And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records (35 page)

Following the dismal reception of their 1981 concept album
Music from “The Elder,”
KISS saw their already waning popularity plummet, and Glickman/Marks made enough of a case against Bill Aucoin that KISS finally edged him out of the picture in the spring of 1982, ending a very successful nine-year relationship. Ace Frehley followed Aucoin out the door in 1983, creating a multimillion-dollar problem for KISS. The band’s April 1980 contract with PolyGram defined KISS as Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, and Ace Frehley (Peter Criss was not included, because his departure had been decided upon weeks prior to the signing). When Ace left, this effectively voided the contract. The band was now worth far less than the two-million-per-album advance provided by the 1980 contract, and PolyGram insisted on a renegotiation.

As for Casablanca, in November 1980, its final founding partner, Cecil Holmes, left. In December, PolyGram terminated an additional twenty-five employees. The four big employee cutbacks demanded by PolyGram in 1979 and 1980, compounded by the usual rats-fleeing-the-sinking-ship attrition, had left a skeleton crew of twenty-five piloting whatever remained at 8255 Sunset. The December 1980 purge included Bruce Bird, Al DiNoble, Bobby Applegate, and Don Wasley. Surprisingly, my attorney, David Braun, was hired to succeed Bruce and to oversee all US record operations for PolyGram.

Once the undisputed champion of new record companies, Casablanca was now nothing more than a vanity label. From 1981 to 1985, PolyGram used Casablanca as a dumping ground for artists and soundtracks—they even threw rereleases from their newly acquired 20
^th
Century Fox Records catalog onto the label. At some point in 1981, the company shifted headquarters to New York (to 810 Seventh Avenue, the very same building where Buddah was located), and 8255 Sunset was vacated. While virtually all product issued during this time was forgettable, one release did stand out. In the summer of 1983, the soundtrack of
Flashdance
—with its megahits “Maniac,” by Michael Sembello, and “(What a Feeling) Flashdance,” by Irene Cara—sold over six million copies. I thought of all the lifeblood we had pumped into Casablanca through the lean years; all the bragging and boasting; all the deal making, risk taking, swindling, and finagling. Now the biggest-selling album in Casablanca history had arrived, and the label wasn’t much more than a name on a door, two phones, and a couple of Kelly Girl staffers. Those fuckers!

On November 18, 1985, the soundtrack of
A Chorus Line
was released. It was the final album issued on the original Casablanca Records label. Eleven years and 289 albums by over 140 artists. It was a hell of a ride.

As for Neil, he rebounded as quickly as I would have expected—or, at least, he attempted to. He took out a full-page ad in the February 23, 1980 issue of
Billboard
that read, “To my Casablanca family and friends—here’s looking at you, kids. See you in the sequel . . . coming soon. With love, appreciation and wishes for good fortune, Neil.” The ad featured a drawing of Humphrey Bogart walking away from the camera. Neil also sent a letter to the remaining Casablanca employees in which he quipped, “I’m still your landlord,” referring to the fact that he retained co-ownership of the buildings in which Casablanca was located.

By the end of February, Neil had designs for his new label laid out. Initially, he planned to call it BogArts, but he changed it to Boardwalk Entertainment. Neil, Jon Peters (Barbra Streisand’s former hairdresser and producer of
Caddyshack
and
A Star Is Born
), and Peter Guber were on the board of directors, and by August many former Casablanca employees had made the leap to Boardwalk—among them Irv Biegel, Ellen Wolf, David Shein, and Ruben Rodriguez. A young executive named Gary LeMel (who would eventually helm Warner’s worldwide music division) became Neil’s new right-hand man. Boardwalk’s first release was the Harry Chapin LP
Sequel,
in October 1980; and among the more notable names on its roster were Ringo Starr, the Ohio Players, Night Ranger (managed by Bruce Bird), and Joan Jett, who would deliver the label’s only No. 1 hit: “I Love Rock ’n Roll.” The roster represented the worst and the best of Neil’s Casablanca approach: he was signing past-their-prime stars (Starr) and finding new artists for a new generation (Night Ranger and Joan Jett). A few Casablanca acts showed up on Boardwalk, as well, including—tangentially, at least—Robin Williams; Robin had starred in the movie
Popeye,
and the label released the soundtrack. Boardwalk meandered along, scoring some decent hits, but nothing they did could compete with the fireworks we’d ignited at Casablanca.

