Paranoia generally came with the genre. “The whole of the West Indian music community, generally speaking, didn’t like each other,” continued Betteridge. “In the days when the Jamaican labels were producing the Wailers, the Maytals, and all the others, half the time they just did not get paid. So there was a huge amount of distrust before we ever got involved with these guys.”
Throughout 1973 and 1974, as the Wailers lugged their reggae around England, Island’s core market seemed to be moving in the exact opposite direction. Among bohemians and art-school chin strokers, progressive rock and cerebral music were reaching their commercial peak. Handling sales for their new semi-independent label, Virgin Records, Island’s senior staffers looked on in envy as Mike Oldfield’s experimental Tubular Bells sold 2 million copies in Britain—far bigger than anything Island had at the time. In an A&R meeting, Blackwell suggested they create an Island sublabel specializing in avant-garde mood music. Guy Stevens interrupted the boss’s brainwave with his Cockney drawl. “Why don’t we call it Lukewarm Fucking Records?” Bursting into hysterical laughter, Blackwell let his idea gurgle gently down the drain.
Luckily, in the summer of 1974, fate threw out a wild card when an Eric Clapton version of “I Shot the Sheriff” rocketed to No. 1 in America. Although Clapton had struggled to play its offbeat groove, it was a resounding endorsement among the white-rocker demographic. For Trevor Wyatt, an Island A&R man and Marley friend, “the whole thing just came together … but certainly Clapton doing that song really opened it up for us, especially in America—well, everywhere, I think. People said, ‘Hmm, who’s written this?’”
Blackwell, sensing Jamaica’s hour was nigh, began pouring resources into Marley. With new musicians and a token Jamaican manager, Bob Marley’s touring machine traveled the world with a spring in its step. Learning from experience, Marley hired a Jamaican cook to keep the band nourished with locally sourced vegetables and fruit. The backing vocalists affectionately known as the I-Threes included his wife, Rita.
As well as providing tour support, Blackwell called in PR heavyweight Charlie Comer, who’d previously worked with the Beatles and the Stones. Wherever Marley performed, Comer ensured the best journalists in the local media were waiting pencil in hand. Above all, Comer was a hands-on operator—managerial, fatherly, straight-talking, tireless. Famous for his unstoppable tongue, he loved the lifestyle of grooming raw talent into stars.
Chris Blackwell considers Bob Marley’s crowning moment the sold-out Lyceum concerts in London in July 1975, where the now legendary live performance of “No Woman No Cry” was recorded. With the cost of tour support eating into the modest album sales, however, the financial payback was still a long way off. In the midseventies, it was Island’s entire roster and affiliated labels that enabled Chris Blackwell to expand his London head office into a stunning new premises in the pretty surroundings of Hammersmith. Choosing his office directly above the studio at the back of the building, Chris Blackwell, they say, wanted to remind his company that true leadership had to retain its proximity to the creative action.
Or so the legend goes. “He’s got a huge, fertile mind and imagination, but I think he got bored of things easily,” reasoned David Betteridge. “He never wanted to get involved in the nitty-gritty … He was the absentee owner. He wanted to do things his way, which is fair enough; he was the majority shareholder. But ya know, you need to talk to the troops! You need to tell people, ‘I wanna do this and I wanna do that!’” The company’s number three at the time, Tim Clark, also admitted, “He did sort of do a disappearing act. He spent a lot of time in America: He was messing around with films and the film industry, and he wasn’t very much available for us at Island Records in the UK.” As events would illustrate, Chris Blackwell and the U.K. indies in general, despite their immaculate taste, were generally not as rigorous as their American counterparts when it came to running businesses.
As with most record men’s idiosyncrasies, it’s arguable that Chris Blackwell’s aversion to management can be largely explained by his early life. “There’s no doubt about it, he is a loner,” David Betteridge confirmed with audible empathy. “Sometimes I didn’t get to talk to him for two months as he disappeared off doing this, that, and the other, causing all sorts of problems.” For those clocking in at the office every day, ol’ Chris was like the classroom rebel who regularly blew off school—and when he was there, he could barely stay seated at his desk.
