Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry

by Gareth Murphy

  The increasingly estranged John Hammond winced at its cathedral-sized rock sound, but the radio deejays who received a test pressing were unanimous in their enthusiasm. A conscious attempt to mix Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, and Phil Spector, “Born to Run” was a blood-strirring cry for stardom that convinced Columbia to get firmly behind a third album coproduced by Landau. Splashing out $250,000 on tour support, ads, posters, and radio promotion, Columbia took full advantage of Landau’s “future of rock ’n’ roll” endorsement. With Newsweek and Time giving the hunky singer their front pages in October 1975, the album climbed to No. 3—in Springsteen’s own words, “the dividing line” in his life.

  Managed success can be disappointing. “It’s going to piss people off,” Springsteen warned of the dreaded “future of rock” slogan. “It pisses me off.” Fearing a media backlash and eager to maintain a human proximity to his audience, Springsteen turned down lucrative offers to play stadiums, even though he was still effectively broke. Hearing reports that, in one fit of rage, he tore down a hall full of “future of rock” posters at a gig in London, Columbia staffers began realizing they’d overhyped their product. Walking onstage “it’s like I’m ten points down,” Springsteen felt. “You’ve got to blow this bullshit out of people’s minds.”

  If anyone, the artist’s own manager, Mike Appel, was behind the campaign’s unashamed zeal. “Bruce Springsteen isn’t a rock ’n’ roll act,” he often repeated. “He’s a religion.” Realizing that Appel owned the masters and half the publishing, the increasingly agitated singer confided in Jon Landau, “He’s robbing me blind.” Freedom from Appel cost Springsteen an $800,000 termination settlement, after which Landau took over as manager. Springsteen’s business arrangements would be straighter without the cantankerous Appel, even though, as Walter Yetnikoff later joked, “Landau saw Bruce as Jesus. He’d call me to report what Bruce had for breakfast.”

  As he listened to the latest sagas from the Springsteen circus, John Hammond was feeling his age. Having suffered a serious heart attack, the sixty-four-year-old was writing the final chapters of his memoirs. In the pampering culture of corporate rock, he observed sadly, “today so much rides on every record that even the most trivial opinion is impelled to express itself and, worse, may even have to be listened to. In the bad old days, when jobs were scarce, any musician who got a record date automatically assumed that the producer who arranged it must have his best interests at heart. Today, musicians—big money artists—are not so sure.”

  Hammond’s old friend Jerry Wexler was in a similar place. As he wandered through Atlantic’s new offices in the Warner Communications tower, “I started seeing people in the halls whose names I didn’t know.” When Ahmet Ertegun and David Geffen nearly merged Atlantic with Elektra/Asylum in the summer of 1974, Wexler hit the roof, warning Ertegun, “One day, you’ll cry rivers of blood from this wonder boy of yours!”

  In fact, the mighty David Geffen was heading for a fall of his own making. After a dinner in Los Angeles, Ahmet Ertegun, flanked by Mick and Bianca Jagger, woke up Cher at 2:00 A.M. in Geffen’s luxurious Malibu residence. As Jagger tinkled on a piano and Cher sang in her billowing alto, Geffen sat there looking glum in a pair of tennis shorts and sneakers. “Look at that creep,” muttered the drunken Ertegun out of earshot. “How can he dress like that?” Everyone in the room knew Geffen was gay—so was this celebrity couple some kind of PR move?

  When Cher called off their wedding, Geffen’s humiliation slid into depression. Despite the commercial success of Elektra/Asylum—which in 1976 shipped 2 million units of what would become the second-biggest album of all time, The Eagles: Their Greatest Hits, with 42 million sales the date of this writing—Geffen suddenly wanted out of the music business. Dreaming of conquering Hollywood, he convinced Steve Ross to give him a senior position in a Warner Bros. movie division. Within months, his lack of tact got him fired. A spectacular burn-out even by Hollywood standards, Geffen lost Steve Ross’s patronage, was misdiagnosed with cancer, and withdrew into retirement.

