And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records

by Harris, Larry

  Neil agreed to hire Eddie Kramer (the man whose touch with Alive! had broken KISS) to produce the album. We also planned a heavy point-of-purchase and print-marketing campaign and paid for thousands of elaborate press kits and mobiles. As we did our annual filling in of Circus readers’ poll cards for KISS, we also voted for Angel in the category of best new group or artist. To everyone’s surprise—except ours, of course—they won, receiving over forty thousand votes and beating out Boston and Heart in the process. To capitalize on the momentum, we built the marketing campaign for On Earth as It Is in Heaven around the poll result.

  Another major addition to our Angel project was their famous visual palindrome logo. As the story goes, a seventeen-year-old fan named Bob Petrick showed up backstage before one of the band’s East Coast shows. His persistence finally won him an audience with Angel’s tour manager, Bill Schereck. Bill (whom Wally Meyrowitz and I had made an honorary Jew and nicknamed Bill Schereckwitz) listened politely as Bob explained that Angel needed a logo, so he had designed one. He showed the drawing to Bill, who told him that he couldn’t promise anything but he’d see what he could do. Going into a dressing room, Bill put the drawing down on a table and accidentally glanced at its reflection in a mirror. He noticed something very interesting that Bob had neglected to mention. When it was turned upside down, the logo was still right side up. Bill was blown away and ran off to find Bob, panicked that he might have lost him. He finally found him, and he bought the logo from him that night for five hundred dollars and an album credit.

  The band members, David Joseph, and everyone at Casablanca loved the logo, too, and when Neil and I were stoned, we’d sometimes amuse ourselves by flipping it back and forth, over and over. We figured if it worked on us, the kids would really think it was magic.

  Speaking of magic, David Joseph wanted Neil to fork over an obscene amount of money for Angel’s tour support. I sat there in disbelief as he laid out his reasoning. He wanted to integrate “high-art illusions” into the band’s live show. As he ran down his idiotic list of magic tricks for the band, I felt embarrassed for him; David was actually pitching this to Neil, and he was 100 percent serious and sober. I waited for him to finish this absurd sales job, knowing Neil was doing his best to suppress howls of laughter.

  And then Neil agreed to every item on the list.

  This was my band, I had signed them to Casablanca, nobody wanted them to succeed more than I did, and even I wasn’t buying this. I decided to keep my opinions to myself, as you never wanted to be negative with Neil, especially in front of a client. After David left, Neil, sensing my hesitation, explained that both Parliament and KISS had huge productions and were beginning to reap the rewards. So why shouldn’t Angel?

  Angel’s stage show was, depending on your perspective, either the greatest or the worst thing you ever saw from a rock band. For those of you who have never attended an Angel concert, here’s how it went down. The house lights would go out, and a lengthy taped introduction based on the end-credits music from Ben-Hur would begin to play over the PA. A huge 3-D prop of a hollow-faced Gabriel (the angel from Angel’s debut album cover) would rise into place atop the backline of the stage. Reaching his zenith, Gabriel would seemingly come alive and begin to address the stoned audience in a booming, God-like voice. Everyone thought the angel’s face was a hologram, but it was actually a rear-projection film of the face of Warren Entner, former guitarist for The Grass Roots, in gold makeup. The voice-over was provided by famous voice actor Paul Frees, who would solemnly intone:

  And it came to pass one day in Heaven that Gabriel summoned his flock of angels unto him and spoke thus, “I have watched my children on Earth at play, and I am saddened that they know not the pleasures of our music. Who of you will go forth and let the music of Heaven echo throughout the lands on Earth?”

  While this was going on, roadies above the stage dressed in black jumpsuits were setting up five mirrored Plexiglas cubes downstage. These were maybe two and half feet wide by two and a half feet tall. They would then stack three additional cubes atop the first one, which created futuristic portals that looked like mirrored doorways. As each band member was introduced, smoke from a fog machine would be released, a spotlight would hit the mirrors, chaser lights would begin revolving around the doorway, and each of the five musicians would seem to materialize inside his cubicle.

  And the first Angel stepped forward and spoke thus, “I will go to Earth,” and Gabriel rejoiced and said, “Go forth my son and sound your drum throughout the land, and from this very day be known as Barry Brandt.”

