Hitmaker

by Tommy Mottola

  I first saw the band with Sandy Linzer, whom I’d become close to during the production of my second T. D. Valentine record. We were amazed to find out that the Savannah Band had been turned down by four or five labels, because the moment Sandy and I saw them, we turned toward each other with looks that said: Can you believe this? If we can get this on a record the right way, we’re going to have a monster act.

  I immediately called Mike Berniker at RCA and told him of my excitement. “Do it!” he said. Talk about trust. Just like that, without hearing a note, and sight unseen. I brought in Charlie Calello to help organize the group’s rhythms and connect the musical dots. Charlie came through big-time, especially on a song called “Cherchez la Femme,” which opened like this:

  Tommy Mottola lives on the road

  He lost his lady two months ago

  Maybe he’ll find her, maybe he won’t

  Oh, no, never, no, no

  He sleeps in the back of his big gray Cadillac

  Oh, my honey

  Blowing his mind on cheap grass and wine

  Oh, ain’t it crazy baby, yeah

  Guess you can say, hey, hey,

  That this man has learned his lesson,

  Oh, oh, hey, hey

  Now he’s alone, he’s got no woman and no home

  For misery, oh-ho, cherchez la femme

  When I played this song and the rest of the album for a roomful of execs at RCA, most of them looked up at me with expressions of dismay. They might as well have shouted: What the hell is this? But Mike Berniker understood. He stood up and started making the cranking motion of an old-fashioned movie camera as if he were filming a kaleidoscopic choreographed dance scene from a thirties classic.

  If the other execs didn’t understand the music, they understood something else. I’d brought them Hall & Oates and “Sara Smile.” And another thing: I was being invited to the corporate dining room to lunch with the higher-ups. RCA really had no choice but to sign the Savannah Band. At the beginning of 1976, almost two years before anyone heard the Bee Gees sing “Stayin’ Alive,” and three years before Donna Summer released “Bad Girls,” the Savannah Band’s first album broke huge, quickly selling more than half a million copies.

  You couldn’t walk down a street in New York without hearing “Cherchez la Femme” blaring out of bodegas, boutiques, car radios, and nightclubs. There are certain songs that will always be unique to the people who did them, because they stand for a moment in time and the vocal phrasing just cannot be duplicated. A lot of great singers sang “Cherchez la Femme,” but it will always be associated with Cory Daye’s voice. Cory was probably one of the best stylists I ever worked with, and what I mean by that is she had a sound and a phrasing that created a totally unique style. So that when the music, the time period, and her voice came together, something phenomenal was created that forced anyone listening to stop in their tracks. Something totally original had been created.

  Hearing my name in “Cherchez la Femme” five times a day on the radio was so strange—almost surreal. At that age and at that time it became very intoxicating, even dangerous, and I was only their manager. You can imagine what it was doing to the Savannah Band.

  A few months after this splash, Hall & Oates came out with their next album. It was called Bigger Than Both of Us and featured “Rich Girl.” That was it. Anything I wanted from that point at RCA was at my fingertips.

  Two hundred percent of my time was now occupied with Hall & Oates and the Savannah Band—but don’t forget, I was still working days in my job at Chappell Music. I was supposed to be a song plugger, which didn’t exactly jibe with the image of a guy driving around in a polished 1959 Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce, wearing fur coats when the winter called for it, and smoking the finest pre-Castro Cuban cigars.

  It was a highly unusual situation. Chappell owned the copyrights to the music of Hall & Oates and the Savannah Band, and it was deriving financial benefits through my efforts. But I was refusing to accept promotions because that would have given me more responsibility and required more of my time. My fatherlike mentor, Norm Weiser, allowed me to use his larger office in the evening to do work on my acts. And I was introducing him to people who might not necessarily take his call. So we made it work for as long as we could. But it soon became apparent to everyone that it was time for me to move on. One day, while at lunch with Ken Glancy, the president of RCA, we had a conversation about it, and he offered up a solution.

