Runnin' with the Devil

by Noel Monk

  For these reasons, among others, David was a strong creative and business force, especially in the early days. If we were going to make this new arrangement work, I had to make David a partner, not an adversary. I don’t mean from a financial standpoint. Contractually, we were all partners. The band members had agreed to an equal split of everything, regardless of the contributions of a particular member on the songwriting front. It’s not unusual for a band member to get a greater share of royalties or publishing revenue if he was the sole author of a song. But many bands in the nascent stage decide that friendship and egalitarianism are more important than quibbling over money.

  One for all . . . all for one!

  This arrangement often works well in the beginning, and then not so well if one or more band members achieves a greater level of stardom, or takes a dominant role in songwriting, as would eventually be the case with Van Halen. For now, though, the pie was split into equal pieces, and my take was 20 percent. There was just one catch: for most of that first year I worked without a contract. And when we finally did put something in place, in the fall of ’79, I had only a thirty-day contract. We did this with the understanding that we would negotiate something more permanent down the road. But it never happened. I worked as the manager for Van Halen for six years, and the entire time I was on a month-to-month contract. What did this mean? Well, a couple things. It meant that while the terms of the actual contract were fine as far as compensation, I had absolutely no job security; the band could terminate me at any time, and for almost any reason, with only thirty days’ notice. I would be owed nothing from the band’s revenue beyond the day I was let go. More typical for a manager is a multiyear deal. I never got anything like that.

  I’ve beaten myself up enough times over the years about that contract. I still feel it was forced on me by the band and Barry Tyreman, who at the time was Van Halen’s attorney, during a meeting in his office. Maybe he wanted to prove to the band that he could be a tough motherfucker, or maybe the band wanted to protect itself better this time around. But Barry pulled out a contract that was far more onerous than the one that Marshall Berle had worked under, and asked me to sign it. I was still relatively young and hungry, and I had never been a manager. Still, I wasn’t an idiot. I knew this was a bad contract; I was wary of a thirty-day deal, and I said so. But Barry pushed it and the guys went along.

  Honestly, I wasn’t that worried about it. I was too excited about managing this fantastic band that I just wanted to keep working. While I viewed Barry as an untrustworthy prick, I liked the guys in the band and felt they would do right by me. I figured I’d wait a little while and renegotiate the terms and get a fair deal.

  It never happened. I asked numerous times over the years and each time the request was nudged aside or ignored, and I grew to live with the idea that I would never have any sort of job security. It was never much of an issue . . . until, of course, it was.

  IN MARCH OF ’79, a few weeks before the release of Van Halen II, I got a call from the promotions department at Warner Bros., informing me that a meeting had been scheduled with executives at Billboard magazine. Billboard was the most powerful and influential music trade publication, largely because its ranking of singles and albums was considered the definitive measure of a record’s success or failure. The entire process for determining these rankings was something of a mystery, but the weight that the brand carried was indisputable.

  I knew a few people at Billboard because I had done production work for some shows sponsored by them in the early 1970s, so I was pretty comfortable taking this meeting. I wasn’t sure what it was about, but figured it had something to do with Van Halen’s new album. Indeed, that was the case. We met in the office of a Billboard executive we’ll call Jeff (not his real name). Nice guy, very courteous and professional, and we’d known each other for a while.

  “First of all, Noel,” he began, “congratulations on your new gig with Van Halen. That’s a great band you have there.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “I think so, too. So tell me, Jeff. What’s going on here?”

  If this sounded like an ignorant question, well, that’s because the entire meeting was far above my pay grade from just a few months earlier.

  “All right, here’s the thing,” he said. “How’s this new album?”

  “It’s great. Coming out in a couple weeks. Why?”

  “I’m sure it’s very good. But how is it going to do? What are the expectations?”

  “I think we’re all excited and optimistic,” I said. This was bland, but absolutely true. I had no idea where the conversation was going.

  “Bottom line,” Jeff said. “Where do you want this album to land on the charts?”

  “What chart?” I said, feigning utter stupidity.

  Jeff smiled. “The only chart that matters, Noel.”

  My first thought was, What the fuck is he talking about? But I tried to just roll with the conversation.

  “I don’t know, Jeff. What do you think?”

  He leaned back in his chair, pressed one palm into the other. “You guys are very good and ready to make a huge jump this year. Would you want to come in at five or six, something like that?”

  Then it hit me: Holy shit, he’s calling our chart position. Weeks in advance. I tried to stay calm. First of all, if he was giving me an opportunity to choose where we would debut on the Billboard album chart, I had to exercise some restraint, rather than get caught up in the insanity of the entire exercise.

  “Maybe low forties,” I said. “Forty-two, forty-four. That gives us someplace to go, rather than falling after the first week.”

  Jeff nodded. “Smart thinking.”

