And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records

by Harris, Larry

  We knew that KISS would eventually become so big that they would sell at least two to three million units each time out. Cutting a deal for one million dollars per album was therefore not out of the question. The band deserved the money, and we knew that with the strong fan base they had cultivated, they would be selling large amounts of product for years to come.

  Glickman/Marks got so heavily into the band’s finances and advertising that Casablanca became almost superfluous to the operation, simply handling sales and a minor bit of promotion. We were used to being involved in planning tours and controlling the press. Now we would step back and let the new KISS organization do the work, unless they interfered with our plans, and then a fight would develop. We were on the brink of getting a KISS single on few major stations when things suddenly fell apart because the KISS promotion team had butted in and ruined everything we’d set up. The KISS promo guys—they actually worked directly for Aucoin—had offered a concert exclusive to a rival station without consulting us. Neil hit the ceiling when he found out. We were all frustrated, because we felt like we were dealing with amateurs.

  But there was an upside to this situation. With the growth of the company, and with all the other major artists we were developing (like Donna Summer and Parliament), it was probably better that we had less to do for KISS. While it would have been nice to use the celebrity of the band we’d worked so hard to establish to boost other up-and-coming artists, KISS was not about to let that happen. Neil and Joyce (who very quietly married on May 28, in an extremely atypical ultra-low-profile Justice of the Peace ceremony, which none of us fellow Casablanca people attended) did maintain their strong personal relationship with Howard Marks, and he and I always got along great. So the communication between the company and group improved, and soon it was running very smoothly.

  For both political and practical reasons, we began to hire Howard Marks Advertising to do campaigns for other acts. We had them place advertising for Donna Summer and Parliament product and tours; they also took on various projects that we did not feel we could develop properly without using a full-service advertising agency. In any case, keeping Howard Marks happy was a strategy that we had come up with to keep KISS grief to a minimum. If we could convince Howard that his fortunes lay with us as much as they did with KISS, then he would be more amenable to working with us as partners on equal footing. We grew closer to Howard and one of his execs, Rosanne Shelnutt, through all the contact we had with them. With these deals, I paid very close attention to the agency’s advertising buys, and I often asked that buys be changed to reflect our approach to marketing many of our artists, not just KISS.

  As the dust was settling from Glickman/Marks’s arrival on the scene, KISS left for Europe. They headed to England first. Wally Meyrowitz (who was still KISS’s booking agent at ATI) and his wife, Lorie, along with me and Candy, made the trip to London. The band was scheduled to rehearse for a few days at Shepperton Studios in Surrey, just outside the city. After rehearsals concluded, the entire contingent trekked to Manchester for the first show of the tour. Following the concert, Wally, Lorie, Candy, and I headed back to London, while the rest of the group moved on to Birmingham. With no one to guide us, we quickly got lost. After wandering around for a while, we made our way to a railway station, and Wally spotted a train that we thought might be headed back to London. The train had already begun to pull out of the station, so we ran after it and leapt aboard like a group of vagabonds. We landed in what looked like a cattle car—no seats, no tickets required. We rode the train for what seemed like hours before finally arriving in London. At the time, the terror campaign of the Irish Republican Army was particularly active, and people were paranoid about suspicious-looking strangers; we got back to our hotel so late and looking so disheveled that we were subjected to a strict and very thorough search before we were allowed to enter.

  The response to KISS’s European tour was hit and miss. Worse, as far as we were concerned, Destroyer was not maintaining the tremendous momentum established by Alive! Not a good sign. Neil and I knew that failing to recapture the kind of hype and sales that Alive! had generated could lead to the band being labeled with three words we avoided like the plague: one . . . hit... wonder.

  Upon returning from Europe, the band immediately geared up for another tour of North America. They would have new costumes and a completely new stage show. Glickman/Marks was turning this into a business and had hired the Jules Fischer Organization (whose experience ran toward Broadway shows) to design and manufacture a new set and production.

  Much like Casablanca, KISS seemed to be operating without a budget—their only constraint was the limits of their imagination. Taking their cue from the Alive! liner notes (the first purposeful attempt to highlight the band mates’ individual personas) and the Destroyer cover’s postapocalyptic landscape, Jules Fischer drafted a set and production that was astonishing in its excess. Flights of stairs flanked the drum riser, which was guarded by two green-eyed demonic cats and rose more than twenty feet in the air at the show’s end, unfurling an enormous cat-adorned tapestry in its wake. On stage left, another flight of stairs led up to something called the Moon Garden (in keeping with Ace Frehley’s Spaceman character). On stage right, Gene Simmons’s demon profile had its own platform, which held a structure of decaying bricks like an iconic castle from the old Hammer horror films and a towering bloody stake that rose behind the bassist during his now infamous blood-spitting routine.

