us, but they kept us at arm’s length. I understood why: no matter how honest or pleasant someone appears to be, there is no altruism in this business; the only person you can, or should, trust at all times in all circumstances is yourself. This mistrust between band and label turned Neil and Joyce’s relationship into a major conflict of interest, at least from KISS and Bill’s vantage point. If the tables had been turned, Neil’s mindset would have been 180 degrees different, as he loved it when our reps were nailing program directors or anyone else in a position of power over us. He saw the value of that leverage. KISS and Aucoin didn’t; they saw half their management team in bed with the president of their record company, which meant that Joyce was susceptible to listening to and fighting for Neil’s point of view instead of KISS’s. The problem festered, and ultimately Joyce parted ways with Aucoin and KISS. It was an amicable divorce. Her interest in Rock Steady (the management company she had founded with Aucoin) was bought out for the reported sum of fifty thousand dollars, and she continued to pull a percentage of the profits for a while.

With the Carson album drawing closer to completion, Neil began to crank up the promotion machine, making sure that there was a great deal of industry prepublicity to create an aura around the release.
The Tonight Show
was doing great. It had a nightly audience of over fourteen million, and it was the largest profit center for NBC Television. Who in their right mind would think that a record featuring major guest stars from the show’s history would be anything but a huge seller? Before anyone had heard one second of the album, Neil had us all believing we had a historic, record-breaking release on our hands. Neil had had great success with a similar project at Buddah, called
Dick Clark: 20 Years of Rock n’ Roll,
which had sold in excess of one million copies. Dick claims to this day that he was able to buy a house in Malibu because of it. If Clark had worked, why not Carson? Neil’s confidence level was so high that he anticipated as many as three more
Tonight Show
highlight albums, which would cover even the earlier Steve Allen and Jack Paar eras of the show. The initial print run of the album was seven hundred and fifty thousand. And it wasn’t just inside the walls of Casablanca that the album’s promise shone brightly—the rest of the industry saw the dollar signs as well. The Carson album greatly eased our transition from the shelter of the Warner umbrella to full independence.

A major logistical hurdle that we faced when we left Warner Brothers was that we now needed to find distributors for our product. The Carson album was very appealing to many wholesalers, and it was a nice carrot to dangle in front of the major independent distributors. Thanks to the album, Neil had great leverage in his negotiations. He was firm: if you could not come up with some advance money, you did not get to be our distributor. Such a move took tremendous balls on Neil’s part, since we had almost nothing to offer as a label. Most of the distributors bought into the pitch, and those who didn’t would soon rue their decision, as Neil refused to work with any who turned him down. He eventually cobbled together a roster of twenty-six independent distributors, many of whom he knew from our days at Buddah. Among them were Record Merchandising (LA/San Francisco), Heilicher (Dallas/Houston/Miami/ Minneapolis), Southland (Atlanta), Music Merchants (Boston), MS Distribution (Chicago), Universal (Philadelphia), London Records (New York/New Jersey), Action Music (Cleveland), and my old reliable apartment furnisher, Zamoski’s (Baltimore/Washington, DC).

The amount of each advance the distributors paid to us directly was related to the markets in which they were prominent. Problems arose in several regions where the distribution lines were blurred; for example, Cleveland may have been shipping to certain Chicago accounts, and Chicago may have been selling to accounts as far away as Los Angeles, so things could get a bit complex at times. Most of the disputes were settled without getting too heated, but our involvement in independent distribution required us to referee the occasional turf war. Additional monies came in from distributors in England and Germany as advances against royalties. We did not have much of a track record of meaningful overseas sales, so these advances were rather small.

Neil personally presold
The Tonight Show
album to everyone he could think of. Not only did he presell the album to the distributors, but he also called many of the major rack jobbers (glorified suppliers who decided upon the product assortment for major retailers and stocked it for them), such as the Handleman Company, and talked them into carrying the album. Normally, Handleman (like Walmart) did not take product for their accounts until it was on the charts or already a proven seller, but Neil had a strong relationship with them, and he was able to persuade them to bend their rules.

Neil not only worked the phones for the Carson release, but he also went out to meet each distributor personally. He would stop at nothing to get them excited about our two-LP magnum opus. He’d hype the album and play the TV commercial for them. He even went so far as to award cash prizes to salespeople who correctly answered certain
Tonight Show
questions. He’d gather a distributor’s salespeople together and ask, “OK, who knows who Aunt Blabby was?” Those who knew got a hundred dollars. Or he would ask if they knew the Magnificent Carnac; those who did won a hundred dollars. These salespeople later told me that they were completely blown away and became big believers in the Carson album. Even thirty years later, most of these guys still fondly remember Neil coming to spend time with them. Many of them have told me that they were great friends of Neil. But they weren’t—Neil just made them feel that way. Spending an hour with someone doesn’t make you a lifelong friend, but Neil’s talent for instant bonding left an indelible impression upon countless people. Many of these distribution companies were located in old warehouses in less-than-upscale neighborhoods. The sales guys were almost never in the office, and even when they were, they probably had to share a phone or a desk, so a visit from someone whom they had read about in the trade papers was a major event. It was probably more important to them than a visit from an artist.

In order to generate the cash flow we needed to pay the bills and secure the advances from the distributors, Neil presold over seven hundred and fifty thousand units. This was an impressive amount for a major label, but for a one-month-old independent like Casablanca, with no artist roster to speak of, it was nothing short of staggering.

On November 15, 1974, the Carson album,
Here’s Johnny: Magic Moments from The Tonight Show,
was released.

The album bombed.

More accurately, it BOMBED. It hit the floor with a lifeless, echoing thud. An enormous (and very dead) elephant in the room that was the music industry.

The only time we would get a sales bump is when Johnny held the album up during
Tonight Show
broadcasts, and even then it was just a small spike. Johnny did this maybe two or three times during the entire promo campaign, and he had to be begged to do it. I was able to get a handful of my album-oriented stations to play a few cuts, but no one in radio gave it much exposure. In the throes of our love affair with the promise of Johnny Carson, it never dawned on us that audio highlights of a TV show were simply not radio friendly. The show did not translate well without Johnny’s facial expressions and those of his guests. The album quickly became the laughingstock of the industry, the joke being that we’d shipped the LP Gold and it was returned Platinum. A funny line, to be sure. Sad thing was, it wasn’t far from the truth.

This begs the question: How can you have more returns than sales? As illogical as it seems, it is possible; it has largely to do with accounting practices and your definition of “sold.” Back then, record companies would give albums—“free goods”—to their accounts instead of offering them a straight discount. When the company sold an account ten albums, for instance, it might include two free albums in the order, so about 20 percent of the records sold went out as free goods. By way of illustration, in the production agreement we’d signed with Bill Aucoin’s company, Rock Steady, it was specifically stated that we would give 20 percent of KISS’s albums and 30 percent of their singles away as free promo product. We didn’t do this with every transaction, only when we were trying to move quantity or position a product to make it more appealing for the retailers and distributors to purchase larger quantities. This practice allowed record companies to promote their albums through free product without having to pay artist royalties (which also generated no money for the labels). Almost all artist contracts stipulated that no royalties would be paid on free goods. If a label had simply given a big discount on an album, the sale would still count, and royalties would have to be paid.