And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records

by Harris, Larry

  Warner’s offices were located in Burbank, in the San Fernando Valley, and they were jammed to the rafters with people. Desks were set up in the hallways. The company had clearly outgrown its surroundings. Even Mo’s office was small—certainly smaller than Neil’s—and it was not at all in keeping with his towering status in the industry.

  Our meeting with Mo started out very cordially, with Mo expressing his happiness with the label arrangement. Then we started to complain. We told Mo that we felt something was drastically wrong with the sales picture. Our retail contacts were telling us that when they ordered a KISS record, it was not shipped to them. Mo claimed to know nothing about a back-order problem, so he called his head of production into the office and asked him if there were any issues that he knew of with the Casablanca product. He explained that over one hundred thousand of our units were back ordered due to pressing-plant issues. Mo then called in Eddie Rosenblatt, head of sales, and asked him to explain why steps had not been taken to rectify the situation, and why he had not been notified. Eddie apologized, offering some ridiculous explanation, which even Mo did not seem to believe. Finally, he and the head of production admitted that since the plants they were using could not keep up with all the orders, they were pressing Warner-owned product before they pressed the product from the subsidiary labels. This was becoming a tired routine. First, we’d been ignored by promotion, and now we were getting screwed by production and sales.

  Mo knew that not having the sales we deserved would hurt our account balance with Warner. Because Warner had thus far paid almost all of our expenses—five Mercedes sedans, office rent and build-out, money to sign and produce artists, tour support for KISS, and so on—we had already racked up a debt to the company of about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars (which would be worth in excess of $3.1 million today). Neil had originally been told that Warner’s investment would be somewhere in the area of a million dollars and that if we did not show signs of scoring a major success, Warner would take us over. The current situation was hurting the development of KISS by negatively affecting chart positions and sales momentum. Mo seemed very embarrassed, and he offered Neil a deal that stipulated that we could leave the label and owe them nothing. Neil took the out, but he refused to allow Mo to whitewash the debt. We paid back every penny of it.

  While Mo appeared mostly sympathetic to our plight, it had not been his idea to bring Neil into the Warner family in the first place. It was Joe Smith’s idea. Joe came from the radio and promotion end of the business, and he had become cochairman of Warner when Mo decided he needed someone to cover for him in areas where he didn’t excel. Smith was one of the best speakers in the music industry—or any other industry, for that matter. He had a way about him that was endearing to everyone. He was able to joke about Morris Levy breaking kneecaps in front of industry bigwigs, including Morris himself, and get away with it (Morris was president of Roulette Records and allegedly the Mafia’s music connection). In fact, Morris would laugh louder than anyone else at these jibes. Joe was our main and probably only supporter at Warner. He’d had to lobby Mo hard to make the Casablanca deal become a reality. Because of this, I will always wonder if Mo engineered the exit strategy for Casablanca when we became too much of a pain in the ass.

  On the ride back to the office, Neil and I were mostly silent. I glanced over at Neil as he drove. His face had that thousand-yard stare of someone utterly lost in thought. He was trying to convince himself of something. Then his face brightened and he said, “Larry, this isn’t bad. This isn’t a bad thing at all. In fact, this is the best thing that could have happened to us. We were coming to the end of our financial rope with Warner anyway, and they would have pulled the plug on us any minute now. Warner’s not a bottomless money pit. But now we’re free to do whatever we want without answering to anyone but ourselves.”

  This was Neil in his element. The circumstances for a neophyte label (just months old, really) that had its corporate umbrella suddenly yanked away were dire. Most companies, most men, would have done the sensible thing and folded their tents. But not Neil. I knew he was very nervous about these new developments—we were now orphans—but by the time we’d reached the office, he had prepared what he was going to say to Cecil and Buck, then Joyce, Bill, KISS, the other groups and managers, and, of course, the press. He immediately began to lay out a strategy for exiting Warner Brothers and shifting distribution over to independents.

  Leaving Warner, I felt like we were in this old National Geographic special that everyone’s seen. A gazelle is born and falls to the ground in a wet heap. The camera pans over to a pack of hyenas approaching in the distance, looking for dinner. The newborn gazelle has to figure out how to run, to learn something in three minutes that it takes humans two years to do. Either that or be eaten. How daunting was the task of establishing Casablanca as fully independent? Put it this way, I was jealous of the gazelle.

  As we found our footing, we took account of what we needed to do to move forward as a self-sustaining company. We quickly realized that we would have to double or triple our staff just to stay afloat. Warner had handled all production, sales, some publicity, all international relations and deals, as well as most of the local and regional promotion. That was all up to us now. But being alone and exposed didn’t mean we had to stop bragging about Casablanca—quite the contrary. We placed full-page ads in several industry publications featuring a drawing of Neil, Buck, Cecil, Nancy Sain (Buck’s assistant), and me walking past Rick’s Café on a Moroccan street and proclaiming, “We’re steppin’ out and comin’ home! Casablanca, we’re now independent!”

