And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records

by Harris, Larry

  The KISS members were working with Bill and Joyce to craft their appearance and show in front of video cameras. We knew that to become successful KISS would have to use television effectively, and the only way to make sure they would come off as an exciting performance band on a real television show was to get them to feel comfortable in front of the camera. Bill and Joyce’s experience in television was therefore the perfect complement to the band’s already over-the-top presence.

  As for the rest of us, just prior to Christmas, Neil and his family, our partners Buck Reingold and Cecil Holmes and their families, and I hopped on a 747, settled into coach class, and headed off to California to begin what was to become the journey of our lives.

  Our arrival in LA was littered with good omens: the weather was fair and warm, and we were greeted at the airport by three limousines, one for each family. Being odd man out without a family of my own, I rode with Neil, Beth, and their kids. I spent my first month or so in LA living with them at the property they had bought in Bel-Air, a very exclusive section of Beverly Hills. Cecil and Buck bought houses in the San Fernando Valley—an area less exclusive than Bel-Air, but still far too expensive for me. I felt both excited and dislocated; I hadn’t had time to look around LA beforehand for a place to rent, and I was in no position to buy a home.

  Arriving at Neil’s new house—a spacious, two-story domicile set against a hillside across from the Bel-Air Country Club—we were met by Milt Friedman, the owner of a local rental car company. He presented us with seven Mercedeses courtesy of Warner Brothers. One for each of us, plus the wives. The vehicles would become a familiar sight in the Casablanca parking lot, so much so that Joe Smith, the co-chairman of Warner Brothers Records, would often joke about the irony of “all these Jewish New Yorkers driving German-made cars.” He was certain that wasn’t kosher.

  Living with Neil, Beth, and the kids was fun for me, and it made LA feel much more like home; it was like I had a family, even though I was just borrowing Neil’s. It was during this time that I saw firsthand how family-oriented Neil was. He adored his children and doted on them every chance he got. He even brought the New York winters of his childhood to LA for them one Christmas by renting some of the large snow-making machines used on movie sets to create a winter wonderland in his front yard.

  He and I were both early risers, and helping him to get the kids fed and off to school each morning helped ease my transition from New York to LA. Beth was a joy to be around, too. She was the complete package. She was beautiful by any standard—a prepossessing woman with an olive complexion, a stunning face, and large, intelligent eyes. Beth would also not hesitate to give her opinion on a vast array of subjects. With her combination of beauty, confidence, and wit, I thought she was just about perfect.

  A few days after we arrived, Alison Steele, our good friend and renowned radio personality from WNEW in New York, called to say she was in town and asked if she and a couple of friends could come over to say hello. Neil said yes without hesitation, despite the fact that the furniture was still in transit and the house was almost empty. Alison arrived not long thereafter with her two friends in tow: David Janssen and his fiancée, Dani Crayne. The New Yorker in me couldn’t help but note how very LA the whole scene was. Here I was hanging with the star of The Fugitive, the wildly popular TV show; its final, climactic episode in August 1967 had garnered the highest ratings in television history to that point. David and I quickly segued from making polite conversation to sitting on the bare wood floor of an unfurnished Bel-Air living room smoking a joint. I was getting high with Dr. Richard Kimble—amazing! Despite the bizarre situation, I found David and Dani to be very friendly, and we were to see them again at various events we staged through the years.

  The fact that our arrival in LA occurred in December was a bit of a blessing. Not only did it allow us a delightful change of weather, but it was also good timing in terms of business. In December, the music industry generally shuts down for two to three weeks for the holidays, and this industry-wide vacation gave us time to get things together at the offices we had rented. Neil had filed the paperwork with the State of California to incorporate Casablanca Records a few weeks earlier, on November 27, 1973, but there was tons of work for us to do before we could officially open our doors for business.

  We set ourselves up in a twentieth-floor apartment at 1155 North La Cienega Boulevard—a stopgap measure until we could find a more permanent home. Toward that end, we hired a woman named Briana, whose working knowledge of Warner, LA, and the music business in general was advantageous for us New Yorkers. She helped us find some ideal office space, and she furnished the place and installed the telephone system in short order. We hired two or three people to answer the phones and deal with some administrative duties, but it was a bare-bones operation to start, with most of the substantive support being provided by Warner Brothers.

  Our first permanent offices were located at 1112 North Sherbourne Drive, just off the Sunset Strip, in a converted two-story house with a three-room guesthouse in the rear. The two houses were connected by a kitchen and a shared, gated yard. Neil, Cecil, and I had our offices in the main house, while Buck took the guesthouse, happily making full use of the relative isolation to do what he wanted without being bothered. Buck could carry on with women at all hours without his wife, Nancy, finding out. He was the only one of us to have an assistant—coincidentally, also named Nancy (Sain)—and although she worked in the guesthouse, her presence apparently did not hinder Buck’s impressive womanizing at all. Despite the fact that Buck’s wife was Neil’s sister-in-law, Neil didn’t seem to mind. Hell, he practically encouraged it. Maybe this was because of the times we were living in, or because Neil was no saint himself, although he was nowhere near as unfaithful to Beth as Buck was to Nancy.

