And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records

by Harris, Larry

  Cleveland was an ideal target. The market was dominated by two radio stations: WIXY-AM, the powerful Top 40 station; and WMMS-FM, which had a progressive rock format. WIXY was directly handled by our independent representative in the Midwest, Bruce Bird, who was one of the first independent record promoters, and a very good one, at that. Bruce had some pull with the program director (PD), Marge Bush, and he helped us to get almost all our product on the station.

  WMMS was more difficult. Their PD, John Gorman, had little to do with the music—he left that up to his star DJ, Kid Leo. Leo was not thrilled about KISS. His main love was David Bowie, so we knew we would have to bring the band into the market and show WMMS how a live KISS show worked.

  In terms of concert promotion, the market was repped by Mike Belkin of Belkin Productions, and he was not warm to the idea of booking KISS. To reduce his risk, we booked the band as an opening act for Rory Gallagher at the Agora Ballroom, a small, old-fashioned, low-ceilinged venue that was furnished with tables and chairs. It was far from the best place to showcase the band, but we had no other choice. The night of the show, April 1, I had Bruce and his younger brother, Gary (who eventually took over Bruce’s business and grew it into one of the most powerful independent promotion firms in the country), arrange for Kid Leo to join us at the venue. As soon as Leo showed up, I handcuffed him to a chair so he couldn’t leave.

  The show was going great until Peter Criss’s drum riser began to go up. The ceiling was too low to accommodate this, and before anyone realized it, Peter had crashed into the ceiling and fallen off his drum riser. I rushed over to him and saw that he was unconscious. With the help of road manager J.R. Smalling, I managed to revive him. Meanwhile, the rest of the band, used as they were to mishaps—Gene had set his hair on fire and Ace was constantly falling down because he couldn’t walk in his space boots—didn’t miss a beat. Despite this, or maybe because of it, Leo was impressed enough to begin playing the band, and Cleveland would eventually become one of their strongest markets.

  KISS’s April 7 gig was another example of how this marketing angle worked. Mark Parenteau was at WABX, the local rock station in Detroit. He was not initially impressed by KISS; he preferred another new act, Aerosmith. Mark was openly gay—why he was married, I never understood—and he had a crush on Steven Tyler, probably because Tyler reminded him so much of Mick Jagger. I arranged a special trip to Detroit to present KISS’s album to WABX. When I arrived at the station, Mark was on the air, so as we talked we were frequently interrupted; we also took breaks to toke a bit of weed or snort a line or two of blow off the KISS album jacket. At first, Mark was totally against playing KISS; the makeup really put him off, though he was a big fan of Alice Cooper (the same contradictory reaction I’d seen among some Warner staffers earlier that year). I eventually cut a deal with Mark whereby Casablanca would pay all the production costs for a KISS concert in Detroit. He could arrange to have any other bands he wanted on the bill, but if KISS blew away the audience within the first five minutes of taking the stage, then he would have to play them like it was the Second Coming. He agreed, and the show was on. The only problem was that Aerosmith insisted on closing the show to make the audience believe they were the bigger act. But, knowing what KISS was capable of, I was fine with this. Besides, the deal stipulated that on-air mentions would be the same for both bands.

  WABX hired a local man named Steve Glantz to promote the show. Glantz was an entrepreneur in his early twenties whose father was bankrolling his promotion company. He had little experience beyond promoting several area college events, though he grew to be a very important contact for KISS. The station arranged for the show to be held at the Michigan Palace, an old five-thousand-seat theater in downtown Detroit. It sold out immediately—I think the ticket price was only ninety-seven cents, since ninety-seven was WABX’s frequency on the radio dial—and the WABX staff showed up in force: David Perry, Dave Dixon, Dan Carlisle, general manager John Detz, and Ken Calvert. Mark and I walked through the audience as KISS began to play. The minute Gene Simmons spit fire, everyone froze. You could hear the proverbial pin drop for about two seconds. Then there was a deafening roar. Mark yelled in my ear, “You win!”

