And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records (27 page)

The party was attended by many noteworthy people, among them Warner Brothers exec Joe Smith; A&M Records founder Jerry Moss; Jeff Wald and his wife, Helen Reddy; Linda Ronstadt; actress Marcia Strassman of
Welcome Back, Kotter
fame; William Shatner; Gene Simmons; and Cher. The last two hit it off, and in short order they became something of an item. Gene did a nice sales job on Cher, and we signed her to Casablanca within a month. Jerry Brown did a nice sales job on Richard Trugman, who left the company in March to work on Brown’s presidential campaign. Richard felt that he’d made his money with Casablanca, and he didn’t think the company’s future was as bright as it appeared.

Trugman had not been the most well-liked person in the company. He had a superior attitude and would constantly complain about the volume of the music we played on the floor above. All of us music people upstairs couldn’t have cared less. Music was the business we were in; the music came first, and the lawyers could wear earplugs if it got too loud. Bruce Bird was his usual adversary in this ongoing battle; Richard would never complain to me or Neil because he knew how we would react.

Around this time, we began to make some changes to the office. During the renovations, Peter Guber discovered wires running up to Neil’s office on the second floor; these wires were connected to a tape recorder in a downstairs office. Neil insisted that he knew nothing about it, and everyone flatly denied any involvement. I was never sure what one of our employees could have gained by eavesdropping on Neil. It bothered me, however, that while everyone claimed that someone else had installed the eavesdropping system, the tape recorder was not well hidden, so it would have been very hard for Neil not to have noticed it.

Due to the discovery of the wires, we met a very strange individual: Arthur Kassel. Art was a self-styled Secret Service man, a staunchly conservative political operative who had a fondness for Quick Tan—he reminded me a bit of G. Gordon Liddy. We hired him to secure the building and our houses, and he made a big production of it. He came to the office, my home, and Neil’s home equipped with the latest technology to sweep for bugs. Candy came home one day to find Kassel and his crew of lackeys in suits in our house without permission. She flipped her lid and threw them all out. The most troubling thing was that we had had the alarm on, the gate closed, and the doors locked, but these guys had gotten in without a problem.

Despite the cloak and dagger stuff—or maybe because of it—Neil liked Art, especially after he gave Neil a New York State Narcotics Department badge. Neil kept it in his wallet; he really thought that it would get him a free pass if he ever needed it. It wasn’t long before he got the chance to try it out. Bruce Bird and Howie Rosen got loaded at a Dodgers game. When he drank and did coke, Bruce became belligerent, and so did Howie. Someone on the balcony above them started dripping soda or beer on their seats. Grabbing their foot-long souvenir bats, Bruce and Howie ran up to the balcony level to find the culprit. Instead they found themselves confronting a large group of guys. Bruce ended up suspended over the balcony railing, and then both he and Howie were taken away by security personnel. Nancy (by now married to Bruce) rushed off to find Neil, who was elsewhere in the stadium. Neil, stoned on ’ludes and feeling bold, assured her he’d take care of it. He went downstairs to the holding pen where Bruce and Howie were being detained (fortunately, he had the presence of mind to leave his stash of drugs behind). But when he flashed the badge Kassel had given him, the security people burst out laughing and told him to get the fuck out of there. So much for Neil’s career in law enforcement.

His philanthropic ventures were a bit more successful. He and Joyce had written a check for one hundred thousand dollars to LA’s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to help fund the construction of a new wing. Their gift was widely covered in the press. Other high-profile events littered Neil’s itinerary, including a February 6 appearance with Donna Summer and Joyce on
The Merv Griffin Show,
the first of several appearances for Neil on this show. In April, we produced a thirty-second TV spot to promote KISS’s
Double Platinum,
a greatest hits collection. Neil was growing so comfortable with being the face of Casablanca that Howard Marks was able to talk him into being the pitch man in the ad. I am sure Howard did not have to twist his arm very much, as Neil always wanted to be in the limelight, and this was just another opportunity. It was one of the cheesiest commercials I have ever seen. It wasn’t even quality cheese—more like Cheez Whiz. If you were a fourteen-year-old KISS fan, would you be motivated by a guy in his late thirties trying to sell you on their record? It just did not work, but who was going to tell Neil that?

