Hunky Dory (Who Knew)

by Laurence Myers

  Lionel was delightfully crazy. On one of the several occasions that his mate Liza Minnelli got married, he hired a private jet and took his entire crowd to the wedding in New York. UK taxation was high in the sixties and none of Lionel’s wild extravagancies were tax-deductible. Even for the man who had written many hit songs including ‘Living Doll’ for Cliff Richard and Oliver! – the greatest ever British musical – he was spending way too much money.

  Lionel was a lovely man and in the early seventies I would try to extract him from his self-created financial quagmire. He had already sold all of his future royalties, including his interest in Oliver! and he was being pursued by the tax man and many creditors. American Express (‘Membership is a privilege’) were particularly intransigent and, after exploring all other possibilities, I told him that he had no choice other than to declare himself bankrupt. Apart from the financial implications, this was a terrible blow to his ego and it was one of the most difficult conversations I’ve ever had.

  Years later he came to our home for dinner so drunk and/or stoned that he bent his fork leaning on it as he fell asleep at the table. When he left he said that he wanted to go to a club to ‘find some pretty company’ and asked me if I would kindly arrange a car to take him. Of course, I said yes and, concerned that Lionel would not find his way home, told the driver to ‘keep the car at Mr Bart’s disposal for as long as he needs and charge the cost to my account.’ Lionel kept the car throughout the night, the following day and the following night. It was impossible to be angry with Lionel. Marsha and I were both really fond of him and we were delighted when Cameron Mackintosh – a mensch if ever there were one – as a condition of producing a highly successful revival of Oliver! at The London Palladium, negotiated that, during his lifetime, Lionel would have his income back from the production.

  We were at the first-night party and Lionel came over to me and said that he couldn’t remember if he should love or hate me. They say if you can remember the sixties you weren’t there. I assured him that he had no reason to hate me. Even though Oliver! was once again hailed as a huge hit for Lionel, he was not working productively and once again I tried to help him. Every composer wanted to collaborate with him, but he did not want to actually work. Don Black, the Tony and Olivier award-winning lyricist, told me that whenever they met for a work session Lionel suggested that they first had a cup of tea. He would then reminisce about the old days until the planned time was up. Don reckons that Lionel was afraid that his talent had deserted him and was frightened to put his head back above the parapet.

  7. DON ARDEN

  My first major music-business meeting involving Mickie Most was in 1964, with the legendary Don Arden, father of the now famous Sharon Osbourne.

  Don, who in his early days had been a singer/impersonator working the variety circuit, was by then a very successful promoter. He brought over Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent and other big US acts to the UK, and had recently promoted a UK tour by The Animals. Some months later, he had still not paid them the six thousand pounds that they had earned. The Animals’ manager, Mike Jeffery, was in America at the time and asked Mickie if he could persuade Arden to pay up.

  I wanted to show Mickie the great value of my accountancy acumen and suggested a meeting with Arden. Mickie explained to me that in the course of a dispute with the Bee Gees’ manager Robert Stigwood, Don had dangled Mr Stigwood out of a window by his ankles. In Mickie’s opinion the only thing that Don understood was violence, and this was something never covered in the exams to be a chartered accountant. Mickie had a plan B. He asked the mountainous Peter Grant, who had worked for Don as a tour manager, to come to the meeting. Being very confident the law was on our side in this issue, I was against bringing along a ‘heavy’, but as it was very early days in my relationship with Mickie, I went along with it.

  I put my accountant’s dark suit on for the meeting. Don had a posh office in Mayfair and as we waited, I heard Don screaming down the phone in his American gangster accent, threatening to have someone’s legs broken. I thought that the accent was rather poor but smiled weakly as we were shown into his office. Don knew why we were there and without the usual formalities a screaming match kicked off between Don on one side and Mickie and Peter on the other. Even in my dark suit I was totally ignored but eventually plucked up the courage to nervously intervene. After all these years, the details of the meeting have stayed in my mind.

  Me: ‘Excuse me, Mr Arden.’

