Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry

by Gareth Murphy

  “The Virgin retail chain, for example, always lost money, but we kept it going because it was very good for our image. Richard didn’t want the shop staff to know; he always played down the bad news. So the public perception was always that Virgin retailing was a profitable business. But it wasn’t really. The only shop that actually made money was the Paris megastore … It was a huge thing—groundbreaking—selling records, selling books, selling films, and the scale of it was a monster. But all the other ones were disasters; they lost a huge amount of money … There were always disasters around Richard, but he’s always managed to paint them as successes. The airline became very successful much later. But certainly in my time, the only thing making big money was the record company. In the end, because of all the losses, particularly in the property company, we had to sell the record company.”

  Behind the scenes, Richard Branson’s business protège Ken Berry was shopping around for a buyer as Virgin began making headlines with high-profile signatures. “We put in an extra effort to sign the Rolling Stones just to decorate the nest,” admitted Draper. “Also Janet Jackson to some extent, although we probably would have signed her anyway. But signing the Rolling Stones for £8 million as we were negotiating the sale price was definitely just to make the whole thing look more attractive.” Thorn-EMI acquired Virgin Records for £560 million.

  Once again, observers were stunned at the enormous price tag. As David Betteridge understood, there was one crucial asset Virgin possessed. “I was sort of lucky enough to see both sides of all that,” explained Betteridge, in reference to the fact that he ran a Virgin sublabel years after his long spell as managing director for both Island and CBS. Compared to the license deals Island maintained with its European partner, Ariola, “I then got an insider’s view of what Virgin had in Europe, which was an entirely different kettle of fish. You could fly to Italy or France or Germany and talk directly to a guy who would sit down with you, as a fellow member of the Virgin group, and discuss promoting your act. Virgin were hugely successful in Europe,” while the likes of Island and Chrysalis were “burning their fingers in America.”

  For Simon Draper, it was the end of a twenty-year adventure. “I was in favor of going public in 1986, although it was madness to start an American office the following year. But the environment you inhabit as a public company is not comfortable, because you have to deliver profits, you can’t take long-term decisions. That’s really why I eventually got out. I didn’t like the environment of being in a big public company, and I definitely didn’t want Richard Branson risking something that I’d built up for twenty years on some venture that was of no interest to me whatsoever. So it was definitely time for a parting of ways.”

  For Chris Wright, those years also proved to be a painful milestone. Because the Chrysalis deal was structured in two parts, the shock hit him two years after the original signature. “I couldn’t sleep for six months…,” admitted Wright with a crackle in his throat. “I was not happy about it. It was the second deal in 1991; that’s when it affected me that badly.” Although he’s among the one thousand richest men in Britain today, Chris Wright says. “I don’t think you do anything for the money. Certainly not when you’re young. Money doesn’t come into it. When you’re young, you don’t need money, you just need a hamburger and a plate of fries. As you get older, you get used to a certain lifestyle and the money does become a bit more important. But not when you’re young.” It was almost as if selling Chrysalis marked the end of his youth.

  Jerry Moss was entering a similar place. “I heard stories about corporations taking over,” he said, “but I just didn’t believe it was going to happen to us … For the first year, I was relatively happy. David Fine told me ‘no changes.’”

  Then the PolyGram chairman telephoned one day. “I’m not sure if you’re aware of our retirement policy,” he began, “but the mandatory age for retirement here is sixty-one, and my birthday is next Saturday.”

  “David, you mean I’m not going to be working with you anymore?” gasped Moss.

  “We’re actually choosing who it is now,” confirmed Fine.

  The successor to the PolyGram throne turned out to be Alain Levy, a notoriously dour record executive who’d risen up through the ranks from the French office of Polydor. “From the outset we didn’t get along,” admitted Moss. “He had an MBA, which is a dangerous thing to have these days. All those people learned in college was to cut expenditure, so in the short term they show profits, but in the long term the company got shut down. It was just an idiotic way to run anything. He would befriend certain artists who’d get anything they wanted. And the others would starve. His manner of leadership was awful, just frightening. And it didn’t work for our company … Pretty soon they cut our Paris office, they cut our New York office. People left. I made it a smaller, tighter more aggressive company, but Alain just wanted me to leave.”

