Never Say No To A Rock Star

by Berger, Glenn

  Karen never released that album during her lifetime. Within a few short years, she was dead.

  The fact that a great artist like Paul was a prick wasn’t so unusual. One of the things that everybody who spent time in the studio knows is that the artists we worked with were often crazy, or jerks, or both. We enjoyed that—unless it caused us too much personal indignity—because it provided us with great stories and stuff to complain about.

  Now I don’t have any problem with musicians trying to make a buck or get laid. It ain’t easy being an artist. So I get it now that these guys had to do whatever it took to survive.

  But it got under my skin that a guy like Paul would go on in his songs about “laying himself down,” and that kind of bull, when he usually treated people like garbage. For some reason, the thing that pissed me off more than anything was when someone pretended to be a savior but was really an ass. I call that sanctimony.

  Simon was far from the only star I encountered in the biz with this character trait. Another Paul I worked with, who was sanctimony personified, was a soprano sax guru named Paul Winter. This Paul won many humanitarian awards for his recordings with endangered species like whales and wolves. To his chagrin, his records ended up in the New Age bin. He hated thinking of himself in that way, certain that his music would be of universal appeal. But the pigeon-hole wasn’t so bad, because he rode that Kumbaya wave to the peak when it was happening in the 1980s.

  It wasn’t that this Paul was without talent. He was a great musician and conceptualist. But he was also just a bit of a gonif. Was this a necessary combination for success?

  Winter got his career start by winning a contest for amateur musicians, the prize for which was a record contract on Columbia Records. The story that I heard was that the first year that Winter competed he lost, so the second year he broke the rules by hiring professional ringers, and he dominated the field. If true, that early act of breaking a few eggs to make an omelet set the tone for what was to come.

  In 1972, Winter had something of a hit with a revelatory record called Icarus. This album was this super-cool fusion thing with top-flight musicians playing all kinds of unlikely instruments for a hit record, including cello, sarrusophone, and mridangam. Despite his name being on the cover, most of the songs were written by someone else, a genius named Ralph Towner, who soon thereafter dumped Winter and went on to fame in a group called Oregon.

  I call Winter the Max Bialystock of the New Age. Remember Bialystock? He was the guy in the Mel Brooks film and smash Broadway hit The Producers, played in the film by Zero Mostel and on Broadway, most famously, by Nathan Lane. Bialystock was a desperate Broadway producer who seduced little old ladies to give him money to put on his money-losing productions.

  Winter did the same. Except in his case, he would seduce little old ladies by telling them that he was making music to save the whales. Then he would use the dough to take trips to Lake Baikal in Russia, or some such, because it was absolutely necessary to go to these exotic locales for “inspiration.”

  When I worked with Winter, we made our records at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the largest gothic cathedral in the world, on 112th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in New York City, where his axe was bathed in reverb twelve seconds long. He had a rich, smooth, lyrical sound that no one but him has ever gotten out of the often reedy and narrow-sounding soprano sax.

  We would record at the Cathedral from dusk till dawn. It was very undyed hemp. We took a lot of cantaloupe breaks, and there was much deep breathing at 3:45 a.m. A twelve-hour night would usually result in a few acceptable notes recorded on tape.

  But it wasn’t all melons. After a night of musical meandering, there was something magnificent about the sun rising in the rose window of the cathedral to the golden sound of Winter’s horn. Paul had great ears and he and his fellow Consort members, brilliant musicians all, worked diligently to create beautiful sounds. Whatever corners he’s had to cut to get there, he does have an impressive catalogue of quality music.

  One night, looking at me with his puppy-dog, gray eyes and speaking in his yoga-instructor voice, Paul asked me to take a walk with him. We wandered to a staircase in the back of the cathedral.

  Paul said, “You have made such an amazing contribution to this record. Really, you are like one of the musicians. I value what you have done so much. I want to reward you in a special way. I’m going to give away some of my royalties on this record to you. I’m going to give you a point.”

