And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records (2 page)

 

 

The summer of 1969 is probably the only time in American history where you can say the season and the year and people just know—Oh yeah,
that
summer. Neil Armstrong, hippies, the amazin’ Mets, and a landmark mud bath called Woodstock.

I was twenty-two and invincible then, or at least young enough to think I was. My days were filled with work, going to the beach, smoking dope, hanging out with friends, admiring our cars in the parking lots at the Queens Boulevard White Castle or the Bay Terrace Shopping Center. I was living with my parents, and I held down a job at a deli and worked as a salesman/delivery person for my dad’s sanitary supply business, where we sold toilet paper and cleaning products. Like most guys I knew, I wasn’t much interested in career planning. I was just too busy enjoying life to worry about what I was going to do with it.

One weekday in early July, a friend mentioned that a big concert—a three-day happening—was being planned in August somewhere in upstate New York, and maybe a bunch of us should go. Sounded good to me, so a few of us purchased tickets at a Queens record store, and we were set.

Never one to forgo comfort when it was available, I insisted that we book hotel rooms. Roughing it had never been high on my list of life choices, so the prospect of camping out for three days with no showers or fresh clothes wasn’t exactly appealing. We were able to get a room at the Holiday Inn in Middletown, not too far from the festival site.

August 15, 1969, the first day of Woodstock, finally arrived. It was muggy and still, and the four of us—me, my friend Neal Cohen (who had just returned from serving in a combat unit in Vietnam), Wendy (the wife of our friend Ken Kaltman, who’d had the misfortune of pulling National Guard duty that weekend), and a friend of Wendy‘s—piled into my ’68 GTO and headed northward. Over fifteen miles away from the venue we hit a four-lane traffic jam. Everyone was headed for the same rural destination.

The traffic jam was a cultural event in itself. Miles of four-lane highway had become inbound lanes, but we still weren’t moving. At all. For hours on end. Many people simply gave up, abandoned their cars, and walked the rest of the way to the festival site. Yet, in those hours of cramped gridlock, as we fumed both literally and figuratively in the overheating GTO, a sense of the Woodstock event began to assert itself. If a car grazed another by mistake, there was no road rage, nobody got angry. Frustration at being stalled for hours in the oppressive wet heat never boiled over. Instead, there was a sense of shared experience, a quickly gathering feeling of community; joints were passed from one car to another, strangers became instant friends, smiles all around. This was something special, a signpost for the summer and the generation, and you couldn’t escape it.

Unfortunately, cars don’t grasp the concept of landmark cultural events, and eventually my ’68 GTO began to seriously overheat. (Lesson for the day: never bring a muscle car to a traffic jam.) I veered off the freeway onto the grass and headed for the nearest exit. The concert would have to wait: we had to get the car to the hotel as soon as possible.

The traffic and our unfamiliarity with the Sullivan County roads made for a longer trek to the hotel than I would have liked, but after some driving around, we found the Holiday Inn, parked the car (just in time), and went inside to register. As we entered the hotel, we saw the reception desk to our right and a small waiting area with couch and chairs to our left. Next to the desk was a large picture window overlooking the parking lot. We soon discovered that we’d accidentally booked ourselves into the event’s headquarters. I stood, slack-jawed, watching Richie Havens check in and Arlo Guthrie relaxing in the corner. Part of the lobby had been turned into the communications center for the festival, and there were walkie-talkies and assorted pieces of shortwave and telephone equipment strewn about. There was no way we were going to be allowed to stay here, but miraculously, our reservations were honored and the desk clerk checked us in.

Neal and I walked down the corridor to our rooms, eyes bugged out and unblinking, thinking, if not saying, “Holy shit!” at every step. We passed Ravi Shankar’s shoes, neatly placed outside his door. We saw folk legend Tim Hardin sitting on his bed, shooting up. Every door we passed, to the left and to the right, another star. We dropped off our stuff and headed back downstairs to eat lunch and see who else was in the hotel.

The corridor had been just a warm-up for the restaurant—a modest affair furnished with Formica-topped tables and a handful of booths. The people sitting in the restaurant—Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend, Janis Joplin, Stephen Stills, David Crosby, Neil Young, Richie Havens, and Arlo Guthrie, all eating lunch, just as casual as you please—made Neal and me feel like interlopers, as if we had “uninvited guest” branded on our foreheads. As we choked down our sandwiches, we tried our best to look cool. We probably failed.

