And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records

by Harris, Larry

  Coinciding with Joyce’s new assignment was our hiring of Susan Munao as head of publicity for Casablanca. Susan had worked with us as a publicist for Gibson and Stromberg in New York. She was a firebrand. A dark-haired Italian barely five feet tall with her stilts on, she had a heavy, heavy New York accent, tremendous energy, and incredible tenacity. She was an outstanding publicist and took her job very seriously.

  One of Susan’s first tasks was to prepare for Donna’s arrival. Neil would say to us, “It’s a four-color world out there, boys. Don’t live it in black and white.” That was definitely the edict when it came to Donna. It had to be red carpet treatment all the way—nothing should be considered too good for Donna. Susan didn’t disappoint. She was there, with Joyce, to meet Donna when she arrived at JFK. After making quick introductions, they escorted Donna to a waiting limousine. As they settled into the car, “Love to Love You Baby” began playing on the FM radio. Of course, it’s possible that this was simply a coincidence—after all, the song was getting some serious airplay at that point—but, given Susan’s drive for excellence, I think she got in touch with one of her legion of New York radio contacts, called in a favor, and arranged for the station to start playing the song on her cue. When Donna entered her room at the Park Lane Hotel, which overlooked Central Park, she found nearly two-dozen floral displays. Susan had laid on every bit of pampering she could muster. This was how impressions were made, and Susan knew it.

  Buck certainly knew it, too, and so he came up with this ridiculous, harebrained stunt. He had a cake made for Donna’s homecoming appearance in her native Boston. It wasn’t just a cake. It was a huge cake that had Donna’s likeness emblazoned on it with icing. Buck had ordered it from Hansen’s Bakery, because Hansen’s was the only bakery that would agree to decorate a cake with the image of a sexy reclining woman. But, oh, by the way, Hansen’s was in LA—three thousand miles from Boston. How do you get a four-foot-long cake from LA to Boston without destroying it? Buck arranged for an ambulance to pick the cake up at Hansen’s and chauffeur it to LAX; then he booked three first-class seats to Boston (two for the cake, one for him). Of course, there were photographers in place at both ends of the trip. Never let a good photo op go to waste.

  Donna was floored. The poor woman hadn’t been to the US in nearly seven years, she had been bedridden for the better part of several months with myocarditis, and she was now on the receiving end of the full Neil Bogart superstar treatment. And the promo tour had barely begun.

  Her six-week excursion was launched in New York with a short performance and an extravagant after party at the Pachyderm Club. Her three-song set was plagued with production problems, mostly stemming from the fact that Donna could not hear herself sing. But the audience didn’t seem to mind, and the evening was a blowout success. The quick tour that followed hit a host of cities across the country, where Donna performed minishows at small discotheques for the very people who were helping to lift her to superstar status. The promotional tour also included high-profile appearances on Soul Train and The Mike Douglas Show.

  The first time I would meet Donna was several weeks later, when she came to our offices accompanied by her Casablanca retinue. At the time, this entourage consisted of Susan, Joyce, and Cecil, but then it grew rapidly and exponentially. Donna greeted us all warmly—me, Dick, Mauri, and the rest of the staff—and she expressed her gratitude for all of our help with her career. The meeting was pleasant and very low pressure. One thing that struck us was that Donna did not look a lot like the woman in the picture Trudy Meisel had given us nearly a year earlier; but you could see a resemblance. She was very pretty, but she looked a bit heavier than she had in the picture, and her hair was not the flowing mane of her album covers and press photos. It was very, very short, and not at all in keeping with the diva status that she was pursuing. This is why Donna would always be photographed in a wig.

  Quietly, during the very early stages of the “Love to Love You Baby” hurricane, the daily sales reports from the distributors began to show that the KISS live album sales were far surpassing those of any of the previous KISS efforts. I spoke with reps from each of our twenty-six distributors several times daily, and the phone was constantly ringing with the news: “There were 1,951 units moved today in Chicago—you got a real smoker here!”; “There were 4,081 in Detroit—your new LP is on fire, Larry!”; “Another 2,949 in Los Angeles—this one’s got long legs, Larry!” But the most exciting news came from the rack jobbers, who began placing orders in excess of one hundred thousand units for the big box stores. The scent of blood was in the water, and we began calling the distributors and urging them to buy more units in the days leading up to KISS appearances in their markets. They did it without blinking, because they knew a hot album when they saw one; plus, the product was returnable, so there was no appreciable risk in it for them anyway.

