Generally, it’s almost impossible for any artist to have it all. They’re always categorized as either pop, or pop and adult contemporary, or R & B, or hip-hop. Nobody, but nobody, had the ability to span all radio formats and demographics. This song gave Mariah what you could only dream and wish for if you were building a career. Everyone at Sony fell in love with that song. So it was not just me being obsessive and delusional about how fantastic it was and how great an inclusion this would be on her next album. The way I saw it, keeping “Hero” off Music Box would have been like nobody ever hearing Tony Bennett sing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” Mariah wasn’t happy about it. But “Hero” was on her next album. This had to be another example for her of seeing me as being controlling.
I really don’t think she got it until “Hero” became a hit in every country of the world, and teenagers were writing her letters saying that they were considering suicide before hearing that song and recognizing there was something greater in themselves to strive for. Or until she was asked to sing “Hero” in a duet with Luciano Pavarotti at a fund-raiser for Kosovo. Or until she was asked to perform it to help heal hearts after the devastating attack on the World Trade Center. Or until she was asked to sing it at Barack Obama’s inauguration. Or maybe until I saw a television special during which she played it for her twins while they were still in her womb.
She was just a kid when she wrote that song, but she probably didn’t get it until she turned into an adult.
It’s important that you see the flip side. There were so many times when my instincts got completely overruled by an artist. Let me give you a great example. At about the same time, I went to Miami and had a meeting with Gloria Estefan that was unlike any that we’d ever had before.
For months, Emilio and I had been discussing where Gloria would go with her next album. It was a crucial time. We had built all of this momentum. With every album she put out she drew more passionate responses, broader demographics, and greater sales. As the saying goes, the pump was primed. Gloria could now release a pop album, attach it to a world tour, and easily double the sales of her last album. But Emilio had come to me with a different approach: an album totally in Spanish that was a tribute to their Cuban roots.
I had heard Gloria sing a song called “Mi Tierra” and thought it was fantastic. But releasing an all-Spanish album next was a risky move. It could narrow her audience just at the time we were set to radically expand it. It made much more sense to launch an album like that on the heels of the next pop success. Whenever I mentioned the Spanish album—whether it be in our New York offices or to execs operating in our territories around the world—I got serious pushback.
I knew we’d have to figure it all out the next time I visited Gloria and Emilio in Miami, and so did Emilio. When he approached me he was a little nervous. “Gloria wants to talk to you alone,” he said.
We were like family, but Emilio handled the production and business side for her, and Gloria never had cause to talk over a topic like this with me—much less ask for a private meeting. It was odd and quiet when we sat down in the backyard of her home on Star Island. We were beneath palm trees and looking out over water, but there was a very slight chill in the tropical atmosphere around us, and as soon as we started talking a quality came out in her that is hard to describe. But I’ll do my best. It was a steely conviction, something that was probably always inside her but had surfaced after the accident. The mental strain and the power that came through the experience, along with the physical strength she’d derived from the grueling workouts, had given her another dimension. She got right to it. She said that she wanted to do her next album completely in Spanish.
“Look, Gloria,” I said. “It’s a great idea. I love the idea. The music is incredible. But let’s just get one more pop album out while we still have momentum, and we’ll release the Spanish album right afterward. The pop album will put wind into the sails of the Spanish album.”
“I want to come out with the Spanish album right now,” she said.
The way she said it was not aggressive, but it made me feel like I was a stack of weights that she was determined to lift.
I didn’t want her to see me as a stack of weights. I wanted her to understand all the potential risks an artist takes when changing direction. I needed to put on my softest pair of velvet gloves.
“Gloria,” I said, “sometimes the artist’s work and the public’s appetite are not aligned. You can take the consumer to new places, but it works best and more smoothly if the new sounds are rooted in something familiar. That familiarity is what makes people feel comfortable when they reach for your album. Once you’re off that track, there’s always a risk you can alienate your audience.”
We talked about the nuances of this for about half an hour. When I was finished, she said: “I understand, Tommy. I thank you, and I love you for thinking it through so thoroughly. But this album means everything to me. And it’s what’s inside me right now.”
I sensed in that moment that the album she wanted to do was the culmination of everything that had happened to her. Not only the accident. But everything from the time she had immigrated to the United States as a little girl from Cuba. She wasn’t running away from a certain style of hits because she was bored and needed to experiment. She was running to a fire that was burning inside her.
It was not a left turn to her. It was a right turn. And I got it.
“Okay,” I said. The company had never thrown itself behind a foreign-language album as if it were a pop album. I knew the velvet gloves were going to have to come off the moment I left Gloria because there were going to be a lot of walls to smash through to help make this album successful.
We stood and embraced. “I believe in you,” I told her. “And I believe in this music. We’ll do it. Nothing will stop us. Let’s go.”