  The writing was quite literally on the wall. In a poignant symbol of the culture clash, the new order took a dislike to a mural created by Tubes members Prairie Prince and Mike Cotten. Depicting the A&M logo in different perspectives, it had been proudly exhibited around the soundstages of the lot since the seventies. Visible from the street outside, it was part of the local landscape—until whitewashed in 1993 by the corporate owners. “Now why would anybody do that?” wondered Moss, who knew it was time to pack up his office mementos. He looked at Herb Alpert with a sorry shrug and said, “What can we do about it? This is the deal we made. And this is who they chose to run it. We don’t own the company anymore … So we left. Herb and I had a lot to do with what our company meant, and once we were gone, it just became a PolyGram entity.”

  One executive, Bob Garcia, attested, “For the average employee who had been involved with A&M for more than fifteen or twenty years, it was almost an assault. It’s what I term the Alain Levy syndrome. It was a very strange experience to hear the words ‘Alain Levy is in the building.’ What does that mean? It means ‘clean up your shit, even though you have no shit to clean up.’ It was like injecting a strange unknown virus into the body. And you never understood it. You never warmed to it. It was never personable. You’re dealing with shareholders, you’re dealing with a building in New York City that looks like something out of Ghostbusters. And it’s the heart and soul of the people who own you. A&M had always been the center of its own universe. Then all of a sudden, we were a satellite circling around someone else’s universe.”

  Even inside the biggest majors, there were casualties. Mo Ostin, in particular, whose corporate owners merged with Time in 1990, was feeling the absence of Steve Ross, who died of prostate cancer in 1992. With bean counters in New York meddling in his decisions, Ostin quickly “found that I couldn’t live with it anymore … I was done.” Looking back on Warner’s spectacular success throughout the seventies and eighties, Ostin believes “a lot of it was attributable that we had this incredible corporate support during the Ross years, with minimum corporate interference. We were allowed to be entrepreneurial and take risks, and because of this, we were able to empower our executives. Philosophically, we stayed close to our basic belief: that music was our highest priority … that whenever there was any conflict between art and commerce, the artist should prevail.” By the midnineties, however, that whole ethic had died with Steve Ross.

  The aging record man had become a semiretired multimillionaire. Some moved on; some stuck around for a while as elder statesmen. For the best minds of a generation, the golden age was over.

  29. LAMENTATIONS

  “Whoever believes will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” Despite the spread of corporate entertainment, there were still innumerable pockets of resistance—especially one.

  Revered by connoisseurs as a sort of temple on the mount, the epicenter for alternative music in Britain was Rough Trade—by all accounts an extraordinary happening in the history of the record business. When the tiny shop opened in 1976, there were only about a dozen ind
ies in Britain, but by the late eighties, there were eight hundred, five hundred of them being handled by Rough Trade’s distribution hub—colloquially referred to as the Cartel. Never before had a single gateway accepted so many vinyl artisans into such a diverse marketplace of homespun music.

  For decades, most record companies operated on the assumption they were delivering the type of music people wanted. However, Rough Trade founder Geoff Travis had always taken the opposite view, pointing out to a BBC journalist in the early eighties, “The record market is artificially created and might not be what people would buy given other alternatives.”

  “That’s as true today as it was back then,” Travis believes, thirty years the wiser. “Just look at Fox News. Fox News gives an image of what a country is and what people are meant to be thinking. And it’s all very circular; what you make available to the general public—and I don’t underestimate the intelligence of the general public, and that’s an important premise—but what you put in front of them is completely and utterly determined by available means of distribution: who’s in power, what people want you to hear, read, see. Although that’s changing hugely with the Internet, it’s still a factor in the way people live their lives, how they think. What we get to see on TV, what we hear on the radio, what we read in our newspapers is absolutely key.”