  Don: ‘Who are you?’

  Me: ‘I am Laurence Myers and I formally represent The Animals in this matter.’ (Thus far, I was quite impressed with myself.)

  Don: ‘Oh, yeah?’

  Me: ‘Would you like to see my authority?’

  Don: (To Mickie) ‘Who is this schmuck?’

  Mickie: ‘He’s their accountant.’

  Don: (Looked at me as if I were an accountant.) ‘So, Accountant, what do you want?’

  Me: ‘You owe my clients money arising from their last tour.’

  Don: ‘Do I now?’

  Me: (Smugly I gave Don a pristine copy of the accounting I had prepared.) ‘Yes, you do, Mr Arden. Six thousand three hundred and seventy pounds.’

  Don: ‘So?’

  Me: ‘So you have to pay them.’ (I looked at Mickie, sure that he was impressed.)

  Don: (Without a glance, he tossed my beautifully presented accounts into his bin. There was a pause.) ‘Fuck off.’

  This was not in my script. Pulling myself up in my chair and pausing for dramatic effect, I said, ‘Mr Arden, if you do not pay, I … [another pause for dramatic effect] am going to issue a writ on behalf of my clients.’ I gave a self-satisfied ‘get out of that’ nod and sat back in my chair.

  Don replied, raising his eyebrows, ‘Are you now?’ He picked up his bin, walked over to a window – no doubt the same one as Mr Stigwood had been dangled from – and threw out the basket. ‘Listen, you little pisher,’ Don growled. ‘Get out of my fucking office or you’re next out of that window.’

  I paused, before offering a weak, ‘You’ll be hearing from our solicitors’ and hurried out of the office. Mickie followed me, laughing. Peter Grant stayed behind to execute plan B – smashing up the office – but, to my knowledge, Don never paid The Animals.

  Later on, Don and I became friendly to the point that one day he felt impelled to call me to warn that he was very sorry, he liked me very much but he was going to have to give my brother-in-law Larry Levene ‘a good smacking’. Larry had financed the making of a record by an artist who had been through Don’s hands. The disgruntled artist had called the B-side ‘Take the Money and Run’, and had credited the writer as being D. Arden. Don, who was surprisingly sensitive for a man who hung rivals out of windows, perceived this as a slight, hence his wish to reward Larry with a smacking. Larry had the good sense to call Don and resolve the issue without being smacked.

  8. MIDEM – THE MUSIC INDUSTRY ANNUAL GET-TOGETHER

  Midem, standing for Marché International du Disques et de l’Edition Musicale, is a music business market/ trade show that takes place in Cannes, France. It has been going for fifty years and I went to the very first one and didn’t miss a year until the eighties. We had a home in Cannes and by the seventies the Midem party that Marsha and I hosted was a very much sought-after invitation.

  Before the demise of the independent music publisher, owners of music copyrights met at Midem to buy and sell territorial rights. There are two copyrights in a record. One is in the written words and music of the song and is owned by the music publisher, and a separate copyright is in the recording, owned by whoever paid for the session. If you own the music copyright in the song of, say, ‘White Christmas’ (you should be so lucky) you’d never have to work again. Every time the song was used on a record, or played in public by anybody, you would be paid a royalty. If you owned the Bing Crosby recording of ‘White Christmas’, you would earn only from the sales of that record, from the public performance or use of that particular reco
rd, maybe in a film or in a commercial.

  Midem used to be full of people who had owned a record master or a publishing copyright, licensing their product on a territory-by-territory basis. Now Midem is attended by tens of thousands of people and takes over the whole of Cannes. The focus is the Palais des Festivals where participants take small booths as offices. The first Midem in 1967 was attended by about five hundred people. The English representatives were Mitch Murray and Peter Callander, very successful songwriters in their own right. They had invited Mickie Most – being an important producer and user of songs – as an honoured guest. Marsha and I together with Chris Most went along for the ride. The rooms at the Martinez hotel had been turned into offices and small independent music publishers from all over the world scurried from room to room, buying and selling copyrights. This was before the Common Market and it was possible to own the rights to a song in any European country. Now it is mainly populated by the large companies who use the date to arrange their own international conferences, and there are more lawyers than what we used to call ‘record men’.

