Hitmaker

by Tommy Mottola

  There was some resistance in the company to the money I advocated spending on the marketing of that first album. I just steamrolled over everyone and grabbed some lapels in the international fiefdom to make sure that the entire company was completely behind Gloria everywhere in the world. Sometimes when you know you’re right, you just have to voice your vision. It can’t always be group consensus. Sometimes you have to follow a single vision no matter what the ramifications. And, of course, nobody had any complaints after Cuts Both Ways was released. It had a half-dozen hits. “Get on Your Feet” had that same magical feel as “Conga.” If you want to see its enduring impact, all you have to do is go to YouTube and type in the words: “Steve Ballmer Going Crazy.” That’s right. The Steve Ballmer. The CEO of Microsoft opened a company speech a while back jumping up and down to that song. Talk about the beginning of the Latin Explosion.

  “Here We Are” and “Don’t Wanna Lose You” from the same album made Gloria a Top 40 radio darling in the United States and all over the world. Not only did the album go multiplatinum at home, but she also had huge hits in Mexico and Brazil, the United Kingdom, and Australia. We sold millions.

  We had opened the door and created the blueprint for the explosion to come down the road for Ricky Martin, Shakira, Marc Anthony, and Jennifer Lopez. In fact, it became the blueprint for every major artist we broke for the next fifteen years.

  When I think back, the experience was more than opening the door. It was about taking the time to get it right. We’ll never know what would’ve happened if that album had not been positioned properly. But we do know that a few bad choices at the start can cut short an artist’s career or even destroy it.

  The choices we made, and the choices Gloria and Emilio continued to make, were the reason she would go on to sing in front of Super Bowl crowds and why she is still selling out concerts more than twenty years later.

  And, as you’ll come to see, whatever I did to help Gloria and Emilio focus her career at that early stage was returned to me personally a million times over.

  Unfortunately, you can’t turn around a corporate culture with a single album.

  I knew there needed to be huge changes. But I didn’t really understand what I was up against until I began to get entrenched in the job. There were a lot of motivated employees, but there were also many who had been there for years, growing fat and happy, and simply collecting checks.

  I’d sit in on a meeting to promote an album and would hear a lot of clichés but not a single compelling strategy. It was all broad brushstrokes, without any of the nitty-gritty dirty work, as if everybody was riding on the artist’s talent and the loyalty of the fan base. Yeah, it was great that we had that loyalty, but it was terrible to be on cruise control. Even worse, we weren’t going out and signing the next big acts. The company had the greatest names in music, artists like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Billy Joel, Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, Ozzy Osbourne, and Wynton Marsalis, to name just a few, but there were no artists in the budding alternative music scene. Those artists looked at CBS as a company resting on its laurels and living in the past.

  Those artists had a point. We had a chief financial officer who kept bound ledgers as if he were working in the forties. It would be one thing if the guy had kept his nose in the books. But he went out of his way to block one of my first initiatives in the rebuilding of our music publishing company.

  I’m sure this same guy was delighted two years earlier when CBS very foolishly sold its own publishing company, CBS Songs, to Stephen Swid and his partners. CBS got $125 million in return for its 250,000 titles, in what was then noted as the biggest deal of its kind. Let me tell you just how shortsighted that sale was: just three years later, not long after I took the job with CBS/Sony, that same catalog was sold to EMI for a reported $337 million. That’s a 170 percent profit that Swid and his buddies made on those CBS titles in just three years. And that’s not all. Worse, CBS/Sony was slowed by a non-compete agreement that prohibited it from getting into the publishing industry for a certain number of years afterward. Here’s the ultimate irony: What started as CBS Songs grew into the world’s largest music publishing catalog called EMI Music. Sony recently paid EMI $2.2 billion to get its catalog back.

  My time at Chappell had taught me the importance of a strong publishing catalog. The art of songwriting is the basis of the whole industry, and copyrights were then—and most certainly are now—the most valuable assets in the business. A small Nashville company, Tree Music, had many country gems, and it was available for $33 million—an ideal first step for us. Yet the financial officer kept asking Walter to knock the idea down. I got Walter to overrule his objections, and Tree became part of a publishing company known as Sony/ATV, but who had time for foolish obstructions? If this guy were still around years later, I’m sure he would’ve also objected to our acquisition of the Beatles’ catalog in a deal that was split with Michael Jackson. The CFO just didn’t get it, and I couldn’t even bear to be in the same room with him. “Tommy,” he once told me, “you don’t understand. CBS is like a giant ocean liner. You’re trying to turn it around too fast.”

  “Not only am I going to turn it around fast,” I snapped at him, “I’m going to turn it into a speedy PT battleship.”

  This CFO had to go. We needed to break apart the fiefdoms that constipated the company. We needed to get as many people as we could on board the PT boat and leave those behind to sink with the Titanic.