  This was how touring and promotion were supposed to work, and it was finally happening the way we’d envisioned it. Mainstream America was about to find out why KISS was our first signing. We watched with growing anticipation (and pride) as the album began to scale the charts. It was at No. 24 on the Billboard chart, and it had been steadily climbing for a month. “Great, first KISS, and now a hit for Donna, too,” we all thought. The distributor reports on KISS kept getting bigger, and the album kept climbing. It hit No. 19 the next week, then 15, then 12. And then it cracked the Top 10. Our first Top 10 album!

  11 The New Casbah

  Angel doesn’t fly—The Mothership—8255 Sunset—

  The billboard—Decorating the digs—Sharell

  declines—Life in the big office—Pockface—All demand,

  no product—Close to the end

  November 29, 1975

  Sunset and Whittier

  Beverly Hills, California

  Was this it? Had we really arrived?

  We had spent most of 1975 fending off creditors and desperately trying to keep our marquee act, KISS, on our roster. We’d barely managed to release one album per month. Every day, I would arrive at the office with the same question in my head: How much longer before it all ends, before everyone realizes we’re just deluding ourselves with drugs and parties and expense accounts that we can’t afford?

  Now, in November 1975, after nearly two years of either sitting around bored with nothing to do or scrambling in a mad panic for artists and money, we saw that everything was happening at once. KISS was finally on fire; Gold status was imminent. The Donna Summer album, with its absurdly long dance number, “Love to Love You Baby,” was blowing up, and what was to become a groundbreaking Parliament LP was about to drop.

  The Sherbourne office was a mess. The original five-person Casablanca staff had quadrupled, and the place was a nest of people, desks, and tangled phone cords. We desperately needed to move, and we were making arrangements to relocate just down the block to the building formerly occupied by A&M Records on the Sunset Strip. The only way I could have made my life more complicated was to get married. So I did that, too.

  On Saturday, November 29, 1975, after dating for about a year, Candy and I were married. Neil and Joyce insisted on throwing the wedding, offering us the house they rented at Sunset Boulevard and Whittier Drive (next door to Tony Orlando) for both the wedding ceremony and the reception. Joyce attended to every detail, ordering the invitations, selecting the colors for the decorations, hiring the valet parking attendants. It was, I’m sure, a heartfelt gesture, and I appreciated the generosity she and Neil showed us, but Candy felt that she didn’t have a hand in planning her own wedding. She was also a bit uncomfortable because she knew that Neil would insist that everything be tied in with the business, which meant a guest list filled with industry contacts whom neither Candy nor I had ever met. KISS and Donna Summer were invited, but they were touring and couldn’t attend. Gregg Giuffria, the keyboardist for Angel, whom we’d signed about six months prior, was one of only a handful of Casablanca artists to attend, though all of the staff were there.
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br />   My elder sisters, Arlene and Pat (who are identical twins), their husbands, Fred and Bob, and their children, along with my parents, flew out for the occasion, and we all had a nice Thanksgiving dinner together at the rotating restaurant atop the Hollywood Holiday Inn. Candy wasn’t quite so lucky with her family. Her younger brother, Jimmy, who had come with their parents, passed out before the ceremony, and her father had to take him home, leaving her mother (who had MS and was confined to a wheelchair) behind with relatives from the Midwest.

  Among my industry friends in attendance were: Mary Turner (KMET); Norm Winer (WBCN); Mike and Carol Klenfner (Columbia Records and Gibson-Stromberg); Mike and Sharon Harrison (Radio & Records); Richard Kimball (KMET); Alison Steele (WNEW); David Perry and his wife, Linda (from WABX and KWST, respectively); Jeff Franklin and Wally Meyrowitz from ATI; and act managers Roy Silver (Fanny) and David Joseph (the Hudson Brothers and Angel). Many others were invited but either couldn’t afford the trip or couldn’t get away during the Thanksgiving weekend.

