And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records

by Harris, Larry

  We could have attempted something with Rolling Stone, too, but our relationship with the magazine was odd. I had almost no experience with them, because during the Buddah days, the press department had handled such relationships. Any overtures I made would have had to go through Neil, whose dealings with Rolling Stone ran hot and cold. His relationship with Jann Wenner, the magazine’s owner and publisher, was icy. However, Neil was fast friends with Rolling Stone writer Lisa Robinson, whose husband, Richard, had worked under Neil at Buddah. Neil still had a lot of pull with Lisa, and she and Richard were always invited to our soirees. Why Neil had not yet exploited that friendship, I cannot say.

  In any case, Circus also conducted a readers’ poll. We bought up hundreds of issues and sat around the Sherbourne offices filling in the poll cards, voting for Ace as best guitarist, Peter as best drummer, and KISS as best group (we thought that voting for Gene or Paul as best vocalist would be stretching it a bit). We were exploiting the age-old perception-is-reality concept. To change Neil’s mantra just slightly, we were “grease-painting the building.”

  Almost without exception, the critical reception of KISS’s music and concerts had been awful. The negative reviews bothered us a little at first, but we quickly got used to them, and Neil was always reminding us (and himself) that any publicity was good publicity. And the fact that the music press so reviled KISS seemed to galvanize KISS’s audience. To many, this just made KISS the antiestablishment band. Using print media to build up, if not outright fabricate, KISS’s stature felt a bit cathartic and ironic to us.

  After a while, kids began to believe that Peter was as good a drummer as any and Ace was the world’s greatest guitar player—although this wasn’t even close to the truth. Based on the perception created by the annual Circus poll, they started to buy up KISS albums. I also believe, although it went unsaid, that Gerald Rothberg was helping us behind the scenes. He thought that this whole KISS phenomenon could be beneficial to his magazine and actually helped us sell more copies. Even though the band wasn’t yet a national success, having their picture on a magazine’s cover increased circulation.

  In conjunction with these efforts, I was soliciting independent photographers like Barry Levine in an effort to place photos of KISS in as many publications as possible. A handful of professional photographers had close ties with the rock magazines, and, given the right circumstances, they would use their pull to get coverage for the bands whose pictures they had taken. This was all done according to some loose-knit, wink-wink exclusivity agreement. We would periodically send some of these photographers on all-expense-paid trips to shows or events involving KISS or some of our other artists. We did not pay them; they would be paid by the magazines on a per-picture-published basis. So the photographers, in effect, worked as lobbyists for the band.

  It was important for Casablanca’s cash flow to have a new KISS album to promote every six months or so. This also helped the band keep their image alive and fresh in the press, and it fed the audience’s growing demand for more KISS, although the band members were not happy that their tour schedule was frequently interrupted so they could record. Casablanca’s near-constant need for new KISS material placed a creative strain on the band; we never gave them enough time to write and record new songs. Dressed to Kill was so rushed (recording had started only three months after the release of their previous album, Hotter Than Hell) that the band had been forced to dredge up songs for it that they’d written before KISS even existed, and even so, the final product was less than thirty minutes long. And here we were, barely two months after Dressed to Kill’s release, with Neil looking for yet another album.

  Rather than force the band back into the studio to write more new material, we hatched the idea of doing a live album. In the mid-1970s, live albums were more prevalent than they are today (now they’re largely nonexistent), but they were far from a no-risk, slam-dunk option. The band had so far released only three albums, and there was no monster hit attached to any of them, so releasing a greatest hits album—which, when you get right down to it, is what a live album is—was not an engraved invitation to success. Still, KISS was such an incredible spectacle in concert that a live album seemed like a logical next step.

