Hunky Dory (Who Knew)

by Laurence Myers

  The offices on Canon Drive in Beverly Hills were astounding, a low-built block nesting amongst lush trees, surrounded by a parking lot that looked like a sales agency for Mercedes. My meeting was with Roy Silver himself, a charismatic man with an extraordinary personality. I thanked him for the extremely generous travel and hotel arrangements but he brushed my words away, indicating that he had merely asked his secretary to make the necessary bookings. There was clearly no ethos of budgetary control in the company coming from the boss.

  The label had two successful artists. Deep Purple were doing well with their debut album Shades of Deep Purple, the single ‘Hush’ from the album having made the Top 10 on the American charts. The only other successful act they had was Tiny Tim, whose novelty recording of ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’ – sung in a high falsetto – had made the Top 20.

  Commenting on the number of staff, and noting the number of Mercedes in the parking lot, I asked Roy how the company could afford such a large overhead out of its relatively modest success. Roy said his LA accountants were dealing with that and he only wanted to talk to me about the cost of setting up in the UK. I went through some figures but he was obviously not focusing on what I was saying. I had the distinct feeling that he had given no thought as to why I should be brought over at great expense. On the way out he introduced me to Tiny Tim, a very strange-looking young man. His American mother was the daughter of a rabbi and his Lebanese father was the son of a Maronite Christian priest. Mr Tim had managed to parlay his falsetto one-hit into something of a career. Other than the dubious honour of meeting Tiny Tim, the trip was a waste of my time and Bill Cosby’s money. Tetragrammaton never opened a London office, and predictably went bankrupt in 1971.

  Roy Silver was, however, a naturally talented chef of Chinese cooking. Later on, in 1976, when his showbiz career was somewhat in tatters, he opened an eponymous restaurant, which quickly became a very popular hangout for the LA glitterati. The Chinese food was excellent – he only used kosher chickens – but the real draw was that if you were a friend – and he had no enemies – he dragged you into the cloakroom and encouraged you to help yourself to cocaine from an extremely large jar that he kept behind the coats. Predictably, his restaurant followed his record company into bankruptcy in 1982. Not the last restaurant to disappear up the owner’s nose in a cloud of white powder.

  As with most LA restaurants, where you sat at Roy’s was an important statement of status. I was once there as a guest of an important film agent who, of course, had been allocated an appropriate ‘I am an important film agent’ table. During the course of our meal Tony Curtis came into the restaurant. Mr Curtis must have been well into his fifties at the time and arguably well past his box-office prime, but I was excited beyond belief to see him in the flesh. When I was a teenager I wanted to look like Tony Curtis, as did any boy my age that did not want to look like Elvis or Marlon Brando. Apart from the fact that as Jewish boys we were both circumcised, Mr Curtis and I had very little in common. Tony Curtis was slim, handsome and looked fantastic on screen. Laurence Myers was overweight and did not even look good in his wedding photos. Anyway, Curtis was now sitting a few tables away from me in the company of a very attractive blonde lady and I could not take my eyes off him. My host was sitting with his back to the focus of my attention and he asked me what I was looking at. In reverential tones I told him that I was looking at Tony Curtis. He did not even look round. ‘Tony Curtis? Can’t get arrested.’

  I was shocked at his callous attitude. ‘But it’s Tony Curtis, the one from Some Like it Hot and …’

  My host turned around, looked at him, turned back to me and said, ‘Look where he’s sitting. I told you, he can’t get arrested.’

  I love LA but I regret to say that the incident was, and no doubt still is, typical of the town. When you’re hot you’re hot and when you’re not you’re relegated to a ‘not hot’ table. Many years ago there was a wonderful sketch on Saturday Night Live which, for me, sums up the LA view of showbiz status. It went something like:

  Chevy Chase, playing a snotty maître d’ is standing at his greeter’s desk. John Belushi, playing an actor, asks if he could have a table for two. Chevy Chase, without looking up says, ‘No. Go away.’

  ‘I’m an actor,’ says Belushi.

  Chevy Case points to a long line of people standing patiently against a wall. ‘Go to the back of that line.’

