And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records

by Harris, Larry

  15 The New Bubblegum

  Two Frenchmen—The Casablanca test—Donna—

  I Remember Yesterday—love Gun—Dazz—Genesis of

  a disco empire—Alec Costandinos—Paul Jabara—More

  payola—The Frankie Crocker trial—A Year at the Top—

  Two more strikeouts—In deep—Offer from Clive

  Davis—PolyGram and the huge payday—

  Bad tax shelters—KISS, George, and Donna

  May 17, 1977

  Casablanca Record & FilmWorks Headquarters

  8255 Sunset Boulevard

  Los Angeles, California

  Neil was talking to me about a new project he wanted us to get into. We would be getting the official pitch in a few minutes, and he was pacing around my office giving me the details on the band and prepping me for the meetings that would ensue. He mentioned the players, but all that stuck in my head was the list of characters he described: guys dressed in leather, a construction worker, a cop, and some cowboys and Indians. “Great,” I thought, “I’m now a casting director meeting with an overcaffeinated Hollywood producer.”

  These guys weren’t cops or cowboys any more than George Clinton was an outer-space pimp. They were a newly created group who called themselves the Village People—a half-serious, half-tongue-in-cheek parody that had been assembled by two French producers and their novice New York music attorney. The producers, Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo, had been creating music in Europe for years with a modicum of success, but they were now concentrating on the US. They brought with them to our meeting a young lawyer named Allen Grubman, who was about to make the first deal of his long and storied entertainment career.

  Morali and Belolo had recently relocated from France to New York in hopes of making their entry into the American music scene. Morali (who was openly gay) and Belolo (who was straight) started hanging out at Manhattan’s hot nightclubs, and they noticed that many patrons showed up dressed in character—as cowboys, or Indians, or what have you. They hit upon the idea of creating a band comprised entirely of such characters; they were so taken with Americana that they wanted each band member to represent some aspect of the American dream—or, at least, the American dream as interpreted by two Frenchmen living in Greenwich Village. They figured that the act would have a built-in audience in gay nightclubs. But where to place them?

  The two had picked up on Casablanca’s maverick approach to the music biz, and they were impressed that we’d developed KISS and Parliament, two fairly out-there acts that many of the major labels wouldn’t have looked at twice (remember that the Warner execs had initially hated KISS, telling us that the band should lose the makeup to be more palatable to the music-buying public). Morali and Belolo knew their vision for the Village People was likely to be met with ambivalence or derision if they pitched it to the likes of Capitol or Columbia. But with Neil they felt they’d found the perfect match. It didn’t hurt that we’d broken the disco genre wide open with Donna Summer, either.

  So, they flew out to LA to meet with Neil. As they walked into Neil’s office, I saw that both Henri and Jacques were very cosmopolitan guys with a flair for fashion. Morali was energetic, flamboyant, and a bit prissy—definitely the salesman of the two. Belolo tended to hang back, was more subdued, and was the business force behind the project. After we exchanged some pleasantries, they got right to their pitch. They played us a recording of the Village People. The album, which was maybe twenty minutes long, was already a complete package, including artwork. This was a strong selling point for us: Casablanca would only need to manufacture and market the record; and with the cover done, we were already halfway home as far as marketing went. If the material was good, this would be an easy sell.

  Neil immediately loved it, but he decided to let me put it to the “Casablanca test” first. This consisted of playing a song at such a high volume that everyone in the entire two-story building would hear it. If people came running to find out what it was, we knew we had something. I played the record at ear-splitting volume, and the office quickly filled with people from sales, promotion, and PR—everyone was attracted to the music. Neil’s eyes were glowing, and we both sensed that this crazy idea had the makings of a monster. The album cover was the cherry on top: we were the label of KISS, Parliament, and Angel, so this group of guys dressed as leather fetishists, Indians, and construction workers was right up our alley. We got it!

