And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records

by Harris, Larry

  With two of our biggest acts, KISS and Parliament, on tour, we turned our attention to others. Even at this point, a full two and half years into the Casablanca adventure, and with quite a few successes on our resume, our release schedule and our artist roster were still sparse. Just before Labor Day, on September 3, we released a self-titled album by a group with no name—literally, that was what they dubbed themselves: The Group With No Name. We’d tried and tried to figure out a name for them, but no one could come up with one. Their album had been nearly a year in the making, and it was a pet project of Neil’s.

  • April 24, 1976: Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels proposes on the air to pay The Beatles $3,000 for a reunion on the program. Among the viewers are Lennon and McCartney, together in New York, who consider walking to the studio to accept.

  • July 29, 1976: The Son of Sam (David Berkowitz) murder spree begins.

  • December 8, 1976: Hotel California by The Eagles is released.

  The quintet consisted of two singing waiters and three singing waitresses from the Great American Food and Beverage Company in Los Angeles. From what I recall, Gene Simmons was an old college buddy of one the guys in the group and had brought them to Neil’s attention. Gene also had something going on with one of the waitresses, Katey Sagal, who, eleven years later, would play Peggy Bundy on the hit Fox sitcom Married with Children. Katey and the rest of the group had been hanging out with us for the better part of a year, since we were back on Sherbourne. They were nice kids and everyone liked them a lot. I felt that their LP had the potential to turn into something special, but, again, it was Neil who really loved this band. Since all five members could sing lead, he believed they had that magic something that it takes to become a supergroup. The band eventually hired Joyce and Donna Summer’s manager, Dick Broder, to represent them, and they did a live appearance on the syndicated TV show Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert. They opened with their first single, “Baby Love (How Could You Leave Me),” and they were quite impressive. Despite this high-profile appearance, a second single (“Get Out in the Sunshine”), and continued print support in the trades, no one could figure out how to market the band, and the LP went nowhere.

  The Group With No Name wasn’t the only act we struggled to develop. Another was Larry Santos, a blues/soul singer who’d penned a No. 3 hit called “Candy Girl” for The Four Seasons in 1963. We’d released a self-titled album for him in June of 1975 and a follow-up in early October 1976. We all loved Larry, and his voice was just haunting (he has since done a multitude of commercial voice-overs), but we’d no idea how to market him. His material was wonderful, but its production—featuring lush orchestral accompaniment—morphed his blues/ soul vibe into something unmarketable. The music was too progressive to be blues, and too bluesy for the progressive radio stations to touch. Try as we might, MOR (middle of the road) radio was the only place where we could find a home for it, and MOR was such a catch-all category that landing it there meant nothing. Larry fit into no existing format, and because of that, his albums flopped in terms of sales.

  Another project we were spearheading was an album by Long John Baldry. John was an extremely tall, thin guy who is probably best remembered for his association with other, more successful musicians: he shared a stage with Jimmy Page, Rod Stewart, and Elton John at various points during the 1960s. I was very much aware of his pedigree, recognizing him as royalty on the English music scene. I met him a few times and found him brilliant and interesting to talk to. His only album for us, Welcome to Club Casablanca, did not do well. It was mostly a case of bad timing; with Parliament, KISS, and Donna Summer skyrocketing simultaneously, plus the constant influx of new people at Casablanca, our plate was too full to give his album the attention it needed. There was also the problem of his back catalog: John had so many past releases that there was little demand for new material. He eventually launched a suit against us for not marketing his product, and I wanted to fight it. Neil cautioned me, “If you want to, then fine, but sometimes it’s cheaper to settle and bite the bullet.” I considered this and weighed it against the cost of giving John what he wanted. We settled for ten thousand dollars, which was a lot less than the lawyers would have billed us to fight it.