  “How about we give you a talent scout/production deal?” he said. It was a simple arrangement. You know how to find the hits. Here’s some money. Bring them to us. That deal would allow me to leave Chappell and start my own company. Glancy was smart. He knew this would allow me to focus all of my attention and help increase the sales of Hall & Oates and the Savannah Band.

  I found a two-bedroom apartment at 105 West Fifty-Fifth Street, second floor, great space, with wood floors and a fireplace. I got a desk, some furniture, and in a way I was just where my mother and father had always wanted me to be. I was in my own business.

  The birth of Champion Entertainment couldn’t have been better timed. Hall & Oates were on fire. So was the Savannah Band. And in December 1977, the same month that John Travolta and Saturday Night Fever sent everybody running to the discos, we released a song on RCA called “Native New Yorker.”

  There’s some irony in “Native New Yorker.” That is, not one member of the group that sang it was a native New Yorker. Two of the three members of Odyssey were sisters—Lillian and Louise Lopez—who were originally from the Virgin Islands and living in Connecticut when Sandy Linzer found them. The sisters knew a Filipino backup bass player named Tony Reynolds, whose dream was to make enough money to move back home and open a gas station. It wouldn’t surprise me if he now owns an entire chain based on the success of that one song.

  Sandy Linzer had written “Native New Yorker” for Frankie Valli. But maybe it was destined for a female voice. When it was channeled through Lillian Lopez it became magic, like she owned it. We brought in Charlie Calello to arrange the song in a way that made it pure commercial disco. This time, when the execs at RCA heard the song there was no denying it was going to be a huge hit. The music had every necessary ingredient: great song, great arrangements, the star power of New York, and a disco beat that could play in any hot club from here to Hong Kong. Mike Berniker went nuts when he heard it.

  I used my connections to book Odyssey on a bunch of television shows. We took the three band members, put makeup on them, styled them, and quite often had them lip-synch, because outside the studio their voices were not that great. But Lillian’s voice will be the way that “Native New Yorker” is remembered. It worked. Odyssey was a one-hit wonder, but I was able to hit one more monster out of the park for RCA.

  Even Sam Clark couldn’t help but take notice. When I was first trying to break John and Daryl, he used to ask me how “Hallz & Oates” were doing. As if they were somehow connected to the buffoonish comedy of Huntz Hall, the guy who played Sach in the old Bowery Boys movies. But he began to see the respect I was getting around the industry, and I started to wonder if he was even becoming a little jealous. I was no longer driving a banged-up Chevy into his driveway. I had a very early model of car phone installed in my Mercedes convertible, and I know that definitely pissed him off. There was friction in his voice when he asked Lisa: “Why does Tommy need a phone in his car?” A giant fight over the car phone ensued between Lisa and me. She moved back in with her parents for a few days, and I began to wonder what the hell this was all about.

  I tried to bury it all under the workload. But I was also starting to encounter difficulties there, too. Few people were aware of what was going on behind the hits. When a bunch of street kids like the Savannah Band start drinking the Kool-Aid, your job as a manager begins to feel like you’re a 911 receptionist working the late Saturday night shift. If instant success is a spark, the Savannah Band was a tank of gasoline.

  We’d schedule interview
s for them at hotels and they’d show up late, six or eight at a time, carrying bags of laundry to be washed and dry-cleaned, then each of them would order two of the most expensive meals on the room service menu, one to eat just then, and the other to take home. Two of the three key members, Cory Daye and Stony Browder, were boyfriend and girlfriend. I remember getting a call late one night after they’d gotten into a major fight at the Continental Hyatt House on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. They didn’t call it the Riot House for nothing. When Cory locked Stony out of her room, Stony opened up a window on a floor below and climbed up on the terraces like King Kong mounting the Empire State Building, then smashed through the sliding glass doors on Cory’s terrace and broke into her room. The group hired a screwy business manager who questioned everything that I was doing. Even the coleader of the band, August Darnell, who had a master’s degree and had taught English in high school, once pushed me to the point of a fistfight in my office. I needed to pour myself a scotch to calm down after that one.

