And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records

by Harris, Larry

  Buck made the same offer to Cecil, who also turned him down. The next day, he broke the news to Neil, who was livid that Buck had tried to take Cecil and me with him. Neil never allowed people to work through the standard two-weeks’-notice period, and Buck was gone within twenty-four hours, taking Nancy Sain, A.J. Cervantes, and Nancy Reingold with him. Nancy Reingold would return to us later that year, after she had divorced Buck.

  Even though Buck was one of the original four musketeers—along with Neil, Cecil, and me—his departure was a great relief to everyone. Candy, in particular, was thrilled to be rid of him. Buck would often come up behind her and lick her neck as she sat at her desk, and I’m sure she wasn’t the only victim of his stunts. We were all tiring of his shit, his boorish behavior, and the constant parade of sex partners he would bring into the building. He was loud and pushy and determined (all good qualities in a promotions man, to a degree), but he dressed like a redheaded, white pimp, and it was clear to everyone that he was a huckster with no real passion for, or understanding of, the business. Some radio station people liked him a lot because he supplied them with women and drugs and (possibly) money, but just as many would call Neil and ask him to ensure that they never saw Buck again. In the end, I think Buck was simply the wrong man for the times. Had it been the 1950s, his look and demeanor may have made him a big success. As it was, he had become an embarrassment to us.

  With Buck gone, I had to run Top 40 promotion by myself. This was a big stretch, because it was so different from the FM progressive radio promotion I’d been focusing on. I had done Top 40 in my early days at Buddah, but it was never really my thing. My feeling was that if you loved the music and wanted it to change the world for the better in some way, FM progressive promotion was a much more effective road to travel. Becoming a successful promotions man is an intuitive process. It requires a keen feel for the marketplace and a sense of how to play a network of connections. I just didn’t have the network or the name recognition in Top 40 to do the job well, nor did I know where all the bodies were buried, or who to pay off, or when. As good as I was with FM, I was wrong for this niche. I was able to hold it together for about ten minutes, but I knew I was kidding myself. The time was going to come when we had an important single to get played and I wouldn’t be able to do it justice.

  Fortunately, we had only four albums coming out in the first quarter of 1976. With no one to attend to promotion full time, not to mention our ongoing cash crunch, we were in no hurry to push any more releases forward, so we kept the pace slow. Both Hugh Masekela and Buddy Miles had issued follow-ups to their 1975 successes with us: Masekela released Colonial Man at the end of January, and Miles released A Bicentennial Gathering of the Tribes a month later (see, there’s that bicentennial thing creeping in again). Margaret Singana, a South African musician, released an album with us on the same day Miles released his: February 24. And KISS, too, was working on a follow-up, a studio LP called Destroyer that we hoped would sell even a fraction as well as Alive!, which was still a runaway sensation.

  KISS during their August 1973 Casablanca audition at the Henry LeTang School of Dance in New York. (Eddie Solan)

  KISS, sans makeup, outside the offices of Creem magazine in Southfield, Michigan, in June 1974. (Charlie Auringer)

  Cecil Holmes, Curtis Mayfield, Neil Bogart, and Art Kass circa 1970. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

  Publicity Director Nancy Lewis and Larry Harris give George Burns a tour of the Buddah offices in 1973. (Collection of Larry Harris)

  Larry’s Casablanca Record & FilmWorks business card. (Collection of Larry Harris)

  A 1974 letter (note the early Casablanca stationery) from Neil Bogart to Larry’s parents. (Collection of Larry Harris)

  Larry and Candy Harris getting married on November 29, 1975, at the Bogarts’ residence. Earlier in the year, this same living room hosted the party where “Love to Love You Baby” was discovered. (Barry Levine)

  Early Casablanca promo photo of Parliament from 1975. (Echoes/Redferns)

  KISS driving them wild in New Jersey, during their first U.S. stadium show, on July 10, 1976. Less than three years earlier, they were a local club band. (Vintagekissphotos.com)