  Neil sat down with Allen Grubman and signed the group on the strength of the finished album. We’d yet to meet or speak to a single member of the band, and we wouldn’t for several months. The guys were cast members more than musicians or singers (though each could carry a tune), and the idea was for them to be entertaining, not create great music. None of us paid attention to the fact that the Village People and their vibe were blatantly gay. Frankly, not only did we not pay attention to it, but we didn’t even realize it. Their music was so energetic that it demanded your attention. I don’t think it was possible not to like it. But anything more than a five-second glance at the band revealed an array of obvious references to the homosexual lifestyle, which was the foundation of so much disco music.

  This aspect of disco never bothered Neil or me. Again, the Village People’s best songs were so catchy—you were instantly pulled into their hook-laden melodies, and that’s all that mattered. This is precisely how (and the irony is laugh-inducing) many fundamentalists who regard the homosexual lifestyle with contempt can dance around shrieking “Y—M—C—A” at the top of their lungs along with the Village People, happy as clams, oblivious to any subtext or message. Great melodies hide lyrical meaning, which is why a song like Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” can be considered a pro-American anthem when it’s nothing of the sort.

  With the addition to our roster of the Village People, disco became Neil’s new bubblegum. Not everyone at Casablanca was unaware of the sizable homosexual presence in disco culture, and a fissure grew between the disco and rock contingents. As our disco department expanded, a few homophobes in the company—mainly in the pop department—began to reveal themselves. They mostly kept their mouths shut, but Neil and I could feel the tension. Some of them would refuse to shake hands with a person (an artist or a fellow employee) who was gay, or even breathe the same air. A few snide comments were made in meetings, but it never went beyond that.

  Our first and still premier disco act was Donna Summer. But we just couldn’t duplicate the huge breakout success of her initial album and single, released in 1975. The follow-up, which came out in March 1976, was titled A Love Trilogy, and it had gone Gold, but the buzz that surrounded “Love to Love You Baby” just wasn’t there. Donna’s Four Seasons of Love followed, coming out around Thanksgiving. It was a five-song concept LP based on the four seasons (spring had two songs). The second single, “Winter Melody,” came out in January 1977, and it had the distinction of being one of the very first 12-inch singles ever released. (Disco clubs, which liked to play epic-length singles, were the prime movers behind the creation of the 12-inch single.) The same month, we had Peter Lake direct and produce a sixteen-minute Donna Summer promotional film, portions of which he shot at Donna’s Benedict Canyon home. The primary footage for Donna’s promo was lensed on a very warm day, which was all wrong for a “Winter Melody” (one of the tracks Peter was shooting). Peter came up with the idea to spray a semiopaque white material over the lens to simulate winter, and the stunt actually worked. The extra attention garnered us another Gold album, but again the record had no real legs, no hype sustaining it. Desperate to keep Donna from sliding to one-hit-wonder status, in February we released a two-track limited edition LP of Love to Love You Baby (not to be confused with the 1975 Oasis album of the same name), which was designed as a greeting card to capitalize on the Valentine’s Day market.

  • August 16, 1977: Elvis Presley dies of an apparent overdose at his Graceland mansion; he was 42.

  • October 14, 1977: Bing Crosby passes away on a golf course near M
adrid at age 74.

  • October 20, 1977: Three members of Lynyrd Skynyrd are killed in the crash of a chartered plane near McComb, Mississippi.

  The promotions department came up with the idea of sending copies of the LP to radio stations accompanied by an oversized heart-shaped chocolate that complemented the LP’s cover art. Karmen Beck, who worked in promotion for us, was working overtime to get 150-plus Jiffy LP mailers ready to ship out, and yellow boxes of the chocolate were stacked in the hallway outside the promotions department. Neil walked by, noticed the huge pile of candy, and casually asked Karmen what she was doing. “That’s a nice idea, Karmen, but what is this chocolate? It’s not Godiva. Since this is Donna, and we’re Casablanca, only the very best will do. Fix it!” Poor Karmen had to redo most of the packages at home in order to make her deadline. We then flooded the scene with advertising for what we thought was a cash cow. Same results: good sales, no buzz.

