And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records (9 page)

KISS clearly needed to headline. This would be tricky in markets where they had little or no airplay. ATI had to skip over whole areas of the country until we could establish the band on radio there. In the case of San Francisco, we never got airplay from the legendary KSAN-FM; station PD Tom Donahue was not crazy about the band, even though he was friends with Neil.

KISS did play small gigs in the market, and they began to establish a following, but this still did not translate into KSAN airplay. We waited until the demand for a live show in the market became overwhelming due to airplay and exposure from KFRC (the Top 40 station), outlying AOR stations, and the print media. Then the band went back to San Francisco and did a headlining arena show for Bill Graham. Graham had avoided presenting KISS in other markets. I think he just did not like the band and the kind of rock they represented. I found his reluctance interesting, because he shared a Hungarian Jewish heritage with Gene Simmons.

With KISS finally off and running, we turned our attention to other ventures. One of the more interesting plans was for Neil to do a series of musical greeting cards with Bob Crewe of BC Generations. (Bob was famous for writing songs with and producing The Four Seasons.) The first card was to feature the song “My Happy Birthday Baby.” The idea was decades ahead of its time, and unfortunately it went nowhere; musical greeting cards are, of course, sold widely today.

We also concentrated on expanding our roster of artists, and one of the first we signed was Parliament, fronted by creator George Clinton. To call George unique would be a vast understatement, and there was nothing understated about George Clinton. He was a creative genius whose music was new and fresh and totally of his own devising. Never mind that this music—an almost indescribable mix of doo-wop and gospel-tinged jazz with heavy grooves and the volume of Black Sabbath—was almost completely unmarketable. Clinton had taken his music, his flair for the dramatic, and his indomitable personality and carved out an exclusive market niche. He called his music P-funk, and everything associated with it was funkified. He didn’t invent the term or the music (it had grown out of jazz and R&B circles decades before, and James Brown had pioneered it in the 1960s), but he took it in an extreme direction, blending over-the-top ideas and quirks to create his own brand. George was especially adept at role-playing. He was fond of claiming that he had thirteen distinct personalities—including Dimwit, Sneaky, Speedy, Doped, and Sexy—whose names he’d recite like the names of the dwarves in some spaced-out reading of
Snow White.

Clinton had created a following that was far more intense than those of groups like the Ohio Players or Average White Band. Parliament’s fans, which he lovingly dubbed “maggot brains” (making George the “maggot overlord”), would be there for every album and every concert. But, given the way that George wrote and recorded his music, the band would not produce a hit single, at least not one that would cross over from R&B to pop radio.

The origins of Parliament are confusing, at best. George grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey, where he formed a doo-wop ensemble called The Parliaments in the late 1950s. That group eventually expanded, and, owing to a dispute with the record company that owned the rights to the band’s name, George renamed the outfit Funkadelic. He released several successful albums for Westbound Records under the name Funkadelic, but by 1974 he’d decided to revive the Parliament moniker and was looking for a record label, even though the player rosters of Funkadelic and Parliament were almost exactly the same. This was an unusual scenario, because we were entering into an agreement whereby we would forgo any proprietary ownership of Parliament; plus, it could be argued that the coexistence of Funkadelic and Parliament would water down the impact of both bands. But Neil didn’t care; he was convinced that George was a moneymaker, no matter what name he used.

Everyone at Casablanca thought Clinton’s management team of Ron Strassner and Cholly Bassoline were hoods. They looked just like Damon Runyon characters, with their fedoras and long black coats, and their attitude was reminiscent of the Mob. But I liked them and their realistic way of looking at the business and the people they were representing. They were certainly not Mob-oriented. Rather like their client, George Clinton, they had their own Detroit Purple Gang kind of flair.