  Angel drummer Barry Brandt would emerge from the lighted doorway, go slap some quick high fives with fans in the first row and then run over to join his drums as similarly imposing scripts were spoken for Gregg, Punky, Mickie, and, finally, lead vocalist Frank DiMino.

  “And thus it came to pass that there was music on Earth as it is in Heaven.” As Gabriel finished speaking to the crowd, the band members would take their places and start the show with their signature song, “Tower.” Of course, if you had an amazing entrance, you had to have an even better exit. So a giant Angel LP cover would descend from above the lighting rig to the center rear of the set. The five Angels would walk into it and begin beating on the sides so you could see they were actually inside. Suddenly, the giant LP would begin to rise above the stage, as if it were ascending to Heaven. And then . . . BOOM! It would explode into pieces. All the spotlights would then go black and, with the crowd clamoring for more, the houselights would go up. By then, the band would already be miles away from the venue. Pure showmanship: always leave them wanting more.

  When the illusions worked, they were effective, but it seemed more often than not at least one of the Angels would get stuck in his cubicle. If that sounds eerily similar to a scene in This Is Spinal Tap, that’s because Angel’s ridiculous cylinders were probably the inspiration for the translucent plastic egg in which Harry Shearer’s character, Derek Smalls, gets trapped. Between KISS and Parliament, I was more than comfortable with over-the-top shows, but I was flat-out embarrassed by Angel’s. In my opinion, the grandiose Ben-Hur music paired with the overblown band introduction wasn’t dramatic, it was silly, and it caused me to question my faith in the band’s prospects.

  The biggest problem we faced was far more practical: Angel wasn’t a headliner in most markets, so they often had to scrap their costly production because the acts that were headliners wouldn’t allow an opening act full use of the PA or lights, much less approve anything approaching the rest of Angel’s elaborate requirements.

  In December 1976, as we were preparing for the release of On Earth as It Is in Heaven (January 24, 1977 was the target date), we had the band do their first promotional films, videotaping performances of two tracks from their back catalog (“Tower” and “Feelin’ Right”) and two songs from the new album (“That Magic Touch” and “You’re Not Fooling Me”). Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert eventually broadcast “That Magic Touch,” and it would turn out to be (if my memory serves me correctly) the only national airplay any Angel video would ever receive in the US, although the clips did appear to help the band in some foreign territories, especially Japan.

  David Joseph continued to work his act both with us and overseas. Going against everyone’s advice (the band wasn’t big enough to justify it), he sent Angel to Japan in early February to officially inaugurate their new stage show. The tour was a disaster. They’d sold out a few of the shows, and the overall turnout was respectable, but the sheer number of problems that arose during the tour was enough to make me wonder if this group wasn’t living under a bad sign. Angel had, quite accidentally, offended the promoter and some members of the public: while visiting several local attractions to do photo shoots, they had climbed upon some hallowed structures. The promoter considered this to be an act of desecration. Another problem arose when the promoter (who allegedly had ties to the criminal underworld) took issue with the way the tour finances were being handled and
hijacked Angel’s entire stage production, refusing to give it back. Bill Schereck met with some heavies and arranged for the equipment to be returned. Then Japan Air Lines told him that the check the promoter had given them to cover the round-trip shipping costs had bounced. It was the band’s first and last overseas tour.

  Wanting to get the maximum return on our investment in Angel, we decided that our six-month-old Film Works division should produce a ninety-minute Angel concert movie. The thirty-five-millimeter film, which would cost one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to make, would showcase the band’s new stage show and feature fantasy sequences of the band performing in Heaven. Fifty prints of the movie would be distributed to local radio stations in advance of tour dates. A single weekend screening in each market would begin at the stroke of midnight—the film would be titled Angel at Midnight. Given the recent release of The Song Remains the Same, the wildly popular midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the fact that we had an in-house film division, an Angel movie wasn’t that hard a sell. Cleveland, one of the band’s biggest strongholds, was chosen as the location for the live segments. WMMS-FM sponsored the event, which took place on April 6 at the Public Hall and cost patrons only $1.01 each. Attendees were strongly encouraged to wear white so that in the film it would look like they were in Heaven with the band. Then, in the second week of May, additional “beauty coverage” (close-up footage) of the band was shot in LA.