  Between the successes and failures of our various releases, Casablanca’s personnel file grew and grew and grew. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that I could walk into the office on any given day and meet someone new. Entire departments seemed to sprout up overnight, like weeds through cracks in the pavement. To give you an idea of the volume of our promotions, hirings, and firings, in the space of seven days in September we: promoted Susan Munao to VP of press and artist relations; promoted Al DiNoble to director of singles; hired a guy named Eliot Sekuler to be director of creative services; and rehired Nancy Reingold, now divorced, to handle MOR radio (she’d championed Larry Santos, which is why he’d landed on MOR). And we weren’t done yet: we promoted Phyllis Chotin to director of advertising; promoted Peggy Martin to national tour director; hired Nellie Prestwood as publicity tour coordinator; and hired Elaine Cooper to be our artist relations coordinator. That was just one week. I had little idea if the promotions were even merited. Not that I thought people were doing a poor job per se, but it was mind-boggling to watch promotions being handed out like hors d’oeuvres. We were growing rapidly and needed more resources, so we hired more people. That made sense. But doing so forced us to shuffle the people already working for us into new positions and/or give them new titles, and it all felt like a big game of massage the ego.

  Our publicity department consisted of three or four people, including Susan Munao. We needed that department to grow quickly to support other areas of the company, including promotion, sales, accounting, and the art department. I think the only area that did not see substantial growth was the international department, which was headed by Mauri Lathower, whose assistants were Scott Bergstein and Candy’s sister, Christy. We began to expand the press department by hiring Soozin Kazick as a publicist. She had worked for Neil at Buddah as early as 1969 and then gone on to Capitol Records; she was now living with Howie Rosen (I had introduced them), who would soon be tapped for our promotions department. Susan Munao wasn’t crazy about Soozin—she knew her from New York and did not like her reputation or the way she worked, but she had little choice in the matter.

  Neil and I knew that Soozin was a very good publicist. I remember a night that Neil and I spent with Soozin and her close friend, Creem writer Lester Bangs, at her apartment in New York. Lester was in New York for business, and we all got together for dinner and schmoozing. We did not do many drugs that night, we just sat around talking. Lester was probably the most opinionated writer in rock, especially when he was among other critics, and he wielded a great deal of influence in his professional circle. The night was great, and from then on we never had to worry about Lester verbally destroying any of our rock artists. He was never kind to our disco artists, but we didn’t care.

  Having Soozin at the company made things a little awkward for Candy, as many years before, Soozin and I had had a brief affair. I was forthright with Candy about it, and eventually she and Soozin became the best of friends. They went through their first pregnancies together. When our son Morgan was born, on June 21, 1978, Howie and Soozin were in the room next to ours—they’d had their daughter the day before. We turned the maternity ward into a Casablanca satellite office.

  Part of successfully navigating Casablanca through the waters of the music industry was attending a seemingly endless string of conventions. As a young record company, it was especially important for us to make our presence felt at every opportunity. Next on the convention itinerary was a trip to New York at the end of September for Billboard’s second Disco Forum at the Americana Hotel. It was a four-day affair that ran from September 28 through October 1. On the final evening, an awards banquet was held at which twenty-six winners were presented with various accolades. Largely, if not exclusively, on the strength o
f Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby,” Casablanca was named disco label of the year. I remember accepting the award in person, but I can recall nothing else about the convention, which says something about how many of these get-togethers I attended and what a blur my life had become. We took out a full-page ad in the next issue of Billboard heralding the award. The ad was in the form of a letter from Neil praising disco and emphasizing the genre’s glowing future. It was a nice little award, the first of many disco-related achievements Casablanca would claim in the next eighteen months.

  By far the most significant development came later in October. Neil completed negotiations with Peter Guber to merge Guber’s film production company, FilmWorks, with Casablanca. Peter was a tall, thin, good-looking guy, always well dressed, with an engaging personality and an easygoing smile. He was pure Hollywood. He’d spent some time at Columbia Pictures as an executive VP in charge of worldwide production, leaving in 1975 to form his own company. He knew the movie biz inside and out and had a great brand of bullshit, to boot. Guber navigated the film industry with the same natural ease that Neil navigated the music world. The two had known each other for years, and together they formed a very dynamic duo. They were either Batman and Robin, or Abbott and Costello—I’m not sure which.

