At the end of the session we all sat with our mouths open. My team and I put it straight to Terence: “Man, you have all these great things in you, every ingredient to go all the way. And we’re not talking about our vision of you. This is not us trying to make you into something or take you somewhere you don’t want to go. We’re just asking you to look at what you created before and look at where you are with this album. The vision of your first album was pure and clear, and this is all blurry. What happened?”
He looked at us vacantly and said: “Man, this is what I’m feeling now. This is what I’m hearing.”
He looked and sounded like a different human being. What could I do, except think: Oh, boy, here we go again. Only this was more than a left turn. It felt like this could end up being the left turn of no return.
Neither Fish nor Flesh was released in October 1989, and it just didn’t have it. Here we were, blessed with these great artists, and feeling like we were going to get a chance to help take them to even greater heights. But in the cases of George Michael and Terence Trent D’Arby, despite our all-out efforts to globally promote their albums, we ended up watching them fall, and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it.
The closer Mariah’s album moved toward completion, the more I started drilling deep down into it. Narada had produced the first single (“Vision of Love”) and we had the third single (“Someday”) that I thought we needed. But we still didn’t have the single that I really wanted to pull off our strategy—that second big ballad.
The more I listened to the songs that Narada produced, the more I intuited that something else was going on in the music. There seemed to be an ingredient that was adding to the overall composition but that was not easy to identify. It was more than simply Narada at work. I didn’t know what it was, but I could sense it.
I kept listening and listening and asking questions, and eventually realized that this ingredient was a keyboard player who was in on all the arrangements and sounds. His name was Walter A.
That wasn’t his full name. That’s just what everyone called him. His full name was Walter Afanasieff. But no one had time for that mouthful. So I called him and asked him to come to New York to meet with me. I knew little more at first than the fact that he was a talented keyboard player who was helping Narada with some of the arrangements. The more I asked around, though, the more I heard great things about him from artists like Michael Bolton and people in the Whitney Houston camp. He was a quiet guy, and when we met he didn’t volunteer much about his past. He showed no trace of an accent. I could’ve been talking to a guy born in San Francisco. Only later would I learn that he had Russian parents, that he’d been born in Brazil and was classically trained. There were Russian and Brazilian sounds and rhythms in his DNA that came out of him in ways that nobody would expect. I had no idea that we’d develop him into one of the most talented and original producers I’d ever work with. But from the start it was like recognizing in him many of the talents that David Foster had when he, too, was just a recording session piano player and I’d brought him in to do his first production on a Hall & Oates album. All I can tell you is that from the moment I sat down with Walter A., I had a good feeling. We offered him an exclusive production deal and he accepted. He was being mentored by Narada, but now he would have the financial freedom to further develop on his own.
The first job I had for him was to get together with Mariah and come up with our second single—the monster ballad. He was thrilled, and so was Mariah. She felt a good chemistry with him at the start.
“I need you to write the ballad and record it in a week,” I told them. “And you need to hit it out of the park.”
To say we were up against the clock would be a joke. The clock had struck twelve. We’d already showcased Mariah before retailers in nine different cities with the famous R & B piano player Richard Tee, and she’d just killed it. There were no fancy gimmicks, no backdrops, no costumes. Just her, the piano player, and three background gospel singers. Our distribution division had primed retailers to clear merchandising space. The entire company was under mandate to make Mariah’s debut album’s release in June 1990 our top priority. Everything was set, except for one thing. That second ballad. The CD was already at the presses in order to be manufactured and released in time for Grammy nominations. We were risking that schedule by calling in Walter A. for that second ballad.
A few days later I went into the Hit Factory studios, where the two were writing. Walter A. put his hands on the keyboard and Mariah began to sing “Love Takes Time.” I can’t describe the feeling, but when you know a hit, you know a hit. Now, they had two days to record it. I went back and asked Mariah for one final vocal change in the bridge, and she was happy she made it, because it really lifted the song. It was off to the pressing plant. Now, we had our one-two-three punch.
We wanted that first punch to land right between the eyes of Arsenio Hall. The Arsenio Hall Show was one of the most popular talk shows at that time—and certainly the coolest and the hippest of the late-night shows. Ordinarily, there’d be no way to get Mariah on a show like that before she’d already had a hit album. Mariah was a complete unknown who’d never sung before a large audience in her life. She was shy, and there was a deer-in-the-headlights quality to her. But after watching her move the retailers and radio people, I was willing to take the risk. So I called up Arsenio, asked him to put her on, and sent him the album. We got the green light.
The curtain came up on a darkened stage. Mariah sang “Vision of Love” and ripped the crowd apart. The response started a groundswell that rose to a crescendo a few days later when she sang “America the Beautiful” at the NBA Finals. The game was between the Detroit Pistons and the Portland Trailblazers at the Palace outside of Detroit. For a couple of minutes she took over not only the arena but also the coast-to-coast telecast. When her voice reached that high-pitched whistle toward the end of the song, the cameras focused on basketball players looking at each other in disbelief, and when she finished, the announcer simply said: “The Palace now has a queen.”