  As you can imagine, this made many of the people running the old fiefdoms very nervous. When I was appointed to the job, many people in the company thought that I’d last only six months. When that didn’t happen, several of the old executives started to put imaginary bull’s-eyes on my back. But none of these executives knew about the immediate connection I’d established with Norio Ohga.

  Ohga not only supported his executives’ visions in a way that reminded me of Steve Ross. But remember: he himself had started out as an opera singer. Music was his life. Even though he was running the biggest electronics giant of the era, he was, in his soul, an artist, and that was where we connected.

  “We need to develop new talent,” I told him during a private lunch with Walter. “Aggressively.”

  I explained that in order to do this we’d have to revamp the entire corporate structure. I was asking for tens of millions of dollars to do so, and I was asking at a time when the music company was operating at a loss. Not many people in their right mind would ever ask a new boss for this kind of funding at such a difficult time. But after thinking for a moment, Ohga said, “Do whatever you have to do. Just bring us the hits and develop the new stars of the future.”

  Walter watched the relationship between Ohga and me unfold like a proud father cutting loose a son he believed in. And when Sony decided it needed to make another move in the entertainment business, he immediately enlisted my help.

  Sony had developed a videocassette magnetic tape called Betamax in the seventies that could film home movies and also be used to play Hollywood classics at home on Sony equipment. It was a great product, superior in a lot of ways to a competitor with a different design—VHS. There was one problem. The consumer wanted only one format. Even though Betamax was in many ways a cut above VHS, it lost out, because it didn’t have its own content that would force the public to accept Sony hardware.

  Sony’s founder, Akio Morita, didn’t want what happened with Betamax to happen to any of the company’s future hardware formats. From his earliest days at the company, Morita understood the importance of both creating new technology and maximizing the value of his brand. When he first brought the transistor radio to America in 1955, people warned him that it would never sell in the U.S. under the name of an unknown Japanese company. One American company told Morita it would place an order for 100,000 transistor radios on the condition that these radios be sold under the American company’s name. Morita said no. His vision was to create cutting-edge technology with the name Sony on i
t. He wanted people all over the world to know that name, trust that name, and seek out products with that name. Protecting the company’s technology and refusing to compromise the brand were the essence of Morita’s philosophy.

  The simplest way to protect future hardware, then, was to develop and control the software—the content. If Sony was putting out its own hit movies and music simultaneously on products that could be served up at home and only on Sony equipment, it could manipulate the market to accept and purchase its hardware.

  What happened to the Betamax may seem like a topic that’s sitting in the dustbin of history. But it’s important to note here. Because the philosophy behind Sony’s reaction to the fall of the Betamax would inevitably hinder the company ten years later when Napster arrived and Sony needed to be open to sharing technology. Sony wanted to control it all.

  Bottom line for the moment: Sony was now in the market for a movie studio. Ohga reached out to Walter to locate the right one, and Walter called me in to help. I suggested what I thought was the most logical thing to do: bring in the most powerful guy in Hollywood. The same guy who had once asked me to back away from the book that led to the making of the movie Goodfellas. That was Mike Ovitz.

  Ovitz flew into New York to meet with Walter and me, and he suggested that we try to buy Columbia Pictures because it was available and had a great catalog. The three of us began to meet and talk regularly to figure out how we could secure the movie studio.

  So a typical day in my first nine months at CBS/Sony looked something like this:

  Implement ideas on changing the culture of the music company.

  Run the Columbia label until I placed the right person in the job.

  Organize Gloria’s new album campaign and get it launched.

  Check sales and promotion on Michael Jackson’s Bad album and tour.

  Follow up on Michael Bolton’s Soul Provider.

  Figure out a launching pad for New Kids on the Block.

  Introduce Harry Connick Jr. to the world.

  And devise a strategy for Sony Corp to buy Columbia Pictures.

  It was like living in the middle of a 24/7 hurricane, going to meeting after meeting after phone call after phone call, then hitting the recording studios all night after work. Every lunch was a working lunch, every dinner a working dinner. There just wasn’t enough time in the day to do everything that needed to be done, so the work bled over to the weekends, and even then there wasn’t enough time.

  I knew that we needed the help of people who were as obsessed and committed as I was to pull all this off. We needed gladiators to compete with all the other companies in the industry to push this company where it should be. Fortunately, there were three things going for me from the start.

  First, I knew what I didn’t know. That meant I knew that I had to bring in people who could guide me in the areas where I was inexperienced.

  Second, my time as a manager had given me the opportunity to work with almost every record company in the business. So I knew exactly where these people were.

  And third, the executives that I needed just happened to be only a few blocks away from my office.

  Walter didn’t really believe I could get the people I wanted for my executive team.

  When I showed him the first name on my list, he looked at me as if I were trying to hire Yoda away from Star Wars.

  You think you can get Mel Ilberman?