  Entering the motion picture business gave Neil the opportunity to become more of a player in Hollywood, and this was of utmost importance to his long-range plans. He had been working on the deal for quite some time, probably close to a year, and he’d always kept the Casablanca ownership group of Cecil, me, Richard Trugman, and even Buck apprised of developments. In order to make the deal happen, we would each have to grant Peter 20 percent of our stock. This was one of the many issues Buck had had with Neil that eventually led to his departure. Buck was so stuck in the here and now that he never seemed to grasp the big picture. If he’d had any foresight, Buck would have seen that the deal Neil had struck was particularly lopsided in Casablanca’s favor. Considering Guber’s success at Columbia, I was very surprised that he wanted to join a company that had spent most of the past two years peering into the abyss of bankruptcy without ever making a profit. Guber could easily have made much more money producing movies on his own than with us, but he was hedging his bets. He bet against himself, and it turned out to be a bad gamble for him.

  Casablanca would own the profits from a five-picture deal Guber had in place with Columbia. In exchange, Guber got 20 percent of a company that was in the red and that, despite all its successes, real and apparent, had never come close to being profitable. But in some ways it may have been a good move for Peter to make: if he had stayed with Columbia, I have no doubt that they would have amortized all of his movies against each other and eventually, through creative accounting, showed that he owed them money and his firstborn.

  The newly merged company was renamed Casablanca Record & FilmWorks. We retained our Sunset location as our headquarters and built out the first floor to accommodate the new film division. We owned three buildings at the site (over fourteen thousand square feet combined), and we still had plenty of room for expansion. Neil kept the title of president, while Peter was named chairman of the board.

  The first picture, an adaptation of Peter Benchley’s follow-up novel to jaws, titled The Deep, was already in production in Bermuda by the time the deal was inked. Development of the movie had begun under the Columbia banner, and Columbia would serve as our domestic distributor on the deal. The merger was certainly a coup for us, and I was especially blown away by the size of the first movie. It had been barely a year since the jaws phenomenon had exploded into theaters—the film had single-handedly created the concept of the summer blockbuster. The property and anything associated with it was still red hot. Peter Benchley’s name gave the picture instant cash-cow status, and with an impressive cast (Jacqueline Bisset, Nick Nolte, Lou Gossett Jr., and Robert Shaw) included, I couldn’t see how it could fail. Guber had also finalized a deal with Bantam Books to release a behind-the-scenes documentary paperback, tentatively titled Inside the Deep, which he would pen himself.

  Another film was listed in the initial agreement. Titled Six Weeks, it had a certain cachet to it as well: the script was to be written by David Seltzer, who was hot due to the success of his screenplay for The Omen. However, unlike production on The Deep, production on Six Weeks went nowhere, and the film wasn’t released until years later, in 1982.

  The glitz and glam of having big names on your roster comes with a price—it demands that you coddle egos and deal with hypersensitive personalities. In November, we were forced to confront a growing problem related to Donna Summer’s boyfriend, Peter Mühldorfer. A lanky fellow, Mühldorfer had established himself as an up-and-coming artist in European surrealist circles. He had come to LA to spend time with Donna, and we all bent over backwards to make him feel comfortable, but all the luxuries and the hospitality we bestowed upon him had no effect. He could see no reason to stay on in the US. He felt that he was the artist, not Donna—she was just his “woman.” He had also grown tired of looking after her young daughter, Mimi. We needed Donna in LA, but getting Donna stateside on a permanent basis required getting Mühldorfer stateside.