We were on exactly the path I had hoped. It was everything I had planned for, and it almost seemed like it was too good to be true. The response was like hitting a gusher. The album sold millions, and I felt like I was walking on air. And if I felt like I was walking on air, I knew I could never imagine what was going on in Mariah’s head.
Having been a manager and having seen how easy it is for everything to turn cold, I tried to keep her balanced as best as I could. “Keep your feet on the ground,” I kept telling her. “This is gonna be a long journey, and if we are not careful, it can stop very quickly. We’ve got to stay focused. Just keep your feet on the ground.”
I also knew exactly where that ground should be: the recording studio. When the first round of publicity ended, there was going to be a lot of work to be done. We had a plan to avoid the sophomore jinx by hitting the public so fast that it wouldn’t even know it’d been hit.
It was a good thing we were able to get Mariah launched at that point, because the company would soon be at a standstill. Somehow things got worse when Walter Yetnikoff returned from Hazelden. The treatment center had removed the alcohol and drugs from Walter’s life—but not the underlying problems that Walter had been using them to anesthetize.
Now that he was sober, he was paranoid and enraged—mostly enraged. For the company, that wasn’t the worst of it. The immediate problem was that Walter had final authorization on all the deals we were making, and he stopped signing contracts to push new and developing projects through. The company was becoming totally paralyzed. The office had an uneasy quiet and stillness like just before a tornado approaches, and you never knew if it was darkness on the edge of town or coming straight for you. It might depend on what side of the bed Walter woke up on. But you knew it was coming. Eventually the blur of insanity was going to blow through and hit someone or all of us. All Walter wanted to do was go on three-hour rants, get into fights, and k
nock down whatever bridges he had remaining.
He was taking on Steve Ross, who had replaced Larry Tisch as his favorite punching bag. He was lashing out at Michael Jackson and feuding with Bruce Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau. He even took on a guy that nobody in the industry would mess with—David Geffen.
“Hire a private detective and get some dirt on Geffen,” he’d tell me. I would just listen and, of course, I didn’t do it. Then he’d call and tell me to investigate Michael Jackson. Of course, I didn’t do that, either. Then he’d call me ten times the following day to see if I had the detectives and the dirt.
He berated Grubman every time they met. Allen had to put up with it because he represented so many CBS artists and there was a lot at stake financially. But it got to the point where I couldn’t watch Walter abuse him. Then Walter ordered the business affairs department to stop talking to Grubman. Then he barred Grubman from coming into the building. Then he ordered that I not speak to Grubman or have anything to do with him. Grubman represented so many of our company’s superstars. How could I not talk to him? It was just crazy, and it went way beyond that. Walter put me in the worst possible position. The man who gave me my big break was telling me not to speak with my dear friend. Walter was tearing at my loyalty.
It got to the point where there were piles of deal memos and contracts sitting on Walter’s desk for a month waiting to be signed. Here we were desperately trying to build the music company of the future to compete and sign new artists, and everybody in the company who was busting his ass was having his hard work boomerang back in his face. When Walter wouldn’t sign the contracts, it looked like we were insulting the managers and lawyers of the new artists. People would ask me over and over: “What’s going on? Why is it taking so long?” It got to the point that I didn’t know what to tell them. Walter was my boss. All I could say was: “The contracts are on Walter’s desk.” All the lawyers in our business affairs department were pulling their hair out. Everyone inside the company became aware of the situation, and it wasn’t long before word reached the entire industry from coast to coast, and then traveled more than six thousand miles across the ocean to Japan.
I tried to get Walter to look at himself in the mirror. I would urge him and beg him, at times, to try to confront the situation for his own sake, also pointing out that the company was 100 percent paralyzed.
“Leave me alone,” he would snap.
This had never happened between us before. Walter had driven a wedge between himself and everybody around him, and now he was driving a wedge between himself and his last supporter—me. His office became a bunker. He closed the doors and wouldn’t let anybody in—including me, and I was used to going into his office ten times a day.
This was headed only one way. I could see that he was going over the edge, and I certainly didn’t want to be attached to him when he went off that cliff.
There was just no reaching Walter. Mickey Schulhof, Sony’s rep in the United States, tried to set up meetings with him to understand what was going on. Walter would berate him and call him Mickaleh Pickaleh. Walter had a special name for everyone in Yiddish. Sometimes being around him was like listening to Jackie Mason on crack. But it wasn’t funny when he told Mickaleh Pickaleh to leave him the fuck alone. You can imagine how well that sat with Mickey. Not only was Walter in denial, he just didn’t care about anything.
Stories started getting back to management in Japan through Schulhof. Mickey was more than Sony’s rep. He was a confidant to Norio Ohga. About a month or so after Mariah’s album came out, Ohga came to New York to talk to Walter about his behavior. Now he had a formal warning, but we all knew it wasn’t going to do any good.