  Larry Harris backstage with Gene Simmons moments before KISS recorded their Alive! album in Detroit, Michigan, on May 16, 1975. (Fin Costello/Redferns)

  Trade publicity shot from Winter 1976–77 promoting Casablanca Records and Casablanca ArtWorks. Left to right: Donna Summer, Neil Bogart, and Donna’s then-boyfriend Peter Mühldorfer. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

  Larry Harris onstage at Detroit’s Cobo Arena on January 25, 1976, to present KISS with their first Platinum album, Alive! (Vintagekissphotos.com)

  Neil Bogart onstage at the infamous Casablanca Records launch party, February 18, 1974, introducing KISS to the shell-shocked West Coast music industry. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

  Neil in June 1977, hard at play in his office. (Brian Leatart)

  Donna Summer onstage during the 1976 leg of the Love to Love You Baby promotional tour. (Fin Costello/Redferns)

  Alive! had won Gold status in early December 1975, and we’d received the plaques marking this achievement soon afterwards. This was a first for KISS, and I don’t know who was more thrilled—us or the band. It was our first legitimate Gold record, too; Carson’s album had technically qualified for that status, but I don’t think there was a soul alive who didn’t know that was a sham. KISS was on the road when the plaques arrived at the office. (When weren’t they on the road?) To surprise them, I flew to New York on New Year’s Eve and went to Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, the big arena out on Long Island, where the band was playing. Just prior to the show, I gave them the awards backstage, and we made a little photo-op of the impromptu event.

  A matter of weeks later, the album passed the one-million mark for units sold. Again, it was a first for KISS and us. The RIAA, the industry association responsible for tracking sales and handing out awards, had created a Platinum award at the beginning of the year for albums that had sold one million units. Prior to that, no matter how many units you’d sold, you would never get anything other than a Gold award. So, it seemed that Alive! would be our first Platinum album. However, the new award was not retroactive: it only applied to albums released after January 1, 1976. There was no way Neil was going to let the occasion go unheralded just because of some arbitrary RIAA rule, so we had Platinum awards made up and I again flew out to a gig, this time at Cobo, in Detroit, on January 27. We made a big event of it. I arranged with KISS’s road manager, J.R. Smalling, to present the awards onstage just before the group did their encores. The record industry was often a glamorous gig for me, even just sitting behind a desk in the office bullshitting with distributors or artists could be a rush, but there’s nothing quite like walking onstage in front of twelve thousand screaming people and a battery of spotlights to raise your heart rate. The event was an even bigger thrill for me than it was for the band. I left the stage with the most intense high I’d ever experienced. No matter what drugs I’d experimented with in the past, none of them ever had that effect on me. Kinda makes you understand why people become entertainers.

  • January 21, 1976: The first commercial Concorde flight takes off.

  • April 1, 1976: Stephen Wozniak and Steven Jobs found Apple Computer.

  • April 23, 1976: The Ramones release their first album.

  Being head of promotions can be fun, but to pull it off you need to be a full-timer, not a pinch hitter. We needed a permanent replacement for Buck, and I took it upon myself to find him. In early February, I was browsing through one of the many trade publications that came my way each week when by chance I read that Scott Shannon, a fairly influential Nashville program director, had been let go. I knew Scott reasonably well. He had been heavily involved in getting the kissing contest promotion off the ground back in the spring of 1974, and Buck had maintained our relationship with him. Scott helped promote our product
and got it on the air whenever he could. I had met him a few times through Buck and was impressed by his line of bullshit, so I gave him a call, and, with Neil’s blessing, I offered him the job of director of promotion. It wasn’t a tough sell. Scott was working promotions at an influential industry publication called Radio & Records, which to me sounded like a fill-in-the-gap gig. I offered him double the salary he’d made as a PD, an unlimited expense account, and a Mercedes convertible. He gladly accepted, and we had our man.