After a while, Wendy and her friend came down, and the four of us decided to make our way to the concert. My GTO had cooled in the parking lot, so we loaded up. We were leaving the hotel grounds when a security guard waved us over. Never a good sign. To our surprise, Wendy jumped out of the car and gave the guy a big hug; turned out he was not only an old friend of her parents, but head of artist entry for the festival as well. He gave us a pass, which I placed on the GTO’s dashboard, and then he told us to join the end of the artist caravan now heading out to the festival site. The motorcade began to make its way through the huge crowds, lights flashing and sirens wailing. We were surrounded by performers, many of them already legendary, receiving a full police escort into the venue. Amazing.

The pass also allowed us into the backstage areas, so we watched the spectacle unfold from the wings. I want to say that standing mere feet from a list of performers too lengthy to mention, too important to describe, was amazing—and it was—but a violent and unrelenting rainstorm had blown in, and after a few hours we were ready to go back to the hotel. We trekked to the GTO, only to discover it was mired in a slurry of mud. While we were trying to find a way out of this dilemma, Arlo Guthrie happened by and asked us if he could hitch a ride back to the hotel. Great—now Arlo Guthrie is helping push my GTO out of the mud. This couldn’t get any more bizarre.

Back at the hotel, we headed straight for the bar, where many of the performers were freely sharing all sorts of intoxicants. The place was small and dark, with only about ten tables, but I will never forget the image of Janis Joplin, bottle of Johnnie Walker in hand, dancing around the bar.

We didn’t sleep at all for three days. We watched the never-ending concert unspool before us in the hot mire, the haze of humidity, exhaustion, and drugs blurring afternoon into evening and evening into epic night. The Who; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; and on and on—we didn’t want to miss a minute of the adventure. Of the hundreds of thousands camped out on Yasgur’s farmland, I’m not sure that any could claim to have gotten more out of Woodstock than I did. I still wonder whether this experience was the fates foreshadowing the events about to unfold.

 

 

After I met Neil Bogart for the first time, more than nine years passed before I heard anything more about him. In September 1971, my parents came home from a wedding and told me they had seen Cousin Ruthie there. She’d said that I should call her son Neil about a job. Good thing, too—I needed one.

I phoned Neil the following evening, and he asked me to come down to Buddah’s offices at 1650 Broadway in Manhattan. The office suite belonged to the Buddah Group (comprised of Buddah, Kama Sutra, Hot Wax, Curtom, T-Neck, and Sussex Records, among others, which collectively were home to a stunning list of big-league players that included The Isley Brothers, Sha Na Na, and The Lovin’ Spoonful). Scepter Records, run by the legendary Florence Greenberg (who had helped steer The Shirelles to stardom), called 1650 home as well, as did many music publishers and artists. After the Brill Building, it was probably the most famous address in the music industry. Hell, even I’d heard of it, and I knew virtually nothing about the business.

The next day, I arrived at Neil’s office and entered the waiting room. Gold records adorned the walls, but the room was decorated in the most awful purple you could imagine, like some sort of toxic grape soda. Even in an era of lime-green leisure suits, the designer responsible should have been cited for second-degree eye-slaughter. I sat in that violet-colored nightmare for over three hours, waiting for Neil. He had completely forgotten our conversation of the night before, and he called his mother to find out who the kid in his waiting room was. I was a little embarrassed to have to repeatedly explain to the receptionist and Neil’s secretary who I was, but since I was only twenty-three, my ego hadn’t developed much, so I wasn’t too offended.

Three hours is a long time to wait, but the names on the walls provided ample distraction. I was impressed by all the posters and gold records, with names like Brewer and Shipley (“One Toke over the Line”), Melanie (“Candles in the Rain”), Curtis Mayfield (Neil called him the “black Dylan” whenever possible), The Isley Brothers, and my favorites, Sha Na Na. With another glance I saw The Lovin’ Spoonful (“Summer in the City”); the Brooklyn Bridge featuring Johnny Maestro (“Sixteen Candles,” “The Worst That Could Happen,” and many other hits); and from Buddah’s just-ended bubblegum days, artists such as the 1910 Fruitgum Company (“Yummy, Yummy, Yummy”), The Lemon Pipers (“Green Tambourine”), and Ohio Express.