  Hey, no harm in asking. I certainly knew Mel well enough to ask. I’d had years of experiences working with Mel. The first being almost a ten-year period at RCA between the midseventies and early eighties when I was managing Hall & Oates, the Savannah Band, and Odyssey. Mel was a tough businessman who would always say no—especially to most managers. But he took a liking to me, and after he’d say no, he’d pull me aside and give me fatherly advice. Look, kid, here’s how you do it.

  My second experience with Mel was after he left RCA and moved to PolyGram Records when I was managing John Mellancamp. Even though Mel was an executive at the record company and I was the artist’s manager, we sometimes felt like we were on the same team—especially in the case of Mellencamp, who was difficult for both of us to work with. Mellencamp brought us close in a way that no one else could have.

  The bottom line on Mel was that I trusted him with my life and, at almost sixty, he knew how to run every single division inside a record company. Business affairs. Creative services. Promotion. Marketing. Accounting. Finance. Sales. Distribution. International. A&R. I had worked with all these divisions on my own as a manager. But Mel actually operated them from the inside, and he had great insight into how to manage large groups of people.

  Walter thought I had no shot at bringing Mel on board—particularly because he knew that Mel was under contract to PolyGram and was working for a guy who’d once worked for him, and with whom he had a falling out, Dick Asher. But I’d been in constant touch with Mel—and I knew something that Walter didn’t. The timing was perfect. Mel had grown disenchanted working with Asher. So I called Mel, and we met at a little coffee shop on Seventh Avenue very close to the PolyGram offices.

  I laid out to Mel everything that I wanted to do. He listened carefully and grasped the situation immediately. He thought it would be a great last stop for him. He’d get a powerful position and, at the same time, be able to mentor and guide me at the top. That made me feel incredible—it told me he truly believed in me.

  Mel’s contract was almost up, and he was going to have to ask Asher to let him go. But he seemed confident he could get a release. “Let’s shake hands,” he said. “I want to do this.” And Mel pulled it off.

  Walter was shocked to find out that Mel was coming aboard. Walter and Norio Ohga really respected Ilberman, and you can imagine how it made them view me when Mel agreed to come work at my side.

  I then focused on a direct raid on Warner. If I was going to elevate Epic and Columbia from imprints to powerful labels, I was going to need execs to compete with the heads of Warner, Elektra, and Atlantic. That was why I wanted Dave Glew. Dave was executive vice president and general manager of Atlantic Records. He was the very backbone of the company, and he had tremendous experience in sales, marketing, and distribution. Just what I needed. I thought I had a shot because I knew that Dave would never have a chance at the presidency in his current company.

  At first, Dave said no. But I set up a secret dinner between him, Walter, and me specifically on a Friday night. Very shortly after all the small talk ended, I cut to the chase, looked him in the eye, and said: “I know you said no. How would you like to be the president of Epic Records?”

  He was stunned.

  I wasn’t finished. “What would you need from us to take that job?” I asked him.

  Now, his mouth was open.

  It was perfect timing because Dave was between contracts. His new contract with Atlantic was sitting on Sheldon Vogel’s desk unsigned. Dave went home that night and talked it over with his wife, Ann. He took out the infamous yellow legal pad that hardly ever left his side and wrote down everything he desired. I’m sure he thought I would say no to many of his requests. When he finished running down everything on his list, I said: “Are you done?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, you’ve got it.”

  But I told him if he wanted this job, he’d have to sign the contract over the weekend. I knew that once Ahmet Ertegun, Doug Morris, and the corporate brass at Warner got wind of what was going on, they would never let Dave go… and I was right.

  On Monday morning, Dave went to work, and he told Ahmet.

  “You can’t leave,” Ahmet said, “you’re under contract.”

  “No,” Dave said, “I’m not.”

  It didn’t take long before telephones were ringing around the Warner Communications building like alarm sirens. The war was on. The next thing Dave knew, he was being summoned to the office of Steve Ross. Ross tried to up the ante, matching the deal I gave him, and then throwing in something like fifty thousand
shares of WCI stock, which at that time had great value because of Atari.

  When Dave told Steve that he’d already signed a contract with CBS/Sony and that he’d be leaving, he was immediately ushered out of the building by security guards.

  That was music to Walter’s ears. Perfect—a war with Steve Ross. Walter never met a Goliath he didn’t love to hurl stones at.

  Next I needed to fill the top job at Columbia Records. I wanted to bring in Don Ienner. Don was Clive Davis’s head of promotion at Arista Records. They were a perfect combination. Clive made Whitney Houston’s records. Don got them on the radio. Those were the two critical components for success in the music business at that time. End of story.

  I’d had a chance to work closely with Ienner when I helped move Hall & Oates from RCA to Arista in the late eighties. Ienner had a chip on his shoulder. He was a bully, loud and brash. He was sort of like the hotheaded Sonny in The Godfather, and after his first few years at Columbia a lot of his staff was wishing that he was on his way to the tollbooth. He was definitely a bull in a china shop, and I knew every aspect of all these traits. But that was precisely the kind of energy that I needed to move that division of the company forward at that time.