  This meant that, after recouping expenses, I would share in profits, receiving a percentage of future sales. Winter owned his own record company, and he could pass on the royalties anyway he liked.

  I was blown away by this gift. Recording engineers were never given royalties. We were paid by the hour. To share in the profits meant that yours truly had special status. It was reserved for producers and artists. I felt a tremendous sense of gratitude and pride in the gift. It was hard to take in such generosity. It meant that Paul would sacrifice some of the money he would be making off the album to give to a schlepper like me. I was ready to go all night as many nights as Paul wanted to, and do everything I could to help create a musical masterpiece.

  The fine print in this offer was that little thing about “recouping expenses.” What I did not know at that time, but Paul did, was that there would be no royalties from this record.

  Winter had expensive tastes. His breakthrough disc, Icarus, was produced by The Beatles’ producer George Martin, who gave Paul permission to spend whatever he wanted on this record. Martin was used to working this way from his days with the Fab Four. The Beatles could run up a tab while recording, because they made their record company a bit of cake.

  Winter took to the privileges of a rock-star budget, but his sales were more on the order of bands like Harry Shields and The Bones of Contention. Since he planned on selling those billions at some point, he figured he wasn’t doing his job unless he was going over budget, and he continued to spend profligately on his projects.

  While he was gallivanting around the globe harmonizing with sea otters, back home, because he spent much and earned little, his debts mounted to the millions of dollars from cost overruns on his several previous recordings. His crackpot schemes to sell beaucoup disks never came to fruition. Even the best New Age noodler rarely sold over 50,000 copies. Hence the need for the old ladies.

  When he bequeathed me his one percent, no album of his had ever recouped costs and turned a profit. Not only would this album have to be his first multi-million-seller to earn a single royalty dollar, but he would have to pay off all his previous debts before he could disburse a dime.

  What Paul knew when he “gave” me a point on his record was that he was giving me 1% of, as they say in show biz, bupkes. But hey, who cares, as long as the music turns out great. And really, he did it all for the sake of his art.

  Winter wasn’t really such a bad guy. His hijinks didn’t stop me from working with him. In fact, I worked for his record company for a bit, even knowing the facts. He was generous enough to let me produce a record on his label by a wonderful singer named Susan Osborn. When we’d be working on a record and someone would make a musical suggestion, he’d say, “Let’s let the music tell us.” That really meant “no fucking way.” I guess to this Brooklynite, I would’ve appreciated it if he had just been direct. At a certain point I wouldn’t drink the Kool-Ade anymore, and he fired my ass. I hope that isn’t the reason I’m telling this tale. That would make me the prick.

  Stories like this are legion in the music biz.

  Art Blakey was a jazz drummer who was renowned for discovering monster talent. Years ago, I was hanging out at the old New York Jazz club, Sweet Basil, chatting with a waitress who worked there while studying art. She was saying how wonderful Blakey was because he gave first shots to innumerable jazz greats.

  I said to her, “You know what that means, right?”

  She didn’t know what I was talking about.

  I s
aid, “It means he doesn’t pay.”

  “What?”

  “Mark my words.”

  A short time later, a sax-playing friend told me this story. Like many young cats before him, he came to New York, hoping to make it. He was excited beyond all measure when he found himself with an opportunity to audition for Art Blakey! Here was this fresh cat’s big chance. He could follow in the footsteps of reed-players Lou Donaldson, Branford Marsalis, and Wayne Shorter among dozens of others, who had also made their way into the biz by playing with Blakey’s band, The Jazz Messengers. When my buddy got to Art’s house, Blakey was rubbing his ass and grimacing in pain.

  “Man,” Blakey asked, “could you go out and get me some Ben-Gay? My butt is killin’ me!”

  Wanting to please, the young musician ran to the corner drug store and got Blakey the unguent to soothe the pain where he had stuck one too many heroin needles.

  Blakey thanked him for the stuff. They played together, and Art invited my buddy to do a gig.

