And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records

by Harris, Larry

  When I returned to the office, Neil had big news for me. He’d had his eye on acquiring Gladys Knight & the Pips, whose contract with Motown Records was about to expire. Gladys wanted to branch out into gospel, blues, and country, but Berry Gordy, Motown’s founder and driving force, wasn’t keen on that career path. Neil had called a meeting and announced that he had secretly signed Gladys to a deal. She was currently working with songwriter Jim Weatherly on her next album, Imagination, her first for Buddah. As if the clandestine signing wasn’t interesting enough, Neil also told me that he wanted us to work Gladys’s final Motown single, “Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye).” Pushing another label’s song is tricky work, but we managed to promote the single very quietly, and it eventually sold over a million copies, peaking at No. 2 on the charts. Once the song had peaked, Neil released Imagination, which spawned the biggest single of the group’s career: “Midnight Train to Georgia.” The song would top the charts and go on to win a Grammy.

  Business was also going well for Bill Aucoin and Joyce Biawitz’s production company, Direction Plus, which by the summer of 1973 was producing a thirteen-episode rock-music-based TV series for national syndication called Flip Side. Each half-hour episode would focus on one or two acts performing in a recording studio, and it was usually hosted by either the president of their record label or their A & R rep. For the Curtis Mayfield/Sha Na Na episode, Neil was the MC, dressed in black leather (in keeping with Sha Na Na’s outfits). I was in the recording studio with him as he videotaped his segments. The program was broadcast in New York on December 22, and I couldn’t help but think it was odd to see the president of a label on television taking up time that rightfully belonged to the artists. However, the feeling left me quickly after the taping, and it wasn’t until years later that I realized it had been a portent.

  I felt lucky and fulfilled, and I frankly couldn’t imagine a better place to be than right where I was. Fortunately, Neil never thought like this. He had already quietly begun conspiring to make a move that would officially certify his legend and make Cecil, Buck, and I co-owners of a lucrative piece of the American Dream.

  4 Leaving the Nest

  Doing it alone—Approaching Warner—Supernova on

  54th Street—Signed—The Who—Going shopping—

  Resurrecting the Fillmore—LA bound—House guest in

  Bel-Air—Alison Steele and The Fugitive—

  Setting up the Casbah—A house on a cliff

  First week of August, 1973

  Buddah Group Offices

  810 Seventh Avenue

  Manhattan, New York

  “Do you want to own a record company?”

  What actually came out of Neil Bogart’s mouth was more like, “Larry, I’m starting my own record company with backing from Warner Brothers. I think you’ve got a good ear for rock, and I want you to help run that part of the company. You’d own a piece of the business, but you’d have to move to LA. You want the gig?” He’d walked straight into my office while I was working my way through the daily glut of calls, and he broke the news in a completely oh-by-the-way fashion. No fanfare, no lead-up. Nothing. Just like that.

  The offer left me dizzy. I was game, of course, but I felt baffled by Neil’s overture—I had no idea what he thought I could bring to the table. There were many other players he could have approached, most with years more experience. Yet here was Neil, standing in front of me, insisting that I had a great understanding of the rock side of the industry and that’s where my attention should be focused. I was young, still felt invincible, and wasn’t quite experienced enough to know what I was getting myself into. What the hell—I was up for it.

  Neil explained, “Larry, you know I’m not unhappy here. We’ve had a lot of success for Buddah, but we can do more, and I think having to answer to Viewlex for everything we do is hindering us.” He was right. We’d had quite a bit of success—scoring six Gold albums in 1973 alone—but Neil always had the Viewlex Corporation looking over his shoulder, he held a sizeable amount of stock (reportedly valued at over a million dollars) that he couldn’t sell for reasons I don’t recall, and he felt that he never received enough credit, so his decision to start his own company made sense.