In fact, the only time Chris Blackwell appeared to be fully available was when he was barefoot by the sea. “We used to have meetings in what we called the Western Office, which was actually a beach in Nassau called the Western Shores,” recalled Betteridge. “There, we used to discuss strategy sitting under the palm trees, eating sandwiches and drinking something. But when he came back to London, trying to sit him down and have an actual meeting was extremely difficult. So you had to guess a lot. When we would have a meeting, it was in a corridor, five minutes, and away we went again. Undisciplined is a good description.”
It all came to a head in 1976. When Virgin’s three-year distribution deal came to an end, Richard Branson jumped ship, and within months, Chrysalis also left. “Island had been like the mother ship, but we could do it ourselves,” explained Chrysalis boss Chris Wright. “We could cut the middleman out and go straight to the distributor. So all we needed to do was marketing and promotion, which we increasingly wanted to do ourselves anyway … There was no personal aspect to us leaving. It was just a natural progression.” As they rode off into the sunset, however, Chrysalis inherited key aspects of Island’s character. “Terry and I would have always ended up doing what we did. But you know, you can’t reinvent the wheel that much,” said Wright.
On the delicate question of emulating Island, Virgin’s A&R man, Simon Draper, recalled that “we went into reggae because we loved it, too. We started out small and then got into it in a big way, and I don’t think that Chris Blackwell liked us for that. We particularly fell out over Peter Tosh, who we signed … Chris Blackwell was incensed! I clearly remember going into a meeting with Blackwell in a pancake house in Notting Hill Gate. Richard Branson was there also. We worked out some kind of compromise in the end, even though I think Island were in the wrong. But it was all to do with whether or not they owned Peter Tosh because he was in the Wailers. And of course with Jamaicans there’s a lot of gray areas when it comes to contracts.”
David Betteridge estimated that both Chrysalis and Virgin represented about 20 percent of Island’s overall turnover—a loss compounded by the money they were throwing down the drain of their American company on Sunset Boulevard. “There were about seventy to eighty employees in the U.K. company,” explained Betteridge. “In those days, there were only fifteen radio stations in England and five thousand in America. Everything from distribution to marketing was on a far bigger scale. The danger with America is that although the rewards are huge when you’re successful, it’s so much more expensive to get there … Once our American operations became a record label, it sucked huge amounts of money out of the European company, and it was never discussed properly.”
For years, Betteridge had adapted to Chris Blackwell’s nomadic lifestyle, but “Island was no longer the company we had started; it had become too unwieldy and I became disillusioned,” he confessed. “People began taking sides. There was a lot of backbiting going on when I left … Three or four indies came and went quickly because the whole company was sliding around in different directions. It was partly my fault, partly other people’s fault, partly Chris’s fault. But a knife should have been taken to it. It should have been reduced in size. We all would have been much happier. It should have remained a smaller, tighter, creative company.”
As Island’s new managing director, Tim Clark, put it, “The problem for us at that time was Island had a number of retail arms, if you like. We were still distributing a certain amount of Jamaican stuff directly to retailers; we’d got into the whole thing of starting a fac
tory because we had such terrible difficulties getting records pressed. But of course it suddenly became a machine we had to feed, both the distribution network and the factory. So when Virgin and Chrysalis left us, it meant we weren’t feeding the machine enough and it started to cost a lot of money.”
A perfect storm had formed over Chris Blackwell’s island. “We had a real financial crunch in 1976, and it wasn’t that long after I’d taken over as managing director,” explained Tim Clark. “It was one evening and Chris Blackwell had just flown in from New York and he was just drained. And he said, ‘You know, I just really don’t know what to do.’ We chatted a bit and I honestly didn’t know what to do either. Eventually he said, ‘We’ve got to do a license deal with EMI,’ so we got on the phone, talked to them, and we got a check for a million pounds.”