  The gig was plagued with production problems, likely stemming from Glantz’s inexperience with larger gigs. The amount of time between acts (Bob Seger and Ted Nugent were also on the bill) was an issue. At multi-act shows, the first bands on the bill do not typically use their full production, which helps shorten the gaps between acts, but I was paying for the gig, and the last thing I was going to do was let KISS take the stage with anything less than their full production. Following KISS’s set, the venue’s representatives threatened to close the building at midnight in compliance with their contracts with the stagehand and security unions. By the time I resolved the matter, it was approaching 2:00 a.m. To compound the problem, the audience was leaving the hall, exhausted after rocking through six hours of music. Steven Tyler threw a screaming hissy fit. Mike Klenfner was there representing Aerosmith’s label, Columbia Records, and he wound up on the receiving end of Tyler’s rant. The image of Tyler, about five foot two and about one hundred pounds wringing wet, yelling up at Klenfner, at least six foot four and three hundred and fifty pounds with hands the size of catcher’s mitts, was by turns hilarious and surreal. I was expecting Klenfner to lift Tyler off the ground and throw him from one end of the backstage area to the other, but he kept his cool, and Tyler lived to sing another day.

  KISS clearly needed to headline. This would be tricky in markets where they had little or no airplay. ATI had to skip over whole areas of the country until we could establish the band on radio there. In the case of San Francisco, we never got airplay from the legendary KSAN-FM; station PD Tom Donahue was not crazy about the band, even though he was friends with Neil.

  KISS did play small gigs in the market, and they began to establish a following, but this still did not translate into KSAN airplay. We waited until the demand for a live show in the market became overwhelming due to airplay and exposure from KFRC (the Top 40 station), outlying AOR stations, and the print media. Then the band went back to San Francisco and did a headlining arena show for Bill Graham. Graham had avoided presenting KISS in other markets. I think he just did not like the band and the kind of rock they represented. I found his reluctance interesting, because he shared a Hungarian Jewish heritage with Gene Simmons.

  With KISS finally off and running, we turned our attention to other ventures. One of the more interesting plans was for Neil to do a series of musical greeting cards with Bob Crewe of BC Generations. (Bob was famous for writing songs with and producing The Four Seasons.) The first card was to feature the song “My Happy Birthday Baby.” The idea was decades ahead of its time, and unfortunately it went nowhere; musical greeting cards are, of course, sold widely today.

  We also concentrated on expanding our roster of artists, and one of the first we signed was Parliament, fronted by creator George Clinton. To call George unique would be a vast understatement, and there was nothing understated about George Clinton. He was a creative genius whose music was new and fresh and totally of his own devising. Never mind that this music—an almost indescribable mix of doo-wop and gospel-tinged jazz with heavy grooves and the volume of Black Sabbath—was almost completely unmarketable. Clinton had taken his music, his flair for the dramatic, and his indomitable personality and carved out an exclusive market niche. He called his music P-funk, and everything associated with it was funkified. He didn’t invent the term or the music (it had grown out of jazz and R&B circles decades before, and James Brown had pioneered it in the 1960s), but he took it in an extreme direction, blending over-the-top ideas and quirks to create his own brand. George was especially adept at role-playing. He was fond of claiming that he had thirteen distinct personalities—including Dimwit, Sneaky, Speedy, Doped, and Sexy—whose names he’d recite like the names of the dwarves in some spaced-out reading of Snow White.

  Clinton had create
d a following that was far more intense than those of groups like the Ohio Players or Average White Band. Parliament’s fans, which he lovingly dubbed “maggot brains” (making George the “maggot overlord”), would be there for every album and every concert. But, given the way that George wrote and recorded his music, the band would not produce a hit single, at least not one that would cross over from R&B to pop radio.

  The origins of Parliament are confusing, at best. George grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey, where he formed a doo-wop ensemble called The Parliaments in the late 1950s. That group eventually expanded, and, owing to a dispute with the record company that owned the rights to the band’s name, George renamed the outfit Funkadelic. He released several successful albums for Westbound Records under the name Funkadelic, but by 1974 he’d decided to revive the Parliament moniker and was looking for a record label, even though the player rosters of Funkadelic and Parliament were almost exactly the same. This was an unusual scenario, because we were entering into an agreement whereby we would forgo any proprietary ownership of Parliament; plus, it could be argued that the coexistence of Funkadelic and Parliament would water down the impact of both bands. But Neil didn’t care; he was convinced that George was a moneymaker, no matter what name he used.