  It was a weird experience, a paradox. Because managing the Savannah Band was also an invaluable study for me in imaging, artwork, live performances, clubs, sound, lights, hair, makeup, styling, and clothing. All of this would help me fast-forward so many careers later on at Sony. So I put up with the craziness. Besides, there were so many good things happening simultaneously to divert my attention. No matter how much crap went down with the Savannah Band on one day, there was always something amazing that would happen with Hall & Oates on the next.

  For instance, shortly after that tense night with August Darnell in my office, Hall & Oates and I went to an Eagles concert at the L.A. Forum. This was 1977. The Eagles were about to sing their just-released Number One hit, “New Kid in Town,” when Glenn Frey stepped up to the microphone and said: “We want to dedicate this to the new kids in town: Daryl Hall and John Oates.” It was as if we had just become part of an elite club.

  On another night, we had a funny incident with Sylvester Stallone. He attended a Hall & Oates concert in New York at the Palladium, and I managed to convince him to walk out onstage during the last song and put his hands up in the air like Rocky, then grab Daryl and John by the scruff of their necks and yank them off the stage to close the show. This was when the movie Rocky had just made Stallone the biggest star in the world. When Sly showed up out of nowhere there was a silent shock of disbelief that set up the place for a delayed reaction, and then a roar that shook the entire street.

  We were on fire. Nights were not nights, they were memorable events. When the baked clams, the lobster oreganata, the pasta, and the veal came out to our table at Joe’s on MacDougal Street, the motto was not: “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you shall die.” It was: “Tomorrow you shall live and have another great day like this.”

  It was like a fantasy. Who wanted to go home?

  We never, ever considered the possibility that the hits would stop or that the glasses would no longer clink. There was no concept of that. How could that possibly happen?

  Of course, I was in for a rude awakening. You can work like a dog, have lots of hits and credibility with a huge network of people who think you’re smart and brilliant, but in the end, as I found out, you are only as good as your last hit record. Sure enough, by 1979, the hits stopped cold.

  Odyssey had had their fifteen minutes of fame. There was so much disarray around the Savannah Band that I broke off management ties. I didn’t need a crystal ball to see the collapse coming, and it was no great surprise when the band broke up after its third album failed to chart. August Darnell started another group called Kid Creole and the Coconuts, which had a great run in Europe, but it was a shadow of what the Savannah Band could’ve been. And, of course, after huge successes with “Sara Smile,” “She’s Gone,” and “Rich Girl,” it was only natural for Hall & Oates to want to stretch in a new direction.

  Daryl and John could write R & B pop hits in their sleep. They could’ve snored hits. Which, to Daryl, was exactly the point. He didn’t want to repeat himself. He wanted new dreams. He wanted different canvases. And why not? He was an artist.

  There was much more freedom back then for artists. But the bottom line remains the bottom line. The record companies put up million-dollar advances and expected hits. It was my job, as the manager, to support Daryl’s dreams. At the same time, it was my job to help bring hits to the company that was paying him. At certain points, that was not an easy tightrope to walk.

  The best way I can explain it is through the first solo album Daryl recorded—Sacred Songs. Daryl created it over a few weeks in 1977 with a very talented, experimental English musician, Robert Fripp, who improvised the guitar solo to David Bowie’s “Heroes” and whom most people know as a member of the progressive rock band King Crimson. Daryl was totally infatuated with musicians like Bowie, Fripp, and Brian Eno. He loved England. And his collaboration with Fripp took him a long way from the streets of Philadelphia. Both Daryl and Fripp were really proud of Sacred Songs, and to this day Daryl points to it as an important building block in his trajectory.

  The execs at RCA didn’t look at it that way. They just didn’t think the music was commercial and, on top of that, they feared the new sound would alienate Hall & Oates’ core fans. So they postponed the release indefinitely. Daryl and Fripp got upset, and they passed around tapes of Sacred Songs to music insiders to prove their point and build an underground demand. Ultimately, Daryl prevailed. But it took three years before RCA released Sacred Songs to very moderate commercial success.

