One key figure in this emerging London scene was Dave Robinson, who would found Stiff Records, Britain’s most iconic New Wave indie of the late seventies. Somewhat similar to the owner of CBGB, Dave Robinson was an adventurous folkie who’d seen the sixties from a different angle. A tough nut with a soft brogue, the sharp, shifty Robinson had grown up in Ireland—then a banana republic sinking into the Holy See. Inheriting his father’s eye for graphic design and slogans, Robinson started out as a magazine photographer and, like so many other restless youngsters of the Irish sixties, set off for London in search of work. He was followed by an Irish R&B band, the People, who camped on his floor and got him evicted—but, one sleepless night in 1967, helped alter his destiny.
After a gig at one of Joe Boyd’s psychedelic UFO happenings, Dave Robinson, acting as manager for the People, collected the £10 fee but returned a few minutes later. “Joe, can you give me a hand? There’s some nutter in the dressing room upsetting the lads. He says he manages Jimi Hendrix and he wants them to open for him on a tour.” Boyd confirmed the man in the suit really was Mike Jeffery. Robinson “looked at me wide-eyed for a second,” he said, “then dashed back to the tiny dressing room.” So Robinson’s band, renamed Eire Apparent, flew away with the Jimi Hendrix Experience to tour the world and elsewhere.
When the road manager fell ill, the lucky Dubliner suddenly found himself lugging Jimi Hendrix’s amplifiers through airports. Playing fifty shows over fifty-four days on one of several backbreaking tours, the strung-out and suspicious Jimi Hendrix began quizzing Robinson about money and contracts. Equally puzzled by Mike Jeffery’s opaque ways, “I wanted to know how the machinery worked,” recalled Robinson, who had been particularly struck by the sight of Muddy Waters forced to play dives in America while Hendrix sold out the best venues to white audiences.
The Jimi Hendrix job experience left Dave Robinson with a head full of ideas. As a roadie and wheeler-dealer looking at London’s gig circuits through Irish eyes, he began contemplating the true meaning of folk—not the California format that was dominating England’s album charts but, as Robinson put it, “music that had a social connection to the environment that it came from.” He noticed a crippled Cockney poet, Ian Dury, to whom he explained his vision, sometime around 1972, of a grassroots, antimajor movement that would bring music back to the people. “Dave sat on the floor,” said Dury, “had a bowl of rice, and said he thought that music would grow by word of mouth, if you had an environment where it could develop in one locality.”
So, between 1973 and 1975, Robinson set up a recording studio above the Hope and Anchor, an elegant, high-ceilinged Victorian pub in a multicultural neighborhood in Islington, whose basement venue was perfect for unknown bands without vans or equipment. Although there were other venues in the pub rock circuits, the Hope and Anchor was London’s equivalent of CBGB. “He was a hustler. And we liked him accordingly,” attested Dury, who was then the singer of Kilburn & the High Roads. “I’ve seen him loading boxes in the back of the van and getting sweaty. For all his verbal, he still gets down there on the concrete, rolls his sleeves up, and gets stuck in. But I didn’t feel for one minute that I never saw him coming.”
Not only were London’s pub rockers struggling financially, the bleak economic context was affecting the public mood at large. As the saying goes, when America sneezes, the world gets a cold. The costs of the Vietnam War had prompted the Nixon Shock of 1971, when the U.S. government unpegged the dollar from its gold standard. With the West’s currencies all linked to the dollar, turbulence swept through the financial markets, provoking a global recession—particularly in Britain. By 1974, British GDP was shrinking at a rate of 4 percent per year, inflation was at 25 percent, and unemployment had spilled over the symbolic 1 million mark. With strikes paralyzing the country, mounds of garbage bags began piling up on street corners, and an international oil crisis caused penury in gas stations. Britain’s malaise hit rock bottom in 1976, when Prime Minister James Callaghan was forced to call in the International Monetary Fund.
It was onto these depressed, rubbish-encrusted streets that Malcolm McLaren returned from his New York adventures—determined to shock London out of its hippie coma. He changed his shop name to Sex and began specializing in hard-rocker outfits inspired by bondage. One customer, sporting his very own look made from destroyed clothes held together with safety pins, was a redheaded teenager by the name of John Lydon. A peculiar kind of streetwise intellectual who understood that Britain’s so-called working class had long since turned into a welfare class, he had a gang of friends, referred to as the four Johns, that included two characters who later invented the stage names Sid Vicious and Jah Wobble.