If there was limelight to be had, we would fall all over ourselves to get into it. At the twentieth annual NARM (National Association of Recording Merchandisers) convention, we broke the bank—and we also defied common sense, but when didn’t we do that? The big, three-day industry get-together was held on the fourth floor of the New Orleans Hyatt Regency, beginning on March 18. Our booth, for lack of a better word, was huge. It was designed as a miniature Moroccan-motif (of course) casino, featuring blackjack, roulette, and other gambling games, all of which had label tie-ins. In one game, guests could win prizes by throwing beanbags at a life-size Dick Sherman prop. We hired veiled belly dancers to mingle with the conventioneers and hand out Casablanca exhibit passes and free gambling chips. We scattered cocktail napkins bearing the names or artwork of Donna Summer, the Village People, Love and Kisses, and Roberta Kelly; and we distributed a nice promotional sampler album,
Return to Casablanca,
specially created for NARM attendees. The capper was a stunning sixty-minute live performance by Donna Summer. The Casablanca experience was the hit of the convention, and talk of it circulated through the gossip columns of industry publications for the next several weeks.

Because
Return to Casablanca
had been such a hit at the NARM convention, we decided to press an additional twenty-one thousand units and send them out to retailers in a specially made carton containing not only the double LP but also cassette and 8-track versions of the same release. And we continued this excess with several key releases throughout 1978. We always loved producing these promotional materials, but the main reason we did them was to make radio people feel special. Most were excited to own a limited edition sampler with a unique cover, and that made them more inclined to give us airplay.

We were moving at warp speed. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew this couldn’t be sustained. I knew the piper would have to be paid. But when? And how much? I was far too intoxicated with this life to care.

 

 

There was blow everywhere. It was like some sort of condiment that had to be brushed away by the waitstaff before the next party was seated. Cocaine dusted everything. It was on fingertips, tabletops, upper lips, and the floor. How many people were doing blow and how many were being blown? The race was too close to call.

I was seated at a table with Bill Wardlow to my left and Neil Bogart to my right. Wardlow was one of the most important and influential men in the business. As the charts editor for
Billboard,
he held the entire music industry in his hands. The bottom line of every record company, from some backroom independent in Detroit to Capitol in LA, could be changed with a flick of Wardlow’s pen.

Over the course of the evening, we watched a succession of legends—who could have collectively accounted for the cover shots of a year’s worth of
People and Rolling Stone
—parade past. Celebrities and sycophants were everywhere. And then there was me, Larry Harris, a kid from Queens. The scene was surreal. It was like witnessing a great empire grown fat on its own arrogance and hedonism, soon to crumble and fall. It was a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life.

Welcome to Studio 54.

Bill, Neil, and I weren’t just in Studio 54—that was for the public, or at least whatever beautiful part of it could worm its way past the red velvet ropes. We were in the catacombs, a series of very exclusive and somewhat private areas in the basement of the renowned disco oasis. And we were here for a reason: to perpetuate our carefully cultivated myth of Casablanca. We were regarded as the gold standard of the record world. With our stable of hot artists, we’d skyrocketed to heights that no young record company had ever (before or since) attained. Disco was the hottest music around, and we owned the niche. We
were
disco. We had a trophy case bursting with so many Gold and Platinum awards that even Atlantic and Warner Brothers couldn’t compete, and we had a grip on the charts that was the bitter envy of the industry. We had earned some of that. The rest of it was hype, and Bill Wardlow had helped us to create it out of whole cloth.

I liked Bill. He was in his mid-fifties, tall, relatively thin, not unattractive, with a full head of gray hair. He always dressed smartly and was fond of long-sleeved, crisply ironed button-down shirts. He tended to talk as if he thought he was smarter than most, though I was never really put off by his vaguely snide demeanor. I found him to be a personable and tractable man, and I enjoyed his company on the many occasions we met. Truth be told, if Bill hadn’t been in charge of the charts for
Billboard,
we probably wouldn’t have had any sort of relationship, and I certainly wouldn’t have been at Studio 54 with him. The ability to manipulate the
Billboard
charts was a major advantage to Casablanca.

