And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records (26 page)

PolyGram had an issue with us from the beginning. Remember, we hated the stiff culture of the corporate world, in which you practically had to ask permission to use the toilet. We didn’t like being managed; we didn’t like bureaucracy; we liked acting like a bunch of delinquents with an expense account. On top of that, a number of our key positions were filled by Jews, and most of the contingent at PolyGram’s corporate headquarters in Europe was German. One of them, in particular (his name was Kurt Kinkler), bragged that he had been a U-boat commander during World War II, which certainly did not endear him to us. This situation struck a discordant note in the relations between Neil, Peter Guber, and numerous PolyGram representatives, although many of the people in the company’s Dutch wing were nice to us.

It was difficult to talk about music and movies with people who had little understanding of our market or our artists. Our culture—the larger American one and the smaller version of it within the walls of 8255 Sunset—was foreign to the PolyGram people. They seemed not to care at all about artists as long as they contributed to the bottom line. This was an attitude with which I was unfamiliar. Buddah had been artist-friendly, we certainly were at Casablanca, and even Warner cared, or seemed to, about artists and their music; if you mentioned an artist, even if he or she was not yet famous, the executives at Warner knew who you were talking about.

Neil and I grew to have so much disdain for PolyGram that we would show up at board meetings in New York tripping on Quaaludes. After one of these meetings, Neil mentioned that he wanted to make me president, and he would become chairman. PolyGram told him they knew I did drugs because I’d been high at the last board meeting (I guess I was slurring more than usual), and they did not want someone who did drugs running the company. But I was already running the company. What did they think I was doing—knitting a sweater? And did they think Neil himself was a squeaky-clean teetotaler? For all intents and purposes, I was already running the day-to-day business of Casablanca; the title bump wasn’t going to change anything.

Shortly after this, PolyGram decided that they should have one of their own people looking over our shoulder. They chose David Shein, a young accountant from New York who initially seemed quite conservative and very pro-PolyGram. It took no time at all for us to change that. I’m not sure what he was used to at PolyGram in New York, or what he expected at Casablanca, but he was one of us in about five minutes. Who doesn’t like going to the best restaurants, driving the fanciest cars, and traveling first class? David became an integral member of the Casablanca team and a convenient, cooperative mole; in espionage parlance, we’d flipped the spy. But David did more than just keep PolyGram away from us: he also helped out in our bookkeeping and accounting department; and, with Neil’s brother-in-law, Joey Ermilio, he helped set up a Wang computer system for us—quite a feat, as it took up a space the size of three or four offices.

Some of the PolyGram distribution people were good at what they did—Rick Blieweis and Emil Patron, to name two—but there were only a few people in the company who understood the record business. They were all in awe of Neil, and they did not dare come close to crossing him. They would do whatever we wanted, no matter how foolish it was. Whenever Neil asked, they would invest more money in Casablanca. Peter Guber was similarly revered. As the golden goose in all of this, Peter was left alone—PolyGram certainly did not want to piss him off and have him head out to the beach again.

A few months after PolyGram became involved with us, Neil and Bruce Bird came into my office. Neil explained to me that I was going to throw a party and spend ten thousand dollars. But not really. He and Bruce would help me get receipts totaling that amount, and I would get PolyGram to reimburse me; I would then give the ten grand to Bruce, who would use it to take care of business. I did as they requested, and it was the closest I ever came to payola. I don’t even remember what record they used the money for, but for that amount they could have covered several major-market stations. Of course, they never helped me with the receipts. Just figuring out who I had invited to the party was a pain in the ass—I listed every politician I could think of, plus dead musicians, old war heroes, and Neil and Bruce and their extended families. If anyone was ever questioned about the party, I figured they would just say that they’d been there and it was great.

