And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records

by Harris, Larry

  Nancy had finally ended her marriage to Buck earlier in 1976. He was lying to her and cheating on her every hour of every day. He was absolutely shameless about it—it was almost as if he wanted to get caught. He was so brazen that among his shack-ups was a woman who lived across the street from them. He would even cheat at the office while Nancy was in the next room. But her loyalty to him was so strong that it took a sledgehammer to the head to get her to recognize his infidelity.

  Early in her relationship with Bruce, Nancy (who had begun to spend a great deal of her time with Bruce in Cleveland) had decided that it would help ease Neil’s angst if she and Bruce were to visit him in LA. So she and Bruce came to town, but they spent most of their visit with Candy and me, and a lot of that time Nancy and Candy just hovered over lines of coke complaining about Neil. Of course, word of these bitching sessions ended up getting back to Neil (Nancy had trouble keeping her mouth shut), leaving the Bruce-Neil relationship in an even worse state than it would have been if Bruce had just stayed home, which is what he’d wanted to do in the first place.

  One afternoon a week or two later, after Nancy and Bruce had left LA, I heard Neil on the phone through our adjoining office door. The volume of the conversation was so loud that I could hear what he was saying with the door closed. “You’re going to do what?!” Neil sounded incredulous. “No! Nancy, you can’t . . . I won’t stand for it.” I shifted uncomfortably in my chair, realizing that Nancy was trying to explain her feelings for Bruce. Neil spun into a tirade. “How could you? How could you possibly marry that complete slob?! He’s going nowhere! He’s a nobody!”

  I absolutely hate playing the middleman in personal conflicts. I’d tried acting as hall monitor between Candy and Neil and gotten nowhere—I’d always thought that two adults shouldn’t need some outside moderator to broker a peace treaty for them anyway. And if I had thought that this particular conflict would have no impact on the company, I would have simply let Neil and Nancy hash it out, but as vice president I had a responsibility to protect Casablanca.

  I let it play out for a few more minutes before I rolled my eyes, sighed, and trudged off to talk Neil down. I opened the adjoining door and shut it behind me. I’d learned that the key to coaxing Neil back off the ledge was a mix of calm, quiet, and resolution. “Look, I know you want Nancy to stay here in LA, but screaming at her and calling the man she loves a slob is going to get you absolutely nowhere, and you know it.” Neil looked at me intensely, eyes popping out more than usual. Then he exhaled and said, “Yeah, I know, you’re right. I’ll get it together.” “OK, then,” I thought, and then I went back to my desk.

  Not five minutes later, I received a call from Bruce, who must have been listening to Nancy talk to Neil. Bruce was every bit as livid. He told me that he and I would always be friends, but he would never do promotion work for Casablanca again, and he would certainly never speak to Neil. Later in the day, after I knew that Neil’s emotions had settled and I had given myself time to think, I went back into his office to talk things over. I was blunt: “If you ever want to have a relationship with Nancy again, you better find a way to apologize and make it up to her. And to Bruce, too.” Although his emotions were easily stirred, Neil was a smart man, and he finally admitted that he wasn’t really mad at Bruce at all; he just desperately wanted to maintain his contact with Nancy, he valued it so much. After a few days, he spoke to Nancy and Bruce and invited them back to LA. Bruce was apprehensive about returning, but he would grin and bear it for Nancy. During their visit, Neil had them over to his house and did a real sales number on Bruce, offering him the position of vice president of promotion. Bruce accepted, even though it would cut his salary in half. Neil assured Bruce that he would take care of him—wink, wink. To my knowledge, he never did, but for the moment, Neil was happy, Nancy was happy, and Bruce was happy.