  The gathering was closed by a gala concert featuring Nina Simone, Sonny and Cher and a young singer called Oliver, one of the early one-hit wonders. Oliver’s hit was ‘Good Morning Starshine’ from the musical Hair. The record was produced by the proudly gay Bob Crewe. Oliver had a wonderful voice but was not very charismatic. He was, however, very pretty. I’m just saying …

  Miss Simone took the opportunity to rant to her audience about how the industry, i.e. most of the people in the room that night, had cheated artists in general, black artists in particular, and very specifically, herself. She was not entirely wrong in her assertions and it must have been an irresistible opportunity for her to vent her spleen, but it sort of killed her performance.

  After the concert there was a big party and everybody including Sonny and Cher were on the dance floor. As was the style at the time, everybody danced with everybody else and I had my few minutes of bliss dancing with Cher. I think it is what inspired her to write ‘Little Man’.

  In 1973 Stig Anderson, a Swedish publisher, was working Midem, trying to place his recording of the Swedish entrant to the upcoming Eurovision Song Contest. It was a time when Scandinavian countries usually scored ‘nil points’ in the contest and he only managed to get deals in a few territories because some small record companies were prepared to take on this certain loser as a favour to Stig, who was a well-liked and much respected individual. Also ‘Waterloo’ sounded like a terrible title for a pop song. Cut to 1976, three years later, and all of the territorial deals for Abba were up. I was chatting with Bob Summer – the worldwide head of RCA Records – when he excused himself: ‘Sorry, Laurence, I have to run over to the Carlton hotel. It’s nearly three o’clock. Stig now wants to make a worldwide deal and has told the head of every major record company that he will be available at three. I have to go and line up with the others outside his suite.’ I guess that Bob was not early enough in the queue because Stig signed Abba to Polydor.

  At one Midem, Marsha and I found ourselves playing latenight poker with a bunch of guys including Mike Stoller who – with lyricist partner Jerry Leiber – were arguably the most successful writers of the era. They wrote many of Elvis’s early rock’n’roll hits including ‘Jailhouse Rock’, ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘King Creole’ as well as brilliant songs like ‘Is that All There Is’ for Peggy Lee. They also co-wrote ‘Pearl’s A Singer’, one of my favourite songs of all time, for Elkie Brooks.

  Mike and I became business friends and I often met with him and Jerry when I was in LA. We usually met at Nate’n Al’s, a very famous deli in Beverley Hills. There, nobody had a prestigious table and the waiters were famously indifferent to celebrities who ate there. Mike always teased Jerry for parking in the public car park thus saving a few dollars, but they were as close as brothers, and for a songwriter groupie like me spending time with them was a joy. At one point, Mike’s wife Corky, herself an accomplished musician, wanted to write a musical about lyricist Al Dubin. He and his composing partner Harry Warren wrote many of the songs for the hit musicals of the forties, including the outstanding 42nd Street. Al Dubin was an alcoholic and he died, unrecognised, in a gutter when he was fifty-four, broke and forgotten. I thought that it was a brilliant project and offered to get involved but, for a number of reasons, it never made it to the stage.

  For me the most amazing thing about our friendship was going to Mike’s home where he and Jerry would pitch their latest compositions to see if they would be of interest to any of the artists that I was involved with in the UK. Jerry Leiber with Mike Stoller at the piano, singing and playing their songs, hoping they would please me. It was like me auditioning Shakespeare for a new play.

  9. ALLEN KLEIN – THE MAN WHO CHANGED THE BUSINESS OF THE BUSINESS

  Allen Klein, who was to be a huge influence in my business life, also first became involved in the music business as an accountant. He was studying for his qualification while working for Fenton & Co., a New York firm that specialised in the entertainment business. He was not a disciplined employee and was soon fired for always being late. He did not bother to qualify but started his own small accountancy firm with a friend who had the necessary licence for the firm to able to practise.