  • July 1, 1974: Isabel Peron of Argentina becomes the Western Hemisphere’s first non-royal female head of state.

  • July 29, 1974: Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas dies at age 32.

  • August 7, 1974: Frenchman Philippe Petit astonishes New Yorkers by performing a high-wire act between the top levels of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers—more than 1,300 feet above the city streets.

  In order to expand Casablanca, we had to do some restructuring. Though Neil had some unique philosophies when it came to running the business (mostly related to choosing artists and his wildly extravagant promotion efforts), when it came to setting up our new departmental infrastructure, we followed the general blueprint that most record companies employ.

  The legal department plays a key early role, as it’s responsible for the language of the contracts that new artists sign, as well as any agreements the record company has (and there are dozens) with various outside companies, such as manufacturing plants, printers, and ad agencies. This department also handles the inevitable influx of legal issues that arise in the course of business (someone is always suing someone).

  The production department is responsible for coordinating the manufacturing process. It gets the master tapes for an album from the recording studio to the mastering lab, and from there to the production facility, where the vinyl is grooved and mass produced; and it gets album artwork to the printer that will produce the cover and/or liner. All of this requires a tremendous amount of coordination and patience, and an eye for detail. It also helps to have someone around with a degree in psychology to talk management off the ledge when the inevitable delays crop up.

  From there, the publicity and promotions department takes over, designing marketing campaigns, placing print ads, scheduling TV spots, and shipping out press kits by the crate. This department often works very closely with the distribution and sales people, who are responsible for selling and positioning the product (albums, singles, and so on) with retailers, working their list of radio, TV, and industry contacts to get the product on playlists.

  Casablanca was still small enough for Neil and me to cover functions that at a larger company would have been handled by an entire staff. Neil ran all the production, working with the manufacturing plants, as well as all the international deals. I worked with the distributors on a daily basis to make sure they were payi
ng attention to our product and knew what airplay and marketing plans we had in the works. I had never done this before, but I had carefully watched Joe Fields perform his magic at Buddah, so I had some idea of what to do. On occasion, Neil would jump in to help me, especially when my lack of experience caused me to be too aggressive and a distributor would call him to complain. But, inexperience aside, I did feel that the distributors could, if they really wanted to, push out more product than they did.

  Art and production were just two of our new responsibilities, and in this a company named Gribbit! gave us a huge hand. A Gribbit! rep named Chris Whorf helped Neil develop the artwork for our albums; he also helped us to design our new stationery and implement the changes that needed to be made to our old Warner-distributed product. Early in the relationship, Neil would go over every LP, inner sleeve, and label design with Chris and do several passes if necessary to get the artwork just right. Gribbit! did most of the Casablanca albums, except those of KISS, which is why there’s somewhat of a theme linking the various Casablanca covers.

  All of the Casablanca albums distributed through Warner bore the catalog designation “NB,” followed by a four-digit number. “NB” was simply Neil’s initials. The first Casablanca album (KISS’s debut) was labeled NB 9001; the second (Gloria Scott’s What Am I Going to Do?), was NB 9002, and so on. With Warner now out of the picture, all future Casablanca albums (excluding special releases, like picture discs) would have the designation “NBLP” and a four-digit number. For reasons I do not recall, we started with NBLP 7001 (again beginning with KISS’s first release) and went on from there.

  Our assuming of multiple responsibilities was a prime illustration of the fact that Neil understood all aspects of the record industry. He was a creative genius when it came to knowing what was needed, and he was acutely aware of every step necessary to make something happen. This applied not only to developing artwork; he also knew his way around the recording studio, the mastering lab, the manufacturing plant, and even the mailroom. His broad knowledge of the business made us bulletproof from scams and schemes: no company involved in the production process could cut corners or take advantage of him.

  With the influx of new employees, it was vital that we set an example, so Neil and I always came to work early. Furthermore, most LA record companies would begin the business day at maybe nine or ten in the morning, but Neil and I were New Yorkers at heart—we liked to begin early so we could catch up with the East Coast. We’d typically put in a good twelve hours, usually leaving the office at 6:00 or 7:00 p.m., and then we’d go home or out to dinner and drinks at Roy’s, where we would network with other industry types. Roy’s was the only place in LA run by industry people, and the music crowd, and occasionally the film crowd, would fill the bar, hanging out and carrying on. The bar was narrow and small, which made for more intimacy and camaraderie. A night at Roy’s was a rite of passage for newbies at record companies such as A&M, Warner, and Capitol.

  Having so much new responsibility on my plate, I required some education (you can only fake so many things at once). I attended as many meetings as I could with Neil and Chris Whorf. I paid close attention to their decision-making methodology. The experience I gained in those few months when we created what Casablanca was to become was ten times more worthwhile than anything I could have learned at business school. Simply attending meetings, hanging out at recording studios, and watching from the sidelines at mastering labs and manufacturing plants was the single greatest learning experience of my life. I absorbed years of book learning inside of a few months.