  Telling me the story, my friend said, “Not only did I never get paid for the gig, but the mother never paid me back for the Ben-Gay!”

  Hey man, musicians are poor and so they have to hustle.

  So artists can be cheap bastards. So what. No artist is that bad, right? I mean, it’s not like they are starting unnecessary wars or anything. We live in venal times where very, very fat cats rip off the unsuspecting poor with exotic mortgages and then crash the economy so no one can get a job. So no matter how opportunistic an artist might be, in general the worst they are doing is sneaking a third portion at the buffet.

  Except for the few who are really bad.

  The worst guy I ever worked with? That would be Joe Brooks. He was truly a psychopathic music dude. You think you’ve never heard of him, but if you were born before 1970 he owns a piece of your inner iPod. He’s the creep who wrote the song “You Light up My Life,” one of the biggest hit singles of all time. At least as big as Paul’s “Bridge.”

  The hit record was sung by the virginal Debbie Boone, Pat Boone’s daughter. Pat was probably another low-life. His comments comparing gay-rights activists to terrorists tells you something about him.

  In the 1950s, Pat Boone’s scam was selling records off the backs of black cats. The original rock n’ rollers like Fats Domino and Little Richard had a hard time selling records, so an attractive white feller like Pat Boone could sing their songs like “Ain’t That a Shame” and “Tutti Frutti” and sell millions.

  Pat’s daughter Debbie said she sang “You Light up My Life” to God. This song being about God is the ultimate bullshit. And I’m going to tell you why.

  Joe Brooks was a no-talent bastard. “Light” was one of the lamest songs ever written, and it won every Grammy. So much for the taste of the elite. It’s not just that I hate treacly sap. I can listen to Celine Dion sing the theme to Titanic and the money note gets me every time. It’s that “You Light up My Life” genuinely sucks.

  Brooks recorded a lot of his shit at A&R. He would come to the studio with nothing written: no charts, no parts, not one note. Then he’d scream and yell at everyone. Because they were getting paid, everyone would pretend the emperor had talent.

  The guy who sat in the first chair in the string section, the savvy and political David Nadien, who had been first chair at the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein, would whisper behind his hand, telling the violinists, violists, cellists, and basses what to play.

  Nadien, who was a gorgeous musician, put up with this crap because that’s how much better the money was in the studio than at the concert hall at that time. The story goes that Bernstein once told him that he had to make a choice between the studio gigs and the orchestra.

  Nadien said, “My dear fellow, there is no choice.”

  All the musicians would make up their own parts.

  Not everyone worked like Simon, or groups like Steely Dan, who would take sixteen hours to cut a basic track, but it was conventional to at least take enough time to get something of acceptable quality. The quality thing was our ethic. That was our pride.

  Joe’s regular engineer, an old English legend named Malcolm Addey, wasn’t available one day, so I was asked to sit in the chair. Before I had a chance to set levels, or the band had time to figure out what notes to play, Joe screamed at me, telling me to hit “record.” I did as he demanded. The thing sounded like a musical rat nest. Before the take was even finished, he ran into the control room ranting, demanding a playback.

  When he heard that it was all a putrid mess, he started screaming at anyone in proximity, including me, “What the f-f-f-f-f-f-f-uck is going on here? What the f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-uck is wrong with you? Are you a f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-ucking idiot?” (Brooks did have a bad stutter, among his many other issues.)

  I suggested it might be a good idea to do another take, and stop saying fuck. “No!” he continued, “Fix it! You fucked it up, now you make it work!”

  There was a limit to the crap I would put up with. The combination of Brooks not having his shit together and being abusive to everyone was beyond my limit. He wasn’t paying me enough and his music sucked. But I could sense something worse than that. I didn’t like being in the presence of evil, especially without skill. So I, for once, refused to work with the guy and ended up not working on his hit record, something I can say I’m proud of. I wasn’t above doing just about anything for a dollar like anyone else in the studio, but this freak skeeved me. (Confession: I recorded the music for the 1992 Republican National Convention even though I’m a member of the Radical Passé Party. I charged top dollar, and knew they’d lose anyway.)

