Let me tell you, nobody ever worked harder for $125 a week. When the workday ended toward dinnertime it started up all over again with a trip over to the industry watering hole, a steak joint on Fifty-Fourth Street called Al & Dick’s. There were a lot of familiar faces at the bar, and other people whom you didn’t know but wanted to meet. After catching up on everything that had happened that day, I went out to the clubs to see what was going to be happening tomorrow.
This was back when clubs mattered. Max’s Kansas City. The Bottom Line. The Bitter End. My Father’s Place. These places were bursting with budding newcomers. If you found the right talent and if that artist didn’t write many songs, you could hook them up with your songwriters. If you were impressed with a singer/songwriter, you could try to sign them to the publishing company. If you found a young talent who might become a star, you could sign them to the publishing company, then make a production deal with them, and maybe even get them a deal with a record company, in which case you’d own the publishing. The job was all about discovering and developing talent.
The talent that rotated through that little bank of offices at MRC was something. Alan Bernstein wrote “This Girl Is a Woman Now,” a huge hit for Gary Puckett and the Union Gap; and “After the Lovin’,” which Engelbert Humperdinck made famous. Benny Mardones wrote “Into the Night.” Phil Cody would go on to write “Laughter in the Rain,” and “Bad Blood” with Neil Sedaka. Robert Flax put five songs on the Billboard charts and fifteen years later went on to become vice-chairman at EMI Music. Janis Siegel would develop into the lead singer for the Manhattan Transfer and win nine Grammys.
That little office on 110 West Fifty-Seventh Street was a magnet for creativity. Muhammad Ali showed up one day looking for the theme song to launch a product called Champburgers. A young singer-comedian named Joe Pesci, who had a nightclub act with his buddy Frank Vincent, hung out there and sang on many of our demos long before winning an Oscar for his performance in Goodfellas. The place was pure passion, a creative stew not only in music but in business development. I was listening, learning, watching, meeting, and doing. Tiny moments in that office changed my life. One of the writers walked around constantly saying he was going to Grub man’s office. “I gotta call Grub-man.” Grub-man. Grub-man. Grub-man… That was all he talked about, and that was how I met Allen Grubman, an up-and-coming attorney. This was long before Allen moved to Park Avenue and became Grewb-man. Fancy-shmancy. Our careers would become intertwined. I’ll never know if all that I accomplished over the years could’ve been done without him. As our friendship grew, we might call each other ten times a day.
The ultimate point here is, when you swung through the door past Tiny, you never knew whom you were going to meet, how it might change your life, or what was going to happen.
Late one afternoon, Joel Diamond came down the hall and sounded out a cattle call. “Hey, guys, we need some background voices. Doesn’t matter if you can sing or not. We need five or ten guys.”
A call for background vocals was commonplace and we paid no mind to it as we headed out to lend a hand. A bunch of us entered the recording studio to find Paul Leka, a jovial Wolfman with his full-face beard, who was a producer one floor up at Mercury Records. As Paul explained what he wanted, his tone was a little apologetic: “Guys, I know you’re going to think this is silly. But I wrote this song and there’s this one part I need you to sing like this: Na, na, na, na… na, na, na, na… hey, hey, hey, goodbye.”
We were all laughing from the get-go because the lyrics were so stupid. Anybody could sing them—which was Paul’s point. He didn’t want professional singers. He wanted this chorus to sound like a bunch of guys hanging out. We all put on headphones, got behind this one microphone, and let it rip. Then we went back to work as if nothing had happened.
Three months later, “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” was the Number One record all over America. You still hear it all the time when college bands and crowds at sporting events want to salt the wounds of an opposing team. And whenever I do I always listen hard for my voice buried somewhere in the background vocals.
