Maybe it was because they were with me, but I felt very comfortable from the moment I came through the doors. I was completely relaxed in the grandiosity of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Perhaps it was also because everything was really right this time. I even had a momentary chuckle when I got word that one of our guests, Ozzy Osbourne, had been freaking out because he didn’t have a suit for the wedding.
He was in his suite at the Plaza with his wife, Sharon, who kept assuring him that she’d ordered his suit and it would be delivered soon. But twenty minutes before they were supposed to leave for the ceremony it still had not arrived.
Ozzy screamed at Sharon: “Where is my suit? I need my bloody suit! I can’t go to this wedding in my banana hammock.”
Soon afterward, there was a knock on the door. A delivery guy stood in the doorway with a big box. When Ozzy opened it, he found three suits.
“Sharon,” Ozzy called out, “how many women is Tommy marrying today?”
As I walked down the aisle, I spotted Ozzy seated near the aisle and reached out to touch the material on his elbow.
“Hey, Ozzy,” I said. “Nice suit.” Funny, the things you remember.
I got to the altar. Emilio was standing there with a big smile on his face. He was the Cupid and the matchmaker, so of course he was entitled. My best man.
Then the organ started playing, and I began to get very nervous. I looked down. I didn’t want to look up at anyone. When I finally looked up, what I saw was better than any movie I could ever imagine. All the way at the back of the church was Thalia, as beautiful and radiant as I’d ever seen her, walking down the aisle in her gown with a fifty-foot train. As she approached the end of her walk, her mother joined her, raised her veil, and kissed her before passing her on to me.
I was pulsing. I held Thalia’s arm, and we walked up to the altar together. But I almost had to pull her because her dress must’ve weighed nearly half as much as she did. I’ll never forget how perfect and articulate Thalia’s English was as she repeated Monsignor Dalla Villa’s words to me. It was as if that oath was pouring out of her heart and soul.
The ceremony was everything we wanted. We walked back down the aisle, smiling at all of our guests and family, finally reaching the two gigantic doors that opened to the street. Just then, a gust hit us, and Thalia’s veil was blowing in the wind. There were ten thousand of Thalia’s fans standing on Fifth Avenue—the entire street had been shut down—and they all screamed at once when she appeared, and then we kissed.
We got through the crowd and paparazzi and into our car, and people followed us all the way downtown. Finally, we arrived at the Regent Wall Street, where I had another surprise waiting. After we relaxed for a half hour and were about to walk into the reception, a large mariachi band in full regalia played the traditional Mexican music when the bride and groom enter the room. I wanted to make sure that Thalia knew that although she was leaving her home, her family, and her culture, I wanted in every way to be part of what she was and have her feel comfortable in her new home, as well.
When the mariachis finished, we sat down at our table and the festivities began. The food couldn’t have been better, and the band started playing. About an hour into the event, the bandleader stopped and said, “Thalia, tonight your husband wanted to give you a very special gift.” He didn’t say anything more. The band hit the downbeat and the music began. Out onto the stage walked Donna Summer.
The whole room went crazy when Donna began singing “MacArthur Park.” Every single guest in that room—every single one—stood up and headed to the dance floor. It was surreal to see so many artists that I had worked alongside, and whom we all associate with standing out front onstage. I mean, c’mon, Bruce and Michael in the middle of a crowded dance floor? But that tells you how deeply Donna’s music was hooked into everyone.
At one point, Marc Anthony, Gloria, and Thalia went up to sing backgrounds for Donna. And then Emilio, who created the Miami Sound Machine and was also its percussion player, pulled me with him as he jumped onstage. We had the time of our lives. The evening became one gigantic party.
Finally, when the moment was right, I stepped up to do something that I had secretly arranged with the band. I picked up the microphone, looked into my bride’s eyes, and sang one of my all-time favorite Sinatra songs: “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” I did my best version of Frank and Count Basie at the Sands. And for that moment, I was the singer I had always wanted to be.
VOICES FROM THE LATIN EXPLOSION
JENNIFER LOPEZ
When I went to Tommy’s office for the first time, I was nervous. He sat me down and said: “What do you want?”
I was speechless.
“What do you want to do with your career?” he said.
I didn’t know what to say, so I said: “I want an A-list deal.”
Tommy said: “Okay, you got it. But I want to sign you right now.”
I said: “Wait a minute. I don’t have my manager here.”
He said: “Let’s call him. Get him on the phone. We’re making the deal right now.”
Tommy always knew what to do. That kind of record company executive doesn’t exist anymore.
RODNEY JERKINS
Producer
Tommy said: “Listen, I got an artist I want you to work with. She’s a movie star. Her name is Jennifer Lopez.”
This was the first deal that Tommy and I did together.
At that time, Jennifer Lopez had no music credibility outside of doing the movie Selena.
I had other people in my ear telling me, “Don’t work with Jennifer Lopez, because she’s not a singer.”