Mi Tierra was not only a beautiful work of art that was honored with a Grammy. It not only became the biggest-selling album ever in Spain. The single reached the Top 40 as far off as Australia. Mi Tierra became the biggest-selling Spanish album ever produced at that time, selling millions of copies. We’ll never know what would’ve happened if she’d released it after a huge pop success. Doesn’t matter. I’m happy to tell you that Gloria was right.
VOICES
GLORIA ESTEFAN
I was so emotional, so nervous when I came out on that stage. Tommy was sitting front row center. He was the first person I saw. He was crying like a baby, and I forgot all about how nervous I was.
CELINE DION
Tommy knew about the business—but he was very sensitive. I’ve seen him cry more than a few times. That’s important to me because I have based a lot of my life, and a big part of my career, upon emotions.
I don’t want to work with people who are not sensitive and emotional. It’s nice when you work with somebody who’s got so much power—but who is also sensitive. I don’t know if there’s an expression like this in English. But in French we say: Une main fer dans un gant velour. It means “An iron hand in a velvet glove.” That’s Tommy. He understood very quickly when we first met that I was shy, nervous, and kind of intimidated. He talked business with René, but with me he tried his best to make me feel as comfortable as possible.
JON LANDAU
You know, it can be a difficult spot when the artist and the manager are playing new music for the record company.
I’ve had executives look up at me after hearing an album and say, “Huh? What was that?” They just couldn’t relate to it, and when that’s the case it’s hard to conceal.
Tommy was a very intelligent listener. Occasionally, he would react with visible emotion, and he could express what he was feeling very well.
What made it different in the case of Tommy is that Tommy used to be a manager. So he understood where I was coming from. Let’s say that Tommy and I were negotiating on a particular point with the artist way, way in the background.
One of the things that I could say to Tommy
is, “Let’s just think about this from Bruce’s point of view.” If there was a point that looked unfavorable to our side, I was the one who would have to take that back to Bruce.
And Tommy understood that very well. Because he knew how that felt as a manager. That was helpful. It’s not like he’d say, “Okay, I’m going to give you a billion dollars because I see it your way.” But it enabled us to have a very freewheeling discussion.
GLORIA ESTEFAN
Tommy and I had our first and only fight over Mi Tierra. But in the end, he understood how important it was to both Emilio and I to pay homage to Cuba, and he got behind it in a big way.
There is no middle ground with Tommy. He sees something he likes, and he knows what light to shine on it. He puts all of his guys behind whatever he does. He believed in us and he took the risk. Another thing about that album—he did great things with that cover.
When Tommy says yes, he will do everything he can to make an artist a success.
CORY ROONEY
One of the things I learned from the experience of “Hero” is how you can overshoot something. At one point, Mariah purposely tried to sabotage the song by making it really soulful and gospel. And Tommy said, “Okay. Cool. Now sing it the right way.”
You know, if you just kind of clean it up and keep it right down the middle, you can broaden the whole song, and everything that truly needs to come out of the song will then come out. Just listening to the A and B performance of “Hero” and seeing the outcome, it made me realize, this guy knows what he’s talking about. And it’s not that he didn’t respect gospel music. Listening to gospel music is one of the things Tommy loves to do most. It’s just that he knew the difference in how a person should sing that song for it to appeal to the masses.
DAVE MARSH
To succeed in the record business, you have to understand the subtleties of race relations in America. For instance, Tommy knew how to position Mariah on the edge of three racial groups: black, white, and Latin. That was Tommy’s skill. He did a hell of a job with Mariah, and it wasn’t easy. Lots of people have good voices. Few of them succeed. Fewer still have the kind of success that Mariah had.
DAVE GLEW
There’s an important piece of this puzzle that is often overlooked. One of the shortcomings of the Warner, Elektra, Atlantic system—and I saw it because I was there for almost twenty years—was that they had two companies. They had a U.S. company with all these powerful executives, and then there was an international company.
When I was at Atlantic, we in New York had very little control over our marketing and our release schedules in Germany, France, and the rest of the world. Because of this, we could not break bands on a global basis. If we released, say, a Phil Collins record in the U.S., sometimes that record would be released a little later internationally. So we couldn’t make that record a global priority.
I kept saying, “Tommy, look, if we can take a Mariah Carey, a Gloria Estefan, a Celine Dion, and you can push a button, and release each record at the same time in every country in the world—the impact on our bottom line is going to be enormous. Enormous!”
We couldn’t do that at first because when Tommy came in he didn’t have control of international. But once Tommy got control of international, he could market and muscle our records globally, and he took over the world. If you sold 300,000 Mariah Carey CDs in Korea and 2,000,000 in Japan, the numbers really started to add up. The cost of making that record, in most cases, was already paid for by the U.S. company. The videos were used all over. So the long profit was huge.
People will never realize what Tommy did for Mariah—I don’t even know if Mariah realizes it herself.