By that point, I tried to stay away from Walter as much as possible. I could only get in trouble if I didn’t. Walter had pissed off so many of the wrong people, and a groundswell was building to take him down. When you’re making Michael Jackson’s camp angry and disgusting Bruce Springsteen’s manager and humiliating Allen Grubman and sniping at Steve Ross—and conspiring to take down David Geffen—you’re basically shaking your fist at a tidal wave.
Schulhof told me that Ohga would be coming to New York for meetings at the beginning of September, and it was not difficult to guess what was going to happen. As the day approached, the entire office seemed to go silent. It was as if the whole company had shut down.
Mickey had already told Ohga that a change needed to be made. But when I was called in to meet with Ohga and Schulhof, Ohga was very thorough. He asked me about all the allegations to see if they were true, and if the company was now at a standstill. Then Ohga and Mickey brought my entire team in and asked variations on the same question: “Are you able to do business? Can you tell me what’s happening?” They all told him that the company had basically been stopped cold.
Within an hour of these meetings, Walter was summoned to meet with Ohga. Norio walked out of that meeting very solemn, like he was leaving the funeral of his best friend. The next day, he and Schulhof called me and my whole team in for a meeting.
There were about six of us in that room. “It is with great sadness that I tell you this,” Ohga said. “A very terrible thing has happened. I have had to tell my good friend of more than twenty years that he will no longer be employed by this company.” He took a deep breath and continued, “I am very fond of Walter and always have been. But this is not my own private company. I have an obligation to our shareholders.”
It took no more than sixty seconds for Ohga to say those words. He stopped and remained speechless. It was all very awkward. He did not get up and leave. Nor did he ask us to leave. He just sat there in silence. Finally, all of us just looked at one another, stood up, and walked out the door.
There was a big play in the media about Walter’s firing. They called it a palace coup. It came to be known as the Labor Day Massacre, because it happened just after everybody came back to work following the September holiday.
The media turned it all on me. These are things I’ve learned to accept. You know how it goes. When someone gets whacked, it’s always easy to point the finger at the guy who’s closest. Especially when his last name ends in a vowel. It made for much more sensational headlines.
Sony Tokyo was stunned by the press’s reaction, confused and not sure what to do. So Ohga immediately moved Mickey Schulhof into Walter’s corporate position. This insanity had really spooked the executives in Tokyo, and it was now time for things to settle down.
I certainly felt terrible about what had happened to Walter. But there was nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing I could do about it. In the end it came down to him or all of us. I just wanted the company to function again.
People in the industry who remember the headlines have no idea what really went down. The clearest way to describe what happened is also the saddest: Walter Yetnikoff cut his own throat.
VOICES
MEL ILBERMAN
Let me tell you something. Walter Yetnikoff was a brilliant guy. Not too many people would have had the genius or the balls that Walter Yetnikoff had to bring Tommy in. If Walter had not been working for a Japanese company, it probably would not have been allowed. You’re not going to be able to give that job to someone who has no experience of working in the structure of a large company. But Walter intuited what Tommy could do. Walter was a wonderful guy. He just had his issues. Those issues put him through a rough time and they caused him a lot of problems.
JON LANDAU
I had a very complex relationship with Walter Yetnikoff over the fourteen years we worked together. Twelve of those years were very, very good. The last two were a deterioration that nobody wants to revisit.
SHARON OSBOURNE
Walter Yetnikoff was completely ignorant about music. He was nothing more than a star-fucker. He treated artists like they were objects, not human beings. On top of that, he was the poster boy for misogyny.
Yetnikoff took more drugs than any artist I ever worked with. He made Ozzy look like an absolu
te beginner. Tommy never got caught up in all that drug nonsense; he was much too smart. When Tommy took over at Sony, he was the only executive in the industry who really cared about music and the artists. The first thing he did was to move a piano into his office. These other executives had calculators, but Tommy had a piano.
RANDY JACKSON
Music entrepreneur/American Idol judge
I often refer to Tommy when I give this example because he was so smart.
I met Tommy when we were still mad young. I was working with Narada Michael Walden—this legendary producer—and Tommy came to San Francisco with this great new artist—Mariah Carey. We started working on Mariah’s first album.
In these producer teams there are always guys behind the scenes that are doing most of the work as the producer grows. When you start out as a producer, you’re doing all the work by yourself. You’ve got one or two projects, whatever.
But you start to grow and then you’ve got ten projects and you can’t do it all. So you need to bring in a B team and a C team.
The smart people go into the studios and look around. Okay. I know who the producer is. But who’s the one really making this happen?
Tommy was astute enough to see that Walter A. and I were doing a lot of the work. He saw something in us that he could definitely use to help nurture Mariah’s career. Walter became a staff producer at Sony. I became the musical director for Mariah’s show, and later, an A&R guy, a senior VP at Columbia Records.
It all kind of snowballed from there. Tommy believed in us and in our talent, and he believed that we knew something that could enrich Mariah. So my hat off and my props to him for believing.
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