  Back in New York, Jerry Wexler, by now absent and excluded from Atlantic’s corporate decisions, handed in his resignation to Ahmet Ertegun. “In an odd way, I was glad to be leaving,” he later confessed. “The industry was going big time, entering an era in which middle executives ran companies with perfunctory approval from above, and top executives had become too involved with megamillion-dollar deals to spend much time thinking about … what, music?” Describing his inner life as a “ballroom full of ghosts,” Jerry Wexler remained a freelance producer who, like John Hammond, still believed that music mattered—culturally, intellectually, spiritually.

  The adaptable Ahmet Ertegun simply boogied on into the late seventies, wining, dining, and serving himself generous helpings of Steve Ross’s private jet. Taking a far lighter view of the vocation, Ertegun felt compelled to remind his peers, “It is a mistake to invest the music we recorded with too much importance. It isn’t classical music, and it cannot be interpreted in the same way. It’s more like the old Fred Astaire movies: They’re fun, but they’re not great art.”

  21. THE ISLAND

  Fortunately things were always a little different in England. Throughout the seventies, England’s comparatively homespun record industry continued to punch far above its weight. If America was the Goliath market dominated by majors, little old England was becoming the proverbial David—firing indie hits across the Atlantic with unbelievable accuracy.

  In England, pop music had become such a national sport that every Thursday evening, one in four inhabitants watched Top of the Pops, the BBC’s chart show. England was also a big spender: Domestic record sales were about one-third higher than in similar-sized European countries like France or West Germany.

  On the fringes of the mainstream media, England had a vibrant network of musically elitist deejays, TV hosts, and journalists. Of all the BBC’s former pirates, the most daring explorer of the British airwaves was John Peel, whose Top Gear radio show was fearless in its showcasing of experimental music. In 1971, BBC television began The Old Grey Whistle Test, a live music show on which the erudite Bob Harris presented the cutting edge of rock. In an indication of just how many music nuts were on the street, Britain’s music publication NME enjoyed a weekly circulation of about 300,000.

  There was one other magic ingredient influencing England’s amazing capacity to keep supplying America with hot records. Since the beat boom, most of England’s biggest acts had been managed by homosexuals. Along with the ambiguously camp Andrew Loog Oldham, there had been Brian Epstein, Robert Stigwood, and the Who’s comanager Kit Lambert. There was also Tony Stratton-Smith, manager of Genesis and owner of the seminal indie label Charisma. Most of the major British acts had a dandy circus master commanding operations from the wings.

  “Never let the music get in the way of the act,” joked Kit Lambert to his boys, the Who. Beyond theatrical flair, the gay influence probably imbued a touch of eternal youth into English rockers. As Who guitarist Pete Townshend pointed out, “Gays were different. They didn’t behave like other adults; they were scornful of conventional behavior; they mixed more easily with young people, and seemed to understand them.”

  From about 1970 onward, Mick Jagger wore lipstick; then Marc Bolan appeared on television with glitter under his eyes. Then, upping the ante considerably, in strutted the very brilliant David Bowie—arguably the most important artist of the whole decade. Since his somewhat shy chart in 1969 with a novelty hit called “Space Oddity,” Bowie had been studying under the gay mime artist Lindsay Kemp, himself a student of the great Marcel Marceau. Combining performance art and experimental rock, Kemp had taught Bowie about makeup, costumes, body movements, voice projection, and sexual power.

  With Bowie consciously approaching his music as an “actor” playing characters such as Ziggy Stardust and Alladin Sane, the dividing line between reality and fiction became a mysterious curtain that, as the seventies unfolded, attracted artists and audiences ali
ke to the very limits of fantasy.

  Bisexual glam rock began crossing the Atlantic in about 1972, when Bowie and his classically trained collaborator Mick Ronson produced Lou Reed—at the time drifting away from his commercially unsuccessful Velvet Underground. The result was Transformer, a classic in which Bowie and Ronson’s glittery orchestrations added a sweetness to Reed’s sleazy depictions of the transvestites in Andy Warhol’s factory. It became an entry-level classic through which hordes of English teenagers began delving back through the Velvet Underground repertoire, discovering New York’s bittersweet underworld of syringes, whips, and ermine furs. As time would tell, thanks to glam rock, a new musical hotline was operating between the London and Manhattan undergrounds.

