Alison “the Night Bird” Steele was on from 10:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. Alison was great; she played all our artists, and we didn’t even have to ask her to do it. She and her boyfriend, who was an assistant district attorney of New York, spent enough time with Neil and Buck on a regular basis that I never really needed to drop in and see her on my promotion rounds. When Alison was on the air, I spent time with John Zacherle, as his show was on at the same time as hers and he had no relationship with either Neil or Buck. I also devoted a great deal of time to all the WNEW talent during their Summer in the Park events—a series of live performances at area parks. It seemed like we had an artist doing an event almost every week—everyone from Jim Dawson and Buzzy Linhart to Sha Na Na. Buddah probably supplied more artists for Summer in the Park than any other label.
• October 1, 1971: Walt Disney World opens outside of Orlando, Florida.
• February 14, 1972: “Steppenwolf Day” is declared in Los Angeles, California.
• August 22, 1972: Actress Jane Fonda broadcasts an anti–Vietnam War polemic from a hotel room in Hanoi.
When my overnight visits were done, I went home, slept for a few hours, woke up, showered, and headed to WNEW to be with Pete Fornatale and later, in the day, Mike Harrison or Dave Herman.
Middays I spent with Scott Muni (even in the early 1970s, he was a living legend in the radio and music industries), and I would watch him drink his lunch. I also became friends with Dennis Elsas, who succeeded Klenfner as music director when he left to become the first album promotion person at Columbia Records, which at that time was the largest label in the world.
I was able to get almost anything played on WNEW, WLIR, and WPLJ (though I could never corner the impenetrable Jonathan Schwartz, who would run and hide when he saw a promo person). I was, at least by my own reckoning, off to a very good start.
A year or so after I joined the company, we moved to 810 7th Avenue. Brand new offices in a classy building. This was nice. I still had to share an office—this time with the new head of album promotion, Jay Schick—but I didn’t mind in the least. Jay came from Florida, where he had been a court reporter. After a few too many “trips,” he decided to venture into the music business. I watched Jay closely to see how he worked; I saw that although he worked hard, he had trouble concentrating. He introduced me to what would become not only my new favorite drug but also the preferred drug of the early-to-mid 1970s: Quaaludes. We were at a concert together, and he casually offered me a couple of pills. I shrugged and thought, “What the hell?” I swallowed two of them. It was a very nice kind of high. It made my fingertips tingle and slurred my speech a bit, but rather than feeling mellowed out, I felt like getting up and doing something, anything—sex, cleaning, cooking. It just felt good to be active. The drug would prove to be Jay’s undoing, as it would cause him to pass out at very inopportune times, like when we were all in a meeting. He left the company shortly thereafter to return to Miami and his more lucrative court reporting gig. But he taught me one important lesson: never take ’ludes before dusk.
The biggest advantage of my new office was that I was right next to Joe Fields, the head of sales. Joe, who was short in stature, had more energy than any ten people I have ever known. I absorbed a host of great sales skills just listening to Joe on the phone. He was a master, given that much of our product was very difficult to sell, especially in the inflated quantities Neil asked him to move. Joe could also hold his own with any radio person; the format did not matter. I can honestly say that he sold the Brooklyn Bridge to a few people and mean it literally and figuratively (the band The Brooklyn Bridge, that is).
One story illustrates just how crazy Joe was. Joe and Neil went to a convention for Heilicher Brothers, a very influential distributor in the Midwest. To make an impression, they hired an old-fashioned prop plane and dressed as 1920 aviators; then they had the plane buzz the convention hotel a few times and land on the hotel grounds. After that stunt, who do you think was the talk of the convention?
One of our major artists was Curtis Mayfield, who, before going solo, was the lead singer of The Impressions. Curtis, along with his manager and partner, Marv Stuart, had his own label: Curtom Records. Buddah manufactured, sold, and promoted the product, but Curtis had total control over the content. Neil usually wouldn’t hesitate to correct an artist if he thought his or her music needed a little something, but when it came to Curtis Mayfield, he would never assume he knew better. Curtis was a true superstar in those days. His albums always went Gold (half a million units sold), and he became a household name in the summer of 1972, when he created the music for the smash movie Super Fly, the soundtrack for which sold over three million units. But, as exciting as his albums were, he was incredibly dull in concert, anchoring himself in front of the microphone and barely twitching a muscle.