  Neil had no experience producing a live album, so we brought in Eddie Kramer, a veteran who had Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin on his resume (KISS were huge fans of both), to guide the recording. The first and largest of the five shows recorded for the album happened on May 16 at Detroit’s Cobo Arena. It was by far the most important concert of KISS’s career to that point. This was a major venue, in the Motor City—arguably then the rock and roll capital of America—and they’d sold it out to great fanfare. The local promoter, Steve Glantz, had been trumpeting the sellout to the media, and both Neil and Bill were doing everything they could to turn the concert into an event. We all flew to Detroit days before the show—me, Neil, Joyce, Bill, the band, and the crew—and we were later joined by a huge entourage of family and friends from around the country. Aucoin rented the Michigan Palace, a Vaudeville-era theater, where he staged the photo shoot for the album cover and filmed the band performing for future promotional use. The footage included full-length music videos (which were then called “promotional films”) for two singles from Dressed to Kill—“C’mon and Love Me” and “Rock and Roll All Nite.”

  The night before the show, I was eating an Italian dinner with Paul backstage at the Michigan Palace. We were in the middle of a conversation when photographer Fin Costello burst in and started taking pictures. Without missing a beat, Paul pretended to stuff sausage links and dinner rolls into his mouth, and then he posed with a can of Vernor’s Ginger Ale (which was invented in Detroit). The second Fin was gone, Paul resumed our conversation, even though I had already forgotten what we were talking about due to the distraction of the flashing camera. Those iconic pictures would be published all over the world in various music magazines, and I always laughed when I saw them.

  The next night, as the band began their show in front of over twelve thousand fans, Neil and I remained backstage, literally and figuratively the men behind the curtain, talking about what a rush it was to see all that we had worked for come to fruition. Over the course of the previous year, the skeleton of KISS’s show had remained essentially the same, but it had grown in size. The backline of half a dozen speaker stacks had become an entire wall of Marshall cabinets. The altitude of Peter’s drum riser had doubled, and during “100,000 Years,” flamethrowers created the illusion that the band was surrounded by a curtain of fire. KISS and their crew were given free reign to indulge their production fantasies, and as a result of their ingenuity and Aucoin’s and Casablanca’s money (seemingly produced from thin air), the show just grew and grew.

  For the Cobo gig, Neil and Bill both knew we had to swing for the fences. KISS’s already oversized production had been amped up. The band was sporting new outfits, their lighting and pyrotechnic displays had been enhanced, they’d significantly shuffled and lengthened their set list, and the show was being projected onto a giant screen above the stage (a commonplace setup nowadays, but relatively rare in 1975). Instead of their usual opener, “Deuce,” they started off with a little-performed song called “Rock Bottom,” chosen for its shimmering acoustic guitar introduction. While a tape of the lengthy intro played over the house PA, a video camera followed KISS from their dressing room to the stage; the images were broadcast on the overhead screen. The gimmick was a spectacular success. The audience’s shrill screaming ramped up to jet-engine volume as the band approached the stage.

  Throughout the gig, Neil and I moved from the left side of the backstage area to the mobile recording studio outside. There, Eddie Kramer was hard at work putting the show to tape. Many of the WABX and Creem people were there, too—Jaan, Dan Carlisle, David and Linda Perry, Dave Dixon, John Detz (general manager of ABX), and Mark Parenteau—along with Joyce and Bill. The audience was borderline electric throughout the concert, even though there wa
s a host of production problems. The new lighting company we’d hired was ill equipped to handle the production, and Peter’s drum riser malfunctioned at the end of the set. Still, everyone said they were thrilled with the evening.

  After taping four more shows over the next two months, Kramer and the band sifted through the material and, following quite a bit of overdubbing, Kramer edited the final cut. Neil was not pleased that so much of the album had to be redone, but the downside of KISS’s high-energy show was that the musical performances suffered. Vocals were often missing (as band members ran around the stage), the musicianship was sloppy, and so on. Most of the material from the five shows was unusable, and the finished record contains little original recording except for Peter’s drum tracks. In essence, recording the Cobo show had been an enormous waste of money and time, and we had a surplus of neither. But, despite all this, the resulting record spectacularly re-created the feeling of a live KISS show.