  The front entryway served as our reception and waiting area. It could accommodate about four people, including our receptionist, Lisa Sepe, who was one of the most naturally beautiful and sweet women I have ever met. She was only about eighteen years old, tall, well built, with long, thick, naturally blonde hair. She had a music industry lineage; her father had been Barry White’s longtime road manager. (We’d soon use Barry to produce the second album Casablanca released, Gloria Scott’s What Am I Going to Do?) The kitchen and dining room were used as office space, as was a sunroom on the other side of Neil’s office. The sunroom was initially used by Neil’s secretary, but it would later become the hub of the production and international departments. The basement of the main house was our mail room, which was run by a kid named Kenny Ryback, who also served as our all-purpose gofer. We had no parking lot, so after the driveway filled with cars, people found ample parking on nearby streets.

  The offices were decorated to look like Rick’s Café in the Bogart film, with high-back cane chairs, rattan sofas, and palm trees. Neil even had a near-life-sized stuffed camel named Bogie installed in his office. After a while, the nails began to come out of the finely crafted cane chairs, and you’d rip your clothing if you weren’t careful. Middle Eastern rugs were laid out generously throughout the house, and anyone who wasn’t paying attention to where they were walking was likely to trip over them. An inordinate amount of greenery adorned the space; while certainly impractical, the plants did give the office an oasis feel and reinforced the whole Casablanca vibe.

  Having our offices so close to Sunset Boulevard afforded us proximity to many of the local radio stations and music retailers without the added hassle of being on such a busy thoroughfare. It didn’t hurt that clubs like the Whisky and the Roxy were just down the block. Another of our frequent gathering places was a popular LA club called Pips. It was a nice dance club, but its real drawing card was the backgammon room in the back. Backgammon was extremely popular at the time, and high-stakes games were played at Pips almost every night. In order to get into Pips, at least one person in your party had to be a member of the club. I don’t recall what the membership dues were, but they weren’t cheap—maybe a few
thousand dollars. Buck was the first to join, and Neil and I were ready to get our checkbooks out, but then we found out that Pips was refusing to allow Cecil to join because he was black. The checkbooks immediately went back into our pockets. Cecil was our brother, and we wanted no part of any club that wouldn’t accept a member of our team. It was a sickening reminder that abject racism still percolated close to the surface in an allegedly enlightened time. Buck stayed on at Pips as a member, mostly for the women, but Neil and I never returned.

  Once we were settled into our offices, I began to look for a house, and I eventually found a place to call my own. It was a small, two-story, two-bedroom house that was hanging—and I do mean hanging—over the side of a cliff near the famous Hollywood sign. Its proximity to such a drop-off caused me some trepidation: I was afraid I would fall off the deck into the abyss below while I was stoned one night. Despite being surrounded by the metropolis, the house was very peaceful and quiet. I found its sense of relative isolation very relaxing. I hired a painter to redo the interior of my new place, and while I waited for him to finish I stayed on with Neil and Beth. I had little money for anything else, so the house had virtually no furniture except a waterbed, which Beth Bogart and Nancy Reingold had helped me select from a nearby Wonderful World of Waterbeds superstore.

  During our trip to the waterbed store, Beth mentioned to me that I should not feel hesitant about having a girl visit me in their home. Nancy jumped on her, insisting that it would be totally inappropriate for me to have sex in Beth and Neil’s house. As the two women argued about this, I realized that although they were twins (as were my older sisters), their opinions and values varied wildly. I felt much closer to Beth.

  My house also contained a leopard-print sofa bed, which I had brought with me from New York, and the dresser and rolltop desk I’d had when I was a kid. So my little home was decorated in a very eclectic, no-taste bachelor style. The entryway was upstairs, and it opened into a kitchen that was separated from the living room by a long countertop. There was no furniture whatsoever on this floor of the house. Absolutely none. And I liked it that way, because when I was home—which was not often—all I wanted to do was to go to bed and mellow out. If I did have a female visitor, I did not want to be able to offer her anywhere to sit but my bed, because I hoped that this would make it easier for me to get laid. The entire back of the house was glass, providing a breathtaking view of the valley below. The final perk of this cliffside isolation: I could grow my own weed in large flower pots hanging on the deck.

  It sounds completely ridiculous these days, but owning a microwave and a twenty-seven-inch TV made me something of a cutting-edge gadget collector. The microwave and a refrigerator were sent to me by the Zamoski Company in Baltimore in exchange for some albums. The television, which was a very large model in 1974, was Neil’s suggestion. At Zamoski’s, they were so cool that they were open to trading anything from carpeting to electronics for vinyl records: this was barter at its best. We would often order prizes for our contests or gifts for artists and DJs from Zamoski’s.

  Soon after I moved in to the house, one of our former Buddah Group artists, comedian Robert Klein, came to stay while he was performing at the Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard. I had gotten to know Robert very well back East, and once I’d moved out to LA, he’d frequently stay with me when he was in town doing shows. Because most of us think of comedians as relative no-names doing five nights a week at the local improv, we tend to forget that the top guys and gals in the field are like rock stars. Robert is solidly old-school now, but at the time he was as hot as any comedian on the planet.