No matter what corporate umbrella we were under, the sign on the door still said Casablanca, which may as well have been Spanish for “disco boys.” Another French import, Leroy Gomez and Santa Esmeralda, came on board in October 1977, bringing their monster hit “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” with them. When I heard their record, I couldn’t get them signed quickly enough. I almost fell off my chair, and then I got our legal department (then headed by Dick Ettlinger) to take care of the particulars. When all was said and done, it was the best deal we ever made. The entire album cost us thirty-five thousand dollars, with a very low royalty rate of about 6 percent (what they had asked for), as opposed to the new-artist standard of 10 to 12 percent. The record sold millions, almost overnight. “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” was one of those once-in-a-lifetime songs that hit with little assistance; we mailed it to the radio stations, and they jumped on it. But, once again, I made the mistake of not seeing a group perform before signing them. Leroy Gomez was not bad looking, but he was a terrible live performer, and Santa Esmeralda, a pair of women, didn’t have a clue about performing either. We arranged a small preview of the band, and it was awful. I knew then that this act would fizzle after only a few hits.

Disco and movies were absorbing all of our attention, so it was fortunate for us that the KISS ship was being helmed by Glickman/Marks, and they were doing it well. They kept us informed of the band’s touring and promotional plans and consulted us on many matters. KISS’s 1977 summer tour had been their biggest success yet, and at a sold-out three-night stand at The Forum in LA, they’d recorded a follow-up to
Alive!
The new live album, a two-record set called
Alive II,
was released on October 24, and it shipped Platinum. KISS had also recently topped Led Zeppelin and the Stones, among others, in a Gallup survey that polled teenagers for their band preferences. KISS had outgrown their next-big-thing status: they were now among rock’s premier acts.

George Clinton and Parliament had been busy as well. Two of their 1977 concerts had been recorded and released in May of that year as a two-disc collection we dubbed
P-Funk Earth Tour.
Initial copies of the release included a poster and a catchy iron-on decal that read “Take funk to heaven in ’77.” The band toured for most of the year (they were major headliners in most markets), and the mothership even made a special landing in Times Square for a documentary, which was eventually scrapped. After Thanksgiving, we released their album
Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome
(I had long since stopped asking George what these titles meant), which contained what would turn out to be some of their last sizable hits, including their only No. 1 R&B hit, “Flash Light.” We produced an amazing TV spot for the album using some of the animation elements Parliament employed in their live performances.

Donna Summer, meanwhile, had re-signed with Casablanca, and as part of the deal we had acquired the worldwide distribution rights to her current releases and back catalog (thus far, we’d only had North American rights to her current releases). Still riding high on of the success of “I Feel Love,” Donna had spent several weeks on tour in Europe. Then, in early November, we rush-released her next album,
Once upon a Time....
Barely five months had passed since her previous LP, but Neil’s perpetual sense of urgency tended to dictate our release patterns, and he was desperate to have a new record for Donna’s fans to buy before Christmas.

In keeping with the grand, larger-than-life vibe of the disco world, we made the release a gatefold double LP, with each of the four sides representing a different musical genre, including a full side of “I Feel Love”-inspired electronica. The concept album told the story of a girl living in a land where everything real was unreal, a fairytale that in some ways mirrored Donna’s own life. One of the album’s singles, “I Love You,” was a major hit in Europe, while the title track, along with “Now I Need You” and “Working the Midnight Shift,” became fan favorites. Though
Once upon a Time...
didn’t yield a bona fide US hit, the LP sold very well, and it was certified Gold in December.

By the end of 1977, we were racing ahead faster than I’d ever thought possible. In the last twelve weeks of the year, we had more releases—seventeen—than we’d had in all of 1976. And as the clock struck midnight that New Year’s Eve, one of those releases, Donna Summer’s
Once upon a Time...,
was sitting atop the disco charts. Casablanca, the disco label, had the top disco act and the top rock act. But the question was: Could we survive life at the top?

