And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records (17 page)

As 1976 began,
Alive!
was selling faster than anything we’d ever released, and the Donna Summer album was not far behind. Parliament’s
Mothership Connection
had also landed in stores, and it was exploding right out of the gate. Buddy Miles and Hugh Masekela still had some legs. This was all great news, right?

Not really. The sudden jump in sales began to cause some major problems for us. When we’d had no money—which was almost all the time until late 1975—we would pay the record manufacturing plants in credit to press our albums. Now we had used up so much credit with these plants that it was getting difficult to find one that would trust us enough to press the large quantities of albums we needed to keep up with consumer demand. The manufacturing plants were comfortable pressing twenty thousand units on credit for us; this wasn’t that big of a risk for them. But half a million or a million units? No way—not gonna happen.

Neil got on the phone with the manufacturers and begged and cajoled them to extend us more credit. Only because of his personal relationship with many of the manufacturers and his unbelievable tenacity were we able to keep our product in the stores for the duration of the 1975 holiday season. Neil finally made a deal with an LA plant called Rainbow to extend us the credit we needed to fill our orders. Rainbow became our saviors, and I am sure they were happy they took the chance.

It felt awfully good to have hit product that was selling huge numbers, but our joy was eroded by the fact that we could be making so much more money. Had we been a large corporation with supporting infrastructure, like Warner or Capitol, we likely would have had twice the sales. We faced the worst problem a small company can have: too much success too soon. The public wanted our product, but we couldn’t get it to them fast enough. Our distribution system was too small. It was imperative that we keep this a secret. If anyone found out, then our artists would go crazy on us and all of our creditors would demand that we bring our accounts current, thus forcing us out of business. Neil’s approach was to spend every dollar that came through the door, but that meant that we couldn’t build up enough cash to improve our infrastructure, which we desperately needed to do to keep pace with the exploding demand for our product. With each passing day, the pressure grew, and we inched closer and closer to bankruptcy.

 

 

As 1976 opened, America began the yearlong celebration of its two-hundredth birthday. Sounds dull now, but it had a profound effect on business: bicentennial sales, bicentennial advertising and marketing plans, bicentennial special editions—it was everywhere. As for Casablanca, we were lagging 198 years behind, but that didn’t stop us. We’d just moved into prime real estate on the Sunset Strip, and the fact that we were about to turn two seemed like a good reason to change our logo. More painting the building, you could say.

At Neil’s behest, Chris Whorf drafted a few versions for us to look at, and after a couple of passes he hit upon the right look. The logo, literally just “Casablanca Records,” remained faithful to David Byrd’s original neon tube design, but the rest of the artwork had been completely overhauled. The dark-blue background, the white skyline of Morocco, and the Humphrey Bogart icon were gone, replaced by a more natural Moroccan scene with camels, a casbah, and palm trees in a palette of desert colors. The new artwork was completed early in the year, but we had only a few pending releases, so it didn’t make its debut until May, for Angel’s sophomore release—
Helluva
Band
.

Just after the year began, Buck Reingold told me he was leaving. He’d been offered a position at Chelsea Records, a new company founded by Wes Farrell. Wes had made a big splash with the Wes Farrell Organization, a music-publishing company famous for a string of hits in the late 1960s and early 1970s like “Hang on Sloopy” and “Knock Three Times.” Buck told me that I should come with him, as Wes had far more pull in the industry than Neil (which was true) and I could make more money (also probably true). There was no way I was going to go anywhere with Buck, for numerous reasons, not least of which was that Neil was my mentor and I owed him everything.

Buck’s relationship with Casablanca—and Neil, in particular—had been eroding for a long time. After Neil and Beth’s marriage had crumbled, Buck started complaining about Neil spending company money on things like renting a house in Beverly Hills, and later buying a house in the equally affluent Holmby Hills. This house was a magnificent four-acre estate with a pool, a tennis court, ten-foot-high wrought-iron double gates, and a guesthouse the size of a normal family’s main abode. Neil had purchased the house for about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, with the company footing the bill. Richard Trugman’s brother, Marty, a big-deal Hollywood real estate agent, had found the property for Neil (nearly a decade later, it would sell for a reported $7.5 million). Buck felt that Neil was taking money right out of our pockets. I don’t know what the hell Buck was thinking, because were it not for Neil, Buck would still be slinging hash. Plus, Neil had given up all his stock in Viewlex to launch Casablanca in the first place. He had taken tremendous personal and professional risks, and it was his reputation that would be ruined if things didn’t work out. Neil was the one who’d gone to Vegas to get the payroll money. He was living this every hour of every day, and he was under more stress than all of us put together.

Buck made the same offer to Cecil, who also turned him down. The next day, he broke the news to Neil, who was livid that Buck had tried to take Cecil and me with him. Neil never allowed people to work through the standard two-weeks’-notice period, and Buck was gone within twenty-four hours, taking Nancy Sain, A.J. Cervantes, and Nancy Reingold with him. Nancy Reingold would return to us later that year, after she had divorced Buck.

Even though Buck was one of the original four musketeers—along with Neil, Cecil, and me—his departure was a great relief to everyone. Candy, in particular, was thrilled to be rid of him. Buck would often come up behind her and lick her neck as she sat at her desk, and I’m sure she wasn’t the only victim of his stunts. We were all tiring of his shit, his boorish behavior, and the constant parade of sex partners he would bring into the building. He was loud and pushy and determined (all good qualities in a promotions man, to a degree), but he dressed like a redheaded, white pimp, and it was clear to everyone that he was a huckster with no real passion for, or understanding of, the business. Some radio station people liked him a lot because he supplied them with women and drugs and (possibly) money, but just as many would call Neil and ask him to ensure that they never saw Buck again. In the end, I think Buck was simply the wrong man for the times. Had it been the 1950s, his look and demeanor may have made him a big success. As it was, he had become an embarrassment to us.

With Buck gone, I had to run Top 40 promotion by myself. This was a big stretch, because it was so different from the FM progressive radio promotion I’d been focusing on. I had done Top 40 in my early days at Buddah, but it was never really my thing. My feeling was that if you loved the music and wanted it to change the world for the better in some way, FM progressive promotion was a much more effective road to travel. Becoming a successful promotions man is an intuitive process. It requires a keen feel for the marketplace and a sense of how to play a network of connections. I just didn’t have the network or the name recognition in Top 40 to do the job well, nor did I know where all the bodies were buried, or who to pay off, or when. As good as I was with FM, I was wrong for this niche. I was able to hold it together for about ten minutes, but I knew I was kidding myself. The time was going to come when we had an important single to get played and I wouldn’t be able to do it justice.

Fortunately, we had only four albums coming out in the first quarter of 1976. With no one to attend to promotion full time, not to mention our ongoing cash crunch, we were in no hurry to push any more releases forward, so we kept the pace slow. Both Hugh Masekela and Buddy Miles had issued follow-ups to their 1975 successes with us: Masekela released
Colonial Man
at the end of January, and Miles released
A Bicentennial Gathering of the Tribes
a month later (see, there’s that bicentennial thing creeping in again). Margaret Singana, a South African musician, released an album with us on the same day Miles released his: February 24. And KISS, too, was working on a follow-up, a studio LP called
Destroyer
that we hoped would sell even a fraction as well as
Alive!
, which was still a runaway sensation.