  We were doing everything we could to distinguish our artists from those of other labels. When it came to album artwork, for instance, we insisted that the album title be in the top third of the cover so a customer flipping through a record store bin could read it easily. Also, Neil had the mastering lab cut our records much hotter (louder) than normal. This mastering ploy would help make our records sound more sharp and alive on radio. For my part, I insisted that the titles and artist names on the spines of our albums be maximized so that when one of our records was sitting on a radio station shelf with only its spine visible, it would be easier to read than the competition’s.

  Neil and I could only do so many things at once, and we needed help. Our first hire, made sometime in mid-September, was Mauri Lathower, a man with a sterling reputation developed during a seventeen-year career with Capitol Records. Mauri would handle international deals for us, and he had witnessed it all, from Sinatra to The Beatles. He was a small, charming guy with a white Van Dyke beard, and he was a jazz musician in his own right. He began with us at a lower salary than he’d had at Capitol, and he was refreshingly willing to tackle all the new-record-label challenges that he knew lay ahead. We trumpeted the hiring to the industry press and also announced that I had become vice president, even though I had been VP for well over six months at that point. It didn’t matter. Any excuse to get our name out there was an opportunity we never passed up.

  A few weeks later, we hired Dick Sherman as our national director of marketing and sales. He knew everyone in the distribution arena and always had a joke at the ready. Dick had played professional basketball with the New York Knicks for about three seconds when he was a lot younger and a lot thinner. He was a very funny guy who rarely had a good word to say about anyone, but he was a true character, so he fit the Casablanca mold.

  Both Dick and Mauri were a generation older than the rest of us, but we all worked and played together without age becoming an issue. If it bothered them when we told clients that they’d been around since before radio was invented, they did a good job of hiding it. When it came to some of our more questionable activities (like smoking grass or other drug-related pursuits), Dick was an old-line conservative; but owing, I assume, to his experiences as a jazz musician, Mauri was much more open to such things.

  Neil always tried to make everyone feel that they were part of the company. In all the years I was at Casablanca, and over the ensuing decades, very, very few people who worked for the company ever said to me that they didn’t love working there. Neil wanted Casablanca to have a family atmosphere, and, accordingly, we would have birthday celebrations with crates of Dom Pérignon and lavish cakes for everyone, from the top-level employee to the lowliest mail-room worker. We always tried to make tickets available for our artists’ shows to everyone who wanted to go, until the company became so large that holding back several hundred tickets to each show became unwieldy and expensive. We also gave out lots of T-shirts and other promotional stuff—Neil had satin Casablanca jackets and very nice leather briefcases made for everyone in promotion, PR, sales, and legal.

  One Monday morning, after returning from a weeklong trip, I walked into the office to find it populated by new people: bookkeepers, secretaries, and other staffers, including Randee Goldman, who would become Neil’s personal assistant. Neil, beaming, shot me a glance as if to say, “Look at all the new stuff I bought for us!” I could envision him hiring people as if he were on a shopping spree: “I’ll take three accountants, two of those secretaries over there, one of those, a dozen of these.” Neil had hired so many new people that we had no office space for them. The dining room between Neil’s office and the kitchen was filled with people, desks, and phones.

  As I entered the room, I encountered the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. I took a deep breath, and, with as much cool as I could muster, I walked over and introduced myself to Mary Candice Hill, whom Neil had hired to handle production for us. To this day, I’ve no idea why she didn’t burst out laughing at me. Here was this tall, lanky guy standing in front of her—sans shoes, for some reason, but wearing ridiculous socks with individual slots for all ten toes, each slot a different color. What possessed us to think that any 1970s attire was cool I have no idea. A grown man wearing toe socks? Really, I have no explanation.

  In retrospect, I realized that I was largely responsible for hiring Candy (she preferred that name to her given one). A few d
ays before my trip, I had walked into Neil’s office, sat down, and started to make small talk. Part of the joy of working in a completely independent company without adult supervision was that we could kill time like this whenever the hell we wanted. Despite the fact that each of us was handling several jobs, there wasn’t all that much to do because we had such a small roster, so whenever we got sick of what we were doing, we’d while away the hours bullshitting, or smoking grass, or dreaming out loud. As we sat there talking about nothing in particular, I was leafing through a copy of Billboard. I ran across a story about Blue Thumb Records going out of business. One of the people they referred to in the article had production experience, so I mentioned it to Neil. Never one to hesitate over a good opportunity, Neil picked up the phone and called Bob Krasnow, president of Blue Thumb and an old nemesis of his from the Buddah days. Bob had left Buddah shortly after Neil arrived as they just did not see eye to eye, but they eventually buried the hatchet. Neil asked Bob about this production person, and Bob gave her a glowing recommendation. Neil hired her a few days later.

  I eventually summoned the chutzpah to ask Candy out to dinner, and she accepted. As we drove to the restaurant she had chosen, Candy explained to me that she did not like Neil. I was dumbfounded. She was comparing him to her former boss, Bob Krasnow, and she apparently felt Neil didn’t measure up. In her eyes, Neil was a glib snake-oil salesman—nothing more, nothing less.