  During this particular visit, I drove him around the city and showed him LA’s hot night spots—like the Whisky and the Roxy—and listened to him rant about his managers, Buddy Morra and Larry Brezner. Robert, who had done The Tonight Show more times than any other comedian, had just signed a lucrative contract with HBO, and his live shows generated good money as well. He felt (justifiably so, according to the half-hour sales pitch I was hearing) that his managers should be treating him as their top guy, but instead they couldn’t stop raving about this new comedian—some guy named Robin Williams.

  After that, I attended a gig of Robert’s at the Troubadour; I knew his routine so well that I could have jumped onstage and done it myself. I found it helpful to drop his name when trying to pick up pretty young things at nightclubs, and his name could equally impress the older set. Robert was nice enough to have dinner one evening with me and my parents, spending most of the meal raving about me. This not only made me proud, but it wowed my parents that a guy who’d done Johnny’s show so many times would say such nice things about their son.

  5 Our First Kiss and a Ride on the Mothership

  Brill Amesbury—Introduction in Acapulco—Ostin, Smith,

  Saul, Regehr, and Rosenblatt—The biggest launch party

  ever—KISS premieres—Progam directors (in the biblical

  sense)—No one wants to KISS—KSHE and the big storm—

  Crash at the Agora—The WABX fiasco—Way ahead of our

  time—George Clinton and the Purple Gang

  Mid-January 1974

  Casablanca Records Offices

  1112 North Sherbourne Drive

  Los Angeles, California

  In early 1974, KISS’s debut album was still not quite ready to be released, as we needed time to prepare Warner Brothers for what was about to befall them. Additionally, January was not typically a good month to release albums, especially those of new artists, since so much product had just hit the market for the holiday shopping season. Instead, a record by an artist named Bill Amesbury, who was referred to us by a Canadian producer whom Neil knew, became Casablanca’s first release. Amesbury’s single, “Virginia,” was not a great record, and I had nothing to do with its promotion as it was tailor-made for Top 40. The record allowed Buck the chance to become familiar with some of the Warner people he would be working with, and it also bought us some time to set up the KISS marketing blitz, which would include several different full-page ads in Billboard, Cashbox, and Record World, as well as a sixty-second radio spot featuring a Humphrey Bogart sound-alike doing Casablanca-themed voice-overs.

  I spent much of this time getting to know the Warner Brothers staff and trying to understand how their company functioned. Most of the people at Warner were less than thrilled about our label. They were used to labels that had (in their opinion) relevant artists—such as Chrysalis, with Robin Trower and Jethro Tull; or Capricorn, with the Allman Brothers. It was beneath a company with such a classy image to be associated with a group that wore makeup—though they did have Alice Cooper. Somehow, Alice’s makeup was upscale in their eyes.

  We weren’t exactly acting like shy, unassuming neophytes. When you have no experience (and we didn’t, compared to Warner), you’re expected to be deferential, to quietly and respectfully pay your dues. We didn’t. We were loudmouthed New York guys who drove nice Mercedeses and drew bigger paychecks than our Warner counterparts. We bragged publicly and loudly in the trades about ourselves—we Casablanca people, not just the company itself or our artists. More often than not, we acted like we were inventing the business, not like the kids who’d just arrived at the party. I can’t imagine that sat well with most of the Warner folks.

  This created two huge challenges for us: one was marketing KISS, and the other was getting Warner Brothers to work with us. To anyone with a pair of functioning eyes, KISS was a supernova waiting to explode, but igniting the fuse was proving far more difficult than we expected. KISS was an uphill battle for us as far as Warner Brothers was concerned, and at the crux of that was the black-and-white contrast between the Casablanca and the Warner ways of doing business. We were a small group of kids out on a new adventure, and Casablanca was as shoot-from-the-hip as you could get. From the start, Neil boasted about us to anyone who would listen. He especially played us up in the January 1974 edition of an in-house Warner newsletter called Circular, sayi
ng that I had walked into Buddah right off the streets and now knew more about the world of FM radio than guys who had been doing promotions for ten or twelve years. A great compliment, but Neil was being an overzealous braggart and had wildly overstated my experience. In the same article, he also explained the infrastructure that made Casablanca not only successful but also unique among record companies: we were a team of promotion men. It was unusual for a record company president to do promotions himself—to call radio stations, to go out on the road and visit them—but Neil did it, and he loved doing it too. Promotion was the name of the game for us, and that’s what we were: a promotion company.

  In sharp contrast, Warner Brothers was a cumbersome bureaucratic maze in which every department clung desperately to its own turf. Buck or Neil or I couldn’t have cared less who got the credit, we just wanted to succeed. Warner’s staff seemed intent on their proprietary success. It was a classic study in contrast: entrepreneurial creativity versus the old-style corporate mentality. Working for Warner was a dream come true for most Warner employees because it made them part of the WEA (Warner Elektra Atlantic) Corporation, and while the prestigious labels Elektra and Atlantic had great acts, the Warner roster was cooler and hipper.