As coincidence would have it, another character who occasionally dropped into McLaren’s shop was Steve Jones, a kleptomaniac scavenger who had just stolen a vanload of guitars and amplifiers from a David Bowie gig and dreamed of starting a band. He consulted the well-connected McLaren, whose first suggestion was to give Lydon an audition. Standing beside the shop jukebox, Lydon contorted and wheezed to Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” and got the part. For a band name, McLaren came up with the Sex Pistols, effectively an extension of his boutique.
More interested in the fashion than the music, McLaren suggested that Lydon study the leather-gloved cripple Ian Dury, who wore razor-blade earrings and had an imposing stage pose of arching his back over a low-adjusted microphone stand. Dury had borrowed the trick from his childhood icon, fifties rocker Gene Vincent, who wore a leg brace as the result of a motorcycle injury.
The Ramones arrived in London on July 4, 1976, like the outbreak of a virus. They had just released their debut album on Sire Records and were being managed by Danny Fields. Despite a few supporters in New York’s music press, the Ramones were broke and going nowhere. Imagine their delight flying into London and performing to an enthusiastic crowd of three thousand at the prestigious Round House.
Just before the show, Clash members Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, and Paul Simonon climbed through a broken window backstage and hung out with the Ramones in their dressing room. John Lydon charmed his way in through the stage door and joined this prophetic assembly. With other nobodies watching from the crowd, including members of what would become the Stranglers and the Damned, if there was a seminal moment when punk was born, this was it—symbolically, on Independence Day in London.
At exactly the same time, disco’s rapid evolution from the New York underground to global pop phenomenon came together. Back in 1973, the first warning shot was Manu Dibango’s Soul Makossa, a French pressing shipped into Brooklyn by African importers. Found by David Mancuso in a Jamaican store, it burned the house down every night at the Loft. With other deejays clambering for the last remaining copies in circulation, in May Billboard ran a piece noting Soul Makossa was “fetching a record price of between $2 and $3 in New York shops because of its unprecedented popularity in the black community.” Observing the flood of cover versions, Atlantic secured American rights for the original.
As record labels started noticing this growing dance-floor community, in 1975, David Mancuso, with Steve D’Aquisto and journalist Vince Aletti, set up a nonprofit record pool. Once a week, about one hundred deejay members converged on Mancuso’s new Loft at 99 Prince Street to pick up thirty to fifty new releases and prerelease promos. Record companies, both majors and indies, as yet inexperienced in the art of club promotion, only had to deliver a box of records to one address in return for precious feedback and support from all of New York’s trendsetting deejays. Once again, the idealistic David Mancuso was putting the scene first.
The first record mogul to invest heavily in disco was inevitably Robert Stigwood, the Cream manager turned Jesus Christ Superstar bankroller, who with his booming entertainment company, RSO, had produced the 1975 film adaptation of Tommy, starring Roger Daltrey and Elton John. In February 1976, Stigwood’s waning clients the Bee Gees had recorded their first disco smash hit, “You Should Be Dancing”�
�a spectacular comeback.
During that summer of 1976, just as punk was rising up in London, Stigwood read a New York Magazine story called “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night” written by British music critic Nik Cohn. Presented as real-life reporting, it described the urban struggles of a working-class Brooklyn youngster who, every weekend, went wild on the dance floor of the Bay Ridge discotheque 2001 Odyssey. Stigwood bought the screen rights for $90,000, signed a three-picture deal with John Travolta for $1 million, and began filming Saturday Night Fever, whose soundtrack was in large part supplied by his Bee Gees.
Probably the most iconic disco label of them all was an independent based in Los Angeles: Casablanca, whose comical, New York–bred founder, Neil Bogart, was one of the most spectacular boom-to-bust record men the business has ever seen. He may have been straight, but like Robert Stigwood’s, his career began theatrically; he attended the School of Performing Arts, which inspired the 1980 film Fame. From there, he ran the inexplicably misspelled Buddah Records, whose core market was bubblegum—low-nutrition pop rock aimed at youngsters musically disenfranchised by counterculture.