  Belushi meekly does as told. After a while Chevy Chase goes over to him. ‘You working?’ asks Chevy Chase.

  ‘Yes.’ He gets moved up a couple of places.

  ‘Speaking part?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Belushi.’

  He gets moved up a bit more.

  ‘How many lines?’

  ‘Four lines,’ says Belushi.

  He gets moved down the line.

  And so it goes on, with Chase moving Belushi up and down the line until the famous producer Aaron Spelling, playing himself, comes in and gives Belushi a big ‘Hello’, at which point the Chevy Chase character physically removes a couple of diners by the scruff of their necks and ushers Belushi to a good table. It is one of the funniest sketches I have ever seen and I urge you to try to find it on YouTube.

  Saturday Night Live was, and remarkably still is, a huge and important TV show and in 1978 I was privileged to go and see the live taping, which was a great experience. I had gone to New York with John Goldstone, the producer of the Pythons’ Life of Brian, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam to try to help them to find the money to finance the film after EMI Films suddenly pulled out. Allen Klein had put up the money for my film The Greek Tycoon and he was my best shot. He read the script, but did not think it was funny. I admired Allen for many things, but not his sense of humour. Eric Idle is a really nice guy and even though I didn’t get the film financed, hanging with some Pythons was a great few days in New York. John and Eric took me along to the after-show party that Saturday Night Live always held after the broadcast, at No. 1 Fifth Avenue. I got to rub shoulders with the cast, and actually chatted a little with John Belushi. I think of that privilege whenever I watch The Blues Brothers on TV.

  In 1979 George Harrison put the money up to make Life of Brian. By then I owned GTO Films, a film-distribution company, and John Goldstone really wanted me to distribute the film and offered very favourable terms. Unfortunately, Bill Dunn, the American schmuck who was then running GTO Films for me, did not like the film and did not feel he was the right person to do it. He was an idiot for turning it down and I was a bigger idiot for not replacing him with someone with a sense of humour.

  13. THE LATER SIXTIES – SHOWBIZ, HERE I AM!

  Another client I got through my growing reputation as accountant/nanny/psychiatrist to the songwriters was Geoff Stephens, born in north London but then living in Southend. He was trying to earn a living as a songwriter and comedy writer and had some of his sketches accepted by the BBC.

  In 1964 he discovered Donovan, later to become a huge international star. Geoff told me he was walking along the front in Southend with Peter Eden – a pal who was also trying to get involved in the music business – when they saw a young man in blue denim and a cap, carrying a guitar. They stopped to chat to him and he played them a couple of songs. His music was very folky, and he was clearly a huge Bob Dylan fan, but he had a certain quality that encouraged Geoff and Peter to sign him for management. In 1965 they produced two albums, What’s Bin Did and What’s Bin Hid and Fairytale, for Pye Records. Both albums were folk-influenced. The first album included Donovan’s original recording of ‘Catch The Wind,’ which was released as a single and made No. 4 in the UK charts. The Pye albums were not particularly successful, probably because Pye was a crap record company. Geoff and Peter decided that they were not natural record producers and they brought Donovan to meet Mickie Most, which was when I met Geoff. The first album that Mickie produced with Donovan was Sunshine Superman, a change of direction away from folk and a huge hit.

  Inevitably, Donovan sought ne
w management and Geoff concentrated on his songwriting. His first big success was writing ‘The Crying Game’, a big hit for Dave Berry. It was a very classy song and in 1992 inspired director Neil Jordan to make a film of the same name. Geoff wrote that one by himself, but then concentrated on lyrics, and collaborated with a variety of composers, writing great songs like ‘There’s a Kind of Hush’ for Herman’s Hermits, ‘Semi-Detached Suburban Mr James’ for Manfred Mann and ‘I’ll Put You Together Again’ for Hot Chocolate.

