And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records (20 page)

By July, Neil and I knew that we needed to increase
Destroyer’s
sales. KISS was already touring, so that avenue of promotion was covered. We released
The Originals
on July 21, a multi-album set of KISS’s first three albums, in the hope of exploiting the exposure
Alive!
had given us to revitalize KISS’s back catalog. While the repackaging did well on its own, eventually reaching Gold status, it did nothing to boost
Destroyer
’s middling sales.

Another single seemed like our best option. The obvious choice was “Detroit Rock City,” the album’s hard-rocking opening number. The reason we chose this song was twofold. KISS was big in Detroit, and we would get an airplay assist from the AOR stations in the market. The other reason was Rosalie Trombley and CKLW. CKLW was a fifty-thousand-watt powerhouse AM station located across the river from Detroit in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. We knew that Rosalie had liked KISS back when Buck was pushing the group on her. When KISS had first played Cobo Arena, in May 1975, we’d brought Rosalie in for the show. Buck had picked her up in a limo, presented her with a dozen roses, taken her across the border to a fancy Detroit restaurant, and brought her backstage to meet the band. KISS, being forewarned about the visit, treated Rosalie like royalty. One of the things KISS (Gene, in particular) was good at was making someone feel comfortable, especially if it helped the band.

Scott Shannon made a special effort to get Rosalie an advance copy of “Detroit Rock City” and asked her to give us her opinion of it. We knew that if she liked the song and made a commitment to play it, then we would be well ahead of the game. After Scott had heard from Rosalie, he came into my office. His complexion was ashen and he was very subdued. Rosalie, he told me, did not like “Detroit Rock City.” She liked the B side, “Beth.” I immediately understood Scott’s reaction.

You see, Neil hated “Beth.” Months earlier, in February, when KISS and Bob Ezrin had first played
Destroyer
for us, Neil’s divorce from Beth was just being finalized. His emotions were raw, and his wounds were reopened every time he had to speak with an attorney about the situation, which was often. Hearing “Beth” (cowritten and sung by Peter Criss), he jumped to the conclusion that the band was making fun of him by writing a song about his ex-wife. He blurted out that the song would never be a single, and he promised to bury it as a B side. It didn’t matter that Peter explained to everyone that the song was about his own wife, Lydia; when he couldn’t find anything to rhyme with “Lydia,” he’d switched to “Beth.” (The true story, related to me years later, was that “Beth” was originally titled “Beck,” and it had been written long before KISS was formed, not for Lydia, but for Becky, the nagging girlfriend of one of Peter’s previous band mates.)

Still fairly new to the company, Scott was afraid of what Neil might do or say to him when he told him about Rosalie’s reaction. Neil was on vacation in Acapulco and unreachable that day, so I had to make the decision. I had Scott tell Rosalie that we would back her up if she played “Beth,” and that I would take the heat from Neil for changing the sides. From that point on, “Beth” was the single’s A side and “Detroit Rock City” was its B side. Why was it necessary to make this switch if the single had already started receiving airplay? Because it gave us the opportunity to reintroduce the single to the marketplace and resend it to radio stations (many of which may have already tossed out the original issue); it also made things easier for the chart makers at
Billboard, Cashbox,
and
Record World
and for retailers, who would have been at a loss as to where they should place the single in their display bins.

Rosalie began to play “Beth.” Scott had also called in some favors from a few buddies at stations in the South, and they obliged him by adding the song to their playlists. The single began to break, appearing on radio add lists, breakouts, and hot lists in all of the radio trade publications. This was another of those serendipitous occurrences—common then, but impossible now, with the advent of the CD and the demise of the 45rpm record. Today, no music director or program director at a major station would take a chance on a new record from a still-unproven group. A record now has to be tested to death, and numerous consultants have to agree that it’s worthy. This is a prime example of radio’s contribution to the stifling of creativity and excitement in music. Today’s record company reps can’t talk to most music and program directors without going through the station’s independent promoter.

