Last night you said that a particular boxer was your boxer, that you owned him.
Yeah. I pay for his training. In the hopes that he would eventually win a lot of money for me. Get that back and some more money, too. In a sense, I'm sort of like a financier.
It's weird that the Baptist Church is the sponsor of this sport which, when you get down to it, is actually quite brutal.
If you don't like violence, if you are a pacifist, the whole idea of boxing will just rub you wrong. I'm a pacifist in the sense that I don't like war, or killing, I don't believe in physical violence through anger. This is controlled violence. There is anger involved, perhaps, but more skill. If you are angry in the ring you cannot defend yourself, or be offensive, because you are fighting through anger. You have to train, for the skills, how to use your mind and how to use your body. You have to have the absence of anger. In that sense, I can sort of defend it.
A couple of the Detroit Lions are in the beginning of What's Going On. In fact, you gave them gold records.
Yes. Lem Barney and Mel Farr. I thought of doing that because they weren't professional singers, and I thought they would be a little different. Only football players can do that thing they do. They know how to whoop it up.
Did you ever show up at that pop festival in Devonshire Downs, Los Angeles, a couple of years ago?
No. I was pretty angry with the management. It was a billing problem, and I really exploded. That was the period right after "Grapevine." They had a list of groups there I'd never heard of like the Fingertips and the Shoeshines, the Doorknobs. And then they had down there, 'And many many others." That's where I was, and I really got upset about it. As they say, my ego had been hurt.
What about Martin Luther King...
You sure you're not with the Senate Investigating Committee?
What about the Martin Luther King concert? Why did you cancel out?
Because I got a thing, a psychological hangup about performing live. I don't think I'll ever enjoy performing. And I would've been very good, too. I was coming onto it. There's a knack; you have to be tremendously relaxed to be a good performer. It had taken years, but I was beginning to settle down. When I say "relaxed," you can be as nervous as hell, but you can't show it in any form. It's like that control valve. Although your heart is going 100 miles an hour-especially if it's a super-important engagement-you simply have to control it. You build a thing inside you and you do it...but it's too nerve wracking. And it doesn't matter whether a crowd likes you or not. Not to me. I'm just extremely nervous about singing. I want to be liked so much, and I've got such a tremendous ego. If it's deflated or punctured or hurt at all, I'll withdraw into my own little pain. That's what's basically happened to me.
One more question: Tammi Terrell. How much do you know about what happened to her?
I don't know anything about what happened. And if I did, I would be willing to tell.
But it's true that the media have made...
Yeah, they've made monsters out of people who probably aren't responsible. I never read any accounts where I did anything detrimental to her.
Did that affect your going away from the scene?
Somewhat.
Somewhat or a lot?
Somewhat.
Were you serious yesterday when you said that women should be made inferior to men?
Yes, I believe that.
If you were a woman, you think you would like that?
I think I would like that.
Being domestic and subordinate?
Yes, sir. You got it, baby.
Are you bothered by Women's Liberation?
Generally I'm not bothered by anything. Let them liberate themselves, if they must. That's their right. And I do believe in rights. I can still think how I feel.
But that's exactly contrary to what you're saying. They want to be "liberated," and you say they should be made to be inferior.
I didn't say "made to be," but sort of "made to feel." [laughs]
You're lucky you know how to laugh at the right places.
I just lost the women of America... can't afford to do that, Marv. They should be liberated, if they want to be-just like the blacks. Should we give them all their rights? I think they should have them, yes... While they have them, make them feel a little inferior.
How can you say that?
That's the same way I feel about women.
As a black man, do you want to be made to feel a little inferior?
As a black man, I am made to feel a little inferior. Something that comes natural. It comes naturally to whites. Most whites feel that way about blacks. Some of them, in spite of feeling that they are, oh, liberal... "Well, I am a liberal white man, I'm really groovy, I like those blacks..." but invariably, the fact is his genes and hormones and everything in him tells him that he is superior. Subconsciously it comes across. It shows in an eye, a gesture, little bitty things that, as blacks, we can pick up. It is passed down from parents' generations. As time goes on, I think it will erase itself. As kids grow up and the process of dying and being born goes on, it will be cool. But it takes time.