  I was fine with the resolution, too, but only because this is what Neil needed to do to keep Nancy in LA. But the collateral damage caused by Neil’s move was now my problem—that is, I had to figure out a way to tell Scott Shannon that someone had just taken his job. That would have been relatively easy had Scott been doing poorly, but he hadn’t. I was very satisfied with Scott as head of promotion; he was doing a good job, and we had had some major hits under his watch—“Beth,” in particular. Since Neil had gotten me into this mess, he would damn well help get me out of it. The next day, he and I huddled to figure out what we could offer Scott that would seem like a lateral move or, better yet, a promotion. I called Scott into my office and explained to him that with the company growing so fast, we wanted to give him a promotion and a raise. He was to be our vice president in charge of special projects. He would help out in various areas of the company, including the motion picture division. Scott went along with this for a time, but I suspect he always resented it, and that showed up later when he was back in radio running a big station in Miami; he refused to help any of us out—me, Neil, or Bruce. He wouldn’t play our records or even take our calls. Years later, I ran into him in a restaurant in New York. By that time, he was a fairly famous DJ on Z100 with a nationally syndicated show. The chance meeting was pleasant enough, and we greeted each other cordially, but that was as far as it went.

  When Bruce moved to LA, he started to build the promotions department, luring some of the best promotion guys away from other companies with perks like a Mercedes, first-class airfare everywhere, and a big salary increase, plus full coverage of moving expenses and, in some cases, the down payment on a house. By March, the department was staffed by three guys talented and experienced enough to be running national promotions by themselves: Howie Rosen, Brian Interland, and Don Wasley.

  Don was entirely new to me, but I’d known Howie and Brian for years. We knew Brian from the Buddah days, when he had worked promo for the local Boston distributor. We’d always liked him a great deal, plus he was still tight with all of my friends at WBCN, so that was another point in his favor. All three had different strengths, and Bruce efficiently captured and directed those strengths to give us the strongest promotion team in the country. Brian was close to the northeast programmers, Don ran in San Francisco circles, and Howie had programming friends scattered along the eastern seaboard. The lineup didn’t last for long. Don Wasley became head of our artist relations department, which meant hanging out with KISS and other artists. Brian was in LA only a short while before his failing marriage forced him to return to Boston, though he retained his position with us after the move. This left Howie as the lone in-house national promotions guy.

  Another Bruce Bird hire was T.J. Lambert. Everyone in the promotions department was married except for T.J., so the rest of the promo guys tended to live vicariously through him. T.J. would come in after a rough night and have the rest of the guys on the edge of their seats with his war stories about entertaining the female population of Los Angeles. Twenty-five years old and working for Casablanca, T.J. was already living the dream—but when two girls moved in with him, everyone in the office, at least everyone with a dick, was even more impressed. One morning, he came to work looking particularly wrung out and collapsed into his chair. He had that running-on-no-sleep look we all knew so well. No one could resist the bait for long. Someone asked him what had happened. T.J. sighed heavily and mumbled, “Well, the girls had six or seven of their friends over last night, and one thing led to another, and . . . ” Then he lapsed back into the semiconscious state we’d aroused him from. The guy had had an orgy with nine women, and he’d regaled us married stiffs with all the joy and enthusiasm of someone doing a line reading of the Sunday classifieds. He stopped talking, stared for a moment (if it’s possible to be asleep with your eyes open, then he was), and pondered out loud, straight-faced and monotone, “I don’t know if I’ll be happy with just two women ever again.” The poor bastard.

  It was fun to work surrounded by such an assortment of characters and lunatics, but, due to Casablanca’s rapid growth, maintaining a sense of managerial presence or
control was becoming a real challenge. The feeling of teamwork that had been such a part of the culture at Buddah and at Casablanca in the early days was beginning to disappear. Departments were establishing their own cliques—sales didn’t know what was going on in marketing, legal barely spoke to accounting, and so on. This slow fracturing undermined the sense of family that Neil so cherished, and he was determined not to let that go. As the company grew, Neil, whose first love was always promotion, would periodically walk down the hall to the promotions department and shout out things like, “OK, first person to get me the Parliament single added anywhere west of the Mississippi gets two hundred dollars. You’ve got sixty minutes . . . go!” or, “Anyone adding a single on a major Top 40 station by the close of business can come to my office and take a C-note out of my hand.” The promotion team members were thrilled when he came into their area of the building, and his visits helped bolster spirits and foster unity. When Neil walked through the offices, he left awe in his wake. He was the Man, and everyone knew it. I made a point of walking the halls every day, too, but with me there was more joking around. My presence certainly did not carry the weight or inspire the same feelings as Neil’s did, which was OK with me, because not long before that I had been in awe of Neil myself.