The office of MRC Music was more than a place. It was a moment in music and time that will never happen again. When most people think back on 1969, they have images of long-haired kids rolling around in the mud and having sex in a haze of marijuana smoke while Jimi Hendrix played “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock. Or images of Neil Armstrong stepping out of a spacecraft onto the surface of the moon. Given the choice of walking in some crater in a space suit, rolling around in fields ridden with deer ticks, or walking the beat for MRC Music, there’s no doubt I would’ve chosen to swing through the doors of 110 West Fifty-Seventh Street to say hello to Tiny. I was where I wanted to be.
One day I was in my office and heard a group of people jostling around. I got a call to go to Joel Diamond’s office. Everybody who was around that day filled the room.
“I have some really bad news,” Joel said. “You’ve all been fired. Including me.”
There was an instant of stunned silence. Then, it was as if the entire room shouted out: “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“A big corporation called Philips-Siemens just acquired Mercury Records,” he said, “including this publishing company. It also owns Chappell Music, and they’re merging us together.”
There was no severance. Certainly not for the writers who were paid by the songs they produced. We were told we had to clear out and vacate the offices by the end of the day. It was a bloodbath. Given the love that we all had for the place, it was cruel, like telling people without a moment’s warning that they’d just lost their jobs and their homes. You can imagine the reaction. People were seriously pissed.
I don’t recall who was in the office that day, and even if I do I’m not naming names. But people decided to take their severance packages into their own hands. They started ripping the stereos out of the walls and rolling pianos down the hallway. “Let’s get trucks!” someone shouted. The crew took turns distracting Tiny, inviting him out for a cup of coffee or other such nonsense, while the others carried stereos and speakers and wheeled pianos out the service entrance and into waiting trucks. It was a chaotic and funny, funny scene. If it were in a movie, it would surely be sound-tracked to “Na, na, na, na… na, na, na, na… hey, hey, hey, goodbye.”
Because I haven’t named any names, you’ll never know most of the people in the office that day. But if you could ask anybody who was there, I’ll bet they’d tell you that even after forty years, whenever they get close to 110 West Fifty-Seventh Street, they detour to the sidewalk on the north side of the street, because word swiftly spread that Tiny was looking for them.
It was the best corporate bloodbath I ever survived. I may have temporarily lost my badge and my beat, but the dismissal could not have turned out any better. A week later, Joel Diamond was talking to the vice president at Chappell Music about a job. There was nothing available at his level. But the vice president, Norm Weiser, mentioned that he was looking for a young song plugger, someone who knew the streets, and Joel recommended me.
A few days later I walked over to the Chappell Music offices on 609 Fifth Avenue for a meeting with the vice president. It was like stepping into a different style of shoe than I’d ever worn before and finding it to be a perfect fit.
Chappell Music dates back to 1811, and it was the largest music publishing company in the world when I walked into Weiser’s office. Among the songs in its catalog is “Happy Birthday to You.” Some of Chappell Music’s writers included Irving Berlin, Stephen Sondheim, and Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. But it was an old-fashioned music publishing company in dire need of fresh blood as it geared up for the 1970s.
I guess Norm checked around, because when I sat across from him there seemed to be no need to prove myself. “I hear you’re the new young guy out there on the streets,” he said, “a guy who knows how to get things done. How would you like to work here?”
“Ar
e you kidding me?” I said. It almost came out as: How about for free?
A smile broke out on Norm’s face. “I’ll tell you what,” he said, “I’ll start you at $250 a week.”
It was better than dying and going straight to heaven. That was double what I was getting at MRC. With $250 a week, I could move out of my parents’ home and get my own apartment. That would put me another step closer to Lisa.
The meeting was coming to a happy conclusion when Norm said: “Oh, just one other thing… There have been reports that some equipment disappeared from the offices of MRC on the day it was closed down. You weren’t part of that little mischief, were you?”
I never got even a small supporting role on the big screen. But Wynn Handman and his acting class would have been damn proud of me in that moment.
“You know, I heard something about that,” I said in a tone that gave the appearance I’d been fishing off the coast of Peru at the time. “What exactly happened?”
