Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry

by Gareth Murphy

  Nicknamed “the Gold Dust Twins” by their staff, copresidents Mo Ostin and Joe Smith quickly understood the spin-off value. “Every manager, attorney, or artist sits down … and they talk about our advertising,” explained Joe Smith at the time. “Tell me another company where people talk about their advertising. Not how much, but the quality of it.” Cornyn began noticing how “Mo and Joe started doing office tours with would-be signees, entering the office doors in Creative Services, pointing at our group and saying, ‘That’s them.’” The curiosity eventually spread to the corporate headquarters. “Steve Ross invited me to New York to speak to financial market analysts—an auditorium full of them,” recalled Cornyn with bemusement, “as if Creative Services had found the divining rod to a whopping new market.”

  Meanwhile, just down the road from Warner’s offices at Burbank, supermanager David Geffen, based in Hoagy Carmichael’s old house, was getting noticed by Steve Ross’s barons. Representing CSN, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young, the agency had a policy of no contracts that was a powerful glue among these embodiments of the hippie dream. Smoking joints on the office sofa, the artists were all kept entertained by Geffen working his telephone—squeezing promoters and record executives with a zeal that verged on sadistic pleasure.

  Although few could understand the fire in his belly, David Geffen was a complex personality haunted by the professional failures of his father, confused by his homosexuality, and ashamed of his mother’s lack of sophistication. If anything, he probably found handling the business of folk singers easier than sitting alone wrestling his own demons. His immense powers to persuade and even manipulate sprang from a deep reservoir of emotion that rendered him, like an iceberg, a deceptively powerful force of nature. When he wasn’t in killer mode, he could be an attentive friend whose puppy eyes drew artists into a world of intimacy and comfort. Although relatively unmusical, he was sincere and discerning in his appreciation of lyrics and possessed the same dissatisfied energy as the brooding songwriters he defended. Like them, he was fleeing drabness and mediocrity—in search of gold-plated recognition.

  Geffen’s sugar daddy in these years was Ahmet Ertegun, an adorable rogue in his own right, with a taste for luxury and elaborate schemes. The fascination was mutual. Observing Geffen working his magic over the telephone one afternoon in the Beverly Hills Hotel, Ertegun whispered to a journalist friend, “He must be talking to an artist. He’s got his soulful look on. He’s trying to purge at this moment all traces of his eager greed.” Sure enough, it was Joni Mitchell at the other end.

  Partly grooming, partly showing off, Ahmet Ertegun berated the young man’s manners and introduced him to collecting art. Ertegun even brought Geffen on a junket to the South of France, where the Rolling Stones were recording Exile on Main St. However, Geffen’s transformation from manager to record mogul began in Clive Davis’s office while shopping around his latest discovery, Jackson Browne.

  “I’m sorry, but I have to interrupt,” Davis apologized as his secretary made signals from the door. “There’s only one person on earth that could make me interrupt your singing, and that’s Goddard Lieberson, and he’s on the line.”

  “Pack up your guitar,” snapped Geffen, standing up. “Pack up your guitar, we’re leaving!”

  “We don’t have to leave, Dave,” pleaded the baby-faced musician.

  “Just do what I tell you,” barked Geffen.

  As manager escorted artist to the exit, Davis bleated, “Wait!” He’d put the man Columbia employees still called God on hold.

  Despite his bluster, Geffen skulked back to Atlantic. “Ahmet, look, I’m trying to do you a favor by giving you Jackson Browne.”

  “You know what, David, don’t do me any favors,” quipped Ertegun.

  “You’ll make millions with him,” drooled Geffen.

  “You know what? I got millions.” sassed Ertegun. “Why don’t you start a record company and then we’ll all have millions.”

  From that fateful repartee, Geffen’s rejection rose into revenge. “Fuck it!” he thought. “If I really believe in these artists I should start a record company.” Financed and distributed by Atlantic, he found the perfect name for his very own artist sanctuary, Asylum. The company was loosely modeled on A&M—at the time, the most artist-friendly label in Los Angeles. The controversial David Geffen had gained access to the WEA banquet, albeit, for the time being, on Ahmet Ertegun’s knee.

