Never Say No To A Rock Star

by Berger, Glenn

  He turned up again in 2005 with another grandiose project about himself, a musical named In My Life. This one was considered a total joke and people only went to see it on Broadway for the sheer horror spectacle of it all.

  The next I heard of Joe, things had taken a decided turn toward the dark side. He was indicted in 2009 on 91 counts for an endless string of casting-couch rapes. Assisted by someone named Shawni Lucier, he would place ads in Craigslist for women to audition for a movie. The gullible wannabes would be flown to New York. Brooks would get them drunk, have them read some dirty script, and then rape them. It turns out that, by the report of at least one victim, he had been raping women, using this ruse since the ‘70s, during the time he was in our orbit.

  It all ended as it should have. On May 22, 2011, Joe wrapped his neck in a towel, put a plastic bag over his head and breathed from a hose attached to a helium tank. Unfortunately, this is a quick and painless suicide method that is now highly recommended in the euthanasia community.

  But let’s assume that Joe had his share of pain in life, if not death. He was a stutterer and probably suffered from many mental disabilities beyond being a psychopath. The characters in his ill-conceived Broadway ditty to himself In My Life, had Tourette’s syndrome and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, so who knows what the hell was going on with Joe.

  It was obvious he was consumed with self-hatred, the source for all narcissistic maniacs. But that’s no excuse. The guy was a total reprobate. And he fucked up his son, too, who was convicted of murdering his girlfriend and will be sitting in a cell at Rikers for the next twenty-five years.

  Most of us weren’t anywhere near as bad as all that. But in New York in the ‘70s, people paid extra for the abuse. If you went to the Carnegie Deli for a pastrami on rye with Russian dressing, part of the fun was getting insulted by the wait staff. We learned at the studio that being obnoxious increased your cachet — it made you more of a star. Add in not sleeping for years, and anyone can get pretty psychotic. We’d work all day to make the money to buy the cocaine to keep us up in order to work all night, and then it would start all over again. Things got pretty flippy, and Ramone, the most volatile of us all, was the ringleader we were all trying to emulate.

  “I want a full staff meeting NOW!” the fat man would command, and Uncle Max would set out the call and everyone would come running. Phil would scream some kind of incoherent gibberish, and we’d all nod obediently. Then Plotnik would call Friedman a putz, and they’d chase each other down the hall spraying fire extinguishers. One time there was no cheese on my tuna melt, so I threw it at my ex-girlfriend Kelly, for whom I got a gig as studio manager. We were all nuts.

  If it wasn’t violence and drugs, it was sex. One time I went down to the basement and found three or four staff members in various stages of undress, blasted out of their minds, in the middle of a game of strip poker. In those pre-AIDS days, everyone was doing everyone, and talking about it, too. You could barely walk through a vocal booth without tripping over people fucking.

  During my quick rise from schlepper to senior mixer, these perfect atmospheric conditions made my nascent arrogance blossom into full flower. My jerkiness could compete with the best of them.

  Before I started at A&R, I had interned at the top jingle house in New York, Herman Edel Productions. That was my way into the biz. My mom was close friends with Willie Edel, the brother of the owner. Willie called Herman, and soon I was walking the dog from this impressive town house on East 53rd Street in the Turtle Bay neighborhood of New York. Herman was rarely on site. The company was being run by what we called the musical “Mod Squad,” the name taken from a hip TV show from the era: a woman, a black guy with an afro, and a long-haired white guy. This was not your father’s advertising supplier. The woman in the trio at Herman Edel was the leader, and one of the most impressive people I’ve ever met in the biz. Her name was Susan Hamilton, and it was her dog, Mendl, that I used to walk.

  Susan was a child-prodigy pianist. In an era when music production was completely dominated by men, she ran the biggest and most successful jingle house of the day. They created music for countless TV and radio commercials for the biggest accounts of the time like Chevrolet, Dr. Pepper, and Eastern Airlines.

