And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records

by Harris, Larry

  However, any action we should or could have taken was precluded by the fact that we had no say in anything concerning the band members. The Village People were owned and controlled by Morali and Belolo; Casablanca did the manufacturing, distribution, and promotion, and little else. The Village People were becoming so successful that we didn’t want to make waves. They were selling as many albums as KISS and Donna Summer, and we just couldn’t afford to piss Jacques and Henri off, so we bit our tongues and tried to ignore the problem. Eventually, I had a heart-to-heart with the two about the band members’ unhappiness. This led to a slight raise, which seemed to appease the band for the moment.

  The Village People were on the superstar launch pad, Angel was going nowhere, and Donna Summer was somewhere in between, in a state of flux. By February 1978, she had hired her third comanager in just three years: Susan Munao, our former publicist. I liked Donna very much, but she was always surrounded by drama. There never seemed to be a state of rest for her—no status quo. Part of that was because she was always in the company of Joyce or Susan, neither of whom was anywhere near low-key; plus, I’m sure she was influenced by any number of the countless people who hovered around her. But Susan, while not always easy to deal with, was at least a known factor.

  Donna’s itinerary was taking an interesting turn. On January 27, she started a three-night stand at the Sahara Hotel in Lake Tahoe with her new backing band, Brooklyn Dreams. At our request, she had added two new songs to her set (neither of which would be released for several months) so that we could shoot a live promotional film for them. One of these was “MacArthur Park,” and the other was a mesmerizing ballad called “Last Dance,” which I’d first heard toward the end of the previous summer.

  The always chipper Paul Jabara had stopped by my office one day and insisted that I drop what I was doing and listen to a new track he’d written. Most of our artists wouldn’t have had this kind of instant access to me (I wasn’t living in an ivory tower—I just didn’t have the time), but Paul was so disarming that it was hard for me to tell him no. I sat and listened to his demo, and when it was over, without saying a word to him, I got up and opened the adjoining door to Neil’s office. Neil was on the phone, so I gave him the look we’d shoot each other when something really important was happening. Saying “I’ll get back to you” into the phone, he came into my office. He seemed surprised to see Paul there. As he sat down, I turned up the volume to a deafening level and opened the outer door: the Casablanca test was in progress. Employees started piling in. Paul danced around, singing along with the tape and making grand gestures with the lyrics. It was a great moment, and everyone in the room absolutely knew we had a smash hit. Paul had written it for Donna Summer, and “Last Dance” came to play a key role in her career. It would also become an integral component of our already booming business, to say nothing of what it would do for disco.

  One of our other French disco imports, Alec Costandinos, handed over two more releases early in the year: the second LP from Love and Kisses, titled How Much, How Much I Love You; and Alec’s biggest hit (under his own name), Romeo and Juliet. I was able to push the title track of the latter to No. 1 on the disco charts, albeit for only a week. A promo film was even produced, which was a true rarity for a disco producer. It featured Alec on a motorcycle with a blonde riding shotgun. Around the same time, a French record company, Carrere, began placing full-page ads in the US trades seeking distribution for a female singer named Sheila, who supposedly was already No. 1 in France with a disco cover of “Singin’ in the Rain.” The idea of pitching Neil on a remake of that twenty-five-year-old Gene Kelly number was ridiculous. I thought it through: on the one hand, how many people in the notoriously trendy disco clubs were going to find this song hip? On the other hand, it was French, and it was disco, which in our books was the magic recipe for a hit single. Within an hour of seeing one of the print ads, Neil was on the phone trying to sign a deal to release the LP in the States. The song went nowhere, but Sheila found success later on, most notably with a 1979 album produced by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic. A similar latter-day success story came from this side of the Atlantic. We bought another go-nowhere record, this one from Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo—a disco concept album of original music about legendary singer and dancer Josephine Baker. The artist was a singer named Phylicia Allen, the wife of Victor Willis of the Village People. By the mid-1980s, Phylicia had become a household name as Clair Huxtable, Bill Cosby’s TV wife on his hit NBC show.