  When something isn’t working, an artist has to blame someone, and artists rarely, if ever, blame themselves. Donna decided that a change of management was in order, and Dick Broder was out. Her other manager—Joyce Bogart—remained, of course; and Jeff Wald was brought on board to oversee her affairs. The association was short and not sweet. Donna never got along with Jeff, and he found her diva-like attitude to be unprofessional—intolerable, in fact—a sentiment that he would later express publicly.

  By mid-May 1977, we were ready to roll out yet another Donna Summer album: I Remember Yesterday. This was Neil’s standard tactic, and we’d already used it with KISS: if the public didn’t like an album or a song, then it was time for a new one, even if only six months had elapsed between releases. After three KISS albums had come out in rapid succession and generated moderate success, the band broke big-time with Alive! and quickly followed it up with Destroyer, which expanded upon what Alive! had done. But with Donna, panic was beginning to set in. Since her debut, she had won a tremendous amount of peer acceptance, as well as industry awards too numerous to mention. But those accolades couldn’t save her flatlining career. I Remember Yesterday was the final LP we would do with Donna under the terms of our original agreement, and we knew if we didn’t hit it out of the park, then Donna would be shopping for a new record company.

  “Can’t We Just Sit Down (And Talk It Over)” came out as the first single. Thirty- and sixty-second TV spots aired all over the place as the summer wore on, and still nothing. Then, echoing what had happened with “Beth” the previous summer, toward the end of July, someone (I don’t recall who) turned the 7-inch single over and began to play the B side, which contained a hypnotic little song that would become Donna’s first Gold single since “Love to Love You Baby.” That single, “I Feel Love,” not only rescued her and us, but, due to Giorgio Moroder’s innovative production (most disco songs featured orchestral accompaniment at that point, but “I Feel Love” had an entirely synthesized background), it significantly altered the direction of club music and jump-started the techno and electronica genres. The song and its production were so brilliant that five years later, in 1982, it was lengthened, remixed, and rereleased, achieving hit status all over again.

  By the summer of 1977, disco was beginning to drive the company, even though KISS was still our premier act and was continuing to scale new heights. Their June release, Love Gun, had contractually shipped Platinum, a first for us and them. The memos from Glickman/Marks that came across my desk detailing production costs for a new tour were eye-popping—this on the heels of the one hundred thousand dollars they’d spent to record Love Gun. Two hydraulic platforms were installed to lower the band at the beginning of the show from the top of their now towering backline of cabinets to the stage. The staircase concept from the Destroyer tour had been expanded, Peter Criss’s drum riser now not only went up but also slid forward to the front of the stage, and two portions of the stage itself now rose more than ten feet into the air during and at the end of the show. And KISS wanted two of these stages so that while they were performing on one stage, the stage for the subsequent show could be assembled. The entire outlay for this mess, including having new costumes designed and made, was nearly two hundred thousand dollars. That didn’t sound impressive enough, so we told the press it was a million-dollar production.

  Shortly after Love Gun was released, Marvel Comics issued a KISS comic book. It featured the band members as superheroes, which gave Neil an idea: Casablanca could create a comic book for a female disco superhero. He presented the idea to Marvel. Given that the KISS comic was their largest seller ever to that point, they were very happy to develop it. Thus Dazzler was born. One day, I went into Neil’s office and saw several panels that had been submitted for approval. I picked one up and was shocked to see that Marvel had actually drawn an image of Neil and introduced it into the action. The concept was tossed back and forth between Marvel and us for so long that it eventually lost its charm for everyone involved and evaporated. I had forgotten all about it until years later, in 1981, I happened to see the first issue in a comic-book store.

  KISS was now becoming an anomaly for us—a white-hot rock band in a growing stable of disco artists. Since we’d released the first Donna Summer album and “Love to Love You Baby,” we had been talking up disco. We hadn’t been big believers in the genre before this; it had seemed insubstantial, a little too much like the flavor of the month, but once we saw that the genre had staying power at the clubs and recognized that the clubs could dramatically influence radio, we embraced it. It was a money-making product, and we were in the money-making business.

