Hitmaker

by Tommy Mottola

  We had gotten a call about a movie about to be released six months down the road. It was called Titanic and starred a young Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. There was a lot of buzz going around about it. It was directed by James Cameron, and James Horner had composed the sound track. There were no songs in the movie. It was all orchestration. But Horner thought that it was really important to have a theme song.

  Cameron disagreed. He didn’t want to be criticized for going too commercial. But he was also eager to make the studio heads happy, and he knew that a hit song from the movie would only help guarantee its box-office appeal. So he was reluctantly open to it.

  We had launched Celine Dion’s career with a movie—Beauty and the Beast. Now she was one of the biggest recording artists in the world, and Horner wanted Celine—and only Celine—to sing the theme to this movie. So I went with some Sony execs to see a screening without the music. Hey, if they wanted to use one of our biggest assets to help their film, then we needed to see what it was going to look like.

  I was vibrating with enthusiasm as I walked out of that screening. But I quickly realized that most of the people from the company who’d come along had mixed feelings. A lot of them thought that it was too over the top, and others simply didn’t like it. I could hear a group in a little coffee klatch knocking it down.

  I burst straight in. “You guys are all nuts,” I said. “You don’t get it. This is Romeo and Juliet on a boat that sinks. Are you kidding me? It’s a smash. It’s a monster!”

  When James Horner played Celine the song for the first time she didn’t really like it. So you’ve got a director who really didn’t want a song in his movie and a singer who didn’t like the song composed for it and didn’t want to sing it. René and I had to persuade Celine to at least do a demo.

  I have a clear memory of the night Celine flew in for that demo. We all entered the big Studio A at the Hit Factory—Horner, René, Celine, and myself. Celine walked into the vocal booth, ran through the song quickly, and then said: “Okay, I’m ready to sing it. Let’s go.” She put on her headphones and the playback of the track started. Celine opened her mouth and started singing, and goose bumps filled my body. When you know it, you know it. I was listening to one of the classic vocals of all time being recorded. She stopped singing, and that was it. One take. One take! No fixes. Nothing. That demo recording became the recording that you heard in every country around the world and will hear for the rest of time.

  My only concern was the placement. We went back to James Cameron and asked where the song would be set in the movie. “If I do this at all,” Cameron said, “it will be at the end of the movie when the credits are rolling.”

  I came back at him sharply. “Nobody will give a shit,” I said, “everyone’s going to be walking out of the theater.”

  We went back and forth but, long story short, we folded. After all, it was James Cameron’s film, and he easily won the battle because it was his way or no way. So I took the opportunity because it was crystal clear to me how big this was going to be. And looking back on it, I have to say James Cameron’s decision was 100 percent right. Placing it anywhere else in the film would have been wrong. The song provokes tears, and I walked out of the completed film knowing that the song was going to be even bigger than I’d originally thought.

  We decided to put all the chips on the table.

  Celine was recording a new studio album that was due to be released at the same time as Titanic’s sound-track album. It was called Let’s Talk about Love. We brought in Walter A. to rerecord “My Heart Will Go On” with the same orchestrations that Horner had composed along with Celine’s original vocal. We put that track on her studio album, so it would be released on each of the albums. The idea was to release both albums on the same day: November 18, 1997.

  Most people in the company were approaching me as if I were crazy. “Tommy, why would you do something like that? The two albums are going to cannibalize each other!”

  “No way,” I said. “This movie will be huge, and those records will have two different audiences.”

  There was something else that I knew. It had been four years now since I had been named chairman of Sony Worldwide and taken over all the international operations. All of the fiefdoms had been destroyed in that time. The whole company was being run differently. It was no longer: Let’s break England, France, or Germany individually, and then let’s break Belgium and Holland. Let’s see how it goes in Asia and… No more of that. There was one unified operation, one global company that could strategize and market a worldwide mandate. When we wanted to break some music all over the world there were no longer any hesitations or internal obstacles. We were set up to unleash a marketing tsunami. And we had the amazing Polly Anthony, who would work her way up from secretary to president of the Epic label, totally focused on helping Celine succeed. Competitors would wonder, Why is it that when we have a biggest hit in the world we sell five million, while Sony’s biggest hits sell twenty? It was not by magic. It was all by deliberate design, and Titanic is one of the best examples.

  Within a twelve-month period, Let’s Talk about Love sold more than 30 million copies and went to Number One all over the world. Simultaneously, the sound track also sold more than 30 million albums. On top of that, “My Heart Will Go On” won an Academy Award the following year, and the song took away four Grammys. Let me explain what this meant financially. Selling more than 60 million copies meant almost a billion dollars in sales for Sony Music—and just from one artist. Today, given the state of the music industry, it’s easy to predict that this will never be done again.