 

 

Gregg Giuffria, Angel’s keyboardist, was in my office. He and I had developed a good relationship since we’d signed the group in 1975, and he was my primary contact among the band members. Gregg would stop by the Sunset building frequently, walking from office to office to maintain his presence and remind all the various department heads (there seemed to be more and more of them each day) about Angel. As we sat there bullshitting, he mentioned that as he’d been working his way through the building that day, saying hello to anyone who would give him a minute, he’d wandered into the office of Steve Keator (our director of media relations) and found one of our recording artists, in full costume, bending Steve over the desk and screwing him in the ass. He was about as fazed at the sight as I was at hearing about it—which is to say, not at all. That was Casablanca.

Gregg and I were discussing Angel’s latest album,
White Hot,
which was Casablanca’s first release of 1978. From the moment we’d signed them, nothing had come easy for Angel. Their looks, talent, and drive all spelled sure thing, but at every turn, some sort of crappy luck or bad karma seemed to be awaiting them—most recently, the eleventh-hour cancellation of their movie
Angel at Midnight.
Gregg was recounting all of the challenges Angel had faced in the past year, including the need to replace bassist Mickie Jones. They’d held secret auditions for the post in LA, and they’d finally found their man in St. Louis native Felix Robinson, whom they knew through another band that Bill Schereck, their tour manager, had been managing.

One of the Casablanca recording acts who also hung around our offices was the Village People. Months after signing the band, Neil and I had finally met that strange cast of characters (which appeared to have evolved since they were assembled for the first LP cover). Jacques and Henri had just finished overseeing the sessions for the second Village People album,
Macho Man.
Their self-titled first release had set 8255 buzzing, and, as usual, the discotheques had jumped on the bandwagon, but the album hadn’t produced a breakaway hit. Radio was still keeping its distance. The second album would change all that—we knew it the moment we heard the title track. It had passed the Casablanca test immediately: I don’t think I ever had that many people come running into my office at once. The coming months bore out the test’s accuracy. “Macho Man,” the single, peaked at No. 2 on the charts. Finally, radio and retail had caught on to what the clubs had been saying, and the Village People had their first Gold single and Platinum album.

While their popularity and sales soared, relations within this disco hodgepodge were not so ideal. I heard a rumor that Victor Willis (who portrayed the cop and was the only straight member of the original act) was allegedly bullying the others. Complaints also began to surface that group members were only getting paid one hundred dollars per week, causing some friction within the ranks. It was becoming obvious to us that we couldn’t expect them to do everything that was being asked of them (interviews, appearances, concerts) for so little money. Plus, there was their image to consider: music stars don’t live on near-poverty wages.

However, any action we should or could have taken was precluded by the fact that we had no say in anything concerning the band members. The Village People were owned and controlled by Morali and Belolo; Casablanca did the manufacturing, distribution, and promotion, and little else. The Village People were becoming so successful that we didn’t want to make waves. They were selling as many albums as KISS and Donna Summer, and we just couldn’t afford to piss Jacques and Henri off, so we bit our tongues and tried to ignore the problem. Eventually, I had a heart-to-heart with the two about the band members’ unhappiness. This led to a slight raise, which seemed to appease the band for the moment.

The Village People were on the superstar launch pad, Angel was going nowhere, and Donna Summer was somewhere in between, in a state of flux. By February 1978, she had hired her third comanager in just three years: Susan Munao, our former publicist. I liked Donna very much, but she was always surrounded by drama. There never seemed to be a state of rest for her—no status quo. Part of that was because she was always in the company of Joyce or Susan, neither of whom was anywhere near low-key; plus, I’m sure she was influenced by any number of the countless people who hovered around her. But Susan, while not always easy to deal with, was at least a known factor.

Donna’s itinerary was taking an interesting turn. On January 27, she started a three-night stand at the Sahara Hotel in Lake Tahoe with her new backing band, Brooklyn Dreams. At our request, she had added two new songs to her set (neither of which would be released for several months) so that we could shoot a live promotional film for them. One of these was “MacArthur Park,” and the other was a mesmerizing ballad called “Last Dance,” which I’d first heard toward the end of the previous summer.