In September 1972, I was sent to Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, to act as liaison between Curtis and the ABC people during the taping of the infamous pilot episode of ABC’s In Concert TV series. Also on the bill was Alice Cooper, the original shock rocker, whom Curtis was to follow onstage. The taping was a mess. ABC’s people did not have it together, and everything was way off schedule. We had been slated for a 12:00 a.m. start time, and at 2:00 a.m. we were still waiting to go on. To make matters worse, none of the thirty people in Curtis’s entourage had any rolling papers left. There was smoke, plenty of smoke, but nothing to roll joints with, and certainly no pipe—pipes were not part of the hardcore pot repertoire at that point. This was a major catastrophe. It was intolerable to have to while away the time without being stoned. Not to worry. In amazement, I watched as a member of Curtis’s posse ripped open a paper grocery bag, filled it with marijuana and menthol tobacco from numerous Newport cigarettes, rolled it, fitted one end with a rolled-up piece of cardboard (a perfect filter) and—viola! The biggest joint I had ever seen. It was at least three feet long and four to six inches wide. After two passes to each person, it was gone, but it had served its intended purpose. We were now all in a better mood.
Eventually, Curtis went onstage before a less-than-enthusiastic audience. The In Concert people had not allowed audience members to go to the bathroom for hours because they were afraid they would leave the hall, and that would make for terrible audience shots. They were also afraid that, once out of their seats, people would not return at all, leaving the production staff to find replacements in the middle of the night. But some audience members decided that they were leaving, and locked doors were not going to stop them. The fact that it was illegal to lock these people into a theater did not seem to bother the show’s producers; they had a show to shoot, and there had to be an audience, no matter what.
In Concert was, in fact, an excellent opportunity for Curtis, as the target demographic for the show was young white males into rock and roll, and he needed exposure to that audience. I am sure Ron Weisner was responsible for setting it up.
Neil was a visionary, and he was one of the first people (if not the very first) to use a TV spot to promote an album release. In most cases, the thirty- and sixty-second commercials were cut-down versions of promotional films (essentially music videos), which were mainly created if you needed to promote your product in foreign territories, or if you needed a moving image on a local dance show or news broadcast. Some of those spots, including one for Stories’s (“Brother Louie”) 1973 album, About Us, are even available on YouTube.
Neil had a wonderful working relationship with two of the principals in the New York production company Direction Plus, which we occasionally hired to produce promo films and TV spots for Buddah. While certainly no one knew it at the time, both of those principals, Bill Aucoin and Joyce Biawitz, would go on to change our lives forever, as we would change theirs.
The Curtis Mayfield three-foot joint scenario may have been an amusing eye-opener for me, but it was nothing compared to some of the situations I found myself in on Curtis’s behalf. He called me at the office one day (I’m sure one
of my Buddah colleagues put him up to it, as I can’t imagine he thought I was cool), and he asked me to meet him at his hotel suite. When I arrived, I found him in bed with several women. He called me over, handed me two thousand dollars, and gave me an address where I was to pick up a package for him. I went to this seedy part of town knowing full well that I had two grand on me and that the package was not going to contain a pastrami sandwich. Carrying around so much cocaine made me very paranoid. I returned to Curtis’s suite, but this time I was not invited in. He opened the door a crack, took the blow from me, and slammed the door shut. No thank-you—nothing. Probably shouldn’t have expected a gratuity, either.
That one occasion aside, Curtis was always very nice to me. In fact, I don’t think I ever saw him be anything but congenial to anyone. Yet I was totally struck by the irony. This guy had written the music to Super Fly and was hailed by everyone as a genius for delivering the antidrug message through songs like “Freddie’s Dead” and “Super Fly,” and now he was doing an entire ounce of blow.