  We hired Peter Lake, who had worked with Peter Guber on The Deep, as vice president of creative services in late 1976. Lake began editing the raw Angel footage at FilmWorks, downstairs at 8255 Sunset. But the film was never completed. There were several contributing factors to this decision. Neil was beginning to get cold feet about Angel (as was I); plus, Angel’s original bassist, Mickie Jones, had been fired just before the final pickup shots were done. I recently ran across a blurb in a 1977 issue of Circus that said we were so pleased with the movie that we were thinking of doing a second Angel film in 3-D. Pleased? We’d never even seen the film. This just goes to show that we would put a shiny ribbon on a funeral casket.

  As an interesting sidenote, before Angel at Midnight completely fell apart, we met with brass at MCA DiscoVision to discuss releasing the movie on an emerging videodisc format, which eventually became LaserDisc (if you’re too young to recall the format, just imagine a twelve-inch DVD). At that point, the entire entertainment industry was eagerly anticipating the arrival of the home video medium, and, for a while, the low-cost videodisc looked like the way things were moving. Neil was well aware of its potential, and since Casablanca had such visual acts, we strongly believed that we’d have a serious advantage over our peers when the time came. With this in mind, Peter Lake was overseeing the future production of promotional films for our artists and tie-ins for our movies. I found out years later that Peter had infiltrated the Aryan Nation to write about the group. Peter was a tall, blond white guy, so I can’t imagine he found it hard to work his way in. He eventually testified in the case involving the 1984 murder (allegedly by the Aryan Nation) of Denver radio host Alan Berg.

  All record companies have subsidiary labels. We could not consider ourselves real players unless we had some smaller companies under our umbrella. Neil had always kept an eye open for these opportunities. Of course, our first subsidiary had been Giorgio Moroder’s Oasis, which we’d acquired in 1975, but Oasis had been totally absorbed into Casablanca and had ceased to exist. In July 1976, Neil had begun to solidify a relationship with Douglas Records, an all-jazz label founded and run by longtime producer Alan Douglas. The deal had included the rights to rerelease twenty archive albums. Among the first were albums by The Last Poets and legendary jazz guitarist John McLaughlin. Both albums had been previously released, and I don’t remember the reissues going much of anywhere. We renewed the deal in February 1977, but if the Douglas-Casablanca pairing is remembered at all, it is for a five-album set called Wildflowers: The New York Loft Jazz Sessions, which was released in March 1977 and to this day carries some weight in experimental jazz circles.

  The next signing was Millennium Records, headed by Jimmy Ienner and Irv Biegel; Jimmy’s brother, Donnie, was their only promo guy. Jimmy was the producer of the Raspberries, and Irv was a record guy who had been around a long time. He was also friends with Jeff Franklin of ATI, and Jeff helped strike the deal with Neil. Since we all loved Donnie, this looked like it might be fun.

  In March, we opened up a New York office with Millennium at 3 West Fifty-Seventh Street. A matter of months later, Millennium was ready to deliver its first album, Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk, which was the brainchild of Meco (Domenico Monardo) and an obvious attempt to ride to success on the back of the Star Wars phenomena, which was then sweeping the nation. The young musician was enamored of the film, and he’d decided it would be a great idea to create a disco version of John Williams’s score. Today it’s easy to recognize Star Wars as a cash cow, but at the time Neil had to talk Jimmy Ienner into putting the Meco album on Millennium, as Jimmy didn’t like it. We’d have been more than happy to keep Meco on the Casablanca roster, but it was important for the new label to establish itself as a bona fide presence in the biz, and nothing spoke louder than a Platinum album. Neil knew it was a guaranteed hit, and he gave Ienner little choice in the matter.

  The LP was coming out at the same time as the official 20th Century Fox soundtrack set, and with John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra on board, 20th Century Fox clearly had the upper hand. Our promotions department would have weekly conference calls late on Sunday afternoons to get everybody hyped up about the releases they’d be working that week. During the call related to the Meco release, Bruce made sure that everyone understood it was Casablanca versus 20th Century Fox, and that we were the underdogs.

  When the promotion staff arrived the next day, they found an unwelcome delivery from Harvey Cooper, head of the promotions department at 20th Century Fox—a black wreath with a banner announcing that Fox was going to bury us with their Star Wars record. Needless to say, the promotions department went ballistic over the threat, redoubled their efforts, and got us our very first No. 1 single: Meco’s “Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band,” the biggest-selling instrumental single in the history of the music business. But it wasn’t Harvey Cooper who had sent the wreath. It was Bruce Bird. He’d had Soozin send it to him to create a villain and thus motivate the promotions department. And it worked.