  Susan was one of those musicians who possessed an ear far beyond those of mere mortals. She’d listen to an orchestra run through a piece and say, “In measure 35 on the second beat, the oboe should be a b natural instead of a b flat.” Not even the conductor heard that nuance.

  Susan was a powerhouse — she had to be in order to survive in that male world, but she was also terrifically sensitive and supportive in ways that were often overlooked, because she did this in unassuming ways.

  I remember one incident from those early interning days that revealed who she was. All of the top Chevrolet clients were assembled in the office for a presentation meeting. She asked me to put up and play the reel-to-reel tape of the music for the new campaign.

  Now, I’d never run a professional tape deck before. I threaded the tape on the machine just fine. Like all master tapes, it was wound “tails out.” This meant that you had to rewind the whole thing to get to the beginning. I pressed the rewind button and the tape zoomed on the turbo-charged machine. So far, so good. I felt pretty slick. What I did not know was that before hitting stop, you needed to slow the tape down first by hitting fast-forward. Instead, I just hit the stop button, which applied the brakes immediately. The tape machine screeched to a full stop. The momentum forced the tape to spill off the reel and get sucked down into the guts of the machine! Dots danced before my eyes, the slickness draining out of me as I was consumed with embarrassment and panic. She could have — and had the right to — scream at me, and fire me on the spot, ending my nascent career on a dime, as there was a chance that I had ruined an extremely important presentation with a major client. But instead, having comprehended what happened, she stayed cool, and quickly launched into some funny anecdotes to entertain the clients while I pulled myself together and gingerly pulled the tape out from under the capstans of the machine and smoothed out all the tangles. She kept one eye on me, and when I finally accomplished the task, she simply nodded, signaling me to hit the play button. Catastrophe averted. That’s the way she always was. She understood what was important and supported the growth of others for the greatest good.

  Most people in the business, and perhaps in life, are followers. They do not have the inner security to lead, to take a stand, to know their own mind, and to risk the courage of their convictions. But not Susan. She knew what — and who — was good, and she gave many of us our first opportunities, because she was great at recognizing, supporting, and promoting talent and hard work.

  She had a deeply generous spirit. She brought me, and many others, into her world, sharing her homes, her wonderfully eccentric parents, her talent, and her wisdom with all of us.

  With Susan saying the word, the door was opened for me to intern at A&R Recording, and the rest was history. She was also the very first person to give me the chance to sit behind the recording console as an engineer.

  From her, I learned how to be cool under pressure. We could take on the toughest challenges, and through top-quality work, we’d succeed. One time, we worked with Ray Charles on a campaign for the United Negro College Fund. While many of the stars we worked with could be extremely demanding, Ray had a reputation as the toughest. Any mistake could bring the session to an ignominious end. Susan ran the session, and I was the engineer. We rocked the house. Ray left a happy man, and we felt like we had won the NBA championship.

  Susan embodied many qualities that appear to be in short supply today: brilliance, excellence, generosity of spirit, and a deep loyalty. She was a gem.

  I was lucky enough to have another wonderful mentor when I hung out at Susan’s jingle house: Willie and Herman’s other brother, Buddy. The Edels were an impressively talented family. But they had something else unique about them. Three out of the four siblings h
ad a rare disease called retinitis pigmentosa, a progressive illness that left them blind. Herman was the only one of the four that didn’t have it. But Buddy did. He would hang out on the top floor of the townhouse, and I’m not sure what his job was exactly. Maybe Herman was just giving him a place to hang his hat. But Buddy was invaluable to me. When I, a seventeen year-old, would get overwhelmed at being in the presence of these Don Draper-like creative advertising superstars and feel as small as a bug, I’d run up to Buddy for some perspective on the whole thing. He was always cool enough to bring my anxiety level down and encourage me to go back down the stairs and bravely face the next daunting task. He was compassionate, funny, and wise. We hung out, and I even went to his apartment a few times, where I helped him out with a few things.

  After Susan helped me land the job at A&R, I got caught up in my own bullshit and lost touch with Buddy. A few years later, after I’d graduated to senior mixer, Buddy and Herman came in to do a session, and they booked me as the engineer. I felt so proud that I could show Buddy and Herman, who had known me from the beginning, that I’d made it!