  Everyone at Casablanca thought Clinton’s management team of Ron Strassner and Cholly Bassoline were hoods. They looked just like Damon Runyon characters, with their fedoras and long black coats, and their attitude was reminiscent of the Mob. But I liked them and their realistic way of looking at the business and the people they were representing. They were certainly not Mob-oriented. Rather like their client, George Clinton, they had their own Detroit Purple Gang kind of flair.

  George and Archie Ivy—who was, more or less, George’s personal assistant—would visit me at Casablanca, and over copious piles of weed and blow (George once brought in some uncut and very potent coke, declaring that anyone who tried it would speak Spanish, as the stuff “hadn’t cleared customs yet”), they would pontificate for hours about how they were going to develop Parliament’s stage show into an otherworldly display of pageantry and pomp and how they needed half a zillion dollars to do it. Many times, I had no idea what they were talking about. My eyes would glaze over, and George would ramble on, giving voice to every thought that came into his head, stream-of-consciousness-style, like William Faulkner gone jive. I would stare at him and wonder, “Man, do you come with subtitles?” I often had to ask Archie or one of the two Purple Gang look-alikes, Cholly and Ron, to translate George for me, but sometimes even they didn’t have a clue. But so what if we didn’t understand what they were trying to explain to us? We gave them the money anyway. These advances were always against future royalties, and Parliament sold enough product to make us comfortable with the arrangement. This eventually became a point of contention, as George would claim that he was owed royalties—he seemed to have forgotten about the tour advances.

  To look at Parliament and their absurd stage show—which eventually came to include an enormous UFO called the Mothership (which would land onstage in a billowing cloud of dry-ice fog), and a giant skull with a glowing four-foot doobie dangling from its mouth—you would think there would be a never-ending series of strange Parliament tales to tell. But, to be truthful, the band was really fun to work with, and aside from a few battles of the kind that typically occur between artists and their record companies, everything went well between us. In fact, I believe that we were the only people who were able to understand and put up with some of their shenanigans—and they with ours.

  6 Kiss∼Off, America!

  Eddie’s idea—Scott’s bigger idea—The biggest mall in the

  world—Two sloppy seconds—Roy’s—Getting fucked by

  Warner—The Hudson Brothers—Ira’s offer—A huge

  strikeout—Three’s a crowd—A divorce—Neil’s new place—

  Guns and the panic button

  April 22, 1974

  2836 Lambert Drive

  Hollywood, California

  Late one night in April 1974, I received a call from Eddie Pugh. Eddie was Warner’s Florida promotion man, and for him to ring me at home at such a late hour was a real surprise. I was half asleep when he called, and he was talking so fast that he was ten seconds into his story before I could figure out what he was talking about. I pieced together something about a progressive rock station in Fort Lauderdale (WSHE) that on April 20 had held a kissing contest in which the couple who kissed the longest won some prizes, including a few KISS albums. The response to the contest had been great, and Eddie wanted to bring it to our attention. I was elated to hear the news, seeing the potential for a national marketing blitz.

  I cannot overemphasize how vital it was to our early success to have relationships with people like Eddie—people who not only had the acumen to recognize a good thing when they saw it but also the generosity to bring it to our attention. Eddie Pugh was different from most promotion people, even within Warner Brothers. Warner had very little black product in the mid-1970s, and Eddie, who was black, was the kind of promotion man who was always looking for a challenge, so rather than stay within the narrow confines of Warner’s small R&B catalog, he would promote whatever he had, regardless of its genre. Here was a guy who covered all the bases. Neil and I were so impressed by Eddie that we eventually hired him.