  The idea to have the wedding on the Saturday following Thanksgiving was mine. The compulsion to devote attention twenty-four/seven to Casablanca was all but part of my DNA at that point, and having the wedding on Thanksgiving weekend meant that I would not miss any work. In fact, from the time Casablanca was formed until I got married, I do not remember ever doing anything that was not work related—unless it had to do with women, and even then I often blended work into the equation. Even my relationship with Candy had fallen under that umbrella, as we shared the Casablanca gig.

  Neil was the best man, and Candy’s maid of honor was her sister, Christy, who I later found out had told Candy not to marry me. Christy wasn’t alone in that regard: Neil’s young daughter, Jill (about six or seven at the time), had gone into the room where Candy was getting ready and said to her, “You can’t marry Larry. My daddy is going to,” which underscores how close Neil and I were. For the ceremony, I was dressed in a rust-colored suit, and Candy wore a flowing gown, though it had no train to speak of. The guests were dressed in an assortment of styles, from formal to casual. There were even a few people in jeans.

  The ceremony took place in the main house, with a justice of the peace presiding (Candy was not Jewish). The reception was held outside in the pool and cabana area, and it was catered by an older African American woman to whom Neil was very loyal; he always hired her to do our parties and events. The pool was left uncovered, although we had entertained the idea of covering it and using it as a dance floor. A tent had been erected over much of the reception area, and there were video games inside (Neil and I loved the things). Space heaters were placed through most of the outdoor dining area; even in LA it can get chilly in November. Jerry Sharell, our old friend from the Buddah days, sang Cole Porter’s “So in Love,” with Neil accompanying him. I thought the wedding was fantastic.

  Candy had a completely different take. When she first joined the company she had expressed her dislike for Neil. He was very smooth, and most people found his perpetual enthusiasm enjoyable, even contagious. I was sure Candy would grow to love him like I did once she really got to know him. Was I ever wrong. She was (and is) very down-to-earth and had trouble dealing with people who fawned over the latest hip styles and fads. Despite my efforts to point out his good qualities, and Neil’s own attempts to curry her favor, Candy never warmed to him, his style, or his methods. She and I would fight about it, because she was reluctant to hang out with Neil and Joyce.

  I tried for a long time to broker some sort of peace between Candy and Neil. I knew that the key to this was getting Candy to go along with the program Neil believed in—that is, she should never utter a negative thought (although this was just about impossible for her), and she should express complete faith in his decisions. After a year of playing Henry Kissinger, I resigned myself to the fact that the best I would achieve was some fragile level of civility.

  Not long after the wedding, we moved into a modest house in Studio City, which had once been owned by Bud Abbott. The house was small, with only two bedrooms, but it had a huge pool and a guesthouse. The walls in one room were paneled, or at least they seemed to be. I had assumed that the paneling was wood until I looked closer and saw that the knotty pine texture had been painted on. Asking around, I found out that the faux paneling had come courtesy of the art department at Universal Studios.

  While the KISS and Donna Summer albums were certainly garnering most of our attention, they weren’t our only ongoing projects. Two of our other acts, Buddy Miles and Hugh Masekela, had also issued albums, and they were selling well. These two releases and the KISS album combined to give us two million-dollar months: September and October 1975. This was the first time we’d risen to the seven-figure plateau, and the fact that it was in consecutive months made it seem less like an accident and more like a trend. Or so we told ourselves.

  Angel, whom we had signed in the spring, had completed their debut album after forty-five days of recording with producer Derek Lawrence, of Deep Purple fame. I was pleasantly surprised at the result—a hard-edged blend of progressive melodic rock. We were all bullish on the band, and despite the fact that their sparkling appearance was the antithesis of KISS’s, we planned on using the KISS blueprint to break them: we’d marry frequent albums with nonstop (and flamboyant) concerts and hope that something would stick. We had released Angel’s debut effort on October 27, and just before Thanksgiving they were in Chicago for the start of the tour to support the album. They were scheduled to kick things off as an opening act for Robin Trower at the Aragon Ballroom.