By September, “Beth” had begun to climb the charts. Then this unlikely song—the B side of the third single from an album that had been panned by some and had thus far fallen well short of building upon its predecessor’s momentum, a string-laden, melodramatic ballad from a band that had established itself by breaking ribcages with three chords and by shooting flames across the stage—became a runaway, crossover, adult contemporary hit. And, as the weeks scrolled by, the song so hated by Casablanca’s owner, the song that had turned our otherwise upbeat promotions guy into a defeated zombie, shot up the charts and became KISS’s first Top 10 single.

I cannot overemphasize how important that song was to KISS’s eventual achievement of superstardom. And it shoved Casablanca several rungs up the prestige ladder in the process. In fact, without “Beth,” it’s entirely possible that KISS would soon have found themselves in the “Where are they now?” category. Up to that point, they had created great buzz as a live act and had broken through in a high-profile way with
Alive!
(which was still comfortably positioned on the charts). They were clearly a band that many in the industry were watching, but the bottom line was that they couldn’t sell singles with the big boys, and their appeal as recording artists and as live performers was still limited to a fairly narrow demographic. “Beth” changed all that. The single surfed the charts for months, peaking at No. 7 on both
Billboard
and
Cashbox.
Suddenly, middle-aged moms carting their kids to school were crooning along with KISS on their favorite adult contemporary stations. With its crossover appeal, “Beth” hurdled demographic walls that we’d never dreamed of scaling. An entire new world now lay open to us. We only had to take that first brave step forward.

 

 

“You want to land a
what?”

The conversation between George Clinton and me had been surreal. Then again, most of our conversations were strange. And the few that weren’t strange were incredibly strange. This was one of the latter.

“Wait a second, George—you want to land a what? A mothership? Onstage?”

Through a haze of pot smoke, Clinton’s unmistakable head was nodding up and down. I could have argued. I could have listed a hundred reasons, starting with the fact that it defied common sense, why landing a life-sized spaceship onstage on a nightly basis was not going to work. I could have quoted numbers and margins and returns on investment. I could have, but I didn’t. I’d learned not to bother trying to talk George Clinton out of something when he had his mind set on it. Hell, George always recognized his own absurdity: “Larry, when you’re funky, you don’t make any sense,” was something I’d heard a dozen times. And, considering the success his creative inspirations had brought Casablanca so far, maybe choosing not to argue was the smart move.

That was months ago and three thousand miles away. Now George and the boys were on an air force base in upstate New York, in a big, echoing hangar, watching a life-sized spaceship (that cost two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars to construct) landing on a massive stage set. Wow. They were in production rehearsals for an upcoming tour. The facility was owned by Theatre Techniques, the stage construction company that had built the set. Both the Rolling Stones and KISS had rehearsed here, KISS as recently as three months before. The KISS connection did not stop there, as the Parliament stage and production had been designed by the Jules Fischer Organization, the company that had provided a similar service for KISS’s new tour.

Parliament’s concerts were out of this world, even without the expensive mothership production. The show revolved around the history of funk on our planet. Funk had been brought to Earth by aliens aboard UFOs and stored in the great Egyptian pyramids. About halfway through the set, during “Mothership Connection,” guitarist Glenn Goins would repeatedly sing the line, “I think I see the mothership comin’.” The other band members would point toward the back of the house, just as pyro ignited. Then the silver mothership would begin flying over the arena floor above the lighting rig.

The mothership was shaped more or less like a flying saucer—round if you looked at it from below, from the audience’s perspective, and tapering to a point like a pyramid if you looked at it in profile. There were lighting cans circling the perimeter of the mothership’s base. As the saucer flew overhead, the lights would glow, a torrent of sparks (from Roman-candle-like effects called gerbs) would arc downward, and plumes of dry ice would flow into the air; all of this combined to create the illusion of exhaust and flight. After completing the trek to the front of the house, the mothership would hover briefly, and there would be a short blackout, during which a quick switch would be made: the mothership was obscured in the lighting rig, and a much larger version of it was lowered slowly to the stage floor; clouds of dry ice billowed out from underneath it, cleverly mimicking powerful thrusters shooting down into the dust, as 120 decibels of rocket power ripped through the PA. Four glass orbs, which were lit from within, were mounted on the corners of the scaffold-like frame that supported the prop.