  • March 6, 1978: Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler, is shot and paralyzed. Joseph Paul Franklin, a white supremacist serial killer, would later allege that he shot Flynt because of interracial sex photos in the magazine, but this would never be proven.

  • April 22, 1978: The Blues Brothers appear for the first time on Saturday Night Live.

  • June 16, 1978: The movie Grease opens, with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John in the lead roles.

  On January 10, 1978, NBC Television had aired an hour-long special by revered anchor Edwin Newman called Land of Hype and Glory. It profiled the growing successes and excesses of the entertainment industry, and both KISS and Peter Guber were featured. Hype had long been the driver of our public persona, but lately—happily—glory had taken the wheel. In October and November 1977, Casablanca had generated $15.4 million in revenue, a full 107 percent increase over the same period in 1976. Since the October 1 acquisition, PolyGram had posted three consecutive months of record sales, peaking at $27.3 million in December and keeping pace with old-school giants CBS, Capitol, and Warner Brothers. For the year, Casablanca had done $55 million, and we were projecting double that for 1978.

  We now had over 160 employees scattered between three buildings on Sunset and a fifteen-person office in Manhattan headed by Ray D’Ariano; we also had Robin Taylor, general manager of Pye Records, ready to help us open the doors to a new London office. PolyGram eventually quashed the idea of the London facility, preferring to control European operations themselves. In February, we named Marc Paul Simon vice president of special projects, and soon afterwards we acquired Simon’s company, Provocative Promotions, absorbing his staff into our ranks. Our subsidiaries were healthy, with hits of their own; Millennium had Meco’s astonishing string of disco soundtrack successes, and Chocolate City had funk/dance purveyors Cameo.

  In mid-March, Cecil, Bruce, and I received title bumps: I became senior vice president and managing director, Cecil became senior vice president and special assistant to Neil, and Bruce assumed my old title of executive vice president. Also in March, David Shein was made vice president and chief financial officer.

  One of the more interesting hires was Bill Tennant, who came over from Columbia Pictures to be president of the FilmWorks division. Bill had been a very successful agent, and one of his clients was Academy Award—winning director Roman Polanski, whose pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, had been murdered by the Manson clan in 1969. Bill had been called upon to identify the bodies of Tate and several of the clan’s other victims. His knowledge of the film industry was vast; he’d inked Peter Fonda’s deal for Easy Rider and attached Polanski to Rosemary’s Baby. While he was production VP at Columbia, the studio had produced Taxi Driver and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, among others. Tennant was brilliant, and Peter Guber knew it. Bill was available because he’d been caught in the crossfire when Columbia studio head David Begelman’s check-forging activities came to light. Begelman, whom Bill considered a mentor, had embezzled over forty thousand dollars by forging check endorsements; a scandal had ensued, and Begelman was forced to resign, pulling Tennant down with him. I don’t think Tennant spent more than five minutes on the street before Guber approached him with a lucrative job offer. He accepted and thus became the third-highest-paid person in the company, behind only Neil and Peter. I was initially pissed off about this, and I treated Bill somewhat as an adversary, but once we’d had a chance to spend some time together we became friends. After all, we were in simi
lar positions—Bill handled the kind of day-to-day details for Guber that I was handling for the record company.

  Another significant hire, at least in terms of its impact on me, was Betty Logan. My former assistant, Terry Barnes, had left to join Scott Shannon at Ariola Records. Shannon had departed in the fall of 1977, and Terry’s interest in the promotion field, as well as her interest in Shannon (she had always seemed to have a bit of a crush on him), prompted her to follow. Unknown to me (and as busy as I was, it was easy for me to be oblivious to such things), Terry wasn’t the only one in the building with strong feelings for Scott. A tall, blonde female staffer in the legal department, whose name has since escaped me, was so distraught over Scott choosing to take Terry with him that one day she attempted suicide while in the building. We kept the whole thing quiet, and very few people even knew it had happened. Betty Logan came into this mess and didn’t miss a beat. She was a bright, beautiful, sweet woman with a dark complexion. She was also brilliant at protecting me from the industry gossip to which record company execs are often subject, and she had no problem putting up with me, my naps, and my drugs, to say nothing of the occasional bouts of flirting with other women that went on. Betty was my ace in the hole.