You're patient.
I'm patient for thirty, forty, fifty or so years. After that I'm gone. If it happens in my time-Hooray, you know?
-April27, 1972
Rolling Stone
At the beginning of another April twelve years later, on the eve of his forty-fifth birthday, Marvin Gaye was shot to death by his own father, the Reverend Marvin Gaye, Sr. His father claimed self-defense, saying that his son was on drugs and was attacking him. He pleaded no contest to a charge of voluntary manslaughter, and in November he was given five years' probation. By then, Marvin's mother had sued for divorce. I helped David Ritz, who would write a biography of Gaye, with the obituary in Rolling Stone. Reading the story from 1972, I shivered as I remembered that Marvin Gaye, unsteady as he was about so many things, felt as though he could do anything he wanted. He'd been competitive all his life, he'd said, but hadn't participated in sports as a kid "because my father loved ...I imagine he overloved me, if that's possible."
Three Dog Might:
SEE HOW THEY RUN!
ost of the musicians in this book have made a lasting impression on music or on the pop scene. Three Dog Night have not. They got a cover story primarily because _ their success in August 1972 was too big, too persistent to ignore.
Three Dog Night, as I've written, was one of those acts that no one else at Rolling Stone cared to do.
Like Chicago, they were a hit-making machine devoid of any outstanding personalities. Unlike almost every other rock artist we covered, they didn't write their own music. Yet they were as big as any band around, and on tour, they were breaking attendance records that had belonged to the Beatles and the Stones.
So, given the assignment, I had a challenge on my hands. What would I write about them?I found my story by looking into the machine behind the musicians, and at the men who operated the machinery. Rolling Stone had not yet delved into a rock band's management structure, beyond quoting the usual complaints about labels and royalties.
Three Dog Night were all about management, and booking, and publicity. They were the stars of a team that numbered, by one executive's estimate, 150 people, from producers who helped them pick their hits to business managers who helped them invest their money, in preparation, perhaps, for the dog days that lay ahead.
T o m W I T C H E R o W N S AND o P E R AT E s The Pet Palace in San Francisco. For thirty years now, he has been teaching people how to train their dogs. `A good dog," he says, "is a welltrained dog. One that respects the master's voice and obeys his every command."
Burt Jacobs manages Three Dog Night. For four years, he has been overseeing the booking of the acts managed by Reb Foster Associates, Beverly Hills: Gayle McCormick, Kindred, Steppenwolf, John Kay, and most of all, Three Dog Night. Three nights a week when possible, and in the biggest houses available-these days, ball parks like Braves Stadium in Atlanta, or the
Cotton Bowl in Dallas.
Jacobs will not tell his age ("Pass"). All we know for certain is that his head is topped by a small bowl of sprayed brown hair. His is an aggressive, can-do face, lightly shaded by tinted glasses. His voice is reasoned, shaded only lightly by his Brooklyn upbringing. Looks deceive. When he talks, he is the trainer: "I decide where they're gonna go, what they get paid, all that. I think a fair ceiling-even for a group like Three Dog Night-I don't want more than $25,000 on a regular date, against a percentage. If I do business and fill the ball park or whatever, I want to walk out with a big chunk of money. If I don't do the business I should, then I don't deserve phenomenal money. I won't ask, like some acts, for $60,000 on regular dates."
I? I? I?
"I make the decisions," says Jacobs, who owns one-third of Reb Foster Associates. He was managing Steppenwolf when he combined with Foster and Three Dog. "If they bitch and I can't explain it to them and convince them why I'm doing it, it gets down to either they don't do the date, or we shouldn't be their manager. We haven't had that problem. I've been fortunate in that I've been right most of the time."
Around the corner from his master's voice, Jimmy Greenspoon sits in the Reb Foster Associates conference room, a dark and earthy room, like all the executives' offices. Foster likes things dark and earthy: he even hired a professional decorator to ensure an organic decor. A skylight allows a small rectangle of sun to pour in against the shingled side wall.