Then, after a two-second blackout and a single burst of exhaust from the ascending mothership, George Clinton would rise from beneath the multilevel set to the top of a staircase. As the fog abated, he would begin his classic pimp walk down the stairs while the band launched into their next number. It was a very effective production, and Parliament would continue to use it throughout most of the decade.

Neil, Joyce, and Cecil flew out to New Orleans for the inaugural landing of the mothership on October 27, and they came back with reports of the crowd’s ecstatic reaction. Clinton was equal parts Sly Stone, Pink Floyd, and Billy Graham, and the concert experience he created was a euphoric revivalist celebration, a religious communion. I reminded myself that this was why we didn’t argue with George. Parliament stayed on the road for months, taking the mothership to tens of thousands of mesmerized concertgoers.

With two of our biggest acts, KISS and Parliament, on tour, we turned our attention to others. Even at this point, a full two and half years into the Casablanca adventure, and with quite a few successes on our resume, our release schedule and our artist roster were still sparse. Just before Labor Day, on September 3, we released a self-titled album by a group with no name—literally, that was what they dubbed themselves: The Group With No Name. We’d tried and tried to figure out a name for them, but no one could come up with one. Their album had been nearly a year in the making, and it was a pet project of Neil’s.

The quintet consisted of two singing waiters and three singing waitresses from the Great American Food and Beverage Company in Los Angeles. From what I recall, Gene Simmons was an old college buddy of one the guys in the group and had brought them to Neil’s attention. Gene also had something going on with one of the waitresses, Katey Sagal, who, eleven years later, would play Peggy Bundy on the hit Fox sitcom
Married with Children.
Katey and the rest of the group had been hanging out with us for the better part of a year, since we were back on Sherbourne. They were nice kids and everyone liked them a lot. I felt that their LP had the potential to turn into something special, but, again, it was Neil who really loved this band. Since all five members could sing lead, he believed they had that magic something that it takes to become a supergroup. The band eventually hired Joyce and Donna Summer’s manager, Dick Broder, to represent them, and they did a live appearance on the syndicated TV show
Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert.
They opened with their first single, “Baby Love (How Could You Leave Me),” and they were quite impressive. Despite this high-profile appearance, a second single (“Get Out in the Sunshine”), and continued print support in the trades, no one could figure out how to market the band, and the LP went nowhere.

The Group With No Name wasn’t the only act we struggled to develop. Another was Larry Santos, a blues/soul singer who’d penned a No. 3 hit called “Candy Girl” for The Four Seasons in 1963. We’d released a self-titled album for him in June of 1975 and a follow-up in early October 1976. We all loved Larry, and his voice was just haunting (he has since done a multitude of commercial voice-overs), but we’d no idea how to market him. His material was wonderful, but its production—featuring lush orchestral accompaniment—morphed his blues/ soul vibe into something unmarketable. The music was too progressive to be blues, and too bluesy for the progressive radio stations to touch. Try as we might, MOR (middle of the road) radio was the only place where we could find a home for it, and MOR was such a catch-all category that landing it there meant nothing. Larry fit into no existing format, and because of that, his albums flopped in terms of sales.

Another project we were spearheading was an album by Long John Baldry. John was an extremely tall, thin guy who is probably best remembered for his association with other, more successful musicians: he shared a stage with Jimmy Page, Rod Stewart, and Elton John at various points during the 1960s. I was very much aware of his pedigree, recognizing him as royalty on the English music scene. I met him a few times and found him brilliant and interesting to talk to. His only album for us,
Welcome to Club Casablanca,
did not do well. It was mostly a case of bad timing; with Parliament, KISS, and Donna Summer skyrocketing simultaneously, plus the constant influx of new people at Casablanca, our plate was too full to give his album the attention it needed. There was also the problem of his back catalog: John had so many past releases that there was little demand for new material. He eventually launched a suit against us for not marketing his product, and I wanted to fight it. Neil cautioned me, “If you want to, then fine, but sometimes it’s cheaper to settle and bite the bullet.” I considered this and weighed it against the cost of giving John what he wanted. We settled for ten thousand dollars, which was a lot less than the lawyers would have billed us to fight it.