  Our last half of ’97 was like watching quick cuts of a sizzle reel. Sales of both Celine’s albums just kept soaring. And Bob Dylan’s Time out of Mind was like a Picasso. In fact, it was one of those Picassos that remind the world just how startling a Picasso can be. At the next Grammy party I was happy to replay the telecast of Dylan receiving his award for best album. But there was no time to stand around and watch our company’s highlight reels. If we weren’t moving forward, we were going backward.

  Record companies have success in cycles. So what the public saw and heard in ’93 could’ve been signed and developed since ’90. And what happened at the end of ’97 generally had started incubating in ’94. Every few years, a huge burst of creativity and hits tends to be followed by a transitional lull. By no means does this signify the company has gone cold. It’s simply a transition. It is part of the process of this beautiful business that we call music. Once you understand this, you know that this lull has to be confronted head-on with a new period of lots of artists in development.

  We were totally prepared for 1998. Not only had we placed a huge emphasis on the discovery of young talent, but we were also focused on every genre of music. This allowed us to meet this transitional period with hit after hit.

  We had set up a regional A&R scouting system, interviewing dozens and dozens of college kids and young music lovers across the country, and hiring the best to scour campuses and clubs to provide monthly reports on new acts. These scouts were in addition to the A&R scouts that each of our labels employed. It was our scout in Texas, Teresa LaBarbera Whites, who found Jessica Simpson and, even more stunningly, a young girl group called Destiny’s Child.

  Of course, back then Beyoncé Knowles was the lead singer and star of the group. But there were four members of Destiny’s Child when the group recorded its first album in 1998. Some important dots were connected when we brought in Cory Rooney, the amazing producer who had worked with Mariah, and Wyclef Jean from the Fugees, to help execute their debut album. The single “No, No, No” shot to Number One and the album sold three million worldwide.

  There was a lot of legal wrangling and shifting of performers in the act, and by the third album the group had consolidated into Beyoncé, Kelly Rowland, and Michelle Williams. We continued to connect the dots and wisely placed their song “Independent Women Part I” into the movie Charlie’s Angels. That helpe
d shoot the album Survivor into the stratosphere.

  It was clear through all of this that someday Beyoncé could and would emerge as the solo superstar that she is today, not unlike how clear it was for Diana Ross when she left the Supremes. It took a little more time for another amazing solo act, Lauryn Hill, to emerge from the Fugees. Lauryn was one of the most unique artists I’ve ever encountered, but everyone in the office was a little nervous when we heard that she wanted to do a solo album.

  The Fugees were extremely successful and had sold nearly 15 million copies of their last album. There just seemed to be no reason to rock the boat and to possibly and prematurely break up the group and end its career if she emerged and became successful. So we met with the group to see if Lauryn would hold back and do one more album with the Fugees first. But a few months later, Lauryn called and said, “Why don’t you come by and listen to the solo project that I’m working on?”

  A group of us went to the studio, sat down, and listened to quite a few songs that she had recorded. We were completely blown away. Each track was better than the last. The album had it all—R & B, soul, hip-hop, and reggae. We were sitting there thinking, Oh, my God, here we go. She will definitely be our next big worldwide superstar.

  The album that grew out of those songs came to be called The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. It came out in 1998 and subsequently won five Grammy awards—including Album of the Year and Best New Artist. When you walk off that stage with five Grammys for your first solo album, the force can be like stepping on the gas of an eighteen-wheeler—or getting hit by one. It affects every aspect and detail of your life. The positives are obvious. You get a bigger career, make a lot more money, and become famous—either for the rest of your life or just for fifteen minutes. The negatives can be the enormous pressures that come along with that. You get followed everywhere. The press will write about anything and everything that you do, even if you didn’t do it. Photographers will come to your home and take pictures of your children through the windows. They will follow you to the point where you will ask yourself, Is all this worth it? Bottom line: your life is no longer your own.

  There’s just no way to tell who can handle the pressure of that kind of success, even though it starts out as the dream of a lifetime. You can only tell after the dream becomes an insane reality. If you win a bunch of Grammys as a member of a group and there are a lot of people around you who can function as shock absorbers, you might have a chance. Unfortunately, I’m sure Lauryn did not feel that whatever support she had around her was enough to protect her from the avalanche of attention that hit.

  What’s more, she was sued by a couple of writer-producers she’d worked with who claimed that they should have received credit on the album. We advised her to make a relatively modest settlement, but she refused, and when the case went to court she broke down on the witness stand and ultimately had to pay millions. Shortly afterward, she seemed to shut down emotionally. She just wanted to get away from everything, and she did. I think she made a very conscious decision to save her own personal life. All I can tell you is that for a while, we were totally unable to reach her. She just disappeared. So sometimes even when you are fortunate enough to develop and break a great talent, when planning out your business and your budgets, you never know if you can count on the artist going forward in the way you might think. What most business-people don’t know is this is an extremely fragile and delicate process, which is why continued and constant artist development on a daily basis was an imperative mandate for all of us.