The always chipper Paul Jabara had stopped by my office one day and insisted that I drop what I was doing and listen to a new track he’d written. Most of our artists wouldn’t have had this kind of instant access to me (I wasn’t living in an ivory tower—I just didn’t have the time), but Paul was so disarming that it was hard for me to tell him no. I sat and listened to his demo, and when it was over, without saying a word to him, I got up and opened the adjoining door to Neil’s office. Neil was on the phone, so I gave him the look we’d shoot each other when something really important was happening. Saying “I’ll get back to you” into the phone, he came into my office. He seemed surprised to see Paul there. As he sat down, I turned up the volume to a deafening level and opened the outer door: the Casablanca test was in progress. Employees started piling in. Paul danced around, singing along with the tape and making grand gestures with the lyrics. It was a great moment, and everyone in the room absolutely knew we had a smash hit. Paul had written it for Donna Summer, and “Last Dance” came to play a key role in her career. It would also become an integral component of our already booming business, to say nothing of what it would do for disco.

One of our other French disco imports, Alec Costandinos, handed over two more releases early in the year: the second LP from Love and Kisses, titled
How Much, How Much I Love You;
and Alec’s biggest hit (under his own name),
Romeo and Juliet.
I was able to push the title track of the latter to No. 1 on the disco charts, albeit for only a week. A promo film was even produced, which was a true rarity for a disco producer. It featured Alec on a motorcycle with a blonde riding shotgun. Around the same time, a French record company, Carrere, began placing full-page ads in the US trades seeking distribution for a female singer named Sheila, who supposedly was already No. 1 in France with a disco cover of “Singin’ in the Rain.” The idea of pitching Neil on a remake of that twenty-five-year-old Gene Kelly number was ridiculous. I thought it through: on the one hand, how many people in the notoriously trendy disco clubs were going to find this song hip? On the other hand, it was French, and it was disco, which in our books was the magic recipe for a hit single. Within an hour of seeing one of the print ads, Neil was on the phone trying to sign a deal to release the LP in the States. The song went nowhere, but Sheila found success later on, most notably with a 1979 album produced by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic. A similar latter-day success story came from this side of the Atlantic. We bought another go-nowhere record, this one from Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo—a disco concept album of original music about legendary singer and dancer Josephine Baker. The artist was a singer named Phylicia Allen, the wife of Victor Willis of the Village People. By the mid-1980s, Phylicia had become a household name as Clair Huxtable, Bill Cosby’s TV wife on his hit NBC show.

On January 10, 1978, NBC Television had aired an hour-long special by revered anchor Edwin Newman called
Land of Hype and Glory.
It profiled the growing successes and excesses of the entertainment industry, and both KISS and Peter Guber were featured. Hype had long been the driver of our public persona, but lately—happily—glory had taken the wheel. In October and November 1977, Casablanca had generated $15.4 million in revenue, a full 107 percent increase over the same period in 1976. Since the October 1 acquisition, PolyGram had posted three consecutive months of record sales, peaking at $27.3 million in December and keeping pace with old-school giants CBS, Capitol, and Warner Brothers. For the year, Casablanca had done $55 million, and we were projecting double that for 1978.

We now had over 160 employees scattered between three buildings on Sunset and a fifteen-person office in Manhattan headed by Ray D’Ariano; we also had Robin Taylor, general manager of Pye Records, ready to help us open the doors to a new London office. PolyGram eventually quashed the idea of the London facility, preferring to control European operations themselves. In February, we named Marc Paul Simon vice president of special projects, and soon afterwards we acquired Simon’s company, Provocative Promotions, absorbing his staff into our ranks. Our subsidiaries were healthy, with hits of their own; Millennium had Meco’s astonishing string of disco soundtrack successes, and Chocolate City had funk/dance purveyors Cameo.