  I was surprised to learn that Neil had started to lay the groundwork a year earlier, in the fall of 1972, when he hired Jeff Franklin of ATI (a major booking agency) to secure funding and distribution for this new label. Jeff was Neil’s close friend, and he acted as his business manager when needed. Their friendship dated back to 1968, when Jeff had brought an artist named Jack Wild to Neil’s attention. He negotiated the hell out of the deal and got Wild signed to Buddah with a very favorable contract. Neil had been thoroughly outclassed by Jeff, and he did not soon forget it. Once his embarrassment had subsided, he took the if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them approach and convinced Jeff to represent him. Jeff took the offer and did a lap of the industry, pitching Neil’s plan to anyone who would take a meeting. Many companies passed on the opportunity—including Warner, which turned Franklin down on three separate occasions—but he was finally able to set up a meeting with Warner’s three top men: cochairmen Mo Ostin and Joe Smith, as well as vice president Ed West. After his initial failures, Franklin had changed his pitch, realizing (correctly) that if he could get the three Warner execs in a room with Neil, then he was halfway home. Once he adopted the ploy of selling them Neil instead of his company, things started to happen. Within seventy-two hours, a seven-figure deal was in place wherein Warner would provide financial backing and distribution for the new company. Before the ink was even dry, Franklin was brokering a deal for Neil to buy out the last three years of his contract with Buddah.

  Neil already had a logo and artwork, designed by renowned artist David Byrd, for his new label, which he called Casablanca Records. Not only did Casablanca have the cachet of being arguably the best film ever made, but Neil also liked the surname connection he had with the film’s star, Humphrey Bogart. Plus, the film was owned by Warner Brothers, which would serve as the new parent company, and this eliminated any risk of legal action against us for the choice of name.

  We had ourselves a new label. Now we needed a big signing. On Friday, August 17, one of the Flip Side producers, Bill Aucoin, called in a favor and asked Neil to listen to a demo tape from a band he was managing, a four-man glitter-rock outfit from New York called KISS. Neil passed the five-song tape to Stories coproducer Kenny Kerner and asked for his opinion. Kenny agreed to check out the tape over the weekend and get back to Neil on Monday. The demo not only sounded great, but it was also produced by the legendary Eddie Kramer (Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix), which surely made KISS seem even more of a desirable commodity. When Kenny reported back on Monday, his enthusiasm about this upstart band aroused Neil’s interest, and a showcase was hastily arranged.

  A few days later, on a warm weekday evening, Neil asked me to accompany him to a small studio at the Henry LeTang School of Dance on 54th Street in Manhattan. Neil had been warned that the performance we were about to see was on the outer fringes of the absurd. He told me to have an open mind, but he also insisted that I be very critical, because this group could play an important role in the survival of our new record company.

  On the way to the performance, we stopped for a quick dinner at Tad’s Steak House, a serve-yourself, tough-steak-for-about-a-buck type of joint. Neil loved food, but he would inhale his meals, not wanting to waste time eating when there were more important things to do. Dining with him was usually a race to finish before he left the restaurant.

  We were running late, so we jogged the few blocks from Tad’s to the dance studio. Arriving quite out of breath, we were surprised to see only a few people in the room—a dozen, at most—among them record producers Kenny Kerner and Richie Wise; KISS’s managers, Bill Aucoin and Joyce Biawitz; the KISS drummer’s wife, Lydia; KISS’s soundman, Eddie Solan; and Sean Delaney, an associate of Bill’s who was helping develop the band’s material and sta
ge show.

  The room was fairly small, maybe twenty feet wide by thirty feet deep; several rows of battered folding chairs were set up in front of the stage. The space was typically used for the kind of dance rehearsals and recitals attended by the moms and pops of the performers—kids decked out in tutus and toe shoes who would stumble through something vaguely resembling ballet or tap. The stage was elevated about a foot above the worn hardwood floor. Behind a small set of drums were at least six stacks of amplifiers and speaker cabinets, and huge PA fills flanked the stage. Had it been a twenty-five-hundred-seat theater, this would have been a modest equipment arsenal. In that small room, it was ridiculous.