To comprehend how Casablanca influenced the charts, it’s helpful to know the players involved and the position each held in the industry hierarchy. In the 1970s, there were eight major music trade papers:
Billboard, Cashbox, Record World, Radio & Records,
Kal Rudman’s
FMQB, The Gavin Report, The Bob Hamilton Radio Report,
and
Bobby Poe’s Pop Music Survey.

Billboard
was the oldest and most influential of them all. Large distributors such as the Handleman Company sold to major retailers like Kmart and Walmart, and they would only buy product if it was on the
Billboard
charts. The initial orders placed by these distributors could be in excess of one hundred thousand units, so it’s easy to see how
Billboard
was vital to sales. In addition, numerous radio stations consulted
Billboard
before deciding whether to add a record to their playlists.
Record World
was regarded as having the most honest and relevant charts, although it lacked the widespread influence of
Billboard. Cashbox,
another old-line magazine, was owned by Mr. George Albert, who would not hesitate to make deals on chart positions in exchange for advertising.

The other trade charts were based on airplay. They manipulated record companies using advertising as a threat, and they had little or no influence on retail. They did, however, have some marginal influence on radio play.
Radio
&
Records, The Gavin Report, The Bob Hamilton Radio Report, Bobby Poe’s Pop Music Survey,
and
FMQB
had this kind of influence, as did a few other regional or format-oriented sheets around the country.

Radio & Records
(
R&R
) appeared on the scene at about the same time Casablanca did. It dealt with radio airplay exclusively, and it was (and still is) the sheet around which much of the pay-for-play and payola revolved. About the time
R&R
was being launched, its owner, Bob Wilson, met with Neil to try to secure an advertising commitment. Neil, of course, leaped at the chance. He was a big believer in helping those who were starting out, because then he could call in the favor when he needed it. And, although he was a big gambler, he would never risk being seen as uncooperative by industry-oriented publications.

In a short time,
R&R
became very influential in the music industry. Its charts were done in such a way that they actually quantified the importance of each radio station—something that opened the door to abuse. It grouped stations into three categories: parallel I markets (more than a million people), parallel II markets (more than half a million), and parallel III markets (more than a quarter million). The publicity ran upstream: if it acquired airplay on enough parallel III stations, your record would begin to look good to parallel II stations. Once it had substantial airplay on parallel II and III stations, then the important parallel I stations would begin to consider playing it, and so forth. A record’s movements on the
R&R
charts directly affected its level of national airplay and thus determined its success or failure. National promotion people who did not understand how to manipulate the
R&R
system would find themselves out of a gig.

Independent promoters benefited handsomely from this process, as it allowed them to approach the big record companies with concrete figures in hand and get compensated accordingly. The charts took the guesswork out of determining how valuable it would be to have an artist added to a radio station, and the independent promotions market grew exponentially as a result. Also, radio program directors found that by relying on the
R&R
charts, they could protect themselves from being fired for choosing the wrong records to play. If a PD’s boss asked him why he’d added a particular record, he could always just point to the
R&R
charts.

At the time,
Billboard
did not have the most scientific method for compiling charts; none of the publications did. The
Billboard
Broadcast Data System (BDS), which made the charts much more scientific, was not invented until 1992. When it came to album sales, a record company would tell the
Billboard
chart department, headed by Bill Wardlow, how many copies of an album it had sold and what level of airplay the album was getting ; it would also inform
Billboard
about any special support initiatives, such as tours or advertising blitzes. Bill would somehow rate this information—I still firmly believe he used a Ouija board—and decide where to place the album. Airplay was not considered in compiling the album charts; sales was the only criterion. The singles charts were based on a combination of Top 40 airplay and sales, weighted more heavily toward airplay.