Greenspoon is Three Dog Night's organist and bad boy: he's the one who pissed into the beer can and coolly watched the groupie guzzle while the other Dogs reeled out of the hotel room, gagging and giggling. Jimmy looks wry through tortured eyes and long, curly red hair, like a Dan Hicks ready to snap. Appearances deceive.
About Burt Jacobs' ball park bookings: "There's time to discuss it, but basically if we bitch and holler and scream and give him shit. . .then he'll bitch and holler and give us shit. If we give him enough reasons-he'll come up with about twenty more."
Michael Allsup, lead guitar for Three Dog Night, looks like a rock and rolling Yorkshire terrier. He is the smallest Dog, and, hustling down the corridors at NBC, past Flip Wilson's studios, past Laugh-In, toward the taping of the band's own TV special, he talks, hopheaded-happily, about upcoming jobs at stadiums in Georgia and Texas, and a festival in North Carolina, and comes off as maybe the most enthusiastic Dog as well.
Allsup's grown accustomed to the pace. "But we want to build a thing," he says. "There's so much more to do than just play music. We want to entertain the kids and do as much as we can, and do theatrics. Those video screens we're using now-that's really no big thing, but it helps a lot for those places. What's a drag is to play on a football field facing downfield. Then you got three video men in front, and, `What am I doing here?' It's just like fulfilling a commitment or something. That's when you start feeling the machinery of a business. But we're not ashamed of being businessmen, because we all love the music, and that's no hype, but I don't feel we should have to be ashamed for being professionals, either."
There is a certain defensiveness about Three Dog Night: The product is such an overwhelming success, but there is something about a showbiz factor, an ingredient of salesmanship, and their relationship to-oh, the public. The salesman may embrace the product, door-to-door, but he can't quite explain it, rationalize it, sell it, to friends.
And Michael Allsup casually articulates a light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel vision. He may gripe at the kind of commercial growth that has forced his firm into a distance from "the kids," but he winds up unable to apologize for being a success, for being good at a good job.
But apologies are not in order. Three Dog Night are at the top of the rock and roll heap for numerous good reasons, most of them having to do with a stage act among the most energetic, professional, and poppily satisfying in existence; music that is by turns commercial and soulful and steadily maturing, and last, but quite possibly foremost, a backup organization of personal, business, financial, and road management to rival any such machine in the business.
It is, after all, a business, beginning with investments like the $ 3 5,000 that Reb Foster, Bill Utley, and Burt Jacobs poured into Three Dog Night over eighteen months. "At that time," says Utley, the president of Reb Foster Associates, "if you want an indication of how much faith we had in them, that was all the money we had. There wasn't any more."
It is a business, if you choose to make your living through music, and your first paydays are Wednesday nights, Talent Night, at the Apollo Theater-if you win.
Chuck Negron, Three Dog's lanky tenor, was a regular at the Apollo with his group, the Rondells.
"There was a $15 prize, but it was the toughest audience you could play in front of. They scraped to get the money to get in there, and if you were bad, they let you know. The first time we were down there, this girl was on before us, singing, and that audience started to boo her and the microphone started disappearing. She started falling, followed it all the way to the ground and it just went away, and the guy came running out-lights, boom-boom, and they got her off the stage, and we were on next. And we were the only white act on the show. But we worked hard and that time, we won the $15. That got me on top of it."
It is business, if you finally get a hit and don't get paid. Danny Hutton, the singing Dog with the dark locks and the fit physique-he always looks like he's just won the lead role in Hair-has been on eleven record labels in ten years, starting at age 19. He was a crate packer at the Disney studios in Burbank, first, then began record-producing, songwriting, and, when forced, singing. In 1965, as a writer on the new Hanna Barbera label, he recorded "Roses and Rainbows," which hit in enough parts of the country to settle near the middle of the Hot 100. For writing the melody, arranging the song, and performing it, Hutton got a cold two-cent-a-record royalty-after calling in an attorney.