But look at it this way. I’m at Epic thinking about releasing a Michael Jackson CD. I would move that Michael Jackson release date a week to give Mariah and Columbia a window so that Epic and Columbia were not competing against each other around the world. Because remember, if you came out with a Michael Jackson CD and a Mariah Carey CD at the same point, they would be fighting for radio time.
Tommy could juggle releases, make sure each artist always had these windows of opportunity around the world, and then he’d put the company’s entire muscle behind each release. His global vision is what made Sony Music so powerful in the nineties.
When I look back on all the music that we released in 1993, and consider everything else that unfolded during those 365 days, I can only scratch my head and wonder how there was ever enough time to pack everything in. This single year of my life could write a book of its own.
This was the year when Mariah released “Hero” on Music Box—which ended up selling more than 30 million and became one of the biggest-selling albums of all time.
It was the year that Celine broke through all over the world with The Colour of My Love—which included three Number One singles.
It was the year that Gloria came out with Mi Tierra.
And the year that Barbra Streisand’s Back to Broadway hit Number One on Billboard’s Top 200 album chart.
Those four releases would have defined a great three-year period for almost any music company in the world.
But now add the crowning achievement of Billy Joel’s career—River of Dreams.
And Pearl Jam, which now showcased our new strength in the alternative/rock music genre, when Vs. not only topped Billboard’s Top 200 album chart, but at the time broke Sound-Scan’s record for selling more than any other artist in one week.
Plus Michael Bolton adding to his succession of hits with The One Thing.
And Harry Connick Jr. closing out the year with the best-selling holiday album in America—When My Heart Finds Christmas.
Everything that had been set in motion from the day we began to make our plans in 1988 began to galvanize in full view of the public and the brass in Tokyo during this one year. Not only were we on top of the charts, our numbers were off the charts. Profits rose by 40 percent in 1993, and Sony management in Japan responded by promoting me from chairman of Sony Music North America to chairman of Sony Music Entertainment Worldwide. The international fiefdoms were now under one umbrella. We could now mandate and seamlessly focus an army of fourteen thousand people around the world to help break and establish more artists and have even bigger hits.
Nineteen ninety-three also was the year I was married to Mariah. And the year I had to go to England to testify in a suit filed against Sony Music by George Michael. And also the year that Michael Jackson was first hit with charges of child molestation.
But I’d like to linger a little on another defining moment in 1993 that told the world we were just beginning our ascent. It was the year that we launched Sony Music studios, the most creative recording facility in the world.
The Sony studio made sense in every way—creatively and financially. It would allow lots of dollars that were being spent in outside studios to now be spent internally with us. Once word of the Sony studio spread, it became the destination for artists in every crack and crevice around the world.
I remember the day I laid the plans out to Norio Ohga. I told him there was this jewel of property on West Fifty-Fourth Street and Tenth Avenue directly down the street from the renowned studio called the Hit Factory. It was the old Twentieth Century Fox Film studio, with an indoor pool that was used in the Esther Williams movies back in the forties. The facility that we had envisioned would be dramatically different. Our facility would provide rooms for preproduction, in addition to cutting-edge recording studios and mixing facilities. It would also contain one of the best soundstages, with ceilings high enough to rig up concert lighting so artists would be able to rehearse their live stage shows before setting off on tour. Artists would also be able to shoot their videos at the studio, then take them upstairs to one of the best video-editing services anywhere. The concept was for artists to complete the entire creative process all under one roof. Almost before I could finish my pitch, Ohga responded: “I love it! This will uniquely separate us from everybody else. This is
what our philosophy should always be. What will it cost?”
I took a deep breath, looked him straight in the eye, and told him: “Between forty and fifty million.”
Then it was Ohga’s turn to take a deep breath, but he didn’t blink. He looked me straight in the eye and gave me the nod. Once again, Ohga got it.
Shortly after the ribbon cutting, a who’s who of recording artists came through the doors. The studio also became a creative hangout where A-list actors would drop by to hang out with some of the musicians. This went way beyond celebrity. They would also end up doing looping sessions there because they liked it so much. People from MTV and all the best video directors and musicians were constantly bumping into each other day after day, night after night, starting friendships and sparking ideas. Many hits came out of casual conversations in those hallways.
It became my destination every day before and after dinner. So many of those artists were recording for other record companies, and every now and then they’d invite me into their recording sessions. I was hearing their music weeks before the execs running the artist’s label.
If their contracts were expiring, or if they were disenchanted in any way with their record labels, our studio certainly made them think that we were a better team and a better home for them because of the way that we took special care of our artists.
Sometimes I’d even have a little fun with the executives of other labels who were friends of mine while we were in phone conversations. I’d drop a line on them, like: “Hey, congratulations, you’ve got a really big hit on the way.”
“What are you talking about?” they’d ask.
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