And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records

by Harris, Larry

—KISS meets the Phantom—Accident on Sepulveda—

  The solo album catastrophe

  April 26, 1978

  254 West Fifty-fourth Street

  Manhattan, New York

  There was blow everywhere. It was like some sort of condiment that had to be brushed away by the waitstaff before the next party was seated. Cocaine dusted everything. It was on fingertips, tabletops, upper lips, and the floor. How many people were doing blow and how many were being blown? The race was too close to call.

  I was seated at a table with Bill Wardlow to my left and Neil Bogart to my right. Wardlow was one of the most important and influential men in the business. As the charts editor for Billboard, he held the entire music industry in his hands. The bottom line of every record company, from some backroom independent in Detroit to Capitol in LA, could be changed with a flick of Wardlow’s pen.

  Over the course of the evening, we watched a succession of legends—who could have collectively accounted for the cover shots of a year’s worth of People and Rolling Stone—parade past. Celebrities and sycophants were everywhere. And then there was me, Larry Harris, a kid from Queens. The scene was surreal. It was like witnessing a great empire grown fat on its own arrogance and hedonism, soon to crumble and fall. It was a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life.

  Welcome to Studio 54.

  Bill, Neil, and I weren’t just in Studio 54—that was for the public, or at least whatever beautiful part of it could worm its way past the red velvet ropes. We were in the catacombs, a series of very exclusive and somewhat private areas in the basement of the renowned disco oasis. And we were here for a reason: to perpetuate our carefully cultivated myth of Casablanca. We were regarded as the gold standard of the record world. With our stable of hot artists, we’d skyrocketed to heights that no young record company had ever (before or since) attained. Disco was the hottest music around, and we owned the niche. We were disco. We had a trophy case bursting with so many Gold and Platinum awards that even Atlantic and Warner Brothers couldn’t compete, and we had a grip on the charts that was the bitter envy of the industry. We had earned some of that. The rest of it was hype, and Bill Wardlow had helped us to create it out of whole cloth.

  I liked Bill. He was in his mid-fifties, tall, relatively thin, not unattractive, with a full head of gray hair. He always dressed smartly and was fond of long-sleeved, crisply ironed button-down shirts. He tended to talk as if he thought he was smarter than most, though I was never really put off by his vaguely snide demeanor. I found him to be a personable and tractable man, and I enjoyed his company on the many occasions we met. Truth be told, if Bill hadn’t been in charge of the charts for Billboard, we probably wouldn’t have had any sort of relationship, and I certainly wouldn’t have been at Studio 54 with him. The ability to manipulate the Billboard charts was a major advantage to Casablanca.

  To comprehend how Casablanca influenced the charts, it’s helpful to know the players involved and the position each held in the industry hierarchy. In the 1970s, there were eight major music trade papers: Billboard, Cashbox, Record World, Radio & Records, Kal Rudman’s FMQB, The Gavin Report, The Bob Hamilton Radio Report, and Bobby Poe’s Pop Music Survey.

  Billboard was the oldest and most influential of them all. Large distributors such as the Handleman Company sold to major retailers like Kmart and Walmart, and they would only buy product if it was on the Billboard charts. The initial orders placed by these distributors could be in excess of one hundred thousand units, so it’s easy to see how Billboard was vital to sales. In addition, numerous radio stations consulted Billboard before deciding whether to add a record to their playlists. Record World was regarded as having the most honest and relevant charts, although it lacked the widespread influence of Billboard. Cashbox, another old-line magazine, was owned by Mr. George Albert, who would not hesitate to make deals on chart positions in exchange for advertising.

  The other trade charts were based on airplay. They manipulated record companies using advertising as a threat, and they had little or no influence on retail. They did, however, have some marginal influence on radio play. Radio & Records, The Gavin Report, The Bob Hamilton Radio Report, Bobby Poe’s Pop Music Survey, and FMQB had this kind of influence, as did a few other regional or format-oriented sheets around the country.

  Radio & Records (R&R) appeared on the scene at about the same time Casablanca did. It dealt with radio airplay exclusively, and it was (and still is) the sheet around which much of the pay-for-play and payola revolved. About the time R&R was being launched, its owner, Bob Wilson, met with Neil to try to secure an advertising commitment. Neil, of course, leaped at the chance. He was a big believer in helping those who were starting out, because then he could call in the favor when he needed it. And, although he was a big gambler, he would never risk being seen as uncooperative by industry-oriented publications.

  In a short time, R&R became very influential in the music industry. Its charts were done in such a way that they actually quantified the importance of each radio station—something that opened the door to abuse. It grouped stations into three categories: parallel I markets (more than a million people), parallel II markets (more than half a million), and parallel III markets (more than a quarter million). The publicity ran upstream: if it acquired airplay on enough parallel III stations, your record would begin to look good to parallel II stations. Once it had substantial airplay on parallel II and III stations, then the important parallel I stations would begin to consider playing it, and so forth. A record’s movements on the R&R charts directly affected its level of national airplay and thus determined its success or failure. National promotion people who did not understand how to manipulate the R&R system would find themselves out of a gig.