George and Archie Ivy—who was, more or less, George’s personal assistant—would visit me at Casablanca, and over copious piles of weed and blow (George once brought in some uncut and very potent coke, declaring that anyone who tried it would speak Spanish, as the stuff “hadn’t cleared customs yet”), they would pontificate for hours about how they were going to develop Parliament’s stage show into an otherworldly display of pageantry and pomp and how they needed half a zillion dollars to do it. Many times, I had no idea what they were talking about. My eyes would glaze over, and George would ramble on, giving voice to every thought that came into his head, stream-of-consciousness-style, like William Faulkner gone jive. I would stare at him and wonder, “Man, do you come with subtitles?” I often had to ask Archie or one of the two Purple Gang look-alikes, Cholly and Ron, to translate George for me, but sometimes even they didn’t have a clue. But so what if we didn’t understand what they were trying to explain to us? We gave them the money anyway. These advances were always against future royalties, and Parliament sold enough product to make us comfortable with the arrangement. This eventually became a point of contention, as George would claim that he was owed royalties—he seemed to have forgotten about the tour advances.

To look at Parliament and their absurd stage show—which eventually came to include an enormous UFO called the Mothership (which would land onstage in a billowing cloud of dry-ice fog), and a giant skull with a glowing four-foot doobie dangling from its mouth—you would think there would be a never-ending series of strange Parliament tales to tell. But, to be truthful, the band was really fun to work with, and aside from a few battles of the kind that typically occur between artists and their record companies, everything went well between us. In fact, I believe that we were the only people who were able to understand and put up with some of their shenanigans—and they with ours.

 

 

Late one night in April 1974, I received a call from Eddie Pugh. Eddie was Warner’s Florida promotion man, and for him to ring me at home at such a late hour was a real surprise. I was half asleep when he called, and he was talking so fast that he was ten seconds into his story before I could figure out what he was talking about. I pieced together something about a progressive rock station in Fort Lauderdale (WSHE) that on April 20 had held a kissing contest in which the couple who kissed the longest won some prizes, including a few KISS albums. The response to the contest had been great, and Eddie wanted to bring it to our attention. I was elated to hear the news, seeing the potential for a national marketing blitz.

I cannot overemphasize how vital it was to our early success to have relationships with people like Eddie—people who not only had the acumen to recognize a good thing when they saw it but also the generosity to bring it to our attention. Eddie Pugh was different from most promotion people, even within Warner Brothers. Warner had very little black product in the mid-1970s, and Eddie, who was black, was the kind of promotion man who was always looking for a challenge, so rather than stay within the narrow confines of Warner’s small R&B catalog, he would promote whatever he had, regardless of its genre. Here was a guy who covered all the bases. Neil and I were so impressed by Eddie that we eventually hired him.

As soon I said goodbye to Eddie, I called Neil. By the next morning, he had a plan. We would arrange for radio stations throughout the country to compete in a huge national Kiss-Off. Eddie had not been the only one to notice the success of the WSHE contest. Scott Shannon, a DJ at WMAK in Nashville, had the inspired idea for KISS to record a cover of Bobby Rydell’s “Kissin’ Time” as part of the promotion. Neil loved it. KISS hated the thought, however. They and their producers, Kenny Kerner and Richie Wise, were dead set against it; they didn’t want to record a cover song when they were perfectly capable of writing their own material. Neil always tried to be positive—positive people were successful people, as far as he was concerned—but if he couldn’t get his way through ebullient enthusiasm, he had no problem rolling up his sleeves and wrestling you to the ground. After his cajoling had failed (and, I’ll admit, KISS doing Bobby Rydell struck me as pretty odd, but I wasn’t about to tell Neil that), he told them, “Look, either you record the song or we’ll pull our support for you.”

It was pure bluff. KISS was our first signing, and, frankly, they were the only thing we had going for us. Neil would never have purposefully killed their career. I knew this, but the one bit of leverage Neil had was that the KISS team was even greener than we were. And with the band’s outlandish appearance and their refusal to tone down their gimmick, they had to recognize that their chances of finding another record company that believed in them were limited. They caved. Neil won, but he didn’t want to fracture the relationship, so he softened his stance. “C‘mon guys, the promotion will work great, and it’s just one song. As a concession, I promise that the song will only be a single, and not part of any future KISS album.” By April 26, KISS was back at Bell Sound Studios in Manhattan, cutting the track in one twelve-hour session. We rush released “Kissin’ Time” as a single and, in direct violation of Neil’s promise, we included it on all new pressings of KISS’s first album starting in June.