  The quid pro quo, as I quickly learned, was payback through advertising. A double-page ad in Billboard at that time was very expensive. If a record label spent enough money and had a band that was deemed destined for stardom, it was possible to manipulate the numbers. Sometimes the money came directly from the band itself. When I became Van Halen’s manager, for example, a full-page ad appeared in Billboard, basically offering me congratulations from the band. Buy enough advertising and you could get leverage with regard to where your band’s new record might show up on the Billboard charts.

  Can I prove any of this? Not really. But I know this conversation happened, and I know that our album debuted on the Billboard chart in the forties, as requested.

  Maybe it was just a coincidence.

  Look, this was the way much of the music business worked back then: you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. In some circles transactions were facilitated through what I called C&C: cash and coke. Or, depending on the person with whom you were doing business, CC&P: cash, coke, and prostitutes. Whatever it took to get the job done. And I was learning very quickly that the job was a lot more complicated, and sometimes dirtier, than it was when I was simply tour manager.

  It was well known in those days that bigger and more successful artists were allocated greater resources—not just compensation but a broad spectrum that included publicity, marketing, merchandising, and tour support, to name just a few line items. Stated policy was that all bands of comparable levels of achievement were treated basically the same. But this simply wasn’t true, and everyone knew it. The monster groups received greater support, as well they should have; the stakes were higher. The strange part, however, was trying to figure out where a particular band fell in the pecking order, and whether there was any sort of document used as a guideline for determining expenditures such as promotion and marketing, or whether these things were entirely arbitrary.

  As it turned out . . .

  One day in the spring of ’79, while sitting in Carl Scott’s office discussing the plans for Van Halen’s upcoming tour, the big man casually mentioned something called the “black book of artist allocations.” I straightened in my seat when the words tumbled out; Carl, sensing he had let slip something intended to remain private, quickly tried to change the subject, but I pressed him for informat
ion.

  “There’s an actual book?” I asked. “And it’s really black?”

  “Nothing you need to be concerned with,” Carl said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  When I asked to see it, Carl refused. I asked again. He would not budge, and I didn’t have the strength to move the big man (metaphorically or literally). Since I had no desire to offend or anger Carl, I let it go; however, I left his office that day with a burning desire to get my hands on a copy of the vaunted black book.

  Back in my office, I scoured the personnel roster in search of an unwitting accomplice for my mission of stealth. I found her in the person of an assistant to one of the Warner VIPs. She was a very sweet and attractive young lady, but I wasn’t interested in a serious or long-term relationship. It may not sound like the noblest gesture, but frankly I was interested in only one thing, and it wasn’t the usual pot of gold men seek at the end of the dating rainbow. What I wanted from her was a copy of the big black book. By the end I think she knew what I was after and was both relieved and offended that it wasn’t what she had thought it was.

  After a few weeks and an investment of several hundred dollars in lunch and dinner tabs, I held in my possession the Holy Grail of management information. As I cracked it open, my heart began to beat faster. My palms were sweating. (Come to think of it, this response wasn’t so much different than the endgame men typically seek.) Inside was the entire Warner Bros. roster of talent, and precisely what they received in terms of support, broken down into every conceivable category. It was fascinating reading that kept me busy for days. As I suspected, the pie was cut into innumerable slices, and they weren’t even close to being of equal size. That said, I have to admit that I was perfectly happy with the portion allotted to Van Halen for the upcoming year.

  Just getting to the truth was an interesting and rewarding exercise, but there was still more to the mystery. As I went over the figures, I felt a nagging curiosity about their inspiration. Record label executives did not just throw money around capriciously. Well, actually they did, sometimes, anyway, but in general checks were written to bands that had the greatest likelihood of producing a return on the investment, and that investment was monitored quite closely; changes could and were made on a moment’s notice.

  Or on ten days’ notice.

  See, I realized that the allocation figures were most likely based on the reports produced for each act on the Warner roster. I received one of these for Van Halen every ten days. Remember when I mentioned this important ten-day report? It included information about how the band was doing in virtually every market in the country, as well as in foreign markets. The information I received pertained only to Van Halen, and not the other artists on the label; that information was delivered to the appropriate manager/attorney/publicist for each of those acts. But I knew that if I could get my hands on a complete list of the ten-day reports, I could solve the puzzle that was by now greatly exacerbating my tendency to be obsessive and compulsive.

  A couple weeks later, as luck would have it, I stopped by the Warner offices in Burbank and discovered the lot so crowded that I was forced to park in a nearby back alley. I walked around to the front door, then wandered through the building for an hour or so, touching bases with all the people who could help my band’s needs and desires. This was not “work” in the traditional sense of the word, but it was crucial to greasing the wheels of our upcoming tour. I was new to the business of management, but after years on the road, I knew the importance of building collegial relationships with the folks back home in the corporate office. By chance, the last person with whom I chatted had an office near the back door, so I used that exit. Outside, while walking to my car, I passed a garbage dumpster. Now, I am not in the habit of Dumpster diving, but as I glanced to my left I noticed several stacks of paper atop the trash heap. I inched closer and recognized them immediately as ten-day reports. Scores of them. Stack upon stack of two-inch-thick reports, for just about every band on the WB roster.