  In 1966, Geoff came into my Regent Street office and played me a record called ‘Winchester Cathedral’. He said the record came about because he was tinkling on his piano with a half-developed song. It was going to be about a guy being despondent about a girl. He got the second half of the first line, ‘… You’re bringing me down’, but couldn’t come up with who was bringing his protagonist down. There was a picture of Winchester Cathedral on his wall and, as many composers do, rather than get stuck on a line he carried on writing the song with the dummy lyric, ‘Winchester Cathedral, you’re bringing me down.’ A bottle of vodka later he had finished the song in the style of Rudy Vallee, a twenties’ megaphone crooner. He went into the studio with John Carter, a multi-talented singer and composer who replicated the twenties’ vocal sound. The record cost Geoff three hundred and eighty pounds. In sober mode he was not at all confident that he could get a novelty record released and asked me if I wanted to put up half of the money and own half of the record.

  As fond as I was of Geoff, I had no wish to piss away a hundred and ninety pounds on a piece of nonsense. As Geoff often reminded me after the event, I didn’t even decline gracefully. I just laughed.

  There was no group so Geoff made up the name The New Vaudeville Band. The record went to No. 4 in the English charts, was No. 1 in the US charts for four weeks and sold over three million copies. Geoff made so much money from the record that, on my advice, he became a non-resident and went to live in Switzerland. I try to never think about ‘if onlys’ but that one was quite hard to put aside.

  The New Vaudeville Band was soon a household name, but there was no band to cash in on the success. Peter Grant was still the head of Rak Management without much to do. Manager and producer Simon Napier-Bell had asked Peter to take over the management of The Yardbirds, who were struggling financially in spite of their undoubted talent, but that hadn’t worked out. The Yardbirds split up and Peter needed to find an act to manage. I asked him if he wanted to put a band together, manage them and exploit the success of ‘Winchester Cathedral’. Peter did not pretend that he liked the record, but he pulled it off brilliantly until the public tired of the novelty. As a 10 per cent owner of Rak Management, I earned a little from The New Vaudeville Band, but nothing compared to ‘if only’.

  Probably as a consolation, Geoff allowed me to write the lyrics of a New Vaudeville Band B-side. My song was called ‘Uncle Gabriel’ and I wrote it under the name of Peter James – the names of the two children Marsha and I had had by then. The A-side was ‘The Bonnie and Clyde’. The record sold very few copies, probably just two, to Peter and James. It is so rare that even I don’t have a copy.

  Peter Grant then put together Led Zeppelin based around ex-Yardbird Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, a first-choice session musician who had played on Yardbirds recordings. John Bonham joined as drummer and Robert Plant was the charismatic lead singer. You may recall from my Don Arden story that Peter was not averse to using the threat of physical violence and his management style reflected this. There are many stories about Peter’s use of intimidation, some apocryphal, but I was in the room when he resolved a dispute with John Bonham, the Led Zeppelin drummer, by threatening in a voice to be believed: ‘Listen you c**t, can you play drums from a wheelchair?’

  As a shareholder in Rak Management, I enjoyed a small financial interest in Zep’s early career. Once, when I was in New York, Peter asked me to bring back a very large amount of cash. I was staying at The Americana hotel and I carefully placed the money in one of the safety-deposit boxes that were situated in the wall behind the reception desk. I was leaving the next day so that only gave me about eighteen hours in which to lose the key. Eighteen hours was enough, and when I went to check out the next day they had to call the safe company to break open the lock. The considerable cost of this was of course charged to me but was a small price to pay for not having to face Peter Grant and tell him that I had left his cash in a wallsafe in New York.

  Whilst still in practice I took over the management of The Tremeloes. They had started off as the backing band for Brian Poole, but had since gone out on their own. It was well after ‘Silence is Golden’ and they were no longer making hit records, but they had done very well and their financial affairs needed sorting out. They were also the publishers of ‘Yellow River,’ a song that they were going to record themselves but gave to a band called Christie, who had an enormous hit with it. I licensed it to Yellow Pages for an advertising campaign for six thousand pounds. It was probably far too little, but it was hard to get a guide. I liked the boys immensely, especially Alan Howard and Chip Hawkes, and I was sorry that I could not revive their recording career, but they were very sensible in accepting that they were a pop band and their time was over. They were very bright and carried on in the music business, writing, producing and managing other bands.