When I first moved to Los Angeles, at the end of 1973, I started visiting
Billboard
weekly to present our product information. I soon curtailed these visits. I didn’t have much to discuss with Bill; our product was not selling very well, and, anyway, Warner already had someone whose job it was to visit
Billboard
and inform them about our product. After we left Warner, in the summer of 1974, I resumed my weekly visits to the trades, determined to find a way to make a substantial impact on the charts. One day, as I spoke with Bill, I noticed that his attitude toward me had changed. He was trying to ingratiate himself to me. It didn’t take me long to figure out why: Bill Wardlow loved disco.

The math was easy. Bill loved disco. Casablanca
was
disco. I was in like Flynn. Bill wanted very much to be a part of our scene, even going so far as to create a separate disco chart called National Disco Action Top 40. If you look at the album charts from that era, you will notice that disco product appears much more influential than it should have been. Bill’s love for disco was the human element of this inexact science. He enjoyed talking to me about disco artists such as Donna Summer, Pattie Brooks, and Paul Jabara, and when the Village People arrived, he was absolutely beside himself. Bill especially loved the attention he’d get when Neil invited him to some disco event we were throwing.

We leveraged the relationship as much as we could. Eventually, I could walk into Bill’s office, tell him the position on the charts I felt a given album should have, and, lo and behold, there it would be. If we needed a bullet on an album or single to show upward momentum, I would just tell Bill that I needed a bullet. In 1977, I was able to get four KISS albums (
Alive!, Destroyer, Rock and Roll Over,
and
Love Gun
) on
Billboard’s
Top 100 at the same time. Of those four albums, only two deserved anywhere near the numbers they were allegedly achieving. This, of course, led us to mount a major retail and industry advertising campaign. Having four albums on the charts at once was something that no one else had ever accomplished: this was a coup.

The volume of trade advertising we were doing was still far greater than it should have been. Early on, Neil had asked me to ensure that everyone was getting the message that we were hot and successful, so I made contractual arrangements with
Billboard, Cashbox,
and
Record World.
We would take their front inside covers every week for a year; if we didn’t have new product to advertise, then we’d run the same ads over and over. We also tried to secure the front cover of
Billboard,
which had three available advertising spaces. Our spending on ads in the trades was obscene, but it did serve to plant our name in front of everyone on a weekly basis. Our ads extolled not just our artists but also the company in general.

We were shaping Casablanca’s reality out of a faux public perception. It didn’t make our bottom line any less real, but it was a grand bit of illusion making. Even we were tempted to believe our own carefully crafted press—and that was dangerous. In the disco era, we had as many as eight albums on the
Billboard
disco chart; for a company less than five years old, it was an amazing position to be in. We even knew the chart positions hours before they were released to the industry. The numbers were not generally available until 3:00 p.m. on Wednesdays, but I would have them by noon.

Neil was very close to Studio 54’s owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager. They were partners, but, through the sheer force of his personality, Rubell was the de facto leader. He was a relatively short guy in his mid-thirties with thinning brown hair and an aggressive look in his eye—a blend of wild enthusiasm, anxiety, and annoyance. He was endlessly energetic and would just as soon bully you as charm you. He could, and did, work a crowd to a degree to which P.T. Barnum might aspire, but he was prone to childish tantrums. If he was in a bad mood or a coke-induced rage, he was uncontrollable—even Ian would steer clear of him. I once saw him dress down an employee over some perceived infraction; for three solid minutes, he screamed himself hoarse as the poor kid cowered from the onslaught. Schrager was about the same age, slightly taller, with more polished good looks. He was by no means quiet and could be very engaging when he wanted to be, despite a speech impediment, but he was far more relaxed than Rubell. I worked with the two occasionally, but I didn’t hang with them as much Neil did.

Although Rubell’s arrogance put many people off, Neil got along well with him; when any of us went to Studio 54, we were treated as major personalities and brought straight into the club’s restricted areas. We never waited outside with the crush of people desperate to be allowed into the cultural nirvana Rubell and Schrager had crafted in midtown Manhattan. We always called ahead, and either Steve or Ian would usher us into his private office to discuss business; in Rubell’s filtered world of beautiful people, we were top-flight celebrities. Studio 54 was a disco club, and Casablanca, especially to Rubell, was the very essence of disco. For us, Studio 54 was flash money—a name and a place we could use to impress anyone, from members of the press to potential artists.