We were living together now, and for the first time in her life Mariah had a sense of stability at home, a sense of grounding, a sense of family, a sense of financial security, a sense of real love and true caring. I’m not talking out of school and I’m not breaking any news here. She’s told her story in the press and on TV time after time, as if the interview process were a form of therapy. The story of her upbringing has been well expressed in the media in precisely her own words. She’d grown up amid the difficulty of having interracial parents at a time and in a place that was not very accepting. She’s told the story of being asked as a kid in elementary school in Long Island to draw her parents, and when she drew her father as a black man and her mother as a white woman the teacher said something like: “No! No! No! Why did you do that?” as if her picture were wrong. Her father was ostracized, people in their Long Island neighborhood set her family’s car on fire, and these tensions ultimately led to her parents’ separation. This left Mariah scarred and often fending for herself.
There have been so many stories in the press about Mariah and me, with me being described as a Svengali, restrictive, controlling, and on and on. Lots of crap. But I had to continue to take the hits because I was the chairman of Sony Music, and so I remained above the fray and never responded. When squeezed, my only statement would be: I continue to be her biggest fan. She is one of the most talented people to come along in entertainment. I will always support her in all of her endeavors.
The irony here is that in the end I was the one who was restrained. But I’m free to speak my mind here. If you’ve read George du Maurier’s novel Trilby, you know that Svengali is a fictional character who hypnotized people and controlled them with evil intent. So that characterization is simply bullshit. No, I did not hypnotize Mariah. No, I did not hypnotize her into selling 200 million albums. No, I did not chain her to the recording studio in the mansion we built after we were married. I was running through cement walls for her, trying to give her all I had learned from the day I set eyes on Elvis Presley at eight years old. But, hey, we all know that everyone has their own way of seeing things. And that includes me.
Our relationship at the start provided all the good things that came along with a loving family. The gifts I had gotten from my parents growing up were extended to Mariah—including the home-cooked meals that I had learned at my grandmother’s knee and prepared for her. Even though my parents didn’t quite know how to assess my new situation, they welcomed Mariah with open arms. That made her feel good and she gave that warmth back to them. Nobody, including Mariah, will tell you that back then she didn’t soak it all in, love it, and appreciate it.
Look, I’m not trying to shrug any responsibility here. It was absolutely wrong and inappropriate for me to become involved with Mariah. And I’m not saying this because there was a generation gap. Thalia and I are a generation apart. And that angel that dropped from the sky and I are still together and enjoying fourteen (and counting) of the best years of our lives. Celine Dion and her husband, René, are also a generation apart, and they have been together for more than twenty years. When the arms you’re in are the right arms, age doesn’t matter.
I should have listened to the piercing voice of my shrink and maintained my distance. Even today, more than twenty years later, when I see Mariah go over the same ground in interviews, I want to say that I am truly sorry for any discomfort or pain that all of my good intentions inevitably caused her, and most of all for the scars it left on my two oldest children. But it was confusing for me, because I went in with a good heart and, by the way, it was Mariah who asked me to marry her.
We had a musical connection. She had the talent—tremendous writing and vocal abilities—and I knew how to help her get the most out of it, and I also was fortunate enough to have the power and the means to execute everything that I knew. Early on, our dreams and our daily conversations were completely aligned. It’s very possible that she could’ve achieved the same success if we’d never gotten any closer than Mariah Carey the singer and Tommy Mottola the chairman of Sony Music. Looking back, that would have been the ideal collaboration for both of us. I wish somebody as strong as I was would have locked me in a room and smacked me around until I finally understood that before I dove in blindly and got involved. Many people did warn me. But with all the elements surrounding me in my personal and professional life, I drank my own Kool-Aid—the very thing that I scream at everyone else not to do. All I could see was a fairy-tale collaboration and success.
As we headed into 1992, Mariah and I were in total agreement when it came to what needed to be done next. Her vocals on the song “Emotion” were so unique—and there were places where Mariah sang through a succession of high notes like a bird—that critics began to wonder if her voice was being manufactured in the studio.
One of the reasons these rumors picked up steam was that Mariah had never gone out on tour. The critics and the masses had not seen her live, so there was no way for anyone to dispute these claims. Of course, I knew how amazing Mariah’s voice was. So did everybody else at Sony. But that didn’t matter. Public opinion can make or break you. I was always acutely hypersensitive to any issue—good, bad, or indifferent—that dealt with consumer thinking and behavior. And I’ve always liked to attack things that are a cause for concern. So we didn’t waste any time.
We simply had to show the world that Mariah’s voice was one of the greatest ever—and we figured out the perfect way to do that. MTV Unplugged.
MTV was the biggest promotional force in the industry by this time, and its Unplugged series had become one of the hottest shows of its time. Its purpose was to show stars outside the studio and give the audience a realistic performance in a natural state with only pure and raw talent coming through. It got off the ground in ’89 and was given a big boost when Paul McCartney performed on it in ’91. So we made a deal for Mariah to showcase her voice in front of a small crowd on MTV.