  After the session I got a call from Buddy. He said it was great to see me after so long a time and suggested we get together for dinner to catch up. I admired him and was excited to get together. I met him near his apartment on Irving Place and he took me to a tony restaurant on that special block near Gramercy Park.

  After a few pleasantries, Buddy said he wanted to talk to me. He got serious.

  “Glenn, Herman and I were quite upset after our session with you.”

  I became alarmed. “Why?”

  “We’re disappointed. You’ve become rather arrogant. I don’t know what happened to that sweet kid I knew a few years ago. You’ve lost your way, young man.”

  I had gone in a very short time from being a kid from Brooklyn who used to run to him in a panic to being the wunderkind, the youngest senior mixer ever, the 21-year-old former schlepper who was working with the stars. I had forgotten who I was and become an ass.

  Buddy fit the cliché: he was blind, but he could see right through me.

  “You’re hot now, but if you continue down this path, soon enough, no one will want to work with you. Herman certainly never wants to work with you again.”

  At first, I felt defensive. Arrogant prickishness seemed to work for a lot of my cohorts. But I didn’t say anything. I burned with shame.

  I could feel his indignation rising. “You better get your shit together, and show some humility.”

  I hung my head, averting his gaze. Then he paid the bill, and we left.

  I reeled away from that meeting dizzy and disoriented. I was shocked, embarrassed, and depressed. Then I felt strangely thrilled. This guy really cared about me. He took me out to bust my ass, but I could tell he did it in a loving way.

  It took some time to absorb what he said, but I knew he was right. It wasn’t the first, or the last, time that I would get knocked off center, lose my core, become less than I could be. Things at times got far worse. I could be just as big a jerk as many of the people I worked with and complain about.

  Along with the players, my favorite people in the studio were the arrangers. The cats who occupied each role in the studio scene seemed to have their own personality traits. Arrangers were usually kind and generous.

  I am reminded of this when I think of the brilliant composer/arranger Pat Williams, who wrote the orchestral interlude for the song, “Still Crazy.” Pat, like most arrangers, was a lovely man.

  Since the time that Paul had done his demo of the song for us, he hadn’t found the solution to the middle section of the song. He hired Pat to compose something that would connect this new part back to the third refrain. But Paul was still unclear about what was going to happen in the bridge leading up to Pat’s section and had not written any lyrics. While a small orchestra waited in the studio at thousands of dollars a minute, Paul sat in another room, summoning the Muses.

  Though Paul was a very slow writer and would work on stuff endlessly to get it right, he managed to write the bridge to this song in just an hour or two.

  Then, when Pat started overdubbing the orchestra, Paul hated just about every note. He ripped Pat’s work apart. It wasn’t as if Williams was incapable of doing this stuff. He has won countless awards and worked with every artist. He’s a major cat.

  Paul had Pat rewrite the entire section on the spot. Writers were used to working hard to get something right, but it was the way Paul did it that left Pat feeling brutalized. By the time we’d finished, he looked shell-shocked and said that he’d never been put through anything like that by any artist ever. It was in moments like this that Paul burnished his reputation as a real prick.

  In the end it came out brilliantly. It is reminiscent of an earlier orchestral part from the Simon and Garfunkel song “Old Friends,” but artists are permitted to steal from themselves. This interlude, with its dissonances and cross rhythms, stands in poignant contrast to the familiar, old-timey melodic repetition of the title. It has the elegiac emotion of longing and sadness, of loss and acceptance, that the song, and Paul’s sensibility, best represents. I’m fucked up, I’ve lost out, but whaddya gonna do?

  The conflicted feeling resolves into a soaring, uplifting tenor sax solo crafted by the great departed studio musician Michael Brecker. The mournful solitude resolves into something hopeful. It’s as if Paul is saying, yeah, it’s all meaningless, but you might as well try to have a hit record anyway. Like Jews throughout history, Simon turns his pain into a wry song, a knowing nod and smile that says, “Could be worse.”