  Neil, meanwhile, who had never been a wallflower, was taking more and more of the company spotlight and branching off into entirely new territory. The first big event that occurred in his life that year was the birth of his and Joyce’s son, Evan, on January 23. A month later, on February 22, Neil and Joyce hosted a party for California’s Democratic governor, Jerry Brown. The twenty-five-hundred-dollar-a-plate black-tie event, which they hosted at their Holmby Hills estate, was intended to boost the political career of Brown, who was gearing up for a run at the 1980 presidential election. Neil was a staunch Republican and so, politically speaking, the polar opposite of Brown, but the party wasn’t about stumping for a presidential candidate. Neil was simply ingratiating himself to someone upon whom he could rely for favors down the line. He was becoming a bit of an elitist. He’d started shopping at the most expensive stores in LA. And he and Joyce had hired Sharon Landa, a famous decorator, to make their house look like a lavish Hollywood estate; they also badgered Candy and me to use Sharon’s services. While Neil loved this “fabulous” lifestyle, the idea of hiring a decorator seemed weird to Candy and me—actually, it just felt like more of the superficial LA scene. But Neil was finally in a position where he could entertain the heads of other labels, movie people, and stars in his home. He basked in their attention. He was as much of a groupie in his own way as anyone, in some respects maybe more.

  The party was attended by many noteworthy people, among them Warner Brothers exec Joe Smith; A&M Records founder Jerry Moss; Jeff Wald and his wife, Helen Reddy; Linda Ronstadt; actress Marcia Strassman of Welcome Back, Kotter fame; William Shatner; Gene Simmons; and Cher. The last two hit it off, and in short order they became something of an item. Gene did a nice sales job on Cher, and we signed her to Casablanca within a month. Jerry Brown did a nice sales job on Richard Trugman, who left the company in March to work on Brown’s presidential campaign. Richard felt that he’d made his money with Casablanca, and he didn’t think the company’s future was as bright as it appeared.

  Trugman had not been the most well-liked person in the company. He had a superior attitude and would constantly complain about the volume of the music we played on the floor above. All of us music people upstairs couldn’t have cared less. Music was the business we were in; the music came first, and the lawyers could wear earplugs if it got too loud. Bruce Bird was his usual adversary in this ongoing battle; Richard would never complain to me or Neil because he knew how we would react.

  Around this time, we began to make some changes to the office. During the renovations, Peter Guber discovered wires running up to Neil’s office on the second floor; these wires were connected to a tape recorder in a downstairs office. Neil insisted that he knew nothing about it, and everyone flatly denied any involvement. I was never sure what one of our employees could have gained by eavesdropping on Neil. It bothered me, however, that while everyone claimed that someone else had installed the eavesdropping system, the tape recorder was not well hidden, so it would have been very hard for Neil not to have noticed it.

  Due to the discovery of the wires, we met a very strange individual: Arthur Kassel. Art was a self-styled Secret Service man, a staunchly conservative political operative who had a fondness for Quick Tan—he reminded me a bit of G. Gordon Liddy. We hired him to secure the building and our houses, and he made a big production of it. He came to the office, my home, and Neil’s home equipped with the latest technology to sweep for bugs. Candy came home one day to find Kassel and his crew of lackeys in suits in our house without permission. She flipped her lid and threw them all out. The most troubling thing was that we had had the alarm on, the gate closed, and the doors locked, but these guys had gotten in without a problem.