Free of the Casablanca yoke, Neil was able to spend more time with his family, and he could pursue other interests, such as coaching Little League baseball. I rarely saw or spoke to him during this time. One day, probably in late 1980, I happened to be picking someone up at LAX when I ran into Neil near the baggage retrieval area. There was nothing awkward about the encounter. He seemed genuinely happy to see me, and I was happy to see him. We chatted briefly about our families and about business, and then we went our separate ways.

A year later, near the end of 1981, Neil went on tour with Carole Bayer Sager and Marvin Hamlisch. Carole was one of Neil’s Boardwalk acts, and he wanted to join her on the road for a short time. When he returned home, he complained to Joyce that he wasn’t feeling well, but because both Carole and Marvin had been suffering from the flu, they didn’t think much of it. Joyce had already booked a doctor’s appointment for herself, so Neil tagged along. The doctor told him that he didn’t have the flu, ordered a battery of tests, and finally diagnosed Neil with lymphoma. The disease was at an advanced stage. It had already consumed one of his kidneys.

News of his illness did not spread quickly. Neil had always been very guarded about his health. Once, in 1979, he didn’t show up at the office for several days. There were no phone calls, no messages, nothing—he was completely MIA. Fearing that something was terribly wrong, I went to his house and knocked on the door. When Joyce answered, I said to her, “I haven’t been able to reach Neil on the phone, and he hasn’t been in the office, and no one seems to know what’s going on.” She assured me that everything was fine, that Neil simply had a respiratory virus. This just shows that when it came to his health, Neil could be quite secretive. By the time he was diagnosed with cancer, I was no longer close to him, or Joyce, or Bruce. He received treatment, and his cancer went into remission briefly, but by early 1982, I had begun to hear rumors that he was very ill again.

I went to see Neil at home. The housekeeper answered the doorbell. I told her who I was, and she disappeared inside. A few moments later, Neil shuffled to the door. His eyebrows had fallen out and he was shockingly pale. The endlessly energetic man I’d known for decades was now a fragile husk; the infectious, madcap light in his eyes had gone out. He smiled and said he was glad to see me, and we walked out under the long portico to chat. I don’t remember much about our conversation, except that it was short. The effort of standing and talking for more than a few seconds was clearly exhausting him. He seemed so tired, and I didn’t want to impose. After only a few minutes, I made my excuses and left. That was the last time I saw him alive. Shortly after that, Neil was admitted to Cedars-Sinai for more intensive treatment. He would never leave. On May 8, 1982, Neil Bogart died at the age of thirty-nine.

I can see the memorial service as clearly as if I were there right now. It was held on May 11, a warm, sunny day, and the large funeral home was filled with Neil’s family and friends. I sat next to his mother and father, with whom I still had a warm relationship. The saddest of sights was his children and Joyce. I had been so close to them for a time, and the thought of his kids growing up without him overwhelmed me. I couldn’t stop crying. I had never before lost someone with whom I’d been so close. I thought about all those years, the thousands of days we’d spent in our adjoining offices. Every day we had fought battles together, not always knowing exactly what we were doing, but sure that we’d win in the end. Neil had given me my shot, taught me everything, and then set me loose.

As grief-stricken as I was, I was inspired to see the crowd that had turned out to honor Neil. The funeral home, which was huge, couldn’t come close to containing the turnout. There were as many people left standing outside as there were inside. I walked so many mourners up to the casket that I lost count. There were a lot of industry heavyweights. Mo Ostin and Joe Smith were among the Warner representatives; Art Kass, Jerry Sharell, Arnold Feldman, and Ron Weisner from Buddah were there, as was Morris Levy from Roulette. Executives from almost every record company in southern California were in attendance. So was nearly everyone who had ever worked at or with Casablanca: including me and Candy, Christy Hill, Cecil Holmes, Bruce Bird and his entire family, Peter and Lynda Guber, as well as Jeff Franklin and others from ATI. Bill Wardlow came, along with the publishers of
Billboard
and many of their staffers; there were also representatives from
Record World, Cashbox,
and the other trade papers. There were radio people from around the country. Dozens of artists and their managers from the Casablanca, Boardwalk, and Buddah days were there: Donna Summer, Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Joan Jett, Paul Jabara, Giorgio Moroder, Jacques Morali, Henri Belolo, Bill Aucoin, Frankie Crocker, and Roy Silver. Other stars and industry giants were also present—such as Dick Clark, Burt Bacharach, Marvin Hamlisch, Bill Withers, Bob Dylan, the Isley Brothers, Neil Diamond, and Gladys Knight and the Pips—many of whom gathered to sing “Gonna Keep an Eye on Us,” a song from
The First,
a Broadway musical about Neil’s boyhood idol Jackie Robinson.