  I quickly took a seat near the back of the room. Four seven-foot monsters in eight-inch platform boots took the stage. The makeup they wore that night was close to what would become the trademark KISS visage: whiteface, with a different design around the eyes for each band member. Paul Stanley’s black star was in place, as were Ace Frehley’s silver explosions, and Gene Simmons and Peter Criss had their respective batwings and cat whiskers under development. But the makeup looked cheap. The whiteface was more like powder than greasepaint. It was pale and transparent rather than stark; it lacked a bright-whiteness that would have provided a contrast to the blacks and silvers, and it ran off their cheeks as they began to sweat. There were no costumes to speak of, either. Gene, who was by far the most comfortable in his alter ego, wore a tight black skull-and-crossbones T-shirt. Paul had on a heavy leather jacket with suede or velvet pants and bright-red platform shoes; Ace wore head-to-toe black with white platform shoes, while Peter had donned a black tank top and red leather pants. I don’t recall the exact set list, but the band stormed through five or six songs, including “Deuce,” “Strutter,” “Nothin’ to Lose,” and an unrecorded song, “Life in the Woods.” They had been performing in New York–area dives for several months, and, for them, it had all come down to impressing Neil and me.

  There was no production at all. None of the trappings of the show that KISS would later make famous were evident—no blood, no fire, no explosions or drum risers, just pure energy and sound. And more sound. The volume level in that small room was indescribable. I’d attended more concerts than I could possibly catalog, and loud music was hardly new to me, but KISS’s decibel level was so high that standing in the jet intake of the Concorde would have been more restful. I couldn’t hear for two days afterward, and during that time I was afflicted with earaches. But, despite the onslaught, I couldn’t help but be impressed as I watched the performance. As green as its members were, KISS was an incredibly compelling band. These guys demanded your attention, and there was no way you could walk away from them feeling apathetic. Love them or hate them, you were going to have a strong reaction, and Neil and I both knew that anyone capable of provoking this type of visceral response was the stuff of future superstardom. I did not spend any time with the band before or after the performance; they did their thing, and then the rest of us went our separate ways—except Neil, Joyce, and Bill, who stayed on to hang awhile. I hopped into my car and went home to suffer the pain.

  A few days later, at Neil’s insistence, I arranged to meet with the band at offices belonging to Howard Marks, who ran an advertising agency that Bill and Joyce were involved with and that would later become instrumental in KISS’s financial success. I gave the band a quick critique of their performance, though I don’t think they paid attention to a thing I said. That didn’t matter—my sole objective for the meeting was to make them feel that Casablanca was the only label for them. Not that anyone else was breaking down doors to sign them, but I dramatically underscored the fact that Casablanca would stop at nothing to promote them. If the relationship was going to work, I needed them to cooperate totally with whatever we asked them to do. I also suggested that they put their logo on the drumhead and figure out a way to use more speakers and amplifiers in their production so it would look more massive. We later accomplished this on the cheap by using fake speaker cabinets; the band didn’t need any extra volume, and empty cabinets were far less expensive. I also wanted them to find a point in the show to destroy some guitars, as The Who, my favorite group, so often did.

  • January 30, 1973: G. Gordon Liddy begins serving a twenty-year prison term for his involvement in the Watergate burglaries.

  • March 17, 1973: Pink Floyd releases The Dark Side of the Moon; the album would spend a record-breaking 741 weeks on the Billboard 200.

  • July 20, 1973: Bruce Lee dies mysteriously at age 32.

  The band spent much of September and October refining their performance and song arrangements with the help of Bill, Joyce, and Sean Delaney. Meanwhile, Neil and Bill had been working on a contract to make KISS Casablanca’s first artists, and on November 1, 1973, a fifteen-thousand-dollar deal was struck. Technically, it was a production agreement between Casablanca and Rock Steady (Bill Aucoin’s company); KISS hadn’t signed anything.

  Before the ink was even dry, the band was recording their debut album at Bell Sound Studios in Manhattan, with Kerner and his partner, Richie Wise, coproducing the sixteen-track sessions. We had chosen Bell over other, more famous studios, such as Electric Lady or the Record Plant, because we’d had a working relationship with Bell at Buddah; Bell was owned by Viewlex, the company that had bought out Buddah in 1969. The album was recorded in less than a month, and without much hype or drama.