Between the successes and failures of our various releases, Casablanca’s personnel file grew and grew and grew. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that I could walk into the office on any given day and meet someone new. Entire departments seemed to sprout up overnight, like weeds through cracks in the pavement. To give you an idea of the volume of our promotions, hirings, and firings, in the space of seven days in September we: promoted Susan Munao to VP of press and artist relations; promoted Al DiNoble to director of singles; hired a guy named Eliot Sekuler to be director of creative services; and rehired Nancy Reingold, now divorced, to handle MOR radio (she’d championed Larry Santos, which is why he’d landed on MOR). And we weren’t done yet: we promoted Phyllis Chotin to director of advertising; promoted Peggy Martin to national tour director; hired Nellie Prestwood as publicity tour coordinator; and hired Elaine Cooper to be our artist relations coordinator. That was just one week. I had little idea if the promotions were even merited. Not that I thought people were doing a poor job per se, but it was mind-boggling to watch promotions being handed out like hors d’oeuvres. We were growing rapidly and needed more resources, so we hired more people. That made sense. But doing so forced us to shuffle the people already working for us into new positions and/or give them new titles, and it all felt like a big game of massage the ego.

Our publicity department consisted of three or four people, including Susan Munao. We needed that department to grow quickly to support other areas of the company, including promotion, sales, accounting, and the art department. I think the only area that did not see substantial growth was the international department, which was headed by Mauri Lathower, whose assistants were Scott Bergstein and Candy’s sister, Christy. We began to expand the press department by hiring Soozin Kazick as a publicist. She had worked for Neil at Buddah as early as 1969 and then gone on to Capitol Records; she was now living with Howie Rosen (I had introduced them), who would soon be tapped for our promotions department. Susan Munao wasn’t crazy about Soozin—she knew her from New York and did not like her reputation or the way she worked, but she had little choice in the matter.

Neil and I knew that Soozin was a very good publicist. I remember a night that Neil and I spent with Soozin and her close friend,
Creem
writer Lester Bangs, at her apartment in New York. Lester was in New York for business, and we all got together for dinner and schmoozing. We did not do many drugs that night, we just sat around talking. Lester was probably the most opinionated writer in rock, especially when he was among other critics, and he wielded a great deal of influence in his professional circle. The night was great, and from then on we never had to worry about Lester verbally destroying any of our rock artists. He was never kind to our disco artists, but we didn’t care.

Having Soozin at the company made things a little awkward for Candy, as many years before, Soozin and I had had a brief affair. I was forthright with Candy about it, and eventually she and Soozin became the best of friends. They went through their first pregnancies together. When our son Morgan was born, on June 21, 1978, Howie and Soozin were in the room next to ours—they’d had their daughter the day before. We turned the maternity ward into a Casablanca satellite office.

Part of successfully navigating Casablanca through the waters of the music industry was attending a seemingly endless string of conventions. As a young record company, it was especially important for us to make our presence felt at every opportunity. Next on the convention itinerary was a trip to New York at the end of September for
Billboard’s
second Disco Forum at the Americana Hotel. It was a four-day affair that ran from September 28 through October 1. On the final evening, an awards banquet was held at which twenty-six winners were presented with various accolades. Largely, if not exclusively, on the strength of Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby,” Casablanca was named disco label of the year. I remember accepting the award in person, but I can recall nothing else about the convention, which says something about how many of these get-togethers I attended and what a blur my life had become. We took out a full-page ad in the next issue of
Billboard
heralding the award. The ad was in the form of a letter from Neil praising disco and emphasizing the genre’s glowing future. It was a nice little award, the first of many disco-related achievements Casablanca would claim in the next eighteen months.

By far the most significant development came later in October. Neil completed negotiations with Peter Guber to merge Guber’s film production company, FilmWorks, with Casablanca. Peter was a tall, thin, good-looking guy, always well dressed, with an engaging personality and an easygoing smile. He was pure Hollywood. He’d spent some time at Columbia Pictures as an executive VP in charge of worldwide production, leaving in 1975 to form his own company. He knew the movie biz inside and out and had a great brand of bullshit, to boot. Guber navigated the film industry with the same natural ease that Neil navigated the music world. The two had known each other for years, and together they formed a very dynamic duo. They were either Batman and Robin, or Abbott and Costello—I’m not sure which.