Finally I was summoned into Neil’s office, which was not purple but was larger than I expected it to be. It had been quite a while since our first meeting, and his appearance surprised me. I’d remembered him as taller and thinner, but he looked like a pudgy Richard Simmons, curly hair and all. Aside from his dark-brown Afro, his most prominent feature was his penetrating, almost bulging eyes. Despite his Brooklyn upbringing, he had only a trace of a New York accent (I more than made up for him in that department) and spoke in an engaging mid-tenor voice. Neil was almost endlessly enthusiastic, but he wasn’t one of those exhausting people who are perpetually “on.” He has often been described as an amazing salesman, and he certainly was, but this stemmed from his ability to make you believe in an artist or song and think it was all your own idea, not something he’d browbeaten you into believing.

We said the obligatory hellos and talked about WNEW-FM, the city’s premiere progressive rock station. Neil was in awe of WNEW, as he had never had a bona fide rock-and-roll hit. He knew he didn’t understand rock the way he understood Top 40 and R&B, and due to the tremendous amount of flack he had received from the critics over the many bubblegum hits he had overseen for Buddah, his aim was to be a player in the rock arena.

I bluffed my way through the meeting by talking about the DJs at WNEW. I had brushed up on their names—which was not too difficult, as there were only a handful of them. But, despite the fact that I had majored in communications in college and had a stronger handle on what was happening in radio than your average twenty-three-year-old, my inexperience was on full display. After our meeting, Neil sent me to chat with Jerry Sharell, Buddah’s head of national promotions, and Buck Reingold, who ran promotions on the East Coast.

I got the job because they needed someone immediately to do local promotion for the New York market. The last person to hold the position had recently been fired for an interesting lapse in judgment. Neil and the president of Viewlex (the conservative educational company that had bought Buddah in 1969), returning to the office after a dinner meeting, had walked in on the promo man having sex on the waiting room couch with the music director of one of the top East Coast radio stations.

If Neil had been alone, he would have walked over and given the guy a raise and a promotion. I mean, what better way to ensure that your music gets played than to bang a prominent music director? But because he was with the president of Viewlex, Neil felt forced to feign indignation and fired the guy on the spot.

The other reason I was hired was nepotism, a policy in which Neil firmly believed. (“All things are relatives,” was a favorite saying of his.) Plus, at $125 per week, I was the cheapest option that had walked through the door. And, just like that, I became Larry Harris, local New York promotion man for Buddah/Kama Sutra Records.

Buddah had been culled from the older Kama Sutra Records, which was secretly owned and controlled by John “Sonny” Franzese, a powerful member of the Colombo crime family. This was not an uncommon arrangement; before the music business became attractive to corporate America, organized crime had established a strong foothold in the industry. By the time I joined the label, all of the original Kama Sutra owners were long gone, their stock purchased by the Viewlex Corporation three years prior. Artie Ripp had left in a huff in late 1969, when Viewlex refused to release the Woodstock soundtrack for which he had acquired the rights, and Sonny Franzese was in jail for armed robbery and conspiracy—although he wasn’t completely out of the loop, despite his cellblock D mailing address.

Buddah, as you may have noticed, is spelled incorrectly. There are a few theories about this. Artie Ripp said he thought it was irreverent to spell Buddha like the Buddhists do; he also claimed he could never say “ha” at the end of the name, only “aah.” Since Buddha was a mystical figure, they thought the reference would give the label a cool, hip aura, and it went with the whole Kama Sutra vibe. But when I first joined the company, I was told it was a printing mistake discovered after it was too
late
(or too expensive) to change. I suspect it was spelled wrong because nobody knew the proper way to spell it. As for which theory is the correct one, take your pick.

The next day, I reported to my new office, which I had to share with Buck Reingold and Ron Weisner, head of artist relations. I was not in the office that much as my job entailed going to all of the reporting retail record outlets in town and building relationships with them so they would send positive sales reports about us to the trades (
Billboard, Cashbox, Record World,
and
The Hamilton Report
) and the radio stations (WWRL, WABC, WPIX-FM, WNEW-AM, WNEW-FM, and WOR-FM, among others).

After I’d had some tutoring from Buck and Ron, I knew that the way to succeed was to give the record stores free product in exchange for the reports. Usually, I gave them singles, but as time went on and things became more competitive, I started giving them whatever albums they wanted. Keep in mind that even when giving away commercial product for free, we still needed to account for those units when it came to calculating artists’ royalties. Any records not used for promotional purposes usually carried a royalty fee to the artist. In some cases, the artist’s contract called for X amount of free goods for use in making sales deals, but in many cases, labels buried the giveaways and never accounted for them. If artists’ business managers or accountants came in to check the books and were thorough enough in their endeavors, they would find a discrepancy and the label would be held accountable for the royalties.