"I heard from somebody who overheard them, and they were saying, `Hey, Danny's paying for everything out of his royalties, including the stamps.' I mean, what? So I just said, `Fuck you, I'm getting screwed.' I went to see a lawyer, and I got a coupla grand out of it in the end."
Business: In 1962, Bill Utley was a hydraulics engineer, and his first cousin, Reb Foster, was a top-rated announcer and program director at KRLA, after only six months in town. The two Texans began producing teen dances that summer, on Thursday nights at the Retail Clerks Union Hall in Buena Park, in Orange County. They each invested $400; Bill would handle business, while Reb got the acts. Prices then were $600 for the Supremes, $300 for the Righteous Brothers, $200 for the Beach Boys. Other headliners were Caesar & Cleopatra (now Sonny and Cher) and Lesley Gore. Utley and Foster were so successful that the police horned in, taking the hall to promote their own sock hops on Friday nights.
In 1965, the cousins moved off into management with the house band at a teen club they'd opened in Redondo Beach. The band was the Crossfires, later renamed by Reb Foster as the Turtles.
Hutton went to MGM Records, where Cory Wells and his band, the Enemies, needed a producer for a single, and Danny rushed to the rescue, with Van Dyke Parks playing along on pans. Chuck Negron was a solo artist on Columbia, being managed by Reb Foster and Bill Utley. Chuck and Danny were friends, and when Danny and Cory decided to form a new group-based on Hutton's idea of three singers sharing lead duties and doing three-part harmonies-they went to Chuck, who invited them to meet his managers.
Jimmy Greenspoon was a neighbor of Hutton's in Laurel Canyon, and he and Cory worked Sunset Strip the same nights, Jimmy as organist with the East Side Kids at the Trip, and Cory with the Enemies at the Whisky. At the posher Galaxie was Mike Allsup with a band being courted by scenic producer Kim Fowley, who bought them a demo called "Roses and Rainbows," which they rejected in favor of a song. "October Country," composed by one Jimmy Greenspoon.
Allsup bumped into Joe Schermie in a hotel; Mike and Joe had bummed through Arizona five years before; now Joe, a bass guitarist, had joined this group called Three Dog Night,
a phrase picked out by Danny's girlfriend, June Fairchild, out of National Geographic, and Allsup quit his band and plugged in when Three Dog Night rented the Troubadour for a night to audition for Dunhill Records. They signed, found Floyd Sneed drumming in a club in the Valley called the Rag Doll, did their first club date second-billed to the Standells (managed by Burt Jacobs), collected $1.45 each, and were open for business.
It would be another year before Three Dog Night got their first gold single in July 1969, with the Nilsson composition, "One." Their first album had been out six months. What it took was a national tour. In concerts second-billed to Steppenwolf and, later, at clubs as headliners, they got raves for their buoyant, soul-styled show, Chuck, Cory, and Danny doing familiar tunes associated with Traffic, the Beatles, Otis Redding, Neil Young. Since "One," they have been regulars on the charts, again with tunes by other musicians: "Eli's Coming" (Laura Nyro), "Mama Told Me Not to Come" (Randy Newman), "Joy to the World" (Hoyt Axton), and `An Old-Fashioned Love Song" (Paul Williams). All eight Dog albums, including the just-released Seven Separate Fools, are million-dollar gold.
As for concerts, every show since they hit headliner status has been a sold-out, standing-on-chair-ovation affair. And because they go along with management's direction-into the ball parks and festivals of America-they are outgrossing the likes of Sly & the Family Stone, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Elvis Presley, and even the Rolling Stones, who reported a gross between $3 and $4 million in fifty-four concerts this summer. Going by figures alone, the Dogs have outdone them, breezing through a spring and summer schedule this year (billed THE TOUR OF TOURS by their zealous public relations firm) that should gross more than $ 5 million-in thirty-one dates.
That's a pretty impressive list of gold and grosses. That's a pretty tough little story of Three Dog daydreams and Three Dog nightmares, with lots of scuffling and scamming in-between. And with that well-oiled machine behind them, that's a lot of money for lots of expensive thrills.
Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll Page 14