  A contrast was taking a great talent like Will Smith, who was already a star when we signed him—he had started as a rapper in Philly, then as an actor had a big hit with The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and he was exploding on the movie scene—so there was no concern about him being tripped up by success. Big Willie Style was an amazing blend of pop and hip-hop that was released at the tail end of 1997 and set him up to sell more than 14 million. The music was fun, cool, and street. In his case, celebrity and notoriety only helped.

  Simultaneously, one of the biggest artist development stories for us in 1998 was in country music. The Dixie Chicks were like a breath of fresh air and so distinctly different from anything you had ever heard. All you had to do was listen to Natalie Maines and her lead vocals and the way the group blended their harmonies, lyrics, and melodies in “Wide Open Spaces” in order to understand how exceptional they were. Individually they were incredible musicians. But it was more than that. They had huge personalities, and really intelligent points of view, and their physical presence was alert, alive, and in your face.

  We brought them to the forefront of awareness in our company at one of our global music conventions. There were thousands of employees from all around the world at our conventions, plus retailers, radio programmers, and vendors. Any act that had a great new album and was able to nail a performance at our convention was guaranteed that a top priority spot would be mandated to the whole company.

  The Dixie Chicks’ performance was so amazing that nobody could resist them. They became one of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of country music, morphing their style into pop music and opening the door for what was to come more than a decade later for some of my favorite artists now, like Taylor Swift and Lady Antebellum, who are completely different musically but are seen as major pop stars as opposed to just country stars.

  The hits were coming out fast and furious in this transition and pushing our company into the future. We felt like kids in a candy store. And just when you think you don’t have room for one more chocolate, there’s that extra special treat that you can’t turn away from. That was a stunning Spanish-language album by Shakira called Dónde Están los Ladrones?

  She was not more than sixteen when I first met her. She barely spoke English and seemed to be very shy. Her vocals and her musicianship were stunning. Later on, I would come to find out that she was not shy at all. In fact, she is extremely intelligent, completely articulate, and, I will endearingly say, somewhat demanding.

  After a couple of years of convincing her to cross over and sing in English, I remember the day she brought me her new album. I sat back and read the lyrics and was mesmerized by the amazing poetry that she had created. It made me sense we were on to something so special and once again so different that the feeling of being able to establish another superstar was in the air all around us. Because anyone who could create these words, compose them into beautiful songs, and sing them was compelling enough to get the attention of millions of people all over the planet. It felt like an explosion was coming.

  So much for a transitional period.

  VOICES

  CELINE DION

  René and Tommy had to talk me into singing “My Heart Will Go On,” and when I look back on it I’m so happy that they did. Singers should always be involved in important choices like these, but you also have to trust people who know the business.

  I remember going to record it. It was supposed to be a demo. I flew into New York, and I wasn’t really ready to record—not vocally, not emotionally, not physically. But, hey, it was a demo. At that point, the track was still not done. I figured I’d do a couple of takes to see if the key and the rhythm was right.

  So I decided to go for a black coffee, with sugar, which I would never do when I record for real. The coffee might change the vibrato a little bit, and caffeine can just bring you to the roof, and not in a good way—for me, anyway.

  So I had a coffee on the plane and after landing I had another coffee. What the heck, it’s only a demo, right?

  I went to the recording studio, met with everybody, and started to sing.

  The song I recorded that day is the one that you still hear on the radio to this day—with black coffee and sugar all over it.

  RENÉ ANGÉLIL

  Sometimes a singer comes out with a great song, but the record company doesn’t know when to launch it, how to market it, where to show it. That’s where Tommy’s the greatest.

&
nbsp; MICHELE ANTHONY

  Yes, I was at that screening. I admit it, a few of us didn’t like it [Titanic]. We thought it was too long and kind of cheesy. Then Tommy came over and was saying, “This is gonna be the biggest movie of the decade,” and a few of us kind of rolled our eyes. But he was right.

  Selling tens of millions of Celine records was really important for Tommy, too, because it showed that here was another female vocalist whose career he helped develop and broke who was now outselling Mariah. To be able to replicate what he’d done with Mariah was really important to him.

  He proved he could do it again. And then again with Shakira. And then, yet again, with the whole Latin Explosion.

  ROBERT DE NIRO

  Tommy’s story is one of those great American success stories. The kid coming out of one of those neighborhoods, getting some street smarts, and making it out to become somebody.

  Then comes some hard times. But the real test of a man is how you get through those hard times and how you come out of it.

  JOE PESCI

  Tommy was deeply hurt by the breakup with Mariah. A lot of people don’t realize that. But we all go through those kind of things. He was hurt before with his first wife and children. He loved his children so much—and they’re such great kids.

  You don’t get used to going through situations like that. That stuff hurts you every time it happens in your life. People think you just hate the other person. No, it’s not that. You hate what happened. It’s not about blaming the other person. He was just very hurt. I know because we spoke about it a lot.