  One of the things that stands out in my mind about Millennium, and especially Donnie, was that whenever he and Howie Rosen found themselves in a city at the same time, I would get a call from our accounting department. We would have to pay for the hotel rooms Donnie and Howie destroyed. They thought they were wrestling stars, and they would battle each other with little regard for the furniture and fixtures. Donnie became CEO of Sony Records, and I wonder if he put up with such shenanigans from his people.

  Another of our subsidiary ventures was Parachute Records, run by Russ Regan. Russ was a legend in the music business, as he had discovered both Elton John and Barry White. He was president of MCA Records, and he’d had the foresight to sign Elton (he’s kept in close contact with him to this day). MCA seemed to go through presidents like a shark goes through teeth. The company’s primary focus was movies, not music, and for some reason they had a great deal of trouble finding or keeping people who knew what to do and how to do it in the music sector. Russ had started up Parachute after being dismissed as head of MCA.

  Russ was a nice guy. We supplied him with offices in one of the buildings on our Sunset lot, which was a natural fit for him since between 1967 and 1972 he had headed MCA’s Universal City Records at the same location. Again, it was very important to Neil that the new label had a hit, but no matter how hard we tried, we could not bring home the money for Russ. There was no new Meco with a disco smash for Russ, and we all felt bad that things weren’t working out for him. The situation came to a head when Neil told me and Bruce to go over to Ru
ss’s office and tell him we were not going to re-sign him once his original contract was up (which was soon). I was not crazy about being the bearer of this news, as I hadn’t had anything to do with signing the label in the first place, but Neil asked, so I swung the axe. Because I wasn’t happy playing the role of executioner, I was fairly blunt with Russ. Bruce was no help to me—he liked Russ, too, and he wanted no part of the conversation.

  Years later, I met Russ at a convention, and he told me that he had been under the impression that ending the relationship had been all my idea because when he went to say goodbye to Neil, Neil had told him that he’d known nothing about it and had only found out from me after it was all done. I explained to Russ that Neil would never have left a decision to drop a label, especially one that I’d had no hand in signing, up to me. Such a decision would come from the very top; my opinion might be solicited, but the final decision would always come from Neil.

  Neil and I were no longer leading the charge with every single thing that was happening. We were now too busy running the company, which had expanded way beyond our ability to micromanage. Our interaction with much of the company was no longer on the level of intimate detail, and we had pulled back to weekly meetings of department heads in either my office or Neil’s. We used these weekly get-togethers to disseminate information through the departments, which no longer managed to communicate with each other very well. Neil and I were still having fun, but this behemoth was growing at such a rate that it was hard to be as hands-on as we would have liked.

  To boost company morale, we began a newsletter of sorts, called Inside the Casbah, to report on what was happening within the company so that everyone would be aware of what their colleagues were up to. It was produced by the press department and handled by writer Walter Wanger, a very bright guy who would become an integral part of our special products division. The newsletter, which came out every few weeks, began with a one- or two-page letter from Neil on company letterhead (the best-looking stuff in the biz, except that the Casablanca logo took up the entire top third of the page, leaving room for about two lines of text after the address and salutation); the letter related news on all upcoming releases and trumpeted the successes we’d had that week or month, all in typical Neil fashion: Great, great—everything is great! Following that were photocopies of the articles or blurbs on Casablanca that had appeared in the trades, along with copies of radio ad sheets listing our active singles and albums and a list of the radio stations that had added them to their rotations. At the end of each issue was a column called “The CIA Report,” which stood for “Casablanca Informs America.” It was written by Walter, and it made fun of all of us, including Neil and me. It spread all sorts of ridiculous, tongue-in-cheek gossip about various people. Cutting the executives down to size not only helped employees feel that we execs were people they could come and talk to, but it also ensured that we didn’t take ourselves too seriously. “The CIA Report” lasted only a short while, as Walter became preoccupied with more important projects and Neil grew more thin-skinned about the Dean-Martin-roast quality of the newsletter’s jibes, many of them aimed at him. The daily pressures of wrangling with this monster we’d created were beginning to wear on him, and the loss of his sense of humor (one of his most upfront and likable qualities) was just the first of many changes.