  As soon I said goodbye to Eddie, I called Neil. By the next morning, he had a plan. We would arrange for radio stations throughout the country to compete in a huge national Kiss-Off. Eddie had not been the only one to notice the success of the WSHE contest. Scott Shannon, a DJ at WMAK in Nashville, had the inspired idea for KISS to record a cover of Bobby Rydell’s “Kissin’ Time” as part of the promotion. Neil loved it. KISS hated the thought, however. They and their producers, Kenny Kerner and Richie Wise, were dead set against it; they didn’t want to record a cover song when they were perfectly capable of writing their own material. Neil always tried to be positive—positive people were successful people, as far as he was concerned—but if he couldn’t get his way through ebullient enthusiasm, he had no problem rolling up his sleeves and wrestling you to the ground. After his cajoling had failed (and, I’ll admit, KISS doing Bobby Rydell struck me as pretty odd, but I wasn’t about to tell Neil that), he told them, “Look, either you record the song or we’ll pull our support for you.”

  It was pure bluff. KISS was our first signing, and, frankly, they were the only thing we had going for us. Neil would never have purposefully killed their career. I knew this, but the one bit of leverage Neil had was that the KISS team was even greener than we were. And with the band’s outlandish appearance and their refusal to tone down their gimmick, they had to recognize that their chances of finding another record company that believed in them were limited. They caved. Neil won, but he didn’t want to fracture the relationship, so he softened his stance. “C‘mon guys, the promotion will work great, and it’s just one song. As a concession, I promise that the song will only be a single, and not part of any future KISS album.” By April 26, KISS was back at Bell Sound Studios in Manhattan, cutting the track in one twelve-hour session. We rush released “Kissin’ Time” as a single and, in direct violation of Neil’s promise, we included it on all new pressings of KISS’s first album starting in June.

  The series of kissing contests, which were collectively dubbed “The Great Kiss-Off,” began on May 10. The single’s lyrics contained the names of many cities around the country, and we used this to our advantage, matching those cities to radio markets: WAYS (Charlotte), WOKY (Milwaukee), WIXY (Cleveland), WSAJ (Cincinnati), WCFL (Chicago), KLIF (Dallas), WFIL (Philly), WQXI (Atlanta), WMAK (Nashville), KJR (Seattle), CKLW (Detroit), KILT (Houston), and WPIX (New York). The names of all these stations/markets, except for Houston and New York, were included in the reworked lyrics for the single. We ran a prominent ad in the May 18, 1974 issue of Billboard (which would have hit newsstands around May 7) to bring national industry attention to the events. The lyrics m
ade radio airplay easier to come by, because radio stations loved to play songs that mentioned their city.

  Here is how the event worked. First, the stations would have a kissing contest in their own markets. Then the local winners would compete for the national title. The publicity would be enormous, and it would go on for many weeks, because it spanned both the local contests and the final national event.

  On June 8, the day of the National Kiss-Off, Neil, Buck, Joyce, and I went to Woodfield Mall (then the largest in the world) in Schaumburg, Illinois, just outside of Chicago. KISS came too, and they walked around the mall in full regalia. There was heavy local media coverage for the event, and many Chicago-area celebrities were on hand. Radio personality Larry Lujack was master of ceremonies. A stage had been erected in a large open area in the middle of the mall. Neil got up on the stage and started asking the crowd for donations to a local hospital charity. He was failing miserably—I don’t think he raised a single dollar. After an hour or so, he had Buck go up to the next level of the mall, stand at the railing where he could see the stage below, and wait for a cue. Again Neil addressed the respectably large crowd that had gathered on both levels, but this time he made it about the children: “C’mon folks, the children really need your money.” At that moment, Buck released a big stack of one-dollar bills into the air, and suddenly it was raining money. People on all parts of the upper level started throwing down ones and fives, and a few tens and twenties—hundreds of them. People on the lower level were picking up the bills, crumpling them, and throwing them toward the stage. It’s a miracle Neil didn’t incite a riot. Aside from performing these onstage fiduciary duties, Neil or I, using a bank of phones, reported every half hour to the participating radio stations on how their contestants were faring. The stations, in turn, aired the results, building excitement in each city. These were mostly Top 40 stations, as Neil wanted to use the outlets that had the highest ratings. Besides, few rock stations would participate in such an obviously commercial event. The national media, television and print, picked up the story, and the Kiss-Off became one of the most successful KISS promotions ever, though the contestants seemed to garner more attention than the band.