  • January 23, 1977: The landmark miniseries Roots debuts, scoring the highest ratings of any miniseries in TV history.

  • February 4, 1977: Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours album is released.

  • July 13, 1977: A twenty-five-hour power blackout hits nine million New Yorkers, leading to rampant looting and riots.

  Casablanca was big business. Important decisions were constantly being made, and millions of dollars and the careers of hundreds were on the line every day. Still, more often than not, we acted like a bunch of sixth graders. One day, a fire broke out in Howie’s office. Neil had taken a bottle of lighter fluid, poured it on Howie’s desk, and ignited it just to show everyone how hot we were. A few miles away at Warner, or over at Capitol, they would have been content with a nice interoffice memo to pass on the news. Not us. We set the furniture on fire.

  That wasn’t the half of it. We played games, too, like Bruce Bird’s “hit the hooker with the Frisbee.” An infamous strip joint, the Body Shop, was located directly across Sunset from us, and it wasn’t all that uncommon for hookers to pace on the sidewalk in front of the club. When he was bored or looking for something to do, Bruce would open his window wide and chuck Frisbees across Sunset, trying to hit the hookers. From time to time, you’d hear the screech of tires—some driver slamming on the brakes when a toy disc zipped passed the windshield.

  Even the parking lot wasn’t immune from our decadence. For instance, Al DiNoble, our director of singles, wasn’t Al. His first name was Fuckin’. As in, “that fuckin’ DiNoble.” Employees had their names painted through stencils onto their parking slots in the lot behind the building. Naturally, Al’s parking space had “Fuckin’ DiNoble” painted onto it. We loved it because it so obviously offended the occasional conservative stuffed shirt who came to visit.

  For his part, Neil would conspire with Phyllis Chotin (our director of advertising) on a practical joke that would leave visitors with stunned expressions. Phyllis would crawl under Neil’s desk before he met with a client and then climb out in the middle of their conversation, like she’d just given Neil head. It was all in good fun, and Phyllis thought it was hilarious, but today we’d be sued into oblivion for it. Howie had his own stunts—one was playing a recording of machine-gun fire at full volume or repeatedly striking a very loud gong every time a record was added to a major station. Even though my office was a good fifty feet down the hall from him, if I was on the phone, the person I was speaking to would ask me what was going on. Neil couldn’t hear the gong unless I had both my doors open, but when he did hear it, he loved it, and he would ask Howie to do it again. I enjoyed these antics, too, and when we had VIP visitors we would sometimes tell Howie to bash the gong just to impress upon them how crazy we were.

  With the pop promotions department growing, the R&B side of the company was clamoring for attention. Spurred on by Renny Roker, Cecil insisted that his department needed to be expanded. This made sense, since Parliament, Donna Summer, and others were being played heavily on R&B radio. Cecil hired Jheryl Busby to be vice president of R&B promotion, Eddie Pugh and Ernie Singleton to handle national promotions, and Ruben Rodriquez to be promotions VP for the East Coast. Once again, we had a team of men so talented and experienced that each could have handled national promotions at the company of his choosing.

  Busby was everyone’s favorite. He handled himself well with radio people and artists, and he would later become the head of Motown Records, which he brought to a greater level of success than it had previously enjoyed. Jheryl became a major player in the biz. He would frequently credit Neil with mentoring him and claim that Neil had made him a better record executive.