“Never mind,” Norm said. He was a wonderful, beautiful man who would become a mentor to me, and maybe he didn’t really want to know. “I was just double-checking.”
As I walked out of Weiser’s office, not only did I feel like I’d gotten my badge back, it was like I’d miraculously been promoted to sergeant. No more showing up to work in jeans and a sweater. I arrived for my first day of work at Chappell in a suit and tie. There was a big office with a window overlooking Fifth Avenue waiting for me, and opposite my office was a glass-partitioned cubicle for my secretary.
I had access to the brass, and the brass had access to talent. I’d see Tony Bennett and a lot of other famous singers walking through the hallways for a conference with some of the songwriters. Little did I know that twenty-five years later I’d become part of a huge transition in Tony’s career. Chappell was a place with such a tremendous history, and I felt proud to be part of it. Even better, it was a company with the intention of moving into the modern era, and I felt like I could be a force in making that happen.
I was hired to pound the streets, and pound the streets I did. I’d go to the office in the morning, get the latest songs from our writers, and walk to record companies and recording studios to play them for producers and A&R guys. The job at Chappell really broadened my contacts. While I was moving from studio to studio, I got a chance to listen to and talk about the music that was being recorded. I inhaled it all and developed a real understanding of what was going on in music. Not many people had ever gotten a chance to have this kind of experience at the start. You couldn’t put a price on it.
The wall of my office started to fill with photos snapped of myself with famous artists. I even began to get the grudging respect of Sam Clark. He didn’t know anybody at the pimple of a company that was MRC. But Chappell Music, that was a whole different story.
I was doing everything I could to show him I was worthy of his daughter, including going to the Actors’ Temple on West Forty-Seventh Street for conversion lessons with Rabbi Schoenfeld. The process took a couple of months. There was no graduation ceremony. But I remember getting a certificate that I took to the Clark home to show that it was official. Hey, I got my license, I’m ready to drive. Lisa and I did not elope. She and her parents began to plan the wedding she’d been raised for at, of course, the Plaza Hotel.
There was one hitch that should’ve told me something wasn’t completely right. Yeah, I’d converted, and I was comfortable with it. Part of the reason I was able to feel comfortable with my decision was my parents. Not long after I’d told Lisa I’d convert in the Fifth Avenue rain, I sat down with my mother and father. I sat on the same plastic-covered couch where I’d found out I was being sent to Admiral Farragut Academy. This time, it was my turn to deliver some news.
“I think I’m gonna get married,” I told them.
“You think you’re gonna get married?” my father asked. “Or you know you’re gonna get married?”
“Look, I know. I’m gonna marry Lisa Clark. But here’s the deal. I have to become Jewish.”
There was a moment of half shock and all silence. They both liked Lisa. But they loved me.
“Tommy, if that’s what’s going to make you happy,” my mother said, “we want you to be happy.”
My father was quick to back her up. “We’re behind you a hundred percent.”
We all hugged and kissed, and that was that. There was no argument, or even a look at the pros and the cons. My mother’s best friend had made it work. We’d all lived the experience with her and her family in the most natural way. And if my parents did have reservations about my conversion, by that stage in life they had to know that once I made up my mind to do something, there was no stopping me anyway.
Looking back now, I can see that part of the reason it was so easy for me to convert was I never really stopped to consider what it meant. I was moving at a thousand miles an hour, and the way my ADD looked at it, converting to Judaism was simply the quickest way to Lisa through Sam Clark’s wall.
It has always worked for me in business because my instincts were more right than wrong, and it always got me to where I needed to go in the quickest way possible. But on a personal level, it worked against me. It hurt me because my emotions whipped me forward without allowing my mind the time to clearly think things through. I didn’t think the conversion through. In the rare moments when I was forced to confront the reality of what I was doing, I started to feel little twinges of Are you sure about this?