  Within a year, Geffen had lined up a small but impressive release schedule including Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, the Byrds, Jackson Browne, Jo Jo Gunne, David Blue, and Linda Ronstadt. Thanks in large part to Jackson Browne’s advice, Geffen tapped into an emerging country-rock scene at a Los Angeles club called the Troubadour. From that connection, various musicians at a loose end began jamming with the help of Browne and another capable songwriter, J. D. Souther. They called themselves the Eagles. Geffen signed them up and paid for Glenn Frey and Don Henley to get their teeth redone.

  As their management agency expanded into a record company and publishing arm, David Geffen and Elliot Roberts were forced to delegate. Geffen moved his attentions to the label; Elliot Roberts continued handling the musicians with his humorous but deceptively shrewd techniques. “He would smoke a copious amount of fantastically great dope and then make these deals,” recalled J. D. Souther, who likened Roberts to a cross between Woody Allen and Fat Freddy. “You’d see guys stagger out of his office as though they just did not know what happened.”

  Picking up the waxy scent of money on the California breeze, in late 1972 Steve Ross asked Geffen to name his price for the barely operational label. In a fateful meeting, Geffen pulled out a cigarette, and quick as a flash, Steve Ross extended a light. “Seven million,” ventured the unprepared debutante. Without batting an eye, Ross agreed and offered Geffen an employment contract for $150,000 per year. Walking out of the meeting on a cloud, Geffen was now among the top fifteen shareholders of Warner Communications, with a personal estate worth $10 million. Or so he thought.

  “Asylum was an artist-oriented label for about a minute,” noted Don Henley, who, like his fellow Eagles, took a few years to realize their publishing and record contract had been sold, effectively by their manager, without due consultation. Geffen had played his hand far too soon. He was about to pick up a game-changing joker—Bob Dylan, whose contract with Columbia had run out and ended in conflict. He was still a big name but artistically at a low ebb. “It’s like as if I had amnesia all of a sudden,” said Dylan of those fallow years in the early seventies when he was raising a large family while struggling to fulfil his contractual obligations. Jerry Wexler felt he was close to poaching Dylan for Atlantic when he was spectacularly outmaneuvered by none other than Ahmet’s wonder boy.

  In an elaborate game of seduction, Geffen had treated Joni Mitchell and Dylan’s guitarist Robbie Robertson to a dandy sojourn in Paris, rooming at the Ritz and swanning down the tree-lined boulevards. Geffen began quizzing Robertson. “Why don’t you, Bob, and the Band do a tour together?” When Robertson argued that Dylan fans were expecting such an obvious move, Geffen delivered a short, sharp reality check. “It’s not expected anymore. It’s been a long time. It would be amazing, and I’ll help put the whole thing together.”

  Hesitant but hungry, Robbie Robertson eventually introduced Geffen to the man himself. Strolling down the beach at Malibu, where Geffen had just moved in near Dylan’s house, Geffen’s decisive brainwave was to suggest selling the tickets directly to the public by mail order. With Dylan excited, Geffen then brought in Bill Graham as tour manager to organize forty shows in twenty-one cities throughout January and February 1974. Geffen, of course, had been providing his professional assistance as a friendly favor, but as the tour approached he made his next move. “What about a live album?”

  Knowing that Jerry Wexler was offering Dylan a conventional deal on Atlantic, Geffen convinced Dylan to set up his own label, Ashes and Sand Records, promoted and distributed through Asylum/Atlantic. Prom
ising 1 million units per album, Geffen exclaimed, “You’ll sell records you never dreamed you could sell.” Dylan altered the plan slightly; he felt a studio album, released just before the tour, would give his comeback added punch. So an unusually loose deal was concluded for one album only.

  Then came a legendary corporate lunch held in Joe Smith’s Beverly Hills home. It was the record industry’s equivalent of a Mafia gathering. All of the WEA top brass were present: Steve Ross, Ahmet Ertegun, Mo Ostin, Jac Holzman, Stan Cornyn, Jerry Wexler, and David Geffen. Grinning from the corner of his couch, Geffen began teasing Wexler.