  It was with this album that we began to become more conceptual, not only in developing KISS as four superhero-ish personalities but also in packaging our LPs. Alive!, a double album, had a gatefold sleeve, and its inner jacket had handwritten notes from the band to their fans, which really played up their four personas. This was the brainchild of Dennis Woloch, a creative young guy on the staff at Howard Marks Advertising. While KISS’s makeup and loose identities had been in place since very early on, this was the first concerted step toward developing those identities into full-fledged characters, a concept that opened up a world of marketing possibilities that KISS would explore to absurd degrees in the coming years. The album also contained an eight-page glossy booklet with a full-page shot of each band member and a centerfold collage of in-concert photos. This was an effort to establish Casablanca as a company that gave fans something extra. We would greatly embellish this concept and use it with many of our other artists.

  As the end of August 1975 drew near, we ramped up for a September 10 release date for the new KISS album. We were also heavily involved in the three Giorgio Moroder projects. We had issued the first of his albums, Einzelgänger, on the Casablanca label back in March. It was a largely experimental electronic album, which was easy enough for us to pitch to progressive rock radio, and it had an initially favorable reception—we scored a “most-added” mention in Record World. But it died quickly. There was nothing to promote, nothing to sell to radio or the press: the album featured no group or image. Most of the music had been made by Giorgio with the help of some session musicians, and Giorgio lived in Europe, so even if we’d wanted to promote the LP using him as the face of the album, he wasn’t available to do it.

  The other project was an album by one of Moroder’s German artists, American-born singer Donna Summer. It had its origins in a party Neil had thrown earlier in 1975. One night, Neil had one of our big blowouts at a house he was renting on Sunset Boulevard, not far from our offices. I don’t remember the occasion—although we never really needed an excuse to party—but, as usual, there was no shortage of drink, weed, coke, and the like. At some point, someone bumped into a turntable, bouncing the needle back to the beginning of the track and turning a four-minute song into an eight-minute song. Everyone loved the experience. I don’t know why, but they clearly did. The record was “Love to Love You Baby,” a demo that Giorgio Moroder had given to Neil. It featured Donna Summer on vocals.

  I doubt that Neil understood the crowd’s reaction any more than I did, but he didn’t care about the why. He focused on the what, and the what was that people liked it, and that’s all that mattered. Making a creative (and crazy) leap, he insisted that increasing the length of this song by two or three times was the key to its success. He dialed Giorgio to share his thoughts. After some convincing, Giorgio agreed to redo the single to Neil’s specifications, though I’m not sure the idea ever made sense to him. I’m not sure the idea ever made sense to me, either, but I’d long since learned to trust Neil’s instincts.

  Giorgio told Neil that he needed time to find the right vocalist and record the track again. He had used Donna Summer for the demo because they had a good working relationship (she’d done an album for his German Oasis label in 1974), but he wanted another singer to do the final version. Neil insisted that the song wouldn’t work unless Donna sang it. Giorgio and a befuddled Donna (she didn’t understand the need to extend the song any more than Giorgio or I did) rerecorded the song, and then Giorgio looped it several times to create an epic version—it was nearly seventeen minutes long. We released it as the A side of an album with the same title, Love to Love You Baby, on the Oasis label on August 27, 1975. The same day, also on our Oasis subsidiary, we released Giorgio’s album Schloss and rereleased the Einzelgänger LP, which we’d previously issued on Casablanca.

  While we waited to gauge public and industry reaction to this borderline lunatic idea of a seventeen-minute pop song, our royalty issue with KISS erupted again. We weren’t in any better position to cut them a check than we’d been six months earlier, when we signed the new contract with them. They knew it, and we knew it. The May 1 agreement had felt like a small victory, but in terms of royalty payments, it was nothing more than a delay tactic. Neil and I knew that KISS’s patience would soon run out. On September 15, 1975, he showed me a letter of termination from Bill Aucoin. KISS was leaving Casablanca.