  Throughout the eighties, Geoff Travis and his colleagues were determined to alter public demand by widening the supply of alternative, independently made music. As Rough Trade’s kibbutz model ballooned into a multistory building, there was a deeper sociological dimension driving demand for moody records that captured the desolation of Britain’s postindustrial decline, particularly in the North. By 1982, Britain’s unemployment level had snowballed to a massive 3 million, having tripled in the previous eight years. Although the national average was one in eight, as many as one in six were on welfare in most parts of the North. Britain had never been so divided.

  As Travis emphasized, however, “It wasn’t a conscious thing to sign so many Northern acts, it just seems to be that the North was where the best stuff came from. I always wonder why there’s not better music from London. It’s strange, maybe that old cliché about hard times producing great art has some veracity to it.”

  While the Cartel incubated a whole generation of indies like Factory, 2 Tone, 4AD, Mute, Creation, One Little Indian, Go! Discs, Some Bizarre, Fiction, and Cooking Vinyl, Geoff Travis signed to Rough Trade’s in-house label the Manchester band that personified the “indie” moniker—the Smiths. “Not everyone knew how great the Smiths were from day one,” said Travis, “but any A&R person knows it’s part of his job to help educate and bring the rest of their company along with things. A lot of people liked the Smiths, a lot of people didn’t understand it, but for some of us they were absolutely central to what Rough Trade was doing. They were intelligent, educated, groundbreaking, original, innovative, politically aware to a degree, they understood feminism in a way that not many men did at that particular time. They were fascinating people. And they were Northerners.”

  One overlooked phenomenon was Rough Trade’s subtle influence on alternative rock in America. While Seymour Stein licensed the North American rights for a wide selection of acts from this indie network, there was a whole other grassroots movement quietly sprouting on the American periphery. One such unsung hero is Bruce Pavitt, founder of Sub Pop, the Seattle label that launched Nirvana.

  Pavitt was originally from Chicago; his winding path to Seattle began in 1979 when he was a student in Olympia, Washington, hosting a radio show called Subterranean Pop. “I played a lot of West Coast punk, like the Dead Kennedys, X, and the Wipers as well as a lot of the Rough Trade catalog,” explained Pavitt. “Rough Trade was my favorite label at the time.” In 1980, Pavitt started the first indie magazine in America, also called Subterranean Pop. He understood that smaller cities around the country had their own happening bands ignored by the major companies, so in his magazine “all records were reviewed from a regional perspective, with an emphasis on cities outside of New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.”

  The originality of Pavitt’s perspective aroused the interest of the English magazine NME, which first reprinted his U.S. Indie Chart. Shortening his magazine title to Sub Pop in 1981, Pavitt then began alternating the magazine with mix tapes. Inspired by Rough Trade and then helped by them, he got his first taste of record production when their “distribution picked up two hundred copies and I was off! It eventually sold two thousand—good numbers at the time!”

  In 1983, Pavitt made his fateful move to Seattle, where he helped set up a store for alternative music and skateboard gear. Called Fallout Records and Skateboards, it became a meeting point in the bohemian Capitol Hill neighborhood. “Although I left in 1985 to start the Sub Pop label,” explained Pavitt, “I helped establish the vibe, which was mostly SST releases, American hardcore punk, as well as U.K. releases from 4AD, Factory, and Rough Trade.” Pavitt also began spreading his message to the local street scene; he wrote a “Sub Pop” column for alternative magazine Rocket; he hosted a Sub Pop show on Seattle radio and deejayed at two clubs, the Metropolis and the Vogue.

  In 1986, Pavitt finally set up his own Sub Pop record label, and two years later, he teamed up with a local music promoter, Jon Poneman, who invested $20,000 “and joined me in documenting the Seattle scene, which we both agreed was really taking off.” On April Fool’s Day in 1988, they opened a tiny office, selling mail-order 45s from bands such as Green River, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, and Nirvana.

