And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records (24 page)

Even unknown disco artists, who may have cost us only twenty thousand dollars, were selling enough product to make a profit. Casablanca was becoming so irrevocably associated with the disco genre that we were called “the disco label,” and artists from all over the world were coming to us in droves to make deals. It reached the point where people wouldn’t go into their favorite record store to ask for the new album by a particular artist—they would ask what was new from Casablanca. We were able to sell product that had no radio play just because the word “Casablanca” was printed on it.

This wasn’t an accident. Initially, we ran into a problem selling disco. In fact, the entire industry was afflicted with the same dilemma. The club DJs tended to play one disco song right after another without naming what was playing. Disco was a very formulaic genre, and it all sounded fairly similar, so clubbers were clueless about what songs they were hearing. Our solution was to flood the clubs with advertising. We had cocktail napkins and posters and coasters and matchbooks bearing images of our artists and logos made up by the truckload, and we distributed them through the network of discotheques. While all this promo material didn’t help you figure out what song you were listening to, it did make the Casablanca name omnipresent, and we soon had ourselves a very successful brand.

To help market that brand, we scoured the landscape for disco artists, and we spent most of the first half of 1977 signing them as quickly as we could get a pen into their hands: Love and Kisses, Paul Jabara, Munich Machine, and many others. Most did not produce any huge radio or retail hits, but they were wildly popular at the clubs. That wasn’t all bad, because it gave Casablanca a consistent presence on a grassroots level.

To this day, it still surprises me that most people don’t really understand that the typical disco act was just a producer and a concept. The bands were (for the most part) merely a fancy logo on a well-designed LP cover, which often portrayed a female in some high-fashion sexual pose. This fantasy concept was mainly intended to help an ad agency to build a marketing campaign around the cover art. And perhaps the best example of the concept was found in the work of European producer-songwriter Alec Costandinos.

Alec was a slender, good-looking guy of Egyptian descent who had been developing acts in France for several years and had scored a decent hit in 1976 with
Love in C Minor,
an album he’d collaborated on with a French disco drummer named Jean-Marc Cerrone. Alec was a joy to work with; the man knew every aspect of his craft. He knew how to write and produce music very quickly, but he was also intimately involved in creating cover art, and he’d often sit in on marketing meetings or work on contractual details with Richard Trugman. He knew that we were spending more time and effort on our bigger acts like KISS and Donna Summer, but as long as we gave him what he needed (which wasn’t much) he never complained. Of all the artists we ever signed, Alec unquestionably delivered the most for our money. He was a one-man assembly line of great disco: between June 1977 and September 1979, he would release eleven albums through Casablanca under six different monikers. The most successful of these was our first Costandinos acquisition:
Love and Kisses.
The debut LP, whose artwork featured a close-up of a woman’s partially exposed breasts (her T-shirt was being ripped apart by several groping hands) had already been released in France, and both Neil and I felt it would do very well stateside. In no small part, this was due to the fact that both of the LP’s two songs were sixteen-plus minutes long. We released the album, and everyone was very pleased with the success of “Accidental Lover” and “I’ve Found Love (Now That I’ve Found You).” Both songs were huge in the clubs throughout the summer of 1977.
Love and Kisses
was so successful that we also snatched up
Sphinx,
a project Alec had worked on with French arranger Raymond Donnez (aka Don Ray). Like
Love and Kisses
before it,
Sphinx
had already been released in France. It had been designed as a concept album that told the story of the betrayal of Christ. Again, the album contained only two tracks, both epic-length, each filling up one side. Jesus meets disco. It was a match made somewhere south of Heaven. It sounded like a good idea at the time, but Neil and I should have known better. We had tried something similar at Buddah with Vaughn Meader, a comedian who in 1971 had released an LP called
The Second Coming
on the Kama Sutra imprint. The album depicted Christ coming back to Earth, getting a Hollywood agent, and doing the talk show circuit. I thought it was funny and wondered if it would open people’s minds with its social commentary, but the public didn’t buy into it, and the album bombed.

Munich Machine came courtesy of our original European disco import, Giorgio Moroder. It was another project Giorgio had developed with songwriter and producer Peter Bellotte. It, too, stuck with the prog-rock-length song idea—“Get on the Funk Train” took up the album’s entire A side. The album was released in May, and it was quickly followed by another of the pair’s Euro-disco experiments (bearing only Giorgio’s name, however) called
From Here to Eternity.
Both albums followed the Casablanca disco trend: a hit in the clubs; not as much buzz on the air or in the stores.

Another signing soon became the favorite artist of almost everyone in the company: the pushy, very talented, very confused-about-everything (including his own sexuality) Paul Jabara. Paul began his relationship with Casablanca by hanging out with us at clubs and then endearing himself to us and many of our artists. Industry luminaries like Barbra Streisand, Donna Summer, and Cher all took a liking to Paul and recorded his songs. It didn’t hurt that he was managed by Ron DeBlasio and Jeff Wald, both of whom (along with Joyce) were also overseeing Donna’s career.

Paul would come into my office and dance and sing his latest song. He was a breath of fresh air. Though he was a funny sort of character, we initially didn’t take him all that seriously. Paul released his first album for us,
Shut Out
(which we pressed on cherry-red vinyl), in May 1977. The album’s title track featured a duet with Donna Summer. Despite his talent and the success other artists had with his songs, Paul never had a hit album of his own, but he was always humble and fun to be with. His manic energy and occasionally neurotic behavior sometimes grated on one’s nerves, but he made coming to work fun. Thirty years later, I still love to listen to his albums.