  I stood there for a moment, surveying the fetid but nonetheless gold-plated pile before me.

  It can’t be this easy . . .

  I looked to my left, then to my right. There was no one in the vicinity. And since this was more than two decades before the enactment of the Patriot Act, well before we all accepted the persistent presence of Big Brother in our everyday lives, I had no reason to worry about surveillance cameras or even cell phones capturing the potentially embarrassing behavior in which I was about to engage. As for legality, well . . . garbage is garbage and in the public domain. So I held my nose and grabbed one of the comprehensive reports. I tossed it in my car, went back to my hotel room, had a shower, and began putting together the final pieces of the puzzle, aligning the numbers in the ten-day with those in the black book. Lo and behold, it was a nearly perfect match, with the greater resources going to those artists who had the most eye-popping ten-day numbers. As I suspected, there was nothing the least bit arbitrary about this entire business, and a band’s fortune could rise and fall in a heartbeat.

  I didn’t wait long before sharing all of this information with David and the other guys in the band. They were duly impressed at the lengths to which I was willing to go on behalf of my band (“Noel, you went into the garbage for us? Pretty slick, man!”), but that was only one of the many items on the agenda. And it was far from the most pressing.

  Unfortunately, there were other aspects of Van Halen’s relationship with Warner Bros. that left the band (and its new manager, the poor schmuck who would have to fix the situation, me) less sanguine. There was the matter of that bill for roughly $1.2 million in tour and band expenses related to the 1978 tour, a staggering amount for a young band to repay. Now, we were all reasonably confident that, based on the success of Van Halen, and the apparent confidence being expressed by WB, that we’d have no trouble making up this deficit. But we would have felt a lot more confident had the terms of the band’s contract with Warner been somewhat more favorable to the people who were actually creating the music and touring all the world to promote it.

  It’s pretty basic, really. Everyone wants to be compensated fairly for their work. No matter how much you love what you’re doing, if you’re not being paid what you believe you are worth, eventually you grow resentful. And there was absolutely no doubt that in at least one very important category, Van Halen was getting royally fucked.

  When he had first recruited me to be the tour manager, Carl Scott had mentioned almost gleefully that he had gotten Van Halen for a virtual steal, but until I became manager I didn’t know exactly what that description entailed. Now that I had access to the band’s financial records, I was able to see for myself what Carl meant. Indeed, Van Halen had been led into a contract that had the potential to restrict in perpetuity the band’s ability to earn what it was worth on the open market. Granted, one could argue that weighing carefully the potential for such distinctions is part and parcel of the negotiating process. Like many young artists, musicians often get screwed on the first contract, and that was certainly the case with Van Halen. What made the deal particularly odious was the probability of that deal remaining in effect for many years to come.

  I’ll try not to bore you with too many of the details, but a few numbers will graphically and concisely illustrate the point. In 1977, Van Halen, as a young and naive band, had been steered into a contract that would pay them a royalty rate of approximately 7.5 points. Now, points do not translate specifically to a percentage, because the record business is enormously complicated. Suffice it to say that Van Halen earned less than one dollar in royalties for every copy of Van Halen sold. This was a bad deal by any reasonable measure, but it sometimes happens to a new band on its first contract. What made it worse was the fact that it covered two records, with an option for Warner Bros. to extend the contract for another two records; when that deal ended, the same option would apply. In other words, Warner Bros. could own Van Halen for the life of the band, at a royalty rate befitting .
. . well, no one, actually, but certainly not one of the biggest bands in the world.

  And there was absolutely nothing that could be done about it.

  When I called the band together and explained all this to them, in very precise terms—including the painful truth that if they were free to negotiate a new contract, they would probably be worth nearly twice as much money as they stood to receive from Warner—the boys were predictably pissed off.

  It was painful to see the band’s response. It was almost like they grew up overnight, expressing not just anger, but the sort of hurt that can only come when one is new to the business, before scar tissue from repeated slashings has a chance to build up.

  “How could they do this to us?” Alex said, in what struck me as one of the last innocent statements I would ever hear from him.

  I looked at Al. I looked at his brother. Their faces bore the exact same expression: a mix of bewilderment and pain. The naïveté was impressive. They were like children suddenly discovering that Santa Claus wasn’t real. I felt bad for them, but I also felt it was necessary for them to shed, once and for all, the cloak of innocence. It was all well and good to get into the music business as a means to chase girls and drugs. But there comes a point in the career of every successful band when it is no longer advisable or even acceptable to ignore the business end of the business, or to trust someone else to do it for you.

  “How could they do that to you?” I repeated back to Alex.

  He nodded. “Yeah, really.”

  “Al, how could they not do it to you? It’s all part of the game, and you guys have to start playing a little more seriously.”

  I wanted them to be not just more attentive but tougher. I had a plan for getting Van Halen out of its contract, and while on the face of things it might have seemed overly optimistic, it was really our only chance for success. Rather than trying to break an ironclad contract, which would cost a ton of money in legal fees, we would take a quieter and more surreptitious tack.