  This experimentation period would have been so much easier if Daryl and John were simultaneously putting out the hits that everyone was expecting. But they seemed to be in either one mode or the other: experimenting or creating hits. I was constantly caught between my respect for them as artists and their commercial possibilities. Daryl will tell you that I always pushed toward the commercial, and he’s right. “Why,” I’d ask him, “are you afraid of hit records? Hits are the biggest part of your credibility.” But he was a trailblazer, and he simply needed to go down new paths.

  Daryl and John veered toward rock on Beauty on a Back Street, which came out in 1977. The album contained no hits. The following year, George Harrison, Todd Rundgren, and Fripp joined Daryl and John on another artistic journey that was entitled Along the Red Ledge. Again, no hits. Look, I got what they were trying to do. And I respected it. Bob Dylan showed up at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 with an electric guitar and got booed. He knew where he was headed, and it ultimately became part of his personal folklore. An artist is no longer an artist when he stops going to new places. Daryl kept telling me: “You’ve got to see the long road, man.”

  I could see the long road. But those artistic risks also brought financial consequences. I hung with these guys day and night, and I was very aware that Daryl and John’s previous successes had brought them a taste for the good life—for expensive cars, fine wine, and beautiful homes.

  I was constantly trying to strike a balance with Daryl and John between the old hits and a new journey. I’d brought David Foster in to produce Along the Red Ledge. Foster has won sixteen Grammys. But you have to understand the timing. This was the late seventies. This was before David Foster had won any of those Grammys or worked with everyone from Whitney Houston to Michael Jackson. Back then, Foster was a hot session keyboard player in Los Angeles. He had never produced any records. Hall & Oates were his first big break. The only reason I knew about him was because he’d come recommended by a guy I considered to be a genius: the lead composer, writer, and arranger for Toto, David Paich. At the time, I saw Foster as a new talent who could help Hall & Oates explore.

  One day when Daryl, John, and I were in the house that we rented in L.A., Foster came over and sat behind the piano. David has these big hands, and when he put them on the keys and played, his sound and his attack were mesmerizing. Foster started to play this incredible melody to “After the Love Has Gone,” which, of course, everybody now knows so well. Eve
n though he wasn’t a great singer, you knew immediately that this was going to be a gigantic hit. It was undeniable. I’m telling you, if an alley cat had sung it, it still would’ve gone to Number One.

  “Yeah, it’s a good song,” Daryl said, “but it’s really not our style. We don’t need that song. We want to write our own music.”

  What could I do? He wanted to make his own music. But at the same time it was really frustrating to me because it was like having a golden goose that refused to lay golden eggs. More than a year after David Foster played us that song, he stepped onstage to accept his first Grammy for it at the 1979 awards.

  I could only shake my head as the airways filled with Earth, Wind & Fire’s rendition of “After the Love Has Gone.” Meanwhile, John and Daryl released an album called X-Static that Foster also produced. Even though there were some brilliant songs, like the classic “Wait for Me,” the album didn’t achieve the success that we were looking for and, quite frankly, needed. It began to become really confusing to their fans. Where is Abandoned Luncheonette? they wanted to know. Where is “Sara Smile”? Where is “Rich Girl” and more of the songs we love?

  All those twists and turns and ups and downs became more knowledge that was invaluable to me years later when I started at Sony and had to navigate around similar bumps in the road. Working so closely with Daryl and John, and later on with Carly Simon, John Mellencamp, and Neil and Tim Finn of the New Zealand group Split Enz and, later on, Crowded House, allowed me to really understand what makes artists tick, where they live, how they breathe, and how their thought processes come about. You know when that knowledge is absolutely indispensable? When you wake up one morning and find yourself working with a roster of four hundred recording artists in every genre of music from country to R & B, to pop, to rock, to classical.