Throughout the late sixties, Neil Bogart was happily going against the hippie-rock traffic, honing his promotional techniques for the likes of Curtis Mayfield, Bill Withers, and Gladys Knight. His favorite mantra, religiously repeated to staffers with a cheeky grin, was “Whatever it takes!” If a radio deejay or program director wouldn’t accept gifts or lunch invitations, Bogart and his gang would do anything to get their records aired on the right stations.
According to one Bogart legend, in his formative years the hardest, most incorruptible program director was Rick Sklar from the influential WABC. Inventing a brand-new trick, Bogart got his brother-in-law Buck Reingold to hide in a stall in the station’s men’s room. Looking through a crack in the door, with his battery-operated record player placed on the toilet seat, he waited for Sklar to enter. When he eventually did, Reingold waited until his prey was comfortable, then played his new record from the neighboring cubicle.
With hilarious stories spreading through the record industry, Neil Bogart caught the attention of the humorous Joe Smith, who believed the job of record company management was simply “to keep people pumped up all of the time.” To set up the inspirational Neil Bogart with his own Warner-affiliated label, Smith talked Mo Ostin into an agreement whereby if Bogart wasn’t making a profit after $1 million of funding, Warner would take over.
The label was named after the classic movie Casablanca, and its first signature was Kiss, whose makeup and ear-splitting performances appealed to Bogart’s taste for theater and excess. For Kiss’s first show in the Midwest, Bogart booked an established headliner, Rory Gallagher, to ensure the showcase would be packed to the gills. With the help of an independent promoter, they lured an influential deejay to the show and handcuffed him to his seat.
Kiss strutted out. Peter Criss’s levitating drum riser went up too high for the low ceiling and knocked him briefly unconscious. Gene Simmons set his hair on fire. Guitarist Ace kept falling over in his giant space boots. As expected, when the denim-clad Rory Gallagher eventually stepped into the smoking ruins, he died a slow death. Bogart repeated the trick on the unsuspecting Aerosmith. Every time Kiss opened a show, their explosive performance left a trail of handcuffed deejays laughing with disbelief.
Larry Harris, Bogart’s cousin and radio promotions man toured stations building special relationships with radio deejays. Sitting quietly in the studio during broadcasts, he nonchalantly carved out lines of cocaine on a Kiss album sleeve. It was a convincing argument, though “I don’t think I pioneered the practice,” stipulated Harris. Still, “the black background of that album was perfect to do coke on.”
The 100,000 Kiss records sold thus far were insufficient to cover Casablanca’s heavy expenditures—the office included a pool house where rock chicks treated visitors to unmentionable surprises. But because the overstretched Warner was struggling to press and distribute orders, Mo Ostin kindly wrote off the $750,000 thus spent and allowed Bogart to battle on as an independent. It was right then, teetering on bankruptcy, in November 1974, that Bogart stumbled on his ticket to disco paradise.
He was visited by Trudy Meisel, wife of German impresario Peter Meisel, who was representing an Italian-born producer by the name of Giorgio Moroder, then enjoying some success in Germany with mood music. Broke, but liking the demos, Bogart secured a label deal whereby Casablanca would promote and distribute Moroder’s Oasis catalog throughout North America. Late one night, the Casablanca gang was listening to one of Moroder’s latest creations, “Love to Love You Baby,” featuring an American soul singer, Donna Summer. When somebody accidentally bumped the needle back to the start, the revelers continued rolling their drugged-up heads to the song’s sensual repetition. Feeling a strange magic in the air, Bogart telephoned Germany and asked Moroder to mix an extended version.
Although it wasn’t exactly danceable, the seventeen-minute version, released by Casablanca in August 1975 as a full side, started making noise in discotheques, first in Florida, then the Northeast. It was even noticed by a few late-night radio deejays who specialized in progressive rock. As a buzz gathered momentum, Bogart began planning Donna Summer’s future.