  The backline of speaker cabinets was decorated with pieces of a cityscape (again from the Destroyer cover), which fell off on cue. There was also a prop that looked like a desiccated tree, which didn’t bear a resemblance to anything the band had done. It just sat there and looked strange. Above the stage were three huge lighting rigs designed to look like red-white-and-blue lightning bolts (you couldn’t escape the bicentennial), and the main lighting rigs were constructed to look like high-tension electrical towers. Behind the drum kit was an oversized Van der Graff generator that shot out enormous arcs of electricity. In a set replete with all sorts of dangers, this forty-five-year-old prop trumped them all (it had been made for the 1931 film Frankenstein), and I can’t imagine that Peter Criss was fond of sitting a few feet away from a rickety movie prop that shot out that kind of amperage. Even the stage floor and the band’s front stage monitors were decorated. At one point, the idea of crashing a car onstage had been discussed. Too bad that never happened—I was looking forward to working over Ford, Chrysler, and GM for the rights to give us free cars to destroy every night.

  By July, Neil and I knew that we needed to increase Destroyer’s sales. KISS was already touring, so that avenue of promotion was covered. We released The Originals on July 21, a multi-album set of KISS’s first three albums, in the hope of exploiting the exposure Alive! had given us to revitalize KISS’s back catalog. While the repackaging did well on its own, eventually reaching Gold status, it did nothing to boost Destroyer’s middling sales.

  Another single seemed like our best option. The obvious choice was “Detroit Rock City,” the album’s hard-rocking opening number. The reason we chose this song was twofold. KISS was big in Detroit, and we would get an airplay assist from the AOR stations in the market. The other reason was Rosalie Trombley and CKLW. CKLW was a fifty-thousand-watt powerhouse AM station located across the river from Detroit in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. We knew that Rosalie had liked KISS back when Buck was pushing the group on her. When KISS had first played Cobo Arena, in May 1975, we’d brought Rosalie in for the show. Buck had picked her up in a limo, presented her with a dozen roses, taken her across the border to a fancy Detroit restaurant, and brought her backstage to meet the band. KISS, being forewarned about the visit, treated Rosalie like royalty. One of the things KISS (Gene, in particular) was good at was making someone feel comfortable, especially if it helped the band.

  Scott Shannon made a special effort to get Rosalie an advance copy of “Detroit Rock City” and asked her to give us her opin
ion of it. We knew that if she liked the song and made a commitment to play it, then we would be well ahead of the game. After Scott had heard from Rosalie, he came into my office. His complexion was ashen and he was very subdued. Rosalie, he told me, did not like “Detroit Rock City.” She liked the B side, “Beth.” I immediately understood Scott’s reaction.

  You see, Neil hated “Beth.” Months earlier, in February, when KISS and Bob Ezrin had first played Destroyer for us, Neil’s divorce from Beth was just being finalized. His emotions were raw, and his wounds were reopened every time he had to speak with an attorney about the situation, which was often. Hearing “Beth” (cowritten and sung by Peter Criss), he jumped to the conclusion that the band was making fun of him by writing a song about his ex-wife. He blurted out that the song would never be a single, and he promised to bury it as a B side. It didn’t matter that Peter explained to everyone that the song was about his own wife, Lydia; when he couldn’t find anything to rhyme with “Lydia,” he’d switched to “Beth.” (The true story, related to me years later, was that “Beth” was originally titled “Beck,” and it had been written long before KISS was formed, not for Lydia, but for Becky, the nagging girlfriend of one of Peter’s previous band mates.)

  Still fairly new to the company, Scott was afraid of what Neil might do or say to him when he told him about Rosalie’s reaction. Neil was on vacation in Acapulco and unreachable that day, so I had to make the decision. I had Scott tell Rosalie that we would back her up if she played “Beth,” and that I would take the heat from Neil for changing the sides. From that point on, “Beth” was the single’s A side and “Detroit Rock City” was its B side. Why was it necessary to make this switch if the single had already started receiving airplay? Because it gave us the opportunity to reintroduce the single to the marketplace and resend it to radio stations (many of which may have already tossed out the original issue); it also made things easier for the chart makers at Billboard, Cashbox, and Record World and for retailers, who would have been at a loss as to where they should place the single in their display bins.

  Rosalie began to play “Beth.” Scott had also called in some favors from a few buddies at stations in the South, and they obliged him by adding the song to their playlists. The single began to break, appearing on radio add lists, breakouts, and hot lists in all of the radio trade publications. This was another of those serendipitous occurrences—common then, but impossible now, with the advent of the CD and the demise of the 45rpm record. Today, no music director or program director at a major station would take a chance on a new record from a still-unproven group. A record now has to be tested to death, and numerous consultants have to agree that it’s worthy. This is a prime example of radio’s contribution to the stifling of creativity and excitement in music. Today’s record company reps can’t talk to most music and program directors without going through the station’s independent promoter.

  By September, “Beth” had begun to climb the charts. Then this unlikely song—the B side of the third single from an album that had been panned by some and had thus far fallen well short of building upon its predecessor’s momentum, a string-laden, melodramatic ballad from a band that had established itself by breaking ribcages with three chords and by shooting flames across the stage—became a runaway, crossover, adult contemporary hit. And, as the weeks scrolled by, the song so hated by Casablanca’s owner, the song that had turned our otherwise upbeat promotions guy into a defeated zombie, shot up the charts and became KISS’s first Top 10 single.