  Allen earned a meagre living from accountancy for clients recommended by Don Kirshner, a close friend who was working for a small publishing firm in the Brill Building. This was the fabulous art deco office block on the corner of Broadway and 49th Street in Manhattan. The Brill Building was crammed full of music publishers and songwriters in small offices and studios; a one-stop-shop for anyone looking for a hit song. Don became one of the most successful music publishers of his era. He discovered and nurtured Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Neil Sedaka, Neil Diamond and Phil Spector. In the sixties, he was given the task of finding songs for The Monkees and called upon his old Brill Building writers to provide some hits. He was in no small way responsible for the incredible success of that show. Later on he did the same thing for The Archies, an animated TV series. It was for good reason that Don was known as the ‘the man with the golden ear’. Don features heavily in Beautiful, the wonderful musical about Carole King. I enjoyed it hugely, although it was strange seeing somebody I knew being portrayed on stage. I remember being halfway through a New York call from him when he said, ‘Hang on, Laurence,’ the line going dead for a minute, ‘I’m going through a tunnel.’ This was 1964 and he was calling me from his car, a truly astonishing thing more than fifty years ago.

  Both Allen and I used similar methods to audit record companies on behalf of our clients. I would start with the vinyl pressing orders. Having verified the number of records actually manufactured, I then established the difference between that number and the number on which they had actually paid royalties to the client, which was always considerably less. The record company would ascribe the difference to promotional copies, reserves for returns, discounts to retailers and other semi-fictional explanations, but in truth some of the major record companies institutionally cheated.

  Allen also invariably found unpaid monies for his artists. His pitch to attract prospective clients never changed (except for the figures). He would say, ‘I can get you a hundred thousand dollars.’ Even if he didn’t get that amount he always got themsomething substantial for which they were quite rightly grateful. Later, he refined this approach and the promised amount became considerably bigger.

  This is how Allen got to Mickie and came into my life. Sam Cooke – whom Allen would later manage – was signed to RCA records. When The Beatles were at their most successful, Allen asked Joe D’Imperio, his contact at RCA, what he would pay The Beatles if they switched to his label from EMI. ‘A million dollars advance and a royalty of 10 per cent’ was the answer. Allen then contrived a meeting with Brian Epstein, The Beatles’ long-time manager, and said: ‘I can get you two million dollars’ (he thought it was more impressive and figured that RCA
would go for it if pressed) ‘and a royalty of 10 per cent’. Brian had signed The Beatles and all of his other acts to EMI and, thanking Allen for the offer, said that he would stay loyal to EMI. They were paying The Beatles one old penny per single sold – about one-sixth of the payment Allen was offering, but Brian was not interested.

  Allen’s thinking was simple, but genius. If you asked a record company what they would pay an artist who was now successful on a rival company’s label, the answer would of course be a huge amount. It was like betting on a horse when the race was finished. If you asked them what they paid their own newly signed and unproven artist, the answer would be very different.

  I did not know Brian Epstein well but at a meeting we had some years later when I was trying to get his artists to record my writer’s songs, he confided in me that Allen was not someone that he would want to do business with. Brian was the most charming man but did not pursue my offer to provide him with songs from my songwriters, so maybe he didn’t want to do business with me either.

  In September 1964, Mike Jeffery, the manager of The Animals, was in New York meeting with top agent Jerry Brandt about possible work for the group. Jerry was a business friend of Allen, and introduced him to Mike. Through Mike, Allen learned that Mickie Most produced The Animals and that Mickie was a hot producer. The Dave Clark Five were going to appear in Get Yourself a Girl with Nancy Sinatra. Featuring in a Hollywood movie was something that no other contemporary British act had ever achieved, and this impressed Mike no end. Allen – with no basis of truth whatsoever – told Mike that he could get The Animals into an MGM movie and that they would be paid ten thousand dollars for the day’s work. Mike was definitely impressed and in return agreed to introduce Allen to Mickie.