The series of kissing contests, which were collectively dubbed “The Great Kiss-Off,” began on May 10. The single’s lyrics contained the names of many cities around the country, and we used this to our advantage, matching those cities to radio markets: WAYS (Charlotte), WOKY (Milwaukee), WIXY (Cleveland), WSAJ (Cincinnati), WCFL (Chicago), KLIF (Dallas), WFIL (Philly), WQXI (Atlanta), WMAK (Nashville), KJR (Seattle), CKLW (Detroit), KILT (Houston), and WPIX (New York). The names of all these stations/markets, except for Houston and New York, were included in the reworked lyrics for the single. We ran a prominent ad in the May 18, 1974 issue of
Billboard
(which would have hit newsstands around May 7) to bring national industry attention to the events. The lyrics made radio airplay easier to come by, because radio stations loved to play songs that mentioned their city.

Here is how the event worked. First, the stations would have a kissing contest in their own markets. Then the local winners would compete for the national title. The publicity would be enormous, and it would go on for many weeks, because it spanned both the local contests and the final national event.

On June 8, the day of the National Kiss-Off, Neil, Buck, Joyce, and I went to Woodfield Mall (then the largest in the world) in Schaumburg, Illinois, just outside of Chicago. KISS came too, and they walked around the mall in full regalia. There was heavy local media coverage for the event, and many Chicago-area celebrities were on hand. Radio personality Larry Lujack was master of ceremonies. A stage had been erected in a large open area in the middle of the mall. Neil got up on the stage and started asking the crowd for donations to a local hospital charity. He was failing miserably—I don’t think he raised a single dollar. After an hour or so, he had Buck go up to the next level of the mall, stand at the railing where he could see the stage below, and wait for a cue. Again Neil addressed the respectably large crowd that had gathered on both levels, but this time he made it about the children: “C’mon folks, the children really need your money.” At that moment, Buck released a big stack of one-dollar bills into the air, and suddenly it was raining money. People on all parts of the upper level started throwing down ones and fives, and a few tens and twenties—hundreds of them. People on the lower level were picking up the bills, crumpling them, and throwing them toward the stage. It’s a miracle Neil didn’t incite a riot. Aside from performing these onstage fiduciary duties, Neil or I, using a bank of phones, reported every half hour to the participating radio stations on how their contestants were faring. The stations, in turn, aired the results, building excitement in each city. These were mostly Top 40 stations, as Neil wanted to use the outlets that had the highest ratings. Besides, few rock stations would participate in such an obviously commercial event. The national media, television and print, picked up the story, and the Kiss-Off became one of the most successful KISS promotions ever, though the contestants seemed to garner more attention than the band.

While our relationship with Warner Brothers had been touch and go to this point, near the end of April 1974, Warner asked (and paid) us to put two of their bands on our label. The company had finally come to realize that certain bands—for reasons related to their type of music, their band members, and/or their management—just did not fit within their organization. But Warner had contracts to fulfill. Placing these bands with us killed two birds with one stone: contractual obligations were met and the artists were gotten rid of with no hard feelings. One of these artists was Marc Bolan of T.Rex (“Bang a Gong [Get It On]”) fame. Neil and I had both followed Bolan’s career to some degree (it was impossible not to), but we didn’t become huge fans of his until we met him. Marc had lived a fast, hard life. He’d enjoyed (probably a bit too much) the spoils of stardom, but he impressed us no end with his renewed vigor and earnest commitment to living a clean life and recapturing the status he’d enjoyed in years past. In retrospect—knowing that Marc would die just a few years later—it’s easy to view this as an example of signing someone on the way down (even though we’d been persuaded to do so), but neither of us had seen it that way at the time. Casablanca was nothing yet, and Bolan gave us credibility in the rock arena, as he was considered by many to be a member of the English rock elite. Marc was an extremely nice guy. He only visited the offices a handful of times, usually with his girlfriend, a pretty woman with refined features and a café-au-lait complexion. Despite his stature in the biz, he was easy to work with and not the least bit elitist. To this day, I can’t imagine what caused Warner to want to get rid of him.