Part of my job was to visit radio stations in New York on their “music days,” which were the days they agreed to see promotion people. When it came to WNEW, WPLJ, and WLIR, the three FM rock stations in the market, I could go whenever I wanted and deal with each DJ individually. I also had to play diplomat with the program directors to keep feathers from getting ruffled.

WPIX-FM, the lone Top 40 FM station in town, had a gem of a program /music director named Barney Pip. Barney was very nice—the type of radio guy who would take a shot on a record he liked. Because of that, WPIX was the first station in the market to play songs like Bill Withers’s “Lean on Me,” or “Scorpio,” the hit instrumental by Dennis Coffey, both of which I shopped. You could visit Barney anytime, even when he was on the air. I also visited the FM rock DJs while they were on the air, but if they were on after normal business hours I called ahead. Back then, the vibe of the industry was open to chance and the moment-to-moment whims of the DJs, who held positions of far greater power than their modern-day counterparts. Every day I had the opportunity to deal with people willing to take a chance on music that hadn’t been tested and retested before it was exposed to the public. In the case of progressive rock radio, you had a good six or more opportunities to have your music played. If the morning guy didn’t like the record, there was still a chance that the afternoon or night person would.

Up until the late 1990s, to have a record played on a station in a decent-sized market you needed to prove that it had all kinds of credentials and, in many cases, you needed to hire an independent station-approved promotions person (called an “indie”) to bring the record in. Just to have your record added was big bucks to the indie promo guy, who in turn paid the station a fee to be its music consultant. The owner of a radio station could make in excess of fifty thousand dollars per year working with an indie.

Is this payola? Yes, more or less. Instead of the record companies giving money (or drugs, women, and various other favors) directly to the radio stations, an independent promotions middleman is paid to do it for them. One key difference is that with the independent promoter in the picture, the money goes to the station owners rather than to the often-underpaid program director or DJ. This keeps the record companies at arm’s length when it comes to actual money changing hands between them and the stations. In my mind, the arrangement creates an ethical gray area. I’m not sure what the substantive difference is in the end: the record companies are still paying to have their music played. Nobody in the music biz or the radio biz wants a repeat of the highly publicized Alan Freed payola trials of the 1950s or other, less-well-known investigations that were conducted throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The current method somehow nullifies that legal risk.

This does create an unbalanced playing field in that the smaller labels cannot compete for airplay; they simply don’t have the money to pay the indies. When all is said and done, it could cost a label hundreds of thousands of dollars just to cover this new form of payola for one record.

As always, the large corporations are most invested in keeping the status quo, and they know that this independent system of promotion protects their turf from any young innovators. This suppression of the entrepreneurial spirit is one of the reasons the music business of today is facing such hard times. Evolving musical forms are what keep music exciting and keep people buying new artists and product. Rap, disco, and even rock and roll were not spearheaded by the majors but rather the little independent guy. Look at the careers of Elvis, Donna Summer, and LL Cool J. It was the small labels that took a chance on them.

Although the indies were not as crucial in the 1970s, even then there were people who had the ability and contacts to control what music was played on key radio stations in major cities. Paying these promotion people with cash, drugs, or records was not uncommon, and it could mean the failure or success of a record.

Ron Weisner, vice president of artist relations, was a great teacher and mentor. He was of average height and build; he had a head of thick hair, a big mustache, and a weird and distinctive gait. Ron had
the push
—the ability to get our artists on local and national TV shows. That’s what he spent most of his time doing, when he wasn’t busy acting as in-house psychiatrist for many of the artists and a few of the employees. He also helped book tours and gigs for the artists.

Ron had major clout with WWRL-AM, the leading R&B station in New York, due to his close relationship with Norma Penella, the station’s music director. It always seemed a little ironic to me that Norma, a middle-aged Italian woman, chose the music for the station that so heavily influenced the city’s black population, but in this she was hardly unique. A big—and here I’m being kind—Italian gentleman named Joe “Butterball” Tamburro was the music and program director for Philadelphia’s WDAS-FM, the leading R&B station in the market. But most stations were owned by white folks in those days, and I suppose they felt more secure having white executives in charge.