  Aucoin had all the leverage on his side, and he soon played his next card. For two weeks we heard rumors from several sources that Bill was shopping KISS to all the heavy hitters: Warner, Atlantic, and Capitol. Even more troubling was that Bill was bankrolling demo sessions with Alice Cooper producer Bob Ezrin for the band’s next studio album, which would give him a big carrot to dangle in front of the record companies as he attempted to negotiate a new deal for KISS. But Neil, despite having every reason not to, remained confident, and in early October he filed an affidavit with the New York Supreme Court accusing Aucoin of attempting to sign KISS with our competitors. Then, a few days later, he blinked and cut KISS and Aucoin a check for two million dollars. This not only fulfilled our guarantee to pay them by October 20 (the date for the first royalty payment listed in our May 1975 agreement), but it also eased tensions between us and the KISS camp. Aucoin and KISS were happy, for obvious reasons, but Neil was physically drained. The stress of the past year was beginning to take its toll on him, and I could occasionally see chinks in his armor. Having to make such a huge payment was a severe financial blow, and it would contribute to the harrowing ride that awaited us in the coming months.

  Despite the occasional flare-up, I never felt that there was any genuine animosity between us and KISS and Bill Aucoin. We all liked one another, and we shared the same great enthusiasm for KISS’s future. But the risk we were all taking, and the financial struggles that ensued, did sometimes conspire to create some tense situations.

  I would have given any takers hundred-to-one odds against what happened next, but it happened just the same. “Love to Love You Baby” began to break. Yes, a seventeen-minute song was getting some buzz. But it wasn’t radio that broke the song. Discotheques, first in Florida and then in the Northeast, gradually began to play it. Club people were having the same reaction to it as the guests at Neil’s party. There was something infectious about Donna’s airy, sexy cooing layered over Giorgio’s incessant, driving music. Neil could sense the impending breakout and pestered Giorgio to fly Donna from Munich, where she was living, to the US for some promotional appearances, which he felt would push the buzz to the critical level where we’d have a major hit on our hands. It took him the better part of a month to convince Giorgio, partly because Donna was recovering from a relatively severe heart infection, but in early November, she traveled to New York to start a six-week promotional tour.

  While we were coordinating the details of her tour, Cecil, Buck, and I worked to get the song on Top 40 and R&B radio. Cecil quickly took care of the R&B side of things, Buck worked on the Top 40 stations, and I helped out where I could. Frankie Crocker, a DJ at WBLS i
n New York who would release a couple of disco albums through us, was one of the first to give the record some airplay, spinning the song in its entirety every night after midnight. Like most hit songs, it grew exponentially once the hype had begun. The momentum carried it forward. Shortly after Donna’s arrival in New York, the record hit the charts.

  Until this point, we’d barely acknowledged the existence of disco. Sure, we knew about it, but to us it was an arcane niche market that appealed only to a select few. We had no disco artists (and no money to sign them or time to promote them, either); very few radio stations, no matter what format they ran, were playing disco; and it simply didn’t seem like a viable genre. Why bother with it? We didn’t sign Donna and Giorgio because they were doing disco: we signed them because we liked the demos we’d heard—and we’d gotten “Love to Love You Baby” for free, anyway, as part of the deal to release Schloss and Einzelgänger.

  But how would we control our emerging superstar? Having an insider in the KISS camp early on (Joyce, when she was the band’s comanager) had been advantageous in many regards. Sensing a similar opportunity with Donna Summer, Neil positioned Joyce as a sort of comanager to work with Dick Broder, Donna’s existing manager. Although she had not yet completed her move to LA, Joyce was living with Neil more or less full time. With her in Donna’s camp, Neil would have a great deal of control over Donna’s career without her management getting in the way. Giorgio, who not only wrote much of Donna’s material but also served as her de facto producer, was living in Germany, so he would not be around to interfere either. It seemed like the perfect arrangement.