  Transformer’s iconic sleeve is said to have inspired the cult transsexual musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show, produced in 1973 by a group of gay actors from Robert Stigwood’s and Lindsay Kemp’s networks. As coincidence would have it, the first Rocky Horror stage performances, at a King’s Road theater, were seen by the owner of a retro clothes shop located nearby—Malcolm McLaren, then just a Teddy Boy revivalist destined for bigger things.

  Moving with the glam tide, in 1972 Britain’s hottest label, Island Records, signed Roxy Music, a collective of art school bohemians whose jarring retro pop came as an unpleasant shock to the company’s fainter-hearted. “Had it been left to the so-called A&R department, which was Muff Winwood, Roxy Music would never have been signed to Island Records,” said their manager, David Enthoven, whose chief ally at the time was Island’s sales manager, Tim Clark. “Tim got it immediately. He got the music, he got the artwork. Muff Winwood absolutely rejected it, he thought they were rubbish. And interestingly, one day in Basing Street, Tim and I were looking at the first Roxy cover, Chris Blackwell walked past and asked Tim, ‘have you done the deal yet?’ Once Chris saw the artwork, to be fair to him, he absolutely got what we were on about.”

  The cover of Roxy Music’s first album, depicting a swimsuited glamour model lying on satin sheets beside a gold disc, was a deliberate middle finger to hippie fashions. Although the group has since been revered as revolutionary, David Enthoven insists that “Roxy was not a huge departure. I know musically it was avant-garde and arty, but King Crimson was pretty avant-garde, and in fact Bryan Ferry auditioned to be lead singer for King Crimson … The thing about Island was there was a diverse range of music in there; there was a kaleidoscope of talent, all the psychedelic stuff and all the folkies as well. Island didn’t really have a musical identity, it was a whole breeding ground of musical genres, and that’s what was cool about it.”

  Destiny or sheer luck? It was at this crossroads that Island boss Chris Blackwell stumbled on his most timeless, universal, and overtly religious discovery. In the spring of 1972, a talented Jamaican songwriter by the name of Bob Marley began winding his way to Blackwell’s office. Already a celebrity in Jamaica, Marley was the front man of the Wailers, who, since the early sixties, had recorded over one hundred tracks for a variety of Kingston labels. Throughout the winter of 1971, the Wailers had been in London, living out of suitcases in a crummy hotel—penniless, cold, and desperately looking for a record deal. Accompanied by their tall, dapper manager, Danny Sims, the Wailers had at first tagged along behind his star act, Johnny Nash.

  The previous year, a twenty-four-year-old rookie publisher by the name of Derek Green had dropped by A&M’s London office, where seated “in the reception area were the most exotic-looking people, Danny Sims, Johnny Nash, and some drop-dead-gorgeous black women.” As they introduced themselves to each other, Sims explained “he had some great music with a story to tell.” Later, in Green’s office, demos were listened to and a deal was signed. “One of my biggest career moments,” said Green, “was when they brought Bob Marley to my office to play me his songs on his acoustic guitar. Danny had brilliantly described Bob as a ‘black Mick Jagger.’”

  Feeling that London’s bigger record companies would be wary of black Mick Jaggers, Green shopped his Jamaican demos around Los Angeles, where “the legendary Lou Adler was the only record producer who had the foresight to recognize the potential of Bob Marley’s songs. Lou gave me a cover by recording a Marley song, ‘You Poured Sugar on Me,’ by the Robinson Family on his Ode Records. Unfortunately, when I signed Marley, the market just wasn’t ready for him yet,” concluded Green, who gave both artists to Dave Margereson, an old friend in the London office of CBS. Margereson was really interested only in Johnny Nash, who provided CBS with two U.K. hit singles, “Stir It Up” and the No. 5 classic “I Can See Clearly Now.” The Wailers had been signed as a favor, which partly explains why their CBS recordings were shelved.

  Although the Wailers had been initially reluctant to visit Island, by the spring of 1972, they were disillusioned and desperate. With Danny Sims back in Jamaica, a promoter called Brent Clarke arranged them a meeting with Chris Blackwell. Looking at the cool but cagey Bob Marley, Bunny Livingston, and Peter Tosh file through the doorway, Blackwell thought “they were nobodies but they were like huge stars, their attitude and the vibe they gave off,” he recalled. “They were prepared and they were ready to work, but they wanted to do everything pretty well on their own terms.”