There was some risk involved. Mariah had come out of nowhere and gone straight to the moon. She didn’t have the opportunity to grow and develop in small clubs and venues. All the years it took artists like Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and Bob Dylan to piece themselves together at these tiny, noisy, smoke-filled locations were the invaluable experiences that made them the pillars of music today. Mariah had to develop her own style in concert, and that was going to take time. But the entire company stood behind her and we rolled the dice.
She stepped on the MTV Unplugged stage in a black leather jacket and jeans, and right off the bat she shattered any rumors of her “studio” voice with a rendition of “Emotions” that sent high notes through the roof and into the clouds. She went through her hits with only a microphone in front of her and a piano, violinists, guitarists, drums, and a choir behind her. For a closing number she delivered a rendition of the Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There” that is the second-best rendition of that song in history—and from my point of view will always hold that position.
Fans deluged MTV with requests to replay the concert, and the network aired it three times as often as the usual Unplugged. Because of this live appearance, there was never any question about Mariah’s voice again.
There were times I got to pause and reflect for a moment, and only a moment, because there was never any more time than that with a thousand moving parts flying around and a hundred holes in the dyke that needed to be filled.
But there was this one particular day I remember heading to the studio to see Bruce Springsteen. As I walked over, my mind drifted back to a night many years before when I saw Bruce setting a crowd of only a hundred people on fire at Max’s Kansas City with an early rendition of “Rosalita.” Then it flipped ahead to the first time I’d heard “Born to Run,” and the power in the imagery of the line “strap your hands across my engines.” When I heard that line I had to stop and pinch myself. And now we were headed to the studio to hear Bruce Springsteen play his new work, and I was going not as a guest, nor as Hall & Oates’ manage
r opening the show at Max’s Kansas City, nor as an observer, but as the head of the company and a conduit to help his music reach a larger audience.
Bruce and Jon Landau decided to release two albums simultaneously in early 1992: Lucky Town and Human Touch. I had no idea what I was going to hear, but I was filled with anticipation and excitement. This was the first work from Bruce that we’d received since I had started at Sony.
We heard so many great songs in that session. But one song still stands out for me: “If I Should Fall Behind.” The lyrics captured the way I feel about people who are near and dear so powerfully that I almost began to cry, and I had to get up and take a break. I just loved it, loved it, and will love it forever. If you asked me what it was that allowed me to get up in the morning and move my body and brain at a thousand miles an hour and try to turn Sony into the biggest music company in the world, it was a song like this.
One of our many strategies was to always look outside the box and try to use our own sense of creativity to connect all the dots. One of the best connections we were able to make for Bruce Springsteen came along in the same period. TriStar Pictures was working on a film starring Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington called Philadelphia, and the director, Jonathan Demme, needed the title track. So we brought the idea up to Bruce’s manager, Jon Landau.
It’s important to pause here to talk about Jon, because you can’t really talk about Springsteen without talking about Landau. And you certainly can’t talk to Bruce unless you talk to Landau. Bruce was fortunate to have a guy who was so obsessively committed yet so in tandem with his thinking, his artistic vision, and his music, as his manager and filter. Nobody got to present an idea to Bruce unless Jon Landau heard about it first and fully believed it would be in Bruce’s best interest, and then, maybe… maybe… just maybe Jon would mention it to Bruce.
At first Landau laughed at us.
“Look,” I said, “this movie is powerful. It’s about a man dying of AIDS. Can we at least get Bruce to a screening?”
Bruce did attend that screening and was deeply moved. Then Bruce and Jon met Jonathan Demme and Tom Hanks. It was a marriage made in heaven. Springsteen’s title track lifted the movie to higher ground and made “Streets of Philadelphia” resonate even more deeply. When you think of that film you think of the song, and when you hear the song you think of the movie. It may seem seamless when you sit in a theater. But the feeling I got watching the two come together was almost addictive. I couldn’t wait to do it again.
Timing is everything, and as luck would have it, in that same period we were able to do the same thing for Sade when the opportunity came along to create a theme song for the movie Indecent Proposal.
Sade’s sexy and smooth sounds were a paradox from a business perspective. Her songs rarely hit Number One, but at the same time they always seemed to be playing—and not just on the radio. When “Smooth Operator” was released you almost couldn’t escape it. You couldn’t walk into a little boutique, an upscale restaurant, or a spa without hearing it. To this day, I reach for Sade’s greatest hits to put on in my home whether it’s downtime, dinnertime, or anytime. I must’ve played “No Ordinary Love” three thousand times over the years. That’s no exaggeration.
I remember the look on Sade’s face the night I told her that over a quiet dinner. We were discussing the launch of her upcoming album and she was filled with joy, but almost a little embarrassed when I said it. She didn’t like any overt attention, and certainly not the glitz and glare of the bright lights. She was a much more introspective soul. She’d record her albums and then disappear for years. That was Sade. But upon the release of this new album, Love Deluxe, we were looking for a major launching and marketing tool. When a film opportunity came along we jumped on it, and Sade didn’t have to do anything. The song was already recorded and a perfect fit. All we had to do was connect the dots.