I first felt a twinge when Lisa showed me the floor plan for the wedding. There was going to be a chuppah set up in the Terrace Room of the Plaza, and that, along with the old tradition of the crushing of the glass, was great by me. But the walk down the aisle… Something just didn’t feel right about the walk down the aisle.
Talk about a scene from a movie. The right side of the aisle was going to be filled with upper-middle-class and wealthy Jews. The left side was mostly going to be my side of the family, Italian-Americans who were used to receptions at a place with big chandeliers under the Whitestone Bridge that looked much more like a wedding in Goodfellas. Something just didn’t feel right about me wearing a yarmulke as I walked between these two groups. It’s hard to explain the twinge, because I thought it was cool putting on the yarmulke at the Jewish camp when I was a kid. Maybe it was something about walking between the two sides. It made me feel like I should somehow stay in the middle. But the yarmulke wouldn’t allow that, and the yarmulke was an ironclad part of the deal. There seemed to be no way out of it. I couldn’t go through the ceremony with my head uncovered. When I mentioned to Lisa that I was feeling a little awkward about the walk down the aisle, I got a slight sign that the wall Sam had put between us might finally be coming down. Someone in Lisa family’s came up with a smart idea. It was to be a very formal wedding… that called for tails. Just put a top hat on his head. Perfect! Done! My head was covered. And my father looked great walking down the aisle in a top hat, too.
It was quite a sight to see. There was a reception and cocktail hour on one floor of the Plaza. The ceremony took place on another floor in front of 350 guests at the Terrace Room. Dinner and dancing were set up on another floor in the Grand Ballroom. I felt like I was king of the world, and the Sunday edition of the New York Times proved it. There I was: HIGH SOCIETY. DAUGHTER OF ABC BIGWIG SAM CLARK MARRIES TOMMY MOTTOLA.
Our honeymoon took us to Paris, Geneva, London, and Rome. It was the first time I’d been out of the United States. I was twenty-two; it was like watching a movie, and all of that experience became part of what I was to become professionally. We stayed in some of the places Lisa knew well, like the Excelsior Hotel in Rome. During meals, I watched how the Europeans handled their silverware differently than I did. I heard how elegant and polished the Italian language sounded in relation to the slang that came off the streets of the Bronx. There was an elevated level of dress and culture all around me. My eyes were opened. I felt like I had a lot of catching up to do. So I couldn’t wait to get back
home and go straight to work…
VOICES
JANN WENNER
Publisher of Rolling Stone
When Rolling Stone was started in 1967, the leading edge of the postwar Baby Boom was just turning twenty-one. This was the biggest, best-educated, and wealthiest generation of young people in the history of the world.
They grew up with this new form of rock ’n’ roll and became intellectually wedded to it. It was the way young people spoke to each other. It was the way they expressed their concerns, their values, and anxieties. But back then nobody could see where it was all going.
Nobody was saying: This will be the most powerful music in the world. It will marry a generation and influence presidents. That wasn’t even in the back of my mind. But John Lennon saw something when he said: “We’re more popular than Jesus.”
JON LANDAU
Manager of Bruce Springsteen
The ’60s leading into the ’70s was all about invention. The music was being invented. The way to present the music was being invented. The way to manage the music was being invented.
We were stepping out of a world where the artist made records and did shows—that’s it. There was no Internet. There were no video channels. If you made a video before then, there was no place to play it. Yeah, if you were the Beatles, you got to make a movie—a real movie that people would go to see in a movie theater. Short of that, there was little use for video. If a musician was lucky, he got to play on The Ed Sullivan Show. The amount of things open to—and demanded of—the artist was much smaller. The machinery was just not that elaborate.
It all began to open up in the time when guys like Tommy and me got started. Nobody really knew how to navigate this new terrain. It just came up in front of us. We were all in the trenches trying to find our path, making it up as we went. When a guy like Tommy solved a problem in a certain way, that way became a model.
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