  Paul’s emptiness, his deadness, his limited capacity for feeling emotion, can be a real asset in making art. The damn thing is going to have to cut pretty deep to get a rise out of a guy like Simon. If the thing he’s making moves him, for the rest of us it’s gonna kick motherfuckin’ ass.

  TRACK TEN

  The Night I Didn’t Have Sex with Bette Midler

  Bette and Arif continued struggling with the Divine One’s vocals. One Friday afternoon, at the end of a long week of recording, I was given the assignment to make and deliver a cassette copy of some rough mixes to her.

  I called Bette up to see when she would be around so I could bring her the tape. When I heard her voice on the other end of the line, I became inspired. I knew things had just ended between her and Paul. Bubbling up from some source of late-adolescent supreme cockiness, total unconsciousness, and massively denied insecurity, I said, “Hey Bette, since I’m coming down to deliver these tapes, would you like to go out for some dinner?” I heard my own voice asking Bette Midler out on a date.

  With a sparkly and wicked smile in her voice, she said, “Sure.”

  I had not only asked Bette Midler out on a date, but she had said yes!

  With the cassette tape in my pocket, I rode the Seventh Avenue subway down from the studio in Midtown to Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village. What seemed like centuries before, when I was thirteen, I had taken the subway in the other direction, north from Brooklyn, and had visited the Village for the first time. The moment I ascended those stairs as a newbie teen, I knew that this was where I wanted to live. Now here I was, the coolest assistant engineer in the world on my way to the house of the hottest babe on the planet.

  Yes, it was all too hip, but I was so far out of my depth, I would be lucky if I didn’t get the bends. I was wearing the worst pair of shoes.

  As you travel south on the granite island of Manhattan toward its narrowing point, you move back through time, to where the city had its birth. Once you get below 14th Street on the West Side, the city loses its easily-traversable grid street pattern, and becomes a tangle of irrationally laid out pathways. I somehow found my way through the confusion to Barrow Street, a charming, narrow lane of early 19th century townhouses. I followed the numbers until I stood in front of her building, number 36. I walked up the stoop stairs and rang the bell.

  Bette lived then in a smartly furnished one-bedroom floor-thr
ough on the parlor floor of the building. Petite, with a mess of red hair, knowing eyes, a funky nose, and an ample, sensuous body, she opened the door and invited me in.

  She asked if I wanted a glass of Chablis. I remembered the first lesson the studio manager Tony had taught me when I began my internship at A&R: whatever the artists ask, your only answer is yes. I also figured that agreeing to whatever she said was the best way to conceal that I was a total dork. Once she brought me the glass, I figured out that Chablis was white wine. I was a quick study.

  Bette was bright, savvy, funny, and a great conversationalist. Whereas I had always felt so awkward and tongue-tied around Paul Simon, with Bette, at least I could speak. Sitting in her kitchen, sipping the wine, she told me she had just met David Bowie, and we talked about what he was like. She said he was smart and that I’d like him. We were getting along, having fun.

  She asked if I wanted to grab some dinner at Alfredo’s. I gave the right answer.

  As we walked west toward the river, down Barrow to Hudson Street, I tried to look like I knew where I was going, while following her footsteps. When we arrived at the restaurant, it was packed. This was the trendiest spot in New York at that time. Everyone was eating Fettuccine Alfredo. Now, I was sure to find out what that was all about.

  I approached the maître d’ to request a table. Looking beyond me, he swatted me away like a mildly annoying gnat. I tried in vain to push through the crowd, vying for a coveted seat at this popular bistro, my raised arm and boy’s voice lost in the din amplified by the tin ceilings. Then the host recognized Miss M., and his attitude immediately changed.

  “Oh, Miss Midler, how nice to see you!” he said in his most sycophantic tone. “Of course we have a table for you, come right this way!”

  As the diva pushed out her bosom, beamed, and sauntered past the adoring crowd to her appointed throne, I struggled to keep up, signaling to no one in particular that I was with her.