  In early December 1973, I invited KISS to join me on a trip to Philadelphia to see The Who perform at The Spectrum, a big sports arena. Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, Peter Criss, and I piled into a Mercedes leased by Jerry Sharell, who had just left Buddah to work as VP of promotion at Elektra Records in LA. Jerry had given me the use of his car when he took the job, and it was quite a step up from my two-seat Opel. The band and I started to get to know each other during the ride from Manhattan to Philly, and it soon became apparent that Gene was the KISS spokesman. I also felt that the other members of the group had been told beforehand to be on their best behavior and say as little as possible. We spent most of the ride without talking much; I could usually carry on long, rambling conversations with anyone, but these guys were so tight-lipped that at times I felt like I was in the car by myself. We arrived at the sold-out twenty-thousand-seat arena and were met by the promoter of the gig, my soon-to-be good friend Larry Magid, who was, and still is, the major promoter of live concerts in the market. We were ushered upstairs to a VIP area to watch the show.

  The members of KISS were knocked out by The Who’s performance, as was everyone else in the arena, and on the ride back to New York they did not stop talking about it. Finally, some conversation! I had been dreading the ride home, figuring it would be a repeat of the awkward two hours of silence on the way down, but I was happily surprised.

  KISS agreed to break guitars onstage (mimicking The Who’s Pete Townshend) if I could find a way for them to afford it. I arranged a deal with the Gibson Guitar Corporation, which would supply the instruments if we would feature the company’s name and logo on KISS’s album covers as well as in the band’s trade and consumer print advertising. We also discussed how we could make Peter Criss’s drum set a centerpiece of the show without actually destroying it, the way The Who did. Though he was no Keith Moon, I always thought Peter was a very solid drummer, and everyone agreed that more attention needed to be paid to him. Shortly thereafter, KISS’s live production began to include a levitating drum riser: Peter would rise up behind the band in a massive bombardment of smoke and explosions.

  A week or so later, Neil and I took the band to several magic shops around New York City to get ideas for KISS’s stage show. None of us really had any idea of what we were looking for. Neil was fascinated by the stuff on display, and he kept pointing to things or picking them up and saying, “Larry, come over here and look at this!” One thing that particularly caught his eye was flash paper. Magicians use it all the time to create little fireballs from the palms of their hands. Neil fell in love
with the stuff, and for the next year he used it at any meetings involving KISS. We’d be meeting with the Warner people, DJs, promo men, or rack jobbers—any audience, really—and he would suddenly say, “KISS is magic!” and unleash a burst of flash-paper flame. It never failed to impress. He did it so often that I started to predict it—“Oh no, here we go again.” Once you’d seen the man behind the curtain a dozen times, the trick lost a lot of its gee-whiz factor. KISS incorporated a couple of flash-paper effects into their shows for the next year, then they moved on to bigger, more impressive displays.

  At the end of December, KISS played a few last small gigs in the New York area and, in a crafty move, a private performance was set up at the Fillmore East, the legendary if short-lived New York concert hall. The invitation list was restricted to members of the local and regional press as well as some New York–based Warner Brothers employees. Prior to this January 8, 1974 show, someone from Warner—which, as a company, was skeptical about KISS’s makeup gimmick—called Neil and asked him to tell the band to drop the makeup. Neil “got” KISS, and he knew that their look would be vital to their, and our, eventual success, but he wasn’t in a position to flat out tell Warner no. So he dutifully obliged, making a halfhearted attempt to convince Bill Aucoin to go along with Warner’s wishes. It was obvious Neil didn’t believe in the pitch he was feeding Bill. When Neil wanted to convince you of something, he convinced you of it. His smile would never waver as he told you in a bright, enthusiastic voice how fantastic this new artist or song was. He wasn’t obnoxious about it; he was steadfast and incredibly effective at removing all doubt. But he was convincing no one here—not me, not himself, and certainly not Bill, who responded with an emphatic no. Neil quickly and, if I had to guess, gladly told Warner of the band’s decision.