In mid-March, Cecil, Bruce, and I received title bumps: I became senior vice president and managing director, Cecil became senior vice president and special assistant to Neil, and Bruce assumed my old title of executive vice president. Also in March, David Shein was made vice president and chief financial officer.

One of the more interesting hires was Bill Tennant, who came over from Columbia Pictures to be president of the FilmWorks division. Bill had been a very successful agent, and one of his clients was Academy Award—winning director Roman Polanski, whose pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, had been murdered by the Manson clan in 1969. Bill had been called upon to identify the bodies of Tate and several of the clan’s other victims. His knowledge of the film industry was vast; he’d inked Peter Fonda’s deal for
Easy Rider
and attached Polanski to
Rosemary
’
s Baby.
While he was production VP at Columbia, the studio had produced
Taxi Driver
and
Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
among others. Tennant was brilliant, and Peter Guber knew it. Bill was available because he’d been caught in the crossfire when Columbia studio head David Begelman’s check-forging activities came to light. Begelman, whom Bill considered a mentor, had embezzled over forty thousand dollars by forging check endorsements; a scandal had ensued, and Begelman was forced to resign, pulling Tennant down with him. I don’t think Tennant spent more than five minutes on the street before Guber approached him with a lucrative job offer. He accepted and thus became the third-highest-paid person in the company, behind only Neil and Peter. I was initially pissed off about this, and I treated Bill somewhat as an adversary, but once we’d had a chance to spend some time together we became friends. After all, we were in similar positions—Bill handled the kind of day-to-day details for Guber that I was handling for the record company.

Another significant hire, at least in terms of its impact on me, was Betty Logan. My former assistant, Terry Barnes, had left to join Scott Shannon at Ariola Records. Shannon had departed in the fall of 1977, and Terry’s interest in the promotion field, as well as her interest in Shannon (she had always seemed to have a bit of a crush on him), prompted her to follow. Unknown to me (and as busy as I was, it was easy for me to be oblivious to such things), Terry wasn’t the only one in the building with strong feelings for Scott. A tall, blonde female staffer in the legal department, whose name has since escaped me, was so distraught over Scott choosing to take Terry with him that one day she attempted suicide while in the building. We kept the whole thing quiet, and very few people even knew it had happened. Betty Logan came into this mess and didn’t miss a beat. She was a bright, beautiful, sweet woman with a dark complexion. She was also brilliant at protecting me from the industry gossip to which record company execs are often subject, and she had no problem putting up with me, my naps, and my drugs, to say nothing of the occasional bouts of flirting with other women that went on. Betty was my ace in the hole.

Neil, meanwhile, who had never been a wallflower, was taking more and more of the company spotlight and branching off into entirely new territory. The first big event that occurred in his life that year was the birth of his and Joyce’s son, Evan, on January 23. A month later, on February 22, Neil and Joyce hosted a party for California’s Democratic governor, Jerry Brown. The twenty-five-hundred-dollar-a-plate black-tie event, which they hosted at their Holmby Hills estate, was intended to boost the political career of Brown, who was gearing up for a run at the 1980 presidential election. Neil was a staunch Republican and so, politically speaking, the polar opposite of Brown, but the party wasn’t about stumping for a presidential candidate. Neil was simply ingratiating himself to someone upon whom he could rely for favors down the line. He was becoming a bit of an elitist. He’d started shopping at the most expensive stores in LA. And he and Joyce had hired Sharon Landa, a famous decorator, to make their house look like a lavish Hollywood estate; they also badgered Candy and me to use Sharon’s services. While Neil loved this “fabulous” lifestyle, the idea of hiring a decorator seemed weird to Candy and me—actually, it just felt like more of the superficial LA scene. But Neil was finally in a position where he could entertain the heads of other labels, movie people, and stars in his home. He basked in their attention. He was as much of a groupie in his own way as anyone, in some respects maybe more.