It took a few years to restructure Island Records, and its near-death experience marked the end of its halcyon days as a gang of kindred spirits. Not only had key players left, two vital sources of talent, Guy Stevens and David Enthoven, were sliding into addiction. From that season of upheaval, though, two important British indies had stepped out into the world: Chrysalis and Virgin. With Terry Ellis moving to Los Angeles, Chrysalis as a label was determined to conquer America the way Jethro Tull had done as a band. Meanwhile, commanding Virgin’s various businesses from his London houseboat, the fiercely ambitious Richard Branson began imagining ways of consolidating his foothold into continental Europe.
22. HIGH TIDE
“Fuck Warner,” read the slogan. “Fuck the bunny!” Its eloquent author was Walter Yetnikoff, Columbia’s new boss. Thus began a despotic reign that would end in rehab. “The appointment went to my head, went to my dick, and over a period of years turned me into a madman,” Yetnikoff admitted to himself on a therapist’s couch.
Yetnikoff’s war against the market leaders, declared at a CBS sales convention, was just a humorous gimmick designed to conquer the spirits of his own troops. His real problem was that “I had a great new job, yet I couldn’t help questioning my qualifications … I was tone deaf.” He knew he needed to invent a king-sized persona to fill the corporate vacuum left by Goddard Lieberson and Clive Davis. “War is exhilarating,” he thought to himself. “War elicits loyalty, solidarity. War gives us purpose and drive. War was what I wanted. War was who I was.”
Shouting into telephones in fuck-littered Yiddish, the rumpled, hard-drinking Walter Yetnikoff personified the sickness dripping out the nostrils of the American record industry. Inside the American majors, musical literacy was in steep decline. Jerry Wexler, John Hammond, Goddard Lieberson, Jac Holzman—the erudite crusaders were riding into the sunset. Although the industry’s two fallen kings, Clive Davis and David Geffen, would both return from the dead, their subsequent influence on the story of pop music would be as businessmen—peddling artists of little cultural significance.
Even Warner’s halcyon days were over. Following Geffen’s resignation, Joe Smith was transferred to run Elektra/Asylum, where he inherited the cocaine-frazzled Eagles. With Smith’s transfer, Mo Ostin became California’s biggest mogul, presiding over a corporation that had grown so large that Walter Yetnikoff was warning big artists leaning toward signing with Warner, “Be careful, you’ll get lost in there!”
A short drive away, the last remaining bastion of purism had locked itself inside the gates of Charlie Chaplin’s old film studio—A&M, for some the label of the early seventies. Whereas inferior imitations such as Asylum had been dressed up as artist havens, A&M was the real thing. An organically grown fairy tale, it all began with two friends listening to records—their bond forged in the fires of Herb Alpert’s meteoric rise to stardom.
“Hanging out with Herbie, I got to learn a lot about artists—their moods, their temperament,” explained the principled Jerry Moss, whose gentle, protective style as a label boss grew from that founding artist-manager relationship. “Herbie was smart, he came from a family of very smart people. But he was an artist. He could remain sort of aloof, dreamy or artistic—it wouldn’t get in the way of his image, and I would come in and do the stuff. But I’d be talking about it to Herbie all the way, whether we were together or on the road, I’d bring him up to date. Herbie was very knowledgeable. He participated in every major decision.”
As A&M evolved into a boutique label for acts as diverse as Burt Bacharach, Procol Harum, Sergio Mendes, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joe Cocker, Humble Pie, the Carpenters, and Supertramp, Alpert continued to record, tour, and produce various jazzy pet projects. A successful production deal with Creed Taylor’s CTI imprint also brought A&M a treasure trove of seminal jazz and funk. With the help of general manager Gil Friesen, Jerry Moss handled company operations and generally signed the rockier acts. As A&M opened offices in Canada, London, and Paris, new recruits immediately felt the atmosphere of kinship and musical excellence that gave it such a special aura. “There was that trust, that incredible trust,” Moss recalled, “and I think when people work for a couple of guys where there’s no question about the leadership of the company and how it functions, it just makes everything cooler and easier.”