The other artist was Fanny, one of the first all-female rock bands. Despite their pioneer status, Fanny is never mentioned in any of the latter-day “women in rock” documentaries. Roy Silver, Fanny’s manager, was a major character in the business (he also managed Jackson Browne). He had a flair that was definitely different. We became involved in various ventures with him, including a new restaurant concept. Roy’s restaurant, aptly called Roy’s, fused Asian and American cuisines. It became popular with industry types, and it featured a private room—not much more than a large booth with three walls and a curtain—where sex or drugs were almost guaranteed upon entry. Since Neil (or maybe it was the company; I can’t recall) was a big investor in the restaurant, we were asked to have our expense account meals there whenever possible.

Roy had many close friends in the music business, including Bob Gibson, Gary Stromberg, and Stewart Levine, all of whom worked with us in various capacities. Neil hired Gibson and Stromberg’s firm to do our publicity, which caused a rift with Warner—its PR department took the hiring as a slap in the face. But Neil hadn’t done it because he thought Warner was incompetent; rather, he’d wanted to make sure we had the attention necessary to generate as much press for our artists (especially KISS) and our company as possible. With Warner being so large, we had some concern that a new subsidiary label like ours would be a low priority. Shortly after hiring Gibson and Stromberg, we began to hear rumors that we would no longer be getting any help from the Warner PR department. I’m sure it did not sit well with Warner that we were paying Gibson-Stromberg with Warner money. Bob Regehr, the head of Warner’s PR, was not pleased with us, and things got sticky between us and his department. Make no mistake, this was his department: Mo Ostin and Joe Smith did not make Regehr do anything he did not want to do.

The one cool thing that his PR people came up with was a black T-shirt that had the name “KISS” spelled out on it with hundreds of rhinestones. The band’s road crew had made their own shirts using this design. Someone from Warner must have seen them at the Casablanca launch party and made the shrewd observation that a mass-produced version might be good promotional merchandise. Unfortunately, they only produced a few hundred of the shirts, which almost immediately became collector’s items. I was able to send some out to contacts in the radio biz, but because of the limited supply, not everyone got one. The shirts were snug, so they definitely looked best on women. Even though I was fairly trim at the time, I could never wear one. When we told the Warner people that we would need more shirts, they explained that they cost almost $20 apiece to manufacture (a fortune in those days); all the rhinestones had to be hand applied, and there was no way they were going to spend more money on them.

With the excitement surrounding KISS and all the publicity, airplay, and concerts, we thought the album would sell like hotcakes. But for some reason, we were stuck at about one hundred thousand units. Looking into the problem brought us more conflict with the Warner promotions department. Buck Reingold was given a tape from an unknown source of a conference call in which the head of promotion, Gary Davis, told his field staff to ignore the product of the custom labels and only work the Warner-owned artists. This really pissed us off, because part of our deal with Warner was that they would help us promote our product. We knew that alone we had very little pull at Warner, so we distributed copies of the tape to Warner’s other subsidiary labels. After enough complaints from the likes of Chrysalis and Capricorn (who meant a lot more to the bottom line at Warner than we did), Davis was looking for another gig. We also ferreted out the real reason the KISS product was stuck in sales limbo: it was back ordered to the tune of over one hundred thousand units. Warner Brothers claimed that they were having some manufacturing problems, so they were only pressing their albums and not the custom-label product like ours.

Although our tenuous relationship with Warner was weighing on us, there was plenty of exciting news at the office. In June we’d signed the Hudson Brothers, a musical trio out of Portland. Mark Hudson would go on to become a very successful songwriter, Brett Hudson became a movie and TV producer, and Bill Hudson married Goldie Hawn, with whom he fathered actress Kate Hudson. The Hudson Brothers came with the added bonus of a deal with CBS Television to produce an hour-long summer replacement series featuring the band.
The Hudson Brothers Show
was already in production, with a premiere date of July 31. Neil became friendly with the show’s producer, Chris Bearde, who had helmed the incredibly popular
Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour
for the previous four years. We also got to know the Hudson Brothers’ manager, David Joseph. These were good people to know, as they would provide us with several key artists for our roster in the years to come.