  I cannot overemphasize how important that song was to KISS’s eventual achievement of superstardom. And it shoved Casablanca several rungs up the prestige ladder in the process. In fact, without “Beth,” it’s entirely possible that KISS would soon have found themselves in the “Where are they now?” category. Up to that point, they had created great buzz as a live act and had broken through in a high-profile way with Alive! (which was still comfortably positioned on the charts). They were clearly a band that many in the industry were watching, but the bottom line was that they couldn’t sell singles with the big boys, and their appeal as recording artists and as live performers was still limited to a fairly narrow demographic. “Beth” changed all that. The single surfed the charts for months, peaking at No. 7 on both Billboard and Cashbox. Suddenly, middle-aged moms carting their kids to school were crooning along with KISS on their favorite adult contemporary stations. With its crossover appeal, “Beth” hurdled demographic walls that we’d never dreamed of scaling. An entire new world now lay open to us. We only had to take that first brave step forward.

  13 The Mothership Arrives

  Flying saucer dudes—The Group with No Name—

  Long John Baldry—The casbah grows again—The Disco

  Forum—Welcome, Mr. Guber—Casablanca Record &

  FilmWorks—The Deep—The Alexander Calder art

  gallery—Rock and Roll Over

  September 1976

  Hangar E

  Stewart International Airport

  Newburgh, New York

  “You want to land a what?”

  The conversation between George Clinton and me had been surreal. Then again, most of our conversations were strange. And the few that weren’t strange were incredibly strange. This was one of the latter.

  “Wait a second, George—you want to land a what? A mothership? Onstage?”

  Through a haze of pot smoke, Clinton’s unmistakable head was nodding up and down. I could have argued. I could have listed a hundred reasons, starting with the fact that it defied common sense, why landing a life-sized spaceship onstage on a nightly basis was not going to work. I could have quoted numbers and margins and returns on investment. I could have, but I didn’t. I’d learned not to bother trying to talk George Clinton out of something when he had his mind set on it. Hell, George always recognized his own absurdity: “Larry, when you’re funky, you don’t make any sense,” was something I’d heard a dozen times. And, considering the success his creative inspirations had brought Casablanca so far, maybe choosing not to argue was the smart move.

  That was months ago and three thousand miles away. Now George and the boys were on an air force base in upstate New York, in a big, echoing hangar, watching a life-sized spaceship (that cost two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars to construct) landing on a massive stage set. Wow. They were in production rehearsals for an upcoming tour. The facility was owned by Theatre Techniques, the stage construction company that had built the set. Both the Rolling Stones and KISS had rehearsed here, KISS as recently as three months before. The KISS connection did not stop there, as the Parliament stage and production had been designed by the Jules Fischer Organization, the company that had provided a similar service for KISS’s new tour.

  Parliament’s concerts were out of this world, even without the expensive mothership production. The show revolved around the history of funk on our planet. Funk had been brought to Earth by aliens aboard UFOs and stored in the great Egyptian pyramids. About halfway through the set, during “Mothership Connection,” guitarist Glenn Goins would repeatedly sing the line, “I think I see the mothership comin’.” The other band members would point toward the back of the house, just as pyro ignited. Then the silver mothership would begin flying over the arena floor above the lighting rig.

  The mothership was shaped more or less like a flying saucer—round if you looked at it from below, from the audience’s perspective, and tapering to a point like a pyramid if you looked at it in profile. There were lighting cans circling the perimeter of the mothership’s base. As the saucer flew overhead, the lights would glow, a torrent of sparks (from Roman-candle-like effects called gerbs) would arc downward, and plumes of dry ice would flow into the air; all of this combined to create the illusion of exhaust and flight. After completing the trek to the front of the house, the mothership would hover briefly, and there would be a short blackout, during which a quick switch would be made: the mothership was obscured in the lighting rig, and
a much larger version of it was lowered slowly to the stage floor; clouds of dry ice billowed out from underneath it, cleverly mimicking powerful thrusters shooting down into the dust, as 120 decibels of rocket power ripped through the PA. Four glass orbs, which were lit from within, were mounted on the corners of the scaffold-like frame that supported the prop.

  Then, after a two-second blackout and a single burst of exhaust from the ascending mothership, George Clinton would rise from beneath the multilevel set to the top of a staircase. As the fog abated, he would begin his classic pimp walk down the stairs while the band launched into their next number. It was a very effective production, and Parliament would continue to use it throughout most of the decade.

  Neil, Joyce, and Cecil flew out to New Orleans for the inaugural landing of the mothership on October 27, and they came back with reports of the crowd’s ecstatic reaction. Clinton was equal parts Sly Stone, Pink Floyd, and Billy Graham, and the concert experience he created was a euphoric revivalist celebration, a religious communion. I reminded myself that this was why we didn’t argue with George. Parliament stayed on the road for months, taking the mothership to tens of thousands of mesmerized concertgoers.