  The show was plagued with production problems from the start. Angel’s crew was not yet comfortable with the setup process for the stage show, and, in the tight confines of the Aragon (an old 1920s dance hall), this delayed the show’s start time quite a bit. Jerry Michaelson, owner of Jam Productions, was steamed, and he went backstage to pull the plug on Angel while they were still playing their set. Angel’s tour manager, Bill Schereck, stepped between Jerry and the power source, and the two argued for a few minutes. Bill lost the battle but won the war: he’d delayed Michaelson long enough for Angel to finish their set. With that crisis averted, Schereck took the crew to Akron, Ohio, where he rented a theater and organized what amounted to a tour boot camp. He had the crew run through the show setup again and again and again, timing their efforts until everything was to his satisfaction. Then he had everyone switch positions and learn the process again, so that the entire crew knew one another’s jobs. They hated him for it, but it worked; by the time they were finished, they were one of the most efficient crews touring.

  Our final album of 1975 was Parliament’s Mothership Connection. Unlike our other artists, Parliament never seemed to need our help: they just needed our money. The band’s driving force, George Clinton, may have been the most musically creative person Casablanca ever signed, and he was never at a loss for wildly out-there ideas. He had, through sheer force of will, carved out a niche unto himself, and his output was all so uniquely Parliament that it may as well have been trademarked. Between KISS and Parliament, we had the two most absurd acts in the business, and they were both just so ridiculously entertaining to watch.

  • September 26, 1975: The Rocky Horror Picture Show premieres in US theaters.

  • October 11, 1975: Saturday Night Live debuts on NBC-TV with George Carlin as host.

  • December 25, 1975: Queen’s epic song “Bohemian Rhapsody” goes to No. 1 on the UK singles charts.

  Parliament’s first two albums for us, Up for the Down Stroke and Chocolate City, had done well, but not spectacularly well. The group had a highly loyal following, but it wasn’t enough to sustain an album; it just provided a nice sales surge upon release. With so much of our attention focused on advancing KISS, as well as on pushing the Angel, Buddy Miles, Hugh Masekela, and Donna Summer albums forward, it was somewhat of a relief to us that Parliament was propelled by its own creative power. We never had to light a fire under George—a joint,
yes, but not a fire.

  It’s hard for me to distinguish one Parliament album from another, because they all left me with nothing to say but “What?” and “Wow!” However, if there was a musical pinnacle to Parliament’s career, I’d say that Mothership Connection was it. How can you not love an album with song titles like “Night of the Thumpasorus Peoples” and “Supergroovalistic-prosifunkstication”? George and his assembled funksters, including the legendary Bootsy Collins, had crafted a unique and completely mad masterpiece, and its impact over the years has never ceased to astound me. Current artists, especially hip-hop and rap ones, are still influenced by it. Dr. Dre, for instance, sampled “P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)” and the title track on one of his CDs in the 1990s.

  George was certainly an integral part of the black music community, but he was also into a host of other things that usually aren’t associated with black culture. For instance, he was a huge fan of Star Trek, and this led him to create a cover for Mothership Connection that looked like Huggy Bear flies the Starship Enterprise: it featured a pimp in a spaceship. George was something else. He had an imaginative way, to paraphrase George himself, of putting black people in situations that were new. I’ll stop short of calling him an out-and-out activist (he always seemed to be more interested in having fun than in political saber rattling), but he definitely broke down stereotypes with every move he made.

  Our Sherbourne offices had never been designed to house more than six or seven people, but, with the staff we’d hired over the past twelve months, we were now sitting on top of one another. Offices that had once been for the private use of Cecil, Buck, or me were now home to four people. Most of us were sharing desks, if not chairs and phones. Never one to think small, Neil had found space for us at 8255 Sunset Boulevard. Not only had he bought the building, but he had also purchased the entire block. He had put together a small investment group, and with the help of Richard Trugman’s close banking relationships and his own good credit, he’d raised enough money to buy the block as a real estate investment. He offered me the opportunity to join the group. I appreciated the invitation, but I declined because I couldn’t afford it.