Tommy said: “If you deliver the song, I’m telling you, it will be a smash hit.”
I had this great idea for a song and I brought the track into Tommy’s office, confident that I had something special. Tommy listened to it and said: “What if the melody went: ‘Da-da-da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da-da…’ ”
That blew me away, because that’s really A&R to me, creative A&R, which we’re missing now in this generation of music men. We’re missing the guys that really have those ears. Tommy understood melody, and he understood where a song should go. He did the melody.
I pulled out my Dictaphone and said, “Do it again, Tommy!” And he sang that melody and I went right back to the studio and it became “If You Had My Love.” That song was Number One for five weeks. Millions of albums sold.
JENNIFER LOPEZ
All these amazing artists with such great catalogs, it all has to do with Tommy.
If one of my records was not performing well in a certain area, Tommy would go to that city and make sure it got heard. My second album with Tommy was a huge success. I said, “Where do we go from here?”
I’ll never forget his answer. He said, “There are no limits—except the ones you create.”
Years later, when he left Sony, I felt orphaned.
MARC ANTHONY
I remember one night I was in the Sony studio recording. It was around one or two in the morning and I was just leaving. I met Tommy on his way in. He was rolling up his sleeves. I said: “Tommy, what are you doing?”
He said: “I’m going to mix your record.”
I said: “But it’s two o’clock in the morning.”
When you see the general doing it himself, you have to step up.
SHAKIRA
It is very rare to find people who really understand music, who can see beyond prejudices, and who can see the dreams that are boiling inside someone, the way he saw the dreams inside me.
You can imagine how hard it is for someone like me, coming from Barranquilla. There were many battles. So when I got to Tommy Mottola’s office, my career in the Spanish world had already arrived at a certain point. I was ready to take the next step. I had high hopes. But I spoke very poor English.
I had a feeling that I could learn how to write songs in English. Finding Tommy was an injection of optimism.
I started to think, Hey, I can do this
because he’s got faith in me. And sometimes that’s all it takes. You just need a person who deposits the amount of faith that you need to really take off with your dreams.
THALIA
When we met, both of our hearts had Band-Aids on them.
In my case, it was always kind of difficult. I had been performing for so many years. People who wanted to take me out were seeing me as the character they saw on television, the person that they thought I was. I never knew if they wanted to be with me or just wanted to be in a photograph with me. And there was this whole matter of impressing me. The whole restaurant would be closed with a table just for me. One time, a guy tried to send me a Rolls-Royce with the keys. They weren’t seeing the real me.
And from a distance, a lot of people don’t see the real Tommy. When people meet him they expect to meet this character—like this strong bull or something. But once you meet him, you see that he’s a very friendly guy, very happy, with funny stories. He has very strong points of view, yet he hears what other people have to say. You come to understand: behind that strong persona is a very sensitive person. When he commits to something, to a friendship, to a love, it’s from his core.
So when we met, it was two hurt souls that just needed the authentic in this crazy world of show business. I’d felt rushed my whole life. If it was not to a soap opera, it was to a tour, or a promotion in Barcelona, and if it was not Barcelona it was Buenos Aires. I was ready to get out of the Ferrari of that crazy, frenetic life and take a bike ride in the country.
That was what it was like when we met. One of the blessings for us was the language barrier. The language barrier made everything slow down for both of us. And then we got to know each other through the telephone.
I think the magic of getting to know one another through the telephone is it’s not how you look or what you’re wearing. It’s not about putting up the best pose or what you’re putting on your lips. It’s just about you. I thank God for that.
We came to find that we had so many similarities. I was born eleven years behind my sisters. Almost the same for Tommy. The neighborhood where I grew up in Mexico City had food stands and markets. In some ways, it was like the Bronx.
Also, Tommy and I met at a great point in our lives. Tommy was already successful. I was already successful. So we came together as equals.
But it’s kind of funny, because as perfect a soul mate as he is, there are always those moments that seem unreal. I remember at the wedding, the moment of the cake, when everybody started singing: “The bride eats the cake, the bride eats the cake….”
And it really hit me: “Whoa! I married a gringo?”
EMILIO ESTEFAN
You could see it in Tommy’s eyes that night. Every time you looked at him, it was the happiest moment in his life.
Just as all the pieces of the complex puzzle of life were finally coming together for me, as I was beginning to feel grounded and right for the first time, and as the Latin Explosion reached its pinnacle, we began feeling seismic shifts underneath our feet throughout the entire music industry. It was sort of like hearing an avalanche miles and miles away, but also thinking that this would never hit any of us.