  Even unknown disco artists, who may have cost us only twenty thousand dollars, were selling enough product to make a profit. Casablanca was becoming so irrevocably associated with the disco genre that we were called “the disco label,” and artists from all over the world were coming to us in droves to make deals. It reached the point where people wouldn’t go into their favorite record store to ask for the new album by a particular artist—they would ask what was new from Casablanca. We were able to sell product that had no radio play just because the word “Casablanca” was printed on it.

  This wasn’t an accident. Initially, we ran into a problem selling disco. In fact, the entire industry was afflicted with the same dilemma. The club DJs tended to play one disco song right after another without naming what was playing. Disco was a very formulaic genre, and it all sounded fairly similar, so clubbers were clueless about what songs they were hearing. Our solution was to flood the clubs with advertising. We had cocktail napkins and posters and coasters and matchbooks bearing images of our artists and logos made up by the truckload, and we distributed them through the network of discotheques. While all this promo material didn’t help you figure out what song you were listening to, it did make the Casablanca name omnipresent, and we soon had ourselves a very successful brand.

  To help market that brand, we scoured the landscape for disco artists, and we spent most of the first half of 1977 signing them as quickly as we could get a pen into their hands: Love and Kisses, Paul Jabara, Munich Machine, and many others. Most did not produce any huge radio or retail hits, but they were wildly popular at the clubs. That wasn’t all bad, because it gave Casablanca a consistent presence on a grassroots level.

  To this day, it still surprises me that most people don’t really understand that the typical disco act was just a producer and a concept. The bands were (for the most part) merely a fancy logo on a well-designed LP cover, which often portrayed a female in some high-fashion sexual pose. This fantasy concept was mainly intended to help an ad agency to build a marketing campaign around the cover art. And perhaps the best example of the concept was found in the work of European producer-songwriter Alec Costandinos.

  Alec was a slender, good-looking guy of Egyptian descent who had been developing acts in France for several years and had scored a decent hit in 1976 with Love in C Minor, an album he’d collaborated on with a French disco drummer named Jean-Marc Cerrone. Alec was a joy to work with;
the man knew every aspect of his craft. He knew how to write and produce music very quickly, but he was also intimately involved in creating cover art, and he’d often sit in on marketing meetings or work on contractual details with Richard Trugman. He knew that we were spending more time and effort on our bigger acts like KISS and Donna Summer, but as long as we gave him what he needed (which wasn’t much) he never complained. Of all the artists we ever signed, Alec unquestionably delivered the most for our money. He was a one-man assembly line of great disco: between June 1977 and September 1979, he would release eleven albums through Casablanca under six different monikers. The most successful of these was our first Costandinos acquisition: Love and Kisses. The debut LP, whose artwork featured a close-up of a woman’s partially exposed breasts (her T-shirt was being ripped apart by several groping hands) had already been released in France, and both Neil and I felt it would do very well stateside. In no small part, this was due to the fact that both of the LP’s two songs were sixteen-plus minutes long. We released the album, and everyone was very pleased with the success of “Accidental Lover” and “I’ve Found Love (Now That I’ve Found You).” Both songs were huge in the clubs throughout the summer of 1977. Love and Kisses was so successful that we also snatched up Sphinx, a project Alec had worked on with French arranger Raymond Donnez (aka Don Ray). Like Love and Kisses before it, Sphinx had already been released in France. It had been designed as a concept album that told the story of the betrayal of Christ. Again, the album contained only two tracks, both epic-length, each filling up one side. Jesus meets disco. It was a match made somewhere south of Heaven. It sounded like a good idea at the time, but Neil and I should have known better. We had tried something similar at Buddah with Vaughn Meader, a comedian who in 1971 had released an LP called The Second Coming on the Kama Sutra imprint. The album depicted Christ coming back to Earth, getting a Hollywood agent, and doing the talk show circuit. I thought it was funny and wondered if it would open people’s minds with its social commentary, but the public didn’t buy into it, and the album bombed.