  “Things moved quickly for Kurt [Cobain] and Nirvana,” remembered Pavitt. “Despite his intense, guttural singing style, offstage Kurt was shy and quiet. He was also sensitive, creative, and a genuine fan of new music. His ambitions were initially modest. In the fall of 1988, he was stoked to have his first single, ‘Love Buzz,’ played on the local college station.” Within a year of their debut album, Bleach, Nirvana made the cover of Britain’s Sounds magazine, toured Europe, and rocked London at Sub Pop’s LameFest showcase.

  Meanwhile, in New York, another young man with a giant destiny in the record industry was rising up through his local indie community, producer and Def Jam founder Rick Rubin. As a student in the early eighties, “I hung out at a tiny independent record store called 99 Records on MacDougal Street, run by a guy named Ed Bahlman,” explained Rubin. “He was sort of my mentor in the music business because he put out independent records like ESG, Bush Tetras, and Liquid Liquid. It was just a really cool indie store where I heard a lot of U.K. twelve-inches and independent punk rock.”

  Rubin got into break beats and befriended Zulu Nation deejay Jazzy Jay. “I experienced hip-hop as black punk rock,” he said. “It was another way of taking music back. It wasn’t made by virtuosos, it wasn’t about great musicianship, it was made by anyone with an idea or something to say.” He was introduced to a black promoter, Russell Simmons, and set up Def Jam in 1984 while still a student. Following initial releases such as LL Cool J’s “I Need a Beat,” Rubin began mixing up all of his diverse influences. “In high school I had listened to stuff like AC/DC and Led Zeppelin. From there I got into independent punk rock—the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag. Then I got seriously into hip-hop, where it all moved full circle because I was missing the old stuff like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.” Blurring the lines between what seemed to be alien genres, in 1985 Rubin produced Def Jam’s first Top 10 smash hit, “Walk This Way,” on which an old Aerosmith rock song was given a striking slant courtesy of rappers Run-D.M.C.

  In the opposite direction, Rubin convinced the hard-core punk band the Beastie Boys to try rapping. The resulting experiment was a 12-inch, “Rock Hard,” which led to a No. 1 album, Licensed to Ill, including two Top 10 hits, “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)” and “No Sleep till Brooklyn.” From that collision of genres and personalities came a third important Def Jam group, Public Enemy, who in 1988 released the landmark hip-hop album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Bac
k.

  Illustrating the constant reverberation of sounds and ideas across the Atlantic, in around 1988, just as grunge and punk-fueled hip-hop began to explode on America’s coasts, back in England, a new kind of postpunk dance wave—inspired by the New York clubs of the early eighties—was starting to swell up through Rough Trade’s distribution networks. Once again, it was coming from Northern England, in particular Manchester, where for six loss-making years, Factory Records had poured profits from Joy Division and New Order into their superclub, the Hacienda.

  “I’m out of touch with the street,” admitted Factory cofounder Tony Wilson in 1987. “Between ’76 and ’81, I knew everything that was being released and I saw a different band each night. But that part of your life passes, and now I rely on other people to tell me what’s happening.” As Factory’s new A&R man, Mike Pickering, explained, “Rob Gretton and I wanted a dance label; Factory Dance … you could feel it happening … God bless Tony, but I don’t think he had the vision Rob had. Tony said dance would never happen.” As a result of this disagreement, Pickering set up his own dance label, Deconstruction, which competed with other house pioneers such as On-U Sound, FON, Champion, and Mute sublabel Rhythm King.

  However, Mike Pickering and Rob Gretton still had influence over programming at the Hacienda. Deejay Dave Haslam recalled that “By the middle of 1987, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were packed every week with twelve hundred people a night. My Thursdays were becoming a focus for the city’s indie dance fans. Pickering’s Fridays were then attracting a slightly harder, blacker crowd.” Then, in early 1988, a new drug called ecstasy entered the building, as another deejay, Jon DaSilva, began Ibiza theme nights on Wednesdays. “The music was coming from all angles,” said DaSilva, “from the deepest Detroit techno, into hip-hop and into garage, back to house and into acid house. It wasn’t just the chemicals, it was the music … The whole thing just hit the Hacienda like a thundering train.”