As Christmas 1972 approached, we all anticipated a great present from Marv Stuart and Curtis for the effort we had put into helping the Super Fly soundtrack become a hit. When Marv showed up with little jars of jam for the staff, Joe Fields went ballistic and ran down the hall yelling at Marv for being such a cheapskate. Considering the rest of us didn’t have the balls to say anything to Marv, we all loved Joe for doing it for us.
I spent many evenings with Joe going to see artists perform—those on our labels and others. Joe would always take the train from his home in Long Island, and since I had a car and was heading back in the same direction, I would take him home late at night when the trains were not running so frequently. Just hanging out with Joe during these outings, I received the best education I could have had in music business history and theory. Joe would later start his own jazz label (jazz was his true love). From what I understand, he then sold it and bought it back several times, making a great deal of money in the process.
One of the many lessons he taught me was that what people want you to perceive is not necessarily the way things are. Before my first trip to Boston to visit the very influential radio station WBCN-FM, Joe gave me a primer on what to expect. He told me that the people I would meet there would like me to believe that the sales guy, Kenny Greenblatt, was the music director. This was to prevent the DJs from being pressured by record people. The station would also use this as a tactic to get advertising from the labels: you would drop off a dozen albums (one for each DJ), and if they decided to play the record, Greenblatt would call to say he could get it played but would need some advertising to show the label supported it. This was all a ruse. Joe explained that the real deal was the program director, Norm Winer, who (in my opinion) ran the station in too democratic a fashion. All of the on-air people, including the newspeople, had a vote in what music was played. Knowing this on my first visit to WBCN, with the new Super Fly album in hand, I made it a point to deal only with Norm.
I became very close to WBCN’s staff, and Boston grew to be one of my favorite destinations. I rarely stayed in a hotel there, opting instead to stay in the house that Norm shared with three DJs: John Brody, Tommy Hadges, and Joe Rogers, who went by the appellation Mississippi Joe. I usually slept on an uncomfortable couch in the living room, but it was more fun hanging with them than being in a hotel by myself. It’s not like I was able to get a lot of sleep when visiting Boston anyway. We would stay up into the wee hours getting high and talking about life. I was to view many a Boston sunrise.
WBCN was the station that helped introduce Monty Python to American audiences. A few of the WBCN people were already Python fans because they’d read about the comedy troupe in Melody Maker, the popular English music and culture magazine, and the person most into Python was Mississippi Joe. So we set up a showing of the Python movie And Now for Something Completely Different for the WBCN audience in a local movie theater. The film was not much more than a series of highlights from the troupe’s BBC show Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but the event was a big success. Everyone in attendance was thrilled at the reception the movie received, and the screening helped make the Boston PBS television station aware of the potential of broadcasting Monty Python’s Flying Circus to American audiences.
On one occasion, I invited a few of the on-air people out to lunch. One of them asked me if some of the staff could join us. I agreed, and, to my surprise, there were about twenty people waiting for us when we got to the restaurant. The entire staff was there, including the elevator operator and the janitor, not to mention the accountant’s nephew. Of course, I was stuck with the bill and had to look like a good sport, but I felt used and abused. Neil was pleased with my expense report that month.
When a group of WBCN staff made a special trip to New York to spend a few days, I arranged for us all to see National Lampoon’s Lemmings show (with Chevy Chase and John Belushi in their pre-Saturday Night Live days) at the Village Gate, a famous jazz club in Greenwich Village that often hosted small off-Broadway acts. Buddah had nothing to do with this show, but I thought everyone would enjoy it. Lemmings was a Woodstock parody (the festival in it was called “Woodchuck”) that mocked the hippie generation, and the Village Gate was so jammed that a number of us had to sit on the floor in front of the stage. Taking the staff to the show helped solidify my relationship with the station, but, to be truthful, it didn’t really seem to matter how close I was to them; they never played many of my records.