  Ruben, too, was a consummate promotion person. He had a simple MO: when it came to working records, there would be no drugs, no payola, and no women. Instead, he would be the Flower Man. He would send flowers to anyone—flowers to all the girls in the office, flowers to the girls he met on the road, flowers to the receptionists at radio stations. And it worked, big time. Ultimately, he did it to get airplay by scoring face time with the bosses: “Oh, you should take a meeting with that Ruben from Casablanca. He’s so nice.” Ruben had his own perception-is-reality gimmick, which involved establishing what a nice guy he was. The flower bills that he sent in could have floated the debt of a Third World country, and I would lightheartedly protest them, but what he was doing worked, so he was allowed to keep doing it. You couldn’t argue with the results.

  Eddie Pugh, who had brought the kissing contest promotion to my attention in 1974, stayed with the company for only a short time. He did not get along very well with Bruce, and the jockeying for power among Jheryl, Ernie, Ruben, and Eddie came to a head. But he did leave on a good note and went on to run the R&B department at CBS.

  Then it was sales’ turn to ask for more people. We needed someone who had the contacts among the major one stops and rack jobbers to get more attention for our product. The person we chose was a well-liked and savvy salesman named Pete Jones. Pete brought us a respect that we were lacking. Not that department head Dick Sherman was held in low regard, but he was not comfortable applying the pressure when we needed it. Dick played the joker/nice-guy role much more naturally. Pete could put the screws to people in such a way that they never felt he was being pushy. He also had a good grasp on how to do major promotional tie-ins with retailers and often came up with fresh ideas to market bands at the retail level. I remember a photo of Pete and his family standing in the snow on the East Coast and holding a banner that said, “Thank you Neil and Joyce, Larry and Candy, and Bruce and Nancy”—we had just put a down payment on a house for them in LA.

  Without question, all of these hirings helped Casablanca, but there was little doubt in my mind that Bruce was the major reason we began to grow so rapidly. Bruce understood how the game was played on Top 40 radio, and Neil and I gave him carte blanche to go out and do whatever was necessary (we didn’t ask for any details, because we didn’t want to have to swear to anything on the stand). Casablanca now appeared—especially to people in the industry—to have all the trappings of success, and there is nothing like success to breed success.

  Along with Bruce’s obvious talent came a temper to match. On a few occasions, he came close to engaging in physical combat with Renny Roker or Eddie Pugh, and I had to rein him in. Bruce had grown up in an atmosphere that was less than conducive to getting along with minorities, and he had mentioned to me several times that in Cleveland, black people and white people kept to their own areas. Much of this anger would disappear when Bruce was not doing drugs, but when he mixed certain substances, he would become extremely belligerent and refuse to back down from a fight (the man could certainly handle himself in a brawl).

 
In January, right on the heels of Bruce’s hiring, we released the debut album of a band called Stallion. I had signed them to the label late in 1976, convinced that they sounded exactly like the Eagles. Another factor in their favor was that my friend Ken Kohl had a piece of their management. Ken was in need of a gig and some money, so it was no big deal to sign them. To this day, Ken and I get kidded about this band, because their finished album sounded nothing like their demo tape. I did not do my homework thoroughly enough and neglected to check out the band up close. I figured the problem was their producer and guru, Dick Darnell. My first clue should have been that when I asked him to make the band sound more like the Eagles, he looked nonplussed and asked who the Eagles were. But by the time this happened, it was too late. The band was already in the studio in Colorado, and I could not pull the plug on the band of one of my best friends.

  Because they were my signing, I put a lot of pressure on our AOR guy, Dick Williams, to get airplay for Stallion. I probably shouldn’t have given him so much grief, as I doubt I could have gotten much airplay for these guys either. I even went so far as to make some phone calls to help promote the band myself, something I hadn’t done in a while. By pressuring some of my old radio friends, I got some airplay, but it was not enough to make a difference.

  My other pet project, Angel, was doing somewhat better. Angel’s first two albums had done OK for us, but Neil and I always felt that they could do more; we fully believed they would become the next KISS, and we spread that perception in the rock press. Neil and I had met with the band’s manager, David Joseph, as early as September 1976 to plan Angel’s third LP, On Earth as It Is in Heaven, and we collectively agreed to pull out all of the stops. It was time to make Angel the next supergroup. After all, we’d done it with KISS, so doing it again would be easy, right?