Cut to Robert Redford, Woody Harrelson, and Demi Moore in Indecent Proposal. The plot had the ideal setup. Harrelson and Moore are married and gamble away everything they own at a casino in Vegas. Redford comes along and offers Harrelson a million dollars to sleep with his wife for a night. Harrelson takes the deal. It’s almost impossible to describe the emotion that “No Ordinary Love” injects when the cameras hone in on Redford and Demi on Redford’s yacht. The music just electrifies the scene, ignites the senses a hundred times more than pure dialogue ever could. Every time you hear the song you think of Demi Moore rubbing the money all over her body.
As soon as we all attended the screening, we knew that it was going to be the ultimate fuel for Sade’s album—and it was. The album was in stores months before the movie came out. Once Indecent Proposal was released, radio jumped on the album big-time and the phone lines lit up. That single movie scene alone incrementally sold millions of additional CDs around the world for Sade.
We were having such phenomenal success plugging our music into movies—and most of it was happening outside of Sony’s own Columbia Pictures. The synergy Walter, Ohga, Morita, and I had hoped for when we first tried to set up the purchase of the studio worked on Philadelphia, but didn’t materialize much outside of that. The successes we were having, though, from Dances with Wolves for Kevin Costner, to launching Celine on Beauty and the Beast, to Indecent Proposal and Philadelphia, led us to the idea of starting our own separate sound-track division that was unique in the industry. With Glen Brunman as president, Sony Soundtrax was born and became one of our most profitable divisions. How’s this? The song that Celine Dion sang years later for Titanic would bring in more than a billion dollars in sales.
Sometimes connecting the dots led me to places I could never have imagined. For instance, like the song “Hero”…
One night, when Mariah and Walter A. were in a writing session for Mariah’s next album, I stopped by the studio to see them just before heading off to dinner.
I’d gotten a call that day from Columbia Pictures. They were working on a film starring Dustin Hoffman and Geena Davis called Hero, and Epic was handling the music. We were thinking of asking Gloria to sing the title track.
I told Mariah and Walter A. what the story line of the movie was, then I asked them if they could come up with the theme song. Walter A. started playing some notes and a possible intro for the song. He and Mariah seemed headed in a good direction, so I went off to dinner.
When I returned at about eleven that evening the two were still working. They’d come up with an almost completed song that they wanted me to hear. As soon as Mariah began singing I started to get chills. Halfway through the song, I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Stop! Stop! Please stop.”
They looked at me like I was losing my mind.
“What’s wrong?”
Wrong? Nothing was wrong. It was almost too much to take.
Confused, they continued to stare at me. For me, it was like being in the room the first time Frank Sinatra started to sing the outline to “My Way,” or Barbra Streisand on her first run-through on “People,” or Elton John finding the right melody to the lyrics of “Candle in the Wind.” It immediately gave me a sense that fifty years from that moment people would still be listening to Mariah sing that song.
“This could be one of the best songs I’ve ever heard,” I told them. That made them happy. But I wasn’t through. “This song is so good that it is not going to be in the movie. This song is not going to be recorded by anyone else. Mariah, this is your song. You have to sing this. This will be part of your legacy. This song has to be on your next album. This is going to be one of the biggest songs in your career, and maybe the biggest. It will become a standard—a classic.”
The smile drained away from Mariah’s face. “I’m writing this song for somebody else. I can’t sing a song like this. It’s too white-bread—it’s just not me.”
Mariah always struggled with her desire to take her direction much more into hip-hop. And it’s understandable. She had grown up with gospel and R & B, and hip-hop had become the mu
sic of her time and generation. It was part of the fabric of who she was. I got that. Though she had agreed to write “Hero,” she didn’t necessarily want the association of singing it.
“Please, listen to me,” I said. “Make it your own. Sing it with your style, with your passion and your soul. Make it your own.”
She and Walter A. went back to work and she did just that, and then she recorded it. We brought in the best mixer at that time, Mick Guzauski, who worked for us on so many hits. I remember sitting next to him at the recording console for the entire mix.
It was hard to imagine that Mariah really didn’t have strong feelings for the song by the way she sang it. Her entire being was infused into it. Great lyrics. Great melody. Great singer. Great production. It not only had everything, it had everything for everybody, and the message was so strong and universal.
The song could be about a young girl whose father was a hero to her. It could be about a teenager being tested. It could be about anyone who stepped up when the moment called for it. It could resonate with anybody. A six-year-old girl could be uplifted by it just as easily as a seventy-year-old man. Mariah and Walter had created a work of art that contained all the ingredients that—once we turned on the Sony machine—could be taken over the top and turned into a standard.
It was so apparent to everybody except Mariah. When she listened to the recording she became apprehensive. Down deep inside I believe she really loved it, but she might’ve been embarrassed by it in front of the hip-hop community. My sense was that it was much more about that than her feeling for the song or the record. The bottom line is that nobody was putting words in her mouth. The song came from her own soul. It just wasn’t the direction she wanted to be going in. Her next album, Music Box, was a great mix of styles. But for her, “Hero” was not even a small piece of that pie.
I saw “Hero” as Mariah’s missing piece. This was the magical piece that was going to open up every demographic to her. Now, everyone all over the world was going to be hooked into her music.
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