One of Neil’s more lucrative ventures was a prestigious deal to distribute Charisma Records through Buddah. Charisma was founded by a former journalist named Tony Stratton-Smith, and it was home to several noteworthy artists, particularly Genesis, then fronted by Peter Gabriel, and the Monty Python comedy troupe. Neil had come to know Tony via our association with Nancy Lewis, who ran publicity for us and had been publicist for The Who. Python had yet to experience their big American breakthrough (that would come in 1974, with the theatrical release of Monty Python and the Holy Grail), but their BBC show was a huge success in Britain. Similarly, Genesis had made a lot of noise in Europe but hadn’t yet found their footing in the states. The band is best known for their later pop stylings when Phil Collins was their front man, but back in the early 1970s, Genesis was a high-concept art-rock outfit whose epic and complex songs (frequently clocking in at over ten minutes) could not find a place on US radio. They had received a great reception in their native England, and Melody Maker, in particular, had been raving about their extravagant stage shows for years, so this was something of a pressure project for Buddah. Their first album for us was Nursery Cryme, and although some people, like Scott Muni at WNEW, played them in his English hour each week, we were having a hard time getting airplay as Peter Gabriel’s vocals were very hard to understand. I had to come up with a way to make everyone pay attention and realize this band had a great live show, and that their music, esoteric as it was, was still accessible and relevant.
I met with Muni and discussed what could be done to get Genesis more exposure on the station. He had no real ideas, as he did not often push his on-air staff to play specific groups unless their music directly related to the station in some fashion. I came up with an idea: we would throw a Genesis concert for the WNEW audience and the small admission fee would go to charity. Buddah and Charisma would pick up the tab. I ran the idea past Neil and Tony Stratton-Smith, and they both agreed. The caveat was that I had to make the concert as high-profile as I could. The show was scheduled for December 13, 1972 at the Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall in Manhattan. I sent out invitations to every noteworthy progressive FM program director in the country I could think of: Bernie Kimball from WCMF-FM in Rochester; Tom Starr from WOUR-FM in Utica; Mark Parenteau from WABX in Detroit; Jerry Stevens from WMMR-FM in Philly; even West Coasters like Mary Turner and Richard Kimball from KMET in LA. We put everyone up at the Americana Hotel.
WNEW plugged the show like crazy, and on the night of the concer
t almost every DJ played Genesis constantly to increase excitement over the event, which, at three dollars a pop, had sold out easily. Genesis blew everyone away, with Gabriel in his bizarre garb flying over the audience. It was a major success. The number of ads (the industry term for a radio station adding a song or artist to its playlist) were too numerous to count. Only Mark Parenteau, as I recall, left the building unimpressed.
A few days after the event, I was smugly sitting in my office feeling oh so impressed with myself—I’d pretty much made Genesis in the US, by my own reckoning—when in walks Buddah comptroller Eric Steinmetz, who was angrily pointing to a bill from the Americana showing a case of champagne charged to Parenteau’s room. Mark had taken the entire case home and charged it to Buddah. I called and bitched him out for a good fifteen minutes, but we wound up laughing about it, and I didn’t press the issue; I knew I would have an IOU with his name on it in my pocket for the foreseeable future. Neil could not possibly have cared less, as he knew it was money well spent. Eric, with his bean-counter mentality, was a pain in the ass about it for weeks, until Neil finally told him to back off and leave me alone.
As 1972 gave way to 1973, Neil, Cecil, and I, along with the Buddah Group, were plowing ahead. We had big hits with Barbara Mason’s “Give Me Your Love” and Stories’s “Brother Louie.” I was getting to spend quite a bit of time with Sha Na Na and their manager, Ed Goodgold. He was a very funny and likeable guy (his quick wit had earned him the nickname “the Rabbi”), and he had one of the most difficult managing gigs in the business. Sha Na Na was comprised of twelve guys, all of whom had equal say in the direction of the band. I always enjoyed seeing them in concert. They put on a great show, and the crowd was always part of the pageantry, dressing in 1950s garb. Before one show, in Detroit, I arrived at the hotel early, so I took a few ’ludes and headed out to the pool. Trying to impress some sweet young thing in a bikini, I dove nonchalantly into the water, not realizing I was at the shallow end. I surfaced with a gash on my forehead and a slight concussion as reward for the stunt. Leaving the tour, I flew home and spent a few days in the hospital in traction.
And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records Page 4