So many images flashed through my head—our first meeting at my parents’ house in 1961, the job interview at Buddah and those awful purple walls. I thought about the guy who hired all his relatives and gave them Mercedeses. The office showman with his flash paper, lighter-fluid bonfires, gongs, and five-hundred-pound speakers. The guy who found KISS. The guy who beat Elvis. The guy who made disco. Who survived the Carson album fiasco. Who divorced Warner Brothers. Who sent boxes of Casablanca LPs to orphanages. Who dined with presidents. Who drove a Rolls Royce Corniche with a vanity plate that read “PS 203”—his Brooklyn elementary school. The guy with the big hair, the camel in his office, that smile, and that gleam in his eye. That inextinguishable gleam.

The image of Casablanca that most people are familiar with was painted by Frederic Dannen in his 1990 book
Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money inside the Music Business.
While I don’t mean to unduly disparage the book or its author,
Hit Men’s
portrait of Casablanca is deeply flawed. Dannen contacted Joyce Bogart-Trabulus and given her the false impression that he would write positively about Neil, and Joyce then asked me to contribute to the book. Somewhat reluctantly, I made some minor contributions. In the end, however, Dannen got most of his first-hand information from a single source: Danny Davis, VP of promotions. Danny hadn’t joined the company until late summer 1979—after I’d left, a good six years after the company had been founded, and long after most of the Casablanca story had been written. When the book came out, I compiled a laundry list of the falsehoods it contains.

Dannen’s chapter on Casablanca begins: “If you were cruising along Sunset Boulevard in the late seventies and saw what appeared to be an enormous Mercedes dealership, chances were good that you’d just stumbled upon the parking lot of Casablanca Records.” The “Mercedes dealership” was not at the Sunset location but at the Sherbourne building, which we used in 1974 and 1975. The staff parking lot on Sunset was behind the building and not visible from the street. Dannen also claims that 8255 Sunset was razed at some point. In fact, it’s still standing; as of this writing, it’s home to CineTel Films.

He also maintains that the Casablanca offices closed at 3:00 p.m. every day. While I can appreciate overstatement for humor’s sake, the comment is very misleading. We had a ton of fun at Casablanca, and we indulged in all the vices you’d expect, but that never kept us from working hard and putting in long hours. If people were regularly checking out in the middle of the afternoon it would not have escaped our notice. Neil and I (and many others) were typically in the office by seven or eight in the morning and often wouldn’t depart until seven at night, sometimes later.

Hit Men
also contains a story about a “drug girl” who dropped by Casablanca almost every day, like a deli waitress. To be sure, there was never a shortage of drugs—all varieties—on the premises. I had a stash in my desk drawer, Neil regularly indulged, and I’m also certain that many Casablanca people had their own connections, but there was no Casablanca drug girl. Several people (all of whom were at Casablanca after I left) have mentioned to me that a young relative of one of the newer Casablanca execs provided a lot of the drugs consumed during the late stages of the company’s existence; it seems to me that this drug girl anecdote is just a way to protect the true identity of the culprit—who was not female. Many of financial particulars in the book are wrong as well. And Dannen ends his Casablanca chapter by saying that Neil didn’t have a good ear for music. By every possible measure, Neil had one of the best ears in the business. Of course, he swung and missed a few times, but he certainly signed many more monster records and artists than he passed on. To complete the baseball metaphor, his batting average was way over the magic .300 mark—I would guess it was somewhere in the .750 range.

Dannen means to sound dramatic, to spin a good story, but a lot of what he describes just never happened. Others have written about Casablanca and hit closer to the mark, such as Elmore Leonard in his 1999 novel
Be Cool.
Yet it’s Dannen’s take that has, for many people, defined Casablanca.