  At the time, Johnny Nash’s rendition of Marley’s “Stir It Up” was No. 13 in England. Chris Blackwell had heard of the Wailers anyway, but his homework suggested they might be tricky. Apart from their contract with CBS, there was the question mark hanging over their manager and publisher, Danny Sims—allegedly connected to the mob, not just in Jamaica, but in America, where he used to run a booking agency and fashionable Broadway restaurant called Sapphire’s. “Marley was actually signed to CBS,” said David Betteridge, “and what happened was that CBS, God bless them, just did not know what to do with him. But Chris did. Chris wanted to sign him, and did a deal with [CBS U.K. chairman] Dick Asher, basically for a two percent override that we had to pay CBS on the sales of the first two Wailers albums on Island.”

  The problem was, Marley harbored suspicions about Island’s accounting—probably why, in this last-ditch effort to get a deal, he asked Blackwell for the cash to produce a single himself. Rather cleverly, Blackwell upped the ante. How much would it cost to make an entire album in Jamaica? Between three and four thousand pounds, replied Marley, holding Blackwell’s eye contact. In the end, Blackwell handed Marley a wad of bills, wished him well, and saw him to the door. Being intuitive, he had managed to turn the situation on its head. The Wailers could have disappeared with the cash, but they returned to Kingston feeling both a moral and musical challenge to hold up their end of the bargain.

  That summer, Marley returned alone to London with the tapes, and Chris Blackwell and sound engineer Tony Platt began extensive postproduction. With Island’s sixteen-track facilities and far superior sound-processing equipment, the Kingston recordings were enhanced and overdubbed with additional instrumentation. The sonic alchemist proved to be Texan keyboardist John “Rabbit” Bundrick, a member of the Danny Sims gang Marley had met in Sweden. Coached by Marley, Rabbit learned how to “chicken scratch” a clavinet through a wah-wah pedal, creating what became the hallmark sound of Bob Marley’s Island recordings.

  The album’s potential hit songs such as “Stir It Up” and “Concrete Jungle” were gently hypnotic grooves tailor-made for dope smokers. Given a luxurious and suggestive sleeve evoking a Zippo lighter, the album, called Catch a Fire, only sold about 14,000 copies in its first year, but it earned the Wailers an appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test. If the truth be known, Blackwell was bitterly disappointed at the public’s lack of interest.

  Simplifying the game plan, they unanimously agreed to revert to a raw, aggressive follow-up album before year-end—Burnin’, which made no effort to Westernize the band’s Trenchtown sound. More political and explosive, it contained two potentially radio-friendly tracks, “Get Up, Stand Up” and “I Shot the Sheriff.” Throughout 1973, Island kept the Wailers on the road—not exactly tourin
g, but promoting, a record-company euphemism for hodgepodge itineraries on which a wannabe act lugs its own show around indifferent halls and local radio stations, often providing supporting slots for established bands.

  Buses, greasy cafés, dive venues—the Wailers were at a low ebb. After they were fired in Las Vegas by Sly Stone on their second American tour, the introverted Bunny Livingston, sorely missing Ital food and Jamaican home life, refused to go out on the road again. Then, in the depths of late November, a weary Peter Tosh, suffering bronchitis, trudged through a fourth tour around Northern England until he, too, threw in the towel.

  Despite their long history singing their way out of the Kingston ghetto, the three-man gang split up after one year on Island. Dubbing Chris Blackwell “Whiteworse,” “because he isn’t black and he isn’t well,” Peter Tosh later accused the Island boss of manipulating Bob Marley into a solo career. Bunny Livingston also maintained he was mistreated and intentionally sidelined. David Betteridge, however, felt “they shouldn’t have been so harsh … The breakup of the Wailers was to do with the band and nothing to do with Island. There was undoubtedly a huge amount of jealousy because Bob got all the plaudits, because he was writing most of the material and because he had a lot more money in his pocket than the other guys. Plus, of course, they were putting too much ganja up their noses!”