  Brooks screwed over the dearly departed session singer Kasey Cisyk, who performed the original vocal on “You Light Up My Life.” Because she didn’t have a nice American name, or connections like Debbie Boone, she got dumped for the single. That kind of thing happens all the time, too.

  Brooks made it on pure shamelessness, which is the root of sociopathy. What would normally hold a person back —a little class, healthy reticence, not wanting to look the fool, or an actual conscience — simply didn’t exist for Brooks. We have a tradition of this in our country. Clever sociopaths, who lack healthy shame and are willing to do anything to get what they want, are often able to bamboozle large swaths of the public and become exceedingly successful.

  People like this have what is kindly referred to in my current profession as a “personality disorder.” You see, there are basically two kinds of nuts in the world. The average neurotic, and if you’re lucky you fit in this category, generally feels bad about him or herself and ok about everyone else. If you feel depressed, or anxious, you want to get rid of the bad feeling. But people with real personality disorders, or what we call “Axis II,” are in a different category entirely. They believe the problem is “out there,” not “in here.” Everything would be fine, if everyone just realized what a genius they were.

  All this exists on a continuum. You could have some narcissistic traits, where it is hard for you to say you’re sorry, or you could be a fullblown psychopath where you can kill people without remorse. When you are like this in the extreme, you believe you can do nothing wrong. You can do anything without any sense of guilt, because you have no human limits. If anyone should point out that what you have done is in any way other than perfect, it is that person who has the problem, not you. These people, it would makes sense to say, are much harder to treat than what we in the biz call the “worried-well,” who belong in category one (hopefully, you). These Axis II types are often attracted to celebrity and politics (think Sarah Palin or Donald Trump).

  Everybody in the studio knew what kind of low-life garbage Brooks was. But we all kept our mouths shut, because a gig is a gig, and what’s the difference between one kind of prick and another? Our job was to get out the product.

  Brooks’s ego was so boundless that, after his big hit, and the movie that went along with it, he parlayed his success into making a second film, called If E
ver I See You Again. This time, this lunatic produced, directed, wrote, and starred in (!) the movie. This sorry excuse goes down in my book as the worst film of all time. The direction makes Ed Wood of Glen or Glenda fame look like a Lubitsch.

  In the movie, Brooks gets to live out his pathetic fantasy. After having been rejected for being a dweeby freak in childhood, he is finally able to nail the shiksa-goddess, played by the perfectly mediocre — and appropriately named — actress Shelley Hack. She falls in love with Joe after seeing him conduct an orchestra, or that is, wave his arms awkwardly in front of about 120 musicians crammed willy-nilly into studio A-1. Talk about a Portnoy’s Complaint!

  By the way, Shelley Hack was famous for being in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, in which she played the beautiful woman on the street who says she is happy because she doesn’t have a thought in her head. She was also renowned for getting thrown off the TV series “Charlie’s Angels” after one season. But this doesn’t make her a bad person. She has actually gone on to do some very noble stuff in her life, including helping the Bosnians. I credit her as a human being far above the more famous and talented sanctimonious schmucks I hung with in the biz. In the end, she’ll be remembered for the “Charlie’s Angels” debacle instead of her good works, but that’s because we live in a very sick society, which, if you haven’t noticed yet, is one of the points of this little section.

  My favorite line in Joe’s film? “I’ve got to go to Carnegie Hall (where he will, of course, be performing) to check the acoustics!” You gotta love it.

  I would get in trouble, back then, for saying that “You Light Up My Life” was an awful song written by an evil man made in the worst way possible; that Joe Brooks not only didn’t deserve success, money, fame, and awards but he really deserved to burn in Hell. Who cared and who listened? Hits talk.

  After his second movie bombed, though, the dreck did sink to the bottom of the bowl, and Brooks was no longer invited to the A-list parties. Years passed, and I wondered what had happened to the creep.