  I was thrilled to have Scott on board. He brought something to the table that I could not: solid relationships with PDs nationwide. Scott had been in radio for a long time, mostly in the South. He’d had great success in places like Mobile, Memphis, Nashville, and Atlanta, often increasing ratings for his stations. The name Scott Shannon carried some weight in radio circles and beyond. The other program directors in Top 40 radio knew him by reputation, if not personally, and they took his calls, which was not always the case when I rang them. He was smart and ambitious, but he was still out of his element somewhat, and Neil and I provided him with extra support during his first months on the job. I called in favors from a couple of our distributor reps—namely, Brian Interland and Bruce Bird (both of whom we’d hire before long). I asked them to help Scott in whatever way they could. It was a great hire for us and for Scott, and within a matter of months, he would play an integral role in cementing KISS’s superstar status.

  KISS, in the meantime, had completed Destroyer, and we were ramping up for a mid-March release. The record was an ambitious project for the band. It was produced by Bob Ezrin, who was in his mid-twenties and already renowned for his successes with Lou Reed and Alice Cooper; later in the decade, his work with Pink Floyd on The Wall would push him into the pantheon of elite producers. Destroyer showcased a grand level of production and musical arrangement. It was far more nuanced and complex than anything KISS had ever done. We sent the initial single, “Shout It Out Loud,” to radio stations and stores at the beginning of March, and it received good airplay in some markets. Despite some pans from critics (including our friends at Creem), the album sold well, but not as well as we’d hoped—which is to say that it wasn’t doing Alive!-like numbers. A second single, “Flaming Youth,” followed at the end of April, and it was one of only a handful of singles we’d ever issue that featured a picture sleeve.

  May was a tremendously hectic month for KISS—even more hectic than usual. First, they took their nonstop touring brigade to Europe for their debut performances overseas. Aucoin had attempted to book them in Europe in the fall of 1975, but he hadn’t managed to solidify an itinerary. We were eager to see it happen, as it gave us the opportunity to do copromotes with our overseas affiliates. While KISS was on the verge of becoming a superstar band in the US, European fans, especially those in the UK, looked upon them as a curiosity. Only in Sweden had a substantial fan base developed, and there would be some major stumbling blocks for us to overcome as we attempted to repeat KISS’s domestic success in the European market. West Germany, for instance, refused to let the band use their trademark logo because the double lightning bolt “S” in their name bore a striking similarity to the Nazi SS insignia. Oddly enough, this wasn’t even a German law, but rather an edict issued by the Allies at the end of World War II. We finally worked it out by changing the logo slightly. The other factor that slowed our development efforts in Europe was that the distributors and licensees with whom we had a loose association all hated one another, so there was little cooperation going on. This is another instance in which having the clout of a major label would have been beneficial.

  The international music business was not something we could ever grasp. In some markets, we had great distributors who would go out of their way to make things happen; in others, it was one fiasco after another, and nothing got done. Neil never cared very much about the international market anyway. He was happy to get the cash advances, and anything else was gravy. He’d never seen much international money at Buddah—why should things be different at Casablanca? As it turned out, the worldwide success of Donna Summer, KISS, and, to a lesser degree, Parliament would change Neil’s tune and our fortunes.

  Things were similarly unsettled for KISS in terms of business infrastructure. Bill Aucoin had split his management company in two, retaining Rock Steady and opening AMI (Aucoin Management Incorporated), which was headquartered in a dazzling Madison Avenue high-rise. Bill’s confidence had reached new heights with the success of KISS, and he began to look for other artists to sign. One of those he signed was a singer named Billy Squier, whose girlfriend was Maxanne Sartori, a DJ on WBCN radio in Boston. Maxanne was about the only person there who would play KISS. Because of this, I had introduced her to Bill Aucoin, and Maxanne, in turn, had introduced Aucoin to Billy Squier. The two got along very well, and it wasn’t long before Aucoin was managing Squier. Bill offered us Squier, but we thought it better not to have all of Aucoin’s eggs in our basket and also wondered what KISS would think if Casablanca had another Aucoin act. We passed on inking Squier, mostly because we were leery of getting involved with someone Aucoin was having a personal relationship with, and we were under the impression he was with Billy in a physical sense—Aucoin was and is openly gay. Aucoin eventually signed Squier to Capitol Records, where he had several hits.