When she eventually arrived at JFK Airport in 1975 for a six-week promotional campaign, Bogart had choreographed the dream homecoming. After seven long years in Germany, she stepped into a waiting limousine and sank into her seat as “Love to Love You Baby” came on the radio. When she walked into her hotel suite overlooking Central Park, nearly two dozen floral displays had been carefully arranged. When she visited her hometown of Boston, Buck Reingold had personally escorted all the way from Los Angeles, a life-sized cake impression of the singer, requiring ambulances and two first-class seats on the plane. Considering she’d spent several months of the previous year bedridden with myocarditis, Bogart ensured that before America fell in love with Donna Summer, she was first happily married to Casablanca.
The bankroller for Casablanca’s first disco experiments was, of course Kiss, who in November 1975 shot into orbit. Their fourth album, Alive!, entered the Top 10 album charts—Casablanca’s first platinum album. The following spring, a studio album, Destroyer, went platinum, as did another studio album, Rock & Roll Over. In a period in which most rock bands released an album a year, Kiss was engaging in a campaign of mass assault. In just thirty months, they released six albums and toured constantly, louder, campier, and more excessive than anyone else on the market.
As cash began pouring in, Bogart paid off his $750,000 debt to Warner, bought a Moroccan casbah in Hollywood, hired new staff, and moved the company into a bigger building on Sunset Strip. Both the lobby and Bogart’s office were given a Rick’s Café theme, complete with stuffed camels, plastic palm trees, Moroccan furniture, and draping textiles suggesting Bedouin tents. Believing that envy would get him the best staff in the business, Bogart gave his people impressive titles, Mercedes sedans, and expense accounts and encouraged everyone to fly first class. Everyone’s birthday, even the box packers’, was celebrated with a champagne party. It was the same strategy for trade fairs. At one, Casablanca constructed a Moroccan casbah whose interiors were filled with various gambling games. Veiled belly dancers moved through the aisles giving away Casablanca gambling chips—lucky visitors could actually win prizes.
Making hits was beginning to feel easy at Casablanca, and for a glorious moment, life never felt so good. The company was happy—musically, professionally, and chemically. Larry Harris, the company number two, smoked joints openly in the office, but as the sun went down, stronger drugs were taken out of drawers. In the early days, Casablanca’s drug of preference was a type of legal pill called quaaludes, otherwise referred to as ludes.
Seeing the success Kiss was enjoying thanks to their extravagant shows, Casablanca’s funk signature George Clinton began demanding tour support in “meetings” that were grass and cocaine sessions. His b
rainwave, described through a cloud of smoke, was the Mothership—a model flying saucer would swoop in from the back of the hall over the heads of the crowd, then, with the lights turned off for two seconds, a bigger version would appear on the stage. Emerging from the dry ice, suggesting cosmic energy, George Clinton would commence his “pimp walk.” Fortunately, thanks to his sense of humor and brilliant rhythm section, George Clinton’s self-indulgence was an instant success with audiences. The accompanying album, Mothership Connection, released in December 1975, went platinum.
Such lavish experiments weren’t always so profitable. Casablanca was also trying to break a progressive rock group called Angel, whose attempts at so-called high-art illusions inspired several sketches in the film satire This Is Spinal Tap. With the hall lights dimmed, the golden face of Angel Gabriel appeared over the drum riser as a celestial voice boomed out across the audience, “And it came to pass one day in Heaven that Gabriel summoned his flock of angels…” A system of lights, dry ice, and mirrors illuminated a set of pyramids. Five glass cubicles rose up from under the stage and released the band into the earthly realm. Unfortunately, musicians got occasionally trapped in their pods.
Clearly there had to be cheaper ways of promoting records. Even the heavy-gambling Neil Bogart sensed that dance-floor hit singles were the solution in a rock world that had literally grown out of all serious proportion. In Europe, Peter Meisel’s Hansa label had been the first to score disco hits, in particular “Daddy Cool” by Boney M. It was the Bee Gees, in early 1976, who proved the point in America. Shortly after, Bogart got another fortuitous visit from Henri Belolo and Jacques Morali—the French producers who had dreamed up the Village People, a sort of gay-club fancy-dress concept depicting symbols of American life: an Indian, a construction worker, a cop, a cowboy, a sailor, a biker.
Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry Page 29