  Neil backed into the solution when he was in Europe with Joyce attempting to garner Casablanca a better distribution deal with some European record companies. (Our distribution arrangement with EMI had been terminated, and an arrangement with RCA to step into the fold had collapsed as well.) While there, Neil got a chance to buy some works by the great artist Alexander Calder—enough to fill a shipping container, and all for a steal. He and Trugman decided that if they had all of these Calder pieces, they could open an art gallery in LA and sell the work; they could also show the work of Peter Mühldorfer, thereby giving him a reason to live in Los Angeles. This would allow Donna to be in LA full time to work on her publicity. It was a win-win situation for everyone, and thus the short-lived Casablanca ArtWorks was born.

  Preparations for the opening of the ArtWorks Gallery were accelerated when the seventy-eight-year-old, terminally ill Calder passed away, on November 11. Not to be ghoulish, but the timing could not have been more ideal in terms of business: nothing increases the value of art like the passing of the artist. Neil and Richard had more invested in the gallery and inventory than anyone else, and they thought that this would be their road to riches. Casablanca’s press department worked on a big opening for ArtWorks, which Candy and I attended, though not necessarily willingly. In fact, Neil decreed that attendance was mandatory; furthermore, we were pressured into purchasing a few Calder prints. The ArtWorks Gallery failed almost immediately. Calder had hired many people to work on his stuff, so even if it bore his name, a Calder work might never even have been touched by the artist. The market was flooded with Calders as soon as he died. But, even though it was a miserable failure as a business, ArtWorks did get Donna Summer over to the US permanently.

  Our work wasn’t finished on that front. We found out that Peter beat Donna when he was feeling down or depressed. She was the focus of attention, the star, not him, and this was very difficult for him to take. We marshaled a campaign to help her build the courage to leave him. Eventually, she saw the light, and they split up. The breakup devastated her, but I believe that her musical success and her new support group helped her to get through this difficult part of her life.

  Meanwhile, KISS was ready to release yet another studio album. In the 1970s, when the biggest acts only released albums on a yearly basis, at most, KISS was churning out material at a breakneck pace. It had been a little over two and a half years since their debut release, and they were completing their sixth album. Much of that output had been directly supported—if not outright demanded—by Neil. The album, titled Rock and Roll Over, was scheduled to ship on November 1, and to get some national exposure for it, we booked the band to appear on The Paul Lynde Halloween Special. The hour-long program aired on October 29 on ABC Television, and it created a nice sales spike for us. It was a grea
t opportunity to feature some of KISS’s material, especially “Beth,” which was in the middle of its successful ride on the charts; the band lip-synched three songs on the show. The national exposure was likely responsible for “Beth” peaking on the charts: it entered the Top 10 a few weeks after the special aired.

  14 The Skyrocket Takes Flight

  Bird flies in—Shannon flies out—Howie, Brian, and

  Don—Managing the asylum—Fire!—Blow job—

  Machine guns—Spinal Tap: The prequel—Angel at

  Midnight—Douglas Records—Millennium and

  galactic funk—“The CIA Report”

  January 1977

  Casablanca Record & FilmWorks Headquarters

  8255 Sunset Boulevard

  Los Angeles, California

  Casablanca released sixteen albums in 1976. In 1977, that number would triple. This type of growth is exactly what the owners of every young business hope for, but steering a company through such expansion is more challenging than creating it to begin with. One of the major factors behind our accelerated growth rate was Bruce Bird, whom we hired as vice president of promotion in January 1977. Bruce ran a successful independent promotion business out of Cleveland, and we’d used him to help market our product in that region. He was happy where he was (his mother and his children from his first marriage lived nearby), and he made an excellent living, but he was also developing a relationship with Nancy Reingold, Buck’s ex-wife. They had known each other for many years—in a purely platonic way—until their relationship took a different turn at a convention in 1976. The news of their budding romance was not well received by Neil. He was desperate to keep Beth and their children in LA. If Nancy, her twin, moved to another city to be with Bruce, then Beth could decide to follow her, taking the kids.