  Despite the cloak and dagger stuff—or maybe because of it—Neil liked Art, especially after he gave Neil a New York State Narcotics Department badge. Neil kept it in his wallet; he really thought that it would get him a free pass if he ever needed it. It wasn’t long before he got the chance to try it out. Bruce Bird and Howie Rosen got loaded at a Dodgers game. When he drank and did coke, Bruce became belligerent, and so did Howie. Someone on the balcony above them started dripping soda or beer on their seats. Grabbing their foot-long souvenir bats, Bruce and Howie ran up to the balcony level to find the culprit. Instead they found themselves confronting a large group of guys. Bruce ended up suspended over the balcony railing, and then both he and Howie were taken away by security personnel. Nancy (by now married to Bruce) rushed off to find Neil, who was elsewhere in the stadium. Neil, stoned on ’ludes and feeling bold, assured her he’d take care of it. He went downstairs to the holding pen where Bruce and Howie were being detained (fortunately, he had the presence of mind to leave his stash of drugs behind). But when he flashed the badge Kassel had given him, the security people burst out laughing and told him to get the fuck out of there. So much for Neil’s career in law enforcement.

  His philanthropic ventures were a bit more successful. He and Joyce had written a check for one hundred thousand dollars to LA’s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to help fund the construction of a new wing. Their gift was widely covered in the press. Other high-profile events littered Neil’s itinerary, including a February 6 appearance with Donna Summer and Joyce on The Merv Griffin Show, the first of several appearances for Neil on this show. In April, we produced a thirty-second TV spot to promote KISS’s Double Platinum, a greatest hits collection. Neil was growing so comfortable with being the face of Casablanca that Howard Marks was able to talk him into being the pitch man in the ad. I am sure Howard did not have to twist his arm very much, as Neil always wanted to be in the limelight, and this was just another opportunity. It was one of the cheesiest commercials I have ever seen. It wasn’t even quality cheese—more like Cheez Whiz. If you were a fourteen-year-old KISS fan, would you be motivated by a guy in his late thirties trying to sell you on their record? It just did not work, but who was going to tell Neil that?

  If there was limelight to be had, we would fall all over ourselves to get into it. At the twentieth annual NARM (National Association of Recording Merchandisers) convention, we broke the bank—and we also defied common sense, but when didn’t we do that? The big, three-day industry get-together was held on the fourth floor of the New Orleans Hyatt Regency, beginning on March 18. Our booth, for lack of a better word, was huge. It was designed as a miniature Moroccan-motif (of course) casino, featuring blackjack, roulette, and other gambling games, all of which had label tie-ins. In one game, guests could win prizes by throwing beanbags at a life-size Dick Sherman prop. We hired veiled belly dancers to mingle with the conventioneers and hand out Casablanca exhibit passes and free gambling chips. We scattered cocktail napkins bearing the names or artwork of Donna Summer, the Village People, Love and Kisses, and Ro
berta Kelly; and we distributed a nice promotional sampler album, Return to Casablanca, specially created for NARM attendees. The capper was a stunning sixty-minute live performance by Donna Summer. The Casablanca experience was the hit of the convention, and talk of it circulated through the gossip columns of industry publications for the next several weeks.

  Because Return to Casablanca had been such a hit at the NARM convention, we decided to press an additional twenty-one thousand units and send them out to retailers in a specially made carton containing not only the double LP but also cassette and 8-track versions of the same release. And we continued this excess with several key releases throughout 1978. We always loved producing these promotional materials, but the main reason we did them was to make radio people feel special. Most were excited to own a limited edition sampler with a unique cover, and that made them more inclined to give us airplay.

  We were moving at warp speed. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew this couldn’t be sustained. I knew the piper would have to be paid. But when? And how much? I was far too intoxicated with this life to care.

  17 Writing the Billboord Charts

  The land of the beautiful people—Playing the charts—Studio 54 and the disco label—Osko’s—Thank

  God It’s Friday—The battle with Saturday Night

  Fever—The battle with Wardlow—Midnight Express