Another of our disco albums originated in an entirely different fashion:
Frankie Crocker and The Heart & Soul Orchestra.
Frankie had been a DJ for years before landing the program director job at WBLS in New York. Black DJs and PDs got paid very little by their white bosses, who had little regard for black music or the black community; the bosses were just in it to make money, and they’d do it on the cheap if they could. Black radio employees in general were paid far less than their white counterparts. As PD at WBLS, Frankie had been involved in payola. You’d pay him three thousand dollars to play a new release for a specified number of weeks—if the record did well in that time, then he would keep it on; if not, it was off. All the record companies knew about this, and it was actually a cheap way to see if you really had a hit: if it worked on WBLS, then it would work throughout the country. This eliminated the hassle of testing a record all over the place, which could cost tens of thousands of dollars. One of Frankie’s friends, Rocky G., turned state’s evidence on him, and Cecil (among many others in the industry) was called in to testify. Though a federal court in Philadelphia later overturned the conviction, Frankie lost his job at WBLS, and after that everyone in the industry treated him as a pariah. Except us—Neil wanted to help him. In order to give Frankie some money to live on, we made a deal with him to do his own product release. Of course, Frankie was not a musician, but he did know R&B—he was one of the best ears in the biz when it came to that. The record he did for us didn’t do great, but quite a few programmers, especially in the black community, played it because they believed that he had been given a raw deal.

When you sign that many bands that quickly, some are going to bomb before they even get started. David Joseph and Chris Bearde (whom we knew through the Hudson Brothers and Angel) brought us one of Bearde’s acts, Greg and Paul, who had a new CBS Television show called
A Year at the Top,
which was about two musicians trying to get signed by a record company. Despite being backed by a production team that included Norman Lear (of
All in the Family
fame) and Don Kirshner, the show, slated for a six-week run, failed almost before it went on the air; it was canceled shortly after the pilot was broadcast on August 5. We’d already agreed to release a self-titled album by Greg and Paul, which featured songs from the series. The program flopped so badly that I don’t think we ever mailed the album to radio. But Greg and Paul did go on to become famous: Greg Evigan as the star of
BJ and the Bear
and
My Two Dads;
and Paul Shaffer, who was already the bandleader on
Saturday Night Live,
as David Letterman’s longtime musical director and sidekick.

To capitalize on the disco revolution and help make something of all our new signings, Neil began to look for the best disco marketing/ promotional person in LA. The name that kept coming up was Marc Paul Simon, a good-looking, very bright disco-marketing genius. Marc had his own company, Provocative Promotions, and it was so good that we eventually absorbed it into Casablanca so that we could have Marc’s services exclusively. With Marc came two of his associates, Michele Hart and Ken Friedman. Ken worked out of New York, and his influence over the club scene there was so great that he practically owned it.

I worked with Marc and his company in planning and organizing our marketing and retail campaigns. Marc also had direct access to Neil, and they would dissect disco in great detail in an effort to distill the formula behind the hits. They would discuss things like beats per minute (most disco hits had almost exactly the same number of beats per minute, and the formula seemed to change every four months or so, keeping things fresh). I explained Neil’s promotional philosophy to Marc and showed him how to implement it at the clubs. The clubs became our research and development labs; we would ask them to test our songs before we put them out for mass consumption. If a song kept club patrons on the dance floor, we knew we had a potential hit, but if they didn’t enjoy the song, we didn’t release it.

Neil took to disco like a duck to water. He began to establish the company as the genre’s home. The competition was slim, as none of the major labels were embracing the music. Even when they did take a chance on disco, they had a hard time dealing with the gay mindset that pervaded the genre. Many also failed to understand that, much like bubblegum acts, disco artists usually had little to do with the music; they were just the drivers of the race cars built by the writers and producers.

The problem with having a glut of disco product was that our rock promotion department, which was second in size only to publicity, had little to work with. Seeing a department of two dozen people with nothing to do didn’t sit well with me, so I went on a tear to get some rock product into the pipeline. This wasn’t easy, because we only had one noteworthy rock group on our roster, so most others didn’t consider us the best label to sign with—they only turned to us after everyone else had passed on them.

Not long after I started this drive to acquire more rock, Scott Bergstein from our international department brought me an exciting tape. The songs were great, and some tracks had the added bonus of including a saxophone—I’m a huge sucker for the sax. I got so excited that I ran into Neil’s office and told him I had found the next great group, but it would cost a hundred thousand dollars to sign them, so I needed his approval. He said, “Why sign a band for a hundred thousand when we could sign four or five disco acts for that amount?” He never even asked to hear the group. I was disappointed, but there was nothing I could do, and so Casablanca lost out on signing Dire Straits. The band signed with Warner Brothers and released their first album maybe a year later, scoring a nice hit with the single “Sultans of Swing.” Under the stewardship of Mark Knopfler, they went on to become a multi-Platinum monolith in the mid-1980s with the enormous hit “Money for Nothing,” a touchstone moment in the history of MTV.

The Dire Straits strikeout wasn’t our only big swing and miss. In 1976, not long after he’d left Genesis, Peter Gabriel came to see us. We met with him and his manager and had them looking for a pen in a matter of moments. They would have signed with Casablanca on the spot had it not been for a poison-pill, oh-by-the-way stipulation Gabriel threw in at the last moment. He wanted half a million dollars per LP. Had we been clairvoyant enough to see “Shock the Monkey” or
So
in our crystal ball, then the half million wouldn’t have seemed so ridiculous, but at that point Gabriel wasn’t much more than the ex-singer of Genesis who hadn’t proved himself as a solo act. Neil felt it just wasn’t worth the risk.