Sony Music was operating at peak performance, and everybody on the team was doing what they did best—and better than ever. It was happening in all sixty of our companies around the world. It was at the same time that we had encouraged Shakira to work on her first bilingual album, entitled Laundry Service. One particular song stood out for me in such a strong and powerful way. It was called “Whenever, Wherever,” and it was one of the most infectious pieces of music I’ve ever heard. It had Latin rhythms, instrumentation and sounds from the Andes integrated with a masterfully constructed pop melody, killer lyrics, and a vocal to die for, and it was crystal clear to me that this song was the first single that was going to propel the album into a global smash.
But Shakira felt differently. She did not think it was the first single, and by this time she had a good grasp of the English language and by no means came off as a shy little girl anymore. She began to show up at meetings with a yellow legal pad filled with fifty questions and details that she wanted addressed—which really earned my respect and admiration. But she played another song for us that she insisted was the right first single. After having seen this movie hundreds of times, I tried to explain to her that if we made a mistake and came out with the wrong first single there was a possibility that this album and its launch could get off to a very shaky start.
She continued to persist, so I called our friends at Z100, the top radio station in the country, and asked them to do me a favor. We slipped them “Whenever, Wherever” and had them spike it—just spot-play it once or twice. The next day it went on the radio and the phones rang off the hook. Shakira grudgingly smiled when she heard about the response, and consented to release the song as the first single. It went straight to the top of the charts all over the world, took the album with it, and sold 15 million copies.
Shakira’s success was the cherry on top of the cake. Our Latin Explosion was in full bloom. Starting with a cornerstone like Julio Iglesias and then moving on to Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine, then to Ricky Martin, Jennifer Lopez, and Marc Anthony, and now Shakira, we helped create a movement that had never happened before. Developing artists and having them sing in their native language, then crossing them over to English and back to Spanish was a windfall of success for the company.
It was hard to imagine at this point that we would have to compete not only with the other companies in the industry but also with our consumers, who could now download for free the music that we were selling.
Music file transfers were swamping the Internet networks at colleges. Napster had 25 million users, and it wasn’t like these people were passing around a couple of songs. They were sharing and downloading entire libraries.
Somebody actually wrote an op-ed in one of the major newspapers wondering why record companies didn’t just do what Napster was doing.
Well, first of all, it was illegal. Napster wasn’t clearing the songs or paying royalties to the artists or the record companies. It was stealing our music and allowing it to be shared for free. And second, there was no technology that actually existed for us to legally license, collect, account, and pay royalties for the record company’s music. Third, there were concerns from the Justice Department about antitrust violations in the event that the record companies would band together and try to create their own infrastructure. The point is, anybody who thinks that we at the record companies just sat on our hands and did nothing about the free downloading of music is totally misinformed. We were all handcuffed.
You’ve got to remember, we were not selling to people individually. We distributed to huge accounts like Walmart and Tower Records. And these retailers were resistant to Internet sales, figuring that it would be a flash in the pan. I’ll say it for the hundredth time: rest on your laurels for a minute in this business and you are toast. Only a few years later, the iconic Tower Records, the retailer that we teamed up with to break and develop so many stars, went bankrupt and belly-up.
It would have been so much easier if accounts like Tower had added a digital component. But their inaction created a void. No single music company could ever deliver the wide array of content that Tower Records offered. Sony, the industry leader, had only 18 percent of the total market share, which meant that all of the music companies would need to get on the same page to sell digitally, and track and account for royalties. What we got was—and excuse me for saying it this way, but it’s the most genteel way of putting it—a total clusterfuck. Every company had its own ideas and agendas to get the most out of the market. We held lots of meetings, but there was little cooperation, because so many of the competing music companies had competing parent companies and nobody had the right user-friendly technology.
For instance, Sony Tokyo wanted all of its technology to dominate the market just as it had with the CD nearly twenty years ea
rlier. Don’t forget, Sony corporate viewed itself as a hardware and manufacturing company. With the exception of Morita and Ohga, none of the Japanese brass were ever comfortable being in the entertainment business—and I mean ever. Time Warner wanted to muscle AOL into the picture in a big-time way. Microsoft was trying to figure out a way to get music into its software, while Steve Jobs had a vision of music as a portal to devices that had not yet been released but would operate as telephones, miniature jukeboxes, and bookshelves.
Microsoft reached out to Sony with a proposal for a partnership that sounded like this: You show us your technology and we’ll show you ours. When a Sony Tokyo exec heard of this he told our New Technologies guru, Al Smith, “That’s crazy! We can’t do that. And we won’t do that!” I guess you could say it was understandable. At the same time, the two companies were in a sales war over Xbox and PlayStation. Apple, on the other hand, needed our content. So Sony Tokyo met with Apple. But, again, Sony Tokyo’s vision of total domination shut those talks down because unless it could control proprietary technology there was absolutely no interest in an Apple partnership. You can’t make this stuff up. Sony Electronics in Japan had such success with the Walkman and the CD, and it was looking to have that success with music on the Internet. It wanted to be able to have the technology behind anything we did. Just imagine what could have happened if a partnership between Sony and Apple had evolved.
Hitmaker Page 29