  “Okay, David, you’ve got Dylan,” conceded Wexler. “Now let’s just forget the whole thing.”

  Geffen continued to poke away at Wexler for his “old style.” The stocky army veteran began berating Geffen’s artist-pampering methods as “ridiculous,” and once Wexler’s notorious anger was aroused, the afternoon’s agenda cartwheeled straight off the highway.

  “Well, if we’re going to follow some kind of rules, let’s talk about who’s fucking up the rules here!” barked Wexler. “You stole an artist that we had!”

  “You’re an old washed-up record man!” groused Geffen. “What the fuck do you know?”

  With veins bulging in his reddening face, Wexler thundered, “David, why don’t you just shut up! You don’t know a thing about music. You’re nothing but an agent! You’d stick your head in a pool of pus to come up with a nickel in your teeth.”

  The lunch host physically restrained Wexler from mauling the terrified Geffen. Steve Ross stood up. “We can’t have this,” he said, then exited to the nearest bathroom. Mo Ostin, shaking his head in disapproval, followed the boss outside.

  When the party adjourned to the dining room, Joe Smith’s wife, who had not heard the shouting from her kitchen, presumed her choice of menu was responsible for the deathly silence around the table. Staring into his cheese soufflé to the sound of forks and knives, Stan Cornyn “felt puzzled by the change in the room … Was it David, who seemed to bring an odd attitude to what we did, who seemed to care less for the boogie and more for the cash? After the pee-break, no one observed that, with his Dylan-signing methods, David Geffen had changed the way record deals worked … David evangelized that record companies, like his own, were to serve their artists … Artists became, in appearance at least, kings, queens, tyrants, though so far very little the richer for it … Only later did I realize that this day had been spent with no talk about music. Of the executives in that room, only one still spent time in studios producing music, and that day he, Jerry Wexler, had felt the least comfortable. Among these men of purpose, opportunity, and spritzing, only Jerry Wexler had, for the moment, lost his way.”

  Whatever the personal, moral, or musical permutations, for Steve Ross, business remained a game of picking winners and calculating odds. “He was a card counter,” explained Jac Holzman. “He’d go to Las Vegas, he could count cards. He’d make a modest amount of money and leave the table.”

  Looking at the Dylan saga through gambler’s eyes, Steve Ross dismissed any need for procedures or arbitration. “If you’re going after him and he’s going after him,” Ross, grinning, told the shell-shocked faces, “we have twice the chance of getting him.”

  20. PSALMS

  On the garbage-infested streets of downtown New York, a brand-new species of record man planted a seed. David Mancuso was an ascetic on a crusade to bring people together in dance-party gatherings that as yet hadn’t acquired a name.

  The history of New York’s dance scene is both complex and hotly disputed. We know for sure that the original discotheque format was, by then, an almost extinct French import from a bygone era. The double-turntable, multicultural disco of the future, drank from a different source: David Mancuso’s memories of his childhood in a Utica orphanage in the late forties and early fifties, where every week the kindhearted Sister Alicia threw parties for the children. They jumped around chasing balloons to the sound of music from records on a little turntable.

  Without realizing the connection until much later in life, Mancuso as a young man was drawn to rent parties, then popular especially among African Americans. “I would go to the Village, I would go to Harlem, I would go to Staten Island, I would go wherever I heard there was a party going on,” said Mancuso. “I’ve always had all sorts of friends, which probably has something to do with growing up in the orphanage.”

  Falling under the spell of Timothy Leary in the midsixties, the introverted and intensely spiritual Mancuso first began hosting LSD rituals around a shrine inside his spacious apartment at 647 Broadway. From playing records on a high-definition sound system, his private gatherings got progressively bigger and more dance-oriented. Rejecting possessions, meditating naked, surviving on stolen food, even taking his front door off its hinges to provide homeless people with a place to sleep, David Mancuso by about 1969 reached so far inside the immaterial world in search of his true identity that concerned friends, seeing his weight loss, convinced him to be hospitalized. It was while standing at the edge of the sane world that he realized his mission in life.