Despite his twinkling eyes and Mexican mustache, Jerry Moss was very selective when it came to picking staffers and artists. “Because Herb and I had a complete trust in each other,” said Moss, “and absolutely would not tolerate corruption from anyone, we were able to make this work. The rules were very simple: If you lie or if you cheat on a deal, you don’t belong here. If you’re an honest person and you want to work hard, A&M was a place for you. Nobody lied. Because lying takes a lot of energy. And this way, we were able to put all the energy into the music. Therein lies the culture that Herb and I created—it became A&M.”
Whenever A&M’s new London boss, Derek Green, called up with a problem or doubt, Moss would repeat, “Derek, just keep signing good acts that we can sell in America,” always emphasizing the virtues of simplicity. Of course, such youthful innocence could not last forever. As Los Angeles became the city of decadence, the rising tide was seeping through A&M’s fabled gates. By late 1976, roomfuls of A&M’s promotion staffers were “visiting the bathroom” with an alarming frequency. Across the industry, the cult of crystal powder was quietly enslaving foot soldiers and record bosses alike, many of them barely thirty and ill prepared for the drug’s insidious side effects—including, among other things, cocaine’s thirst for alcohol.
As one recent arrival from England, Terry Ellis, explained, “L.A. is a show business town. If you’re doing well, and I really was, every door opens to you. You’re the toast of the town.” The conventional wisdom in those days was “work hard, play hard,” but as Ellis recognized with the benefit of hindsight, “the free love legacy of the sixties had got out of hand. Alcohol and drugs were free flowing in a way that seemed normal. I think a lot of people did damage to their health in those years. It didn’t seem abnormal to be at work drunk or stoned, because everybody was.” Or as Jerry Moss put it, “I loved the ideals the sixties created. I was so into the sixties and seventies in a cultural way—as a nation, I felt we were on the verge of something tremendous. And then we blew it. The drugs got more serious, AIDS came in. Late seventies, early eighties; things turned.”
With the big American corporations churning out music that evoked Woody Allen’s gag in Annie Hall about mellowness making you ripen and then rot, the A&R advantage was moving back to the hungrier independents—especially those of a theatrical persuasion who hadn’t got stuck in the Woodstock mud. Presenting Brett Smiley, a Broadway glam rocker, on British television in 1974, Andrew Loog Oldham predicted, “The music business has become very mundane. The music business thinks they make the stars. And I think, this year, they’re gonna find out they’re wrong.” Oldham sensed people were fed up with the sultry dysfunction of hippie rock. He pointed to Elton John’s breakthrough in America, rightly warning, “Entertainers are back!”
Sure enough, as the decade progressed, the theatrical dazzle of early seventies glam rock p
rovided the electric shock that infused life into the rising monsters of the late seventies—disco and punk. A perfect example of Dr. Frankenstein was future Sex Pistols impresario Malcolm McLaren. Still looking for his break, he was swanning around New York in 1975 with his designer partner, Vivienne Westwood, making costumes and iconography for the New York Dolls, whose kitsch blend of lipstick, hair spray, and hard rock was almost like a transvestite’s parody of the Rolling Stones.
Rough, exciting, and often compared to the Velvet Underground, the New York Dolls were inspiring a crop of younger groups all playing at CBGB—a dank, windowless club on the seedy Lower East Side where regulars like Television, the Ramones, and Patti Smith first performed to audiences that included Talking Heads, Suicide, and Blondie. Curiously, the club owner, Hilly Kristal, was a folkie who, having previously managed the Village Vanguard, opened CBGB in 1973 to showcase country, bluegrass, and blues—hence its initials. Evolving organically with the music that walked in off the garbage-infested street, the now legendary CBGB was a folk experiment gone fantastically awry.
Something was in the air. At exactly the same time, London had its equivalent; pub rock, the new moniker to describe small gigs, where for the price of a pint, audiences could hear back-to-basics rock songs oozing wit, energy, and lager froth. Including groups such as Dr. Feelgood, Kilburn & the High Roads, Ducks Deluxe, and Brinsley Schwarz, many of the scene’s central characters were former mods, now approaching thirty and increasingly bored with the hippie detour in between.
Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry Page 28