  Most pop artists had a three-year career. Typically, a band would put out four singles a year and then a best-of album. Containing all twelve tracks. The reason for this was that pop artists appealed to early teens and pre-teens. As the kids grew into their later teens, their musical tastes changed. This is, of course, a generalisation and I could do an analysis of the charts to prove my point but, to be honest, it would be a lot of work that I do not want to undertake, so just take my word for it.

  14. THE SOCIETY OF DISTINGUISHED SONGWRITERS – THE SODS

  As you may have gathered, I had a passionate admiration for songwriters. In the early sixties few artists wrote their own material. Top artists of the day like Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey, The Hollies, Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, Dusty Springfield and even Elvis Presley depended on songwriters for their ongoing success. The Beatles were the real start of the singer/songwriters movement and now of course it is rare to find a successful artist who does not write their own material.

  America had Goffin and King, Leiber and Stoller, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Neil Sedaka and others, most of whom were Jewish – as were Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein, Sammy Cahn and most of the other writers of the great American songbook. There must have been something in New York bagels.

  In the UK there was a coterie of successful songwriters, many of whom wrote with each other, swapping writing partners as might be expected in London’s swinging sixties. I thought that the artists whose careers they had started with a great song did not always appreciate how much they owed to that writer. I knew many UK songwriters well and I devised a scheme whereby, as a condition of a new artist being given a song that became a big hit, the songwriter would have some sort of interest in the artist’s subsequent career. More importantly, as part of my scheme, leading songwriters would pool a part of their income in a company owned by them – and me, of course – thus sharing in each other’s success. The high-earning managing partner of the company would also, of course, be me.

  Just before I left my accountancy practice in 1971, I invited some of the hottest songwriters in London to a dinner: Tony Macaulay, Mike Leander, Geoff Stephens, Don Black, Bill Martin, Barry Mason, Les Reed, Mitch Murray and Peter Callander. If I listed the songs that they had written between them it would take up the rest of this book. Don Black concentrated on films and theatre, working with Andrew Lloyd Webber, John Barry and many other of the best composers around, collecting Oscars, Tony Awards and an OBE on the way. I find it annoying that the contribution of lyricists is often forgotten when songs are credited. Sunset Boulevard is known as an ‘Andrew Lloyd Webber Musical’ but it would not have worked
so well without the lyrics and book of Don Black and Christopher Hampton. Bert Bacharach’s ‘songs’ may never have come to light without the genius of Hal David’s lyrics. Similarly, Elton John and lyricist Bernie Taupin.

  At great, unaffordable expense, I booked the private room at the fashionable trattoria Terrazza in Soho. Every one of the invitees turned up and found my carefully prepared document, explaining my brilliant scheme, on the table in front of them. They all looked through it, some of them more carefully than others, and all promised to take it home to study. I quickly realised that my scheme was a non-starter. These were all ambitious young guys with great faith in their own abilities and they were not ready to be unionised. My scheme was quickly forgotten and they got down to eating and drinking … and drinking … and drinking some more. I did not try to keep up with them. I kept myself unamused, totting up the cost as my guests ploughed through the restaurant’s expensive wine list.

  After the meal someone suggested that we should go somewhere and play poker. I had drunk enough to think that it was a splendid idea. In 1967, we had moved to a flat in St John’s Wood and I invited them all back there, where they added to the expense of the evening by cleaning me out at poker. Some of the writers had never met before and socially it was a great evening. Mitch Murray had such a good time he thought that they should all meet on a regular basis. He came up with the idea of forming The Society of Distinguished Songwriters (The SODS) and all of those who were at my dinner joined. There would be a King Sod and other offices. The membership of SODS has since expanded rapidly. Lionel Bart, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, Abba’s Bjorn and Benny, Queen’s Brian May and many other leading songwriters were later inducted into the society. They would meet on a monthly basis and, once a year, have a SODS’ night bash at a grand hotel when the members invited family and friends. I went along to the first of these, where Mitch Murray was the first King Sod. Marsha and I were invited to many SODS’ nights thereafter and they were great fun. The SODS themselves performed a cabaret that was always entertaining and the food and wine were of the highest order. The society is still going and quite rightly now dominated by a new generation of songwriters, but I have not been to a SODS night for many years.