Timing is everything, and
Hit Men
struck gold in that regard. In the early 1990s, an unexpected thing happened: the 1970s returned. Everything from fashion to movies to music was suddenly in retro mode. Perhaps it was inevitable, but I certainly never saw it coming. Then one day, in the early 1990s, I was killing some time in a retro clothing store, and I was taken aback to find several Casablanca T-shirts. The teenage girl working behind the counter saw me looking at the shirts and asked, “What is it about this Casablanca Records? Everyone stops and looks at these shirts with awe.” Next thing I knew, a home video called
Inside the Casbah: A Visual History of Casablanca Records
was released, and PolyGram issued a four-CD set entitled
The Casablanca Records Story.
We now seemed so popular it made me wonder if we’d missed an opportunity to brand our own line of clothing, as Coca-Cola had in the 1980s.

Casablanca Records was eventually absorbed by PolyGram, and, in 1998, Philips, PolyGram’s parent company, sold PolyGram to Seagram’s, which was then part of the Universal Music Group. In 2000, Tommy Mottola, Mariah Carey’s former manager and husband and past CEO of Sony Music, revived the Casablanca Records name. Lindsay Lohan was his premier act. Even though the only connection between Mottola and us was the logo art and the name, I was rooting for him, but for the life of me I could never figure out why he’d done it. If he had signed Donna Summer or Cher or anyone else who had been involved in the original company I might have understood, but unless he just took the name because he was a fan of the original Casablanca Records I don’t get it—there was no synergy there at all. Sadly, by the time Mottola came along, the music industry had changed dramatically and was facing a whole new set of challenges, so the revived Casablanca didn’t do much. As this is written, Casablanca is again dormant.

These days, when someone who knew Neil speaks about him, they often conclude by saying, “... and how amazing it would have been to see what he’d do in the next twenty years.” People often ask me what I think would have become of Neil Bogart had he lived. While he did see the dawn of the CD and MTV age, he effectively missed the MTV generation, and he never dreamed of such things as downloading, iPods, and YouTube. What would he have made of all this? How would he have adapted his record company to today’s music landscape? It all depends upon which Neil you mean: the Neil of the Buddah days and the early years of Casablanca, who took chances when others ran and hid; or the Neil who had begun to believe his own press and no longer had to fight and scratch his way to each success. I don’t have a definitive answer. I can tell you that Neil would likely have jumped right on the rap and hip-hop bandwagon. It sounds a little counterintuitive to say that a solidly Jewish guy would have synched with a largely African American cultural movement so quickly, but cultural differences posed no challenge for Neil—they were virtually invisible to him. He had an affinity for anything that was natural and not contrived. Parliament, for example, was as out-there as you could get, but despite the weird window dressing, George and his crew were doing what they wanted to do, not what they thought others wanted them to do. That’s exactly why Neil (and the rest of us) liked them. I think Neil would have seen the same thing in many rap or hip-hop artists. He also had a special feel for R&B music and street music, so he would have certainly been ahead of the curve on that.

As for MTV, Neil would have had an entire division devoted to ensuring that his product was always prominently featured. He would have handled the MTV powers the same way he handled the radio powers, and he would have hired the best video directors for his projects, maybe even securing them under exclusive contracts. Keep in mind that Casablanca was way ahead of most other labels when it came to using video and film for artist marketing and promotion.

I can also say with some certainty that Neil would have figured out how to thrive in the world of downloading. The initial industry reaction to downloading was to panic that product was being stolen and then to fight those who were stealing it tooth and nail. I think Neil would have been quick to acknowledge the inevitable growth and permanence of the downloading phenomenon, and he would have adapted to it much faster than others. I can clearly see him, being the promotion guy he was, gravitating toward things like Facebook and Twitter, making early overtures to the originator of Napster, and investing heavily in new media applications, from YouTube to Microsoft. The business model that most record companies follow today is outdated, and it has been for years. I think it’s likely that Neil would have shed that albatross to become a pioneer of the big 360 deals now being offered by companies like Live Nation to proven artists within the industry. He would have seen the Internet and downloading for what they are, just two new vehicles for getting music to the people, like vinyl, tape, and the CD were before them. As much as the landscape changes, people remain constant. Neil always believed that, and he would have believed it no matter when he lived.