  While KISS had always been very loyal to Aucoin, they were troubled that they were selling concert tickets and albums as fast as they could be printed, but there was still no money to be had. Part of this, or most of it, could be ascribed to the fact that the money they made was funneled back into touring, which was an expensive undertaking, considering how elaborate their production demands were. Still, KISS felt that their money could be better managed. So, in May 1976, they hired Glickman/ Marks Management as their business managers. Carl Glickman was a big real estate tycoon out of Cleveland, and Howard Marks was an advertising guy in New York. Aucoin had known Marks for years, as Bill’s old company, Direction Plus, had produced commercials for Howard Marks Advertising. I found the hiring somewhat odd, as Carl and Howard were both way past understanding rock and roll: Marks was forty-seven, and Glickman was fifty.

  We soon found ourselves on the receiving end of a demand for a new record contract. Keep in mind that one of Neil’s greatest fears was that we would lose a band and then see them have a hit with someone else. Neil loved music, and he loved success, but he had an obsessive, abject fear of failure. For him, the style of the music was largely irrelevant; if it was good, he liked it, no matter what the genre, and he was usually excellent at second-guessing the public. But the fear of losing out on the opportunity for a hit consumed him. It had happened with Melanie. After she left Buddah, she had a big hit with “Brand New Key,” and Neil felt that this reflected badly on him—he had worked so hard for her, and he’d committed so many resources to making her a star. Numerous people in the record biz later told me that Neil had made a Herculean effort on behalf of Melanie’s career and that for a while her name seemed to be the only thing coming out of his mouth. I thought that Neil had taken the entire thing far too personally. I subscribed to the shit-happens school of thought. My take was that Melanie had had the right song at the right time, and she’d never had another. It was no one’s fault. Neil’s fear was something I could not understand, and it would be the source of several arguments between us over the years.

  KISS was big enough to be a very attractive jewel for a major record company to add to its crown, and the band could easily have left Casablanca for a more lucrative domain—Capitol, Warner, or any of the other big houses. To their credit, and to our relief, they decided to stay with us. I’d like to think it was partly out of loyalty, but an important motivation was the fact that even if they signed with another label, Casablanca would retain control of their back catalog, and that made them uncomfortable. Additionally, they still believed in Neil and his ability to market them better than anyone else. Their contracts always contained a clause citing Neil as the key man.
This meant that if the company was ever bought, or if anything ever happened to Neil, they were free to do what they wanted. We were going to pay through the nose to keep them, and it would be one of the main reasons for Casablanca’s downfall.

  The contract Glickman/Marks brought to us called for half a million dollars per album as an advance, and another half million for advertising. A million dollars per album! In 1976, this was a ton of money for any band, though the ratio between advance money and advertising was perfectly reasonable. The cash outlay for advertising would help us as well as them, but seeing the price tag on paper nearly made us choke. Again, if they had trusted us, we would have spent the money anyway, but they didn’t, and they had decided to take control of their own destiny. Marks’s advertising agency had almost complete discretion as to how that advertising money was spent; the only fail-safe was that we had to mutually agree to all expenditures. But, in the end, while I would argue with them about certain points, they would usually prevail because they were the so-called advertising experts. I took to reminding myself that we had other things to do, and we couldn’t concentrate all our energies on one group. I won a few battles, but as time went on, I began to pay less and less attention to the hundred-page advertising schedules they sent me. Marks’s firm was to receive the typical agency commission on advertising: 15 percent of gross. This translated into a guaranteed minimum of seventy-five thousand for Glickman/Marks’s advertising agency fee, plus their fee for acting as KISS’s business managers. Aucoin was still their manager, as well, and his fee was 25 percent, so the total of fees incurred by the band was significant.