  With the help of friends, he re-equipped his apartment with Klipschorn speakers, Mark Levinson amplifiers, and two turntables. The result, at what was increasingly referred to as the Loft, was private, balloon-filled parties like nobody had previously experienced. Mixing brilliant musical storyboards of percussive rock, psychedelia, and R&B, Mancuso interlaced his records with sensory special effects—lights, moments of total obscurity, wind fans that blew up to the sounds of tropical storms. “There was something intangible—magical—that wasn’t happening in other places. I hadn’t taken any drugs, yet I felt like I was tripping,” said one eyewitness, Danny Krivit. Although LSD and other drugs were common, Mancuso forbade dealing. It was the sound, music, and collective spirit that made these nights such epic emotional experiences.

  “No way did I want to be a disc jockey,” stipulated the purist Mancuso, who still prefers the more socially conscious title of “musical host.” He invited only friends and music lovers to the Loft—black, white, Hispanic, obese, old, homeless, straight, gay. “We were like a family. There didn’t seem to be any conflicts. Music helped us reach that place. Music was the key to going back home.”

  “I think of David as the acorn that the tree grew from,” said Krivit, who, like so many other Loft regulars, later became a professional deejay. At the time, there were other dancing clubs sprouting up, in particular the Sanctuary, which, despite playing the same types of records courtesy of deejay Francis Grasso, was run as a business. As a social gathering, it leaned more toward trendy pickup joint, reliant on the requisite drugs-and-alcohol formula. These were the two blueprints for most of the nightlife that followed.

  In keeping with the communal, nonprofit ethic in which the hundred or so Loft members paid a token $2 at the door to eat proper meals and dance all night, Mancuso actively helped a wave of lofts and dance clubs in its wake. “It was like a good joint. You passed it,” reasoned the uncompetitive Mancuso. “We were like bees and could pollinate.”

  From more gay-oriented imitations such as the Tenth Floor and the Gallery, all the heavyweight deejays of New York’s nascent dance scene ventured forth in Mancuso’s shadow—Larry Levan, Walter Gibbons, Nicky Siano, Frankie Knuckles, and David Rodriguez. Competition and increasingly exhibitionist mixing techniques turned some deejays into performers. It became a “quest to find new records!” exclaimed deejay Steve D’Aquisto. “We had this thing and we had to keep moving it along.”

  In New York, the proliferation of specialist record stores owed a great deal to independent distributors, who, having been squeezed out of the mainstream rock market, increased their supply of imports and other jazz, soul, funk, Latin, and indie rarities. This motley marketplace was centered around Tenth Avenue, where several independent distributors fed a growing network of specialist record stores. For the new generation of deejays, the main suppliers of rare, danceable vinyl were
Colony Records, located in the Brill Building, and Downstairs Records, which had two outlets in the subway. Both stores allowed customers to listen to records before buying.

  “It was already starting to change by the end of the sixties,” noted Krivit, the son of a club owner. “There weren’t any superclubs yet. This was a time when there was no admission charge, so things were pretty lax money-wise. All the places with jukeboxes were stuck with the same records that everyone else had. The company just said ‘choose from this Top 100.’ My father, however, who had the Ninth Circle, would go up to Tenth Avenue and they would actually cut an individual record—it wasn’t an acetate or vinyl, it was a clay substance, and he could get any jazz record or album cut put on a seven-inch. So he loaded his jukebox with all this hot music. Those distributors really had a wide variety of stuff—they were opening the doors.”

  In 1972, disco pioneer David Mancuso experienced something strange at a place called Blue Hole near Mount Tremper in upstate New York. “There was this little stream that went into a quarry. It was maybe five feet wide, and there were these little whirlpools that looked like speakers, so I leaned over and got as close to them as possible without getting wet. The sound was incredible. It was the cleanest I have ever heard, and there was all this information. It was almost as if I could hear the history of life. Not in words, but in music.”