  Independent promoters benefited handsomely from this process, as it allowed them to approach the big record companies with concrete figures in hand and get compensated accordingly. The charts took the guesswork out of determining how valuable it would be to have an artist added to a radio station, and the independent promotions market grew exponentially as a result. Also, radio program directors found that by relying on the R&R charts, they could protect themselves from being fired for choosing the wrong records to play. If a PD’s boss asked him why he’d added a particular record, he could always just point to the R&R charts.

  At the time, Billboard did not have the most scientific method for compiling charts; none of the publications did. The Billboard Broadcast Data System (BDS), which made the charts much more scientific, was not invented until 1992. When it came to album sales, a record company would tell the Billboard chart department, headed by Bill Wardlow, how many copies of an album it had sold and what level of airplay the album was getting ; it would also inform Billboard about any special support initiatives, such as tours or advertising blitzes. Bill would somehow rate this information—I still firmly believe he used a Ouija board—and decide where to place the album. Airplay was not considered in compiling the album charts; sales was the only criterion. The singles charts were based on a combination of Top 40 airplay and sales, weighted more heavily toward airplay.

  • September 7, 1978: Keith Moon of The Who dies of a drug overdose.

  • October 25, 1978: John Carpenter’s Halloween premieres in Kansas City, Missouri.

  • October 27, 1978: Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin win the Nobel Peace Prize for completing a peace treaty between their two nations.

  When I first moved to Los Angeles, at the end of 1973, I started visiting Billboard weekly to present our product information. I soon curtailed these visits. I didn’t have much to discuss with Bill; our product was not selling very well, and, anyway, Warner already had someone whose job it was to visit Billboard and inform them about our product. After we left Warner, in the summer of 1974, I resumed my weekly visits to the trades, determined to find a way to make a substantial impact on the charts. One day, as I spoke with Bill, I noticed that his attitude toward me had chang
ed. He was trying to ingratiate himself to me. It didn’t take me long to figure out why: Bill Wardlow loved disco.

  The math was easy. Bill loved disco. Casablanca was disco. I was in like Flynn. Bill wanted very much to be a part of our scene, even going so far as to create a separate disco chart called National Disco Action Top 40. If you look at the album charts from that era, you will notice that disco product appears much more influential than it should have been. Bill’s love for disco was the human element of this inexact science. He enjoyed talking to me about disco artists such as Donna Summer, Pattie Brooks, and Paul Jabara, and when the Village People arrived, he was absolutely beside himself. Bill especially loved the attention he’d get when Neil invited him to some disco event we were throwing.

  We leveraged the relationship as much as we could. Eventually, I could walk into Bill’s office, tell him the position on the charts I felt a given album should have, and, lo and behold, there it would be. If we needed a bullet on an album or single to show upward momentum, I would just tell Bill that I needed a bullet. In 1977, I was able to get four KISS albums (Alive!, Destroyer, Rock and Roll Over, and Love Gun) on Billboard’s Top 100 at the same time. Of those four albums, only two deserved anywhere near the numbers they were allegedly achieving. This, of course, led us to mount a major retail and industry advertising campaign. Having four albums on the charts at once was something that no one else had ever accomplished: this was a coup.

  The volume of trade advertising we were doing was still far greater than it should have been. Early on, Neil had asked me to ensure that everyone was getting the message that we were hot and successful, so I made contractual arrangements with Billboard, Cashbox, and Record World. We would take their front inside covers every week for a year; if we didn’t have new product to advertise, then we’d run the same ads over and over. We also tried to secure the front cover of Billboard, which had three available advertising spaces. Our spending on ads in the trades was obscene, but it did serve to plant our name in front of everyone on a weekly basis. Our ads extolled not just our artists but also the company in general.

  We were shaping Casablanca’s reality out of a faux public perception. It didn’t make our bottom line any less real, but it was a grand bit of illusion making. Even we were tempted to believe our own carefully crafted press—and that was dangerous. In the disco era, we had as many as eight albums on the Billboard disco chart; for a company less than five years old, it was an amazing position to be in. We even knew the chart positions hours before they were released to the industry. The numbers were not generally available until 3:00 p.m. on Wednesdays, but I would have them by noon.

  Neil was very close to Studio 54’s owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager. They were partners, but, through the sheer force of his personality, Rubell was the de facto leader. He was a relatively short guy in his mid-thirties with thinning brown hair and an aggressive look in his eye—a blend of wild enthusiasm, anxiety, and annoyance. He was endlessly energetic and would just as soon bully you as charm you. He could, and did, work a crowd to a degree to which P.T. Barnum might aspire, but he was prone to childish tantrums. If he was in a bad mood or a coke-induced rage, he was uncontrollable—even Ian would steer clear of him. I once saw him dress down an employee over some perceived infraction; for three solid minutes, he screamed himself hoarse as the poor kid cowered from the onslaught. Schrager was about the same age, slightly taller, with more polished good looks. He was by no means quiet and could be very engaging when he wanted to be, despite a speech impediment, but he was far more relaxed than Rubell. I worked with the two occasionally, but I didn’t hang with them as much Neil did.

  Although Rubell’s arrogance put many people off, Neil got along well with him; when any of us went to Studio 54, we were treated as major personalities and brought straight into the club’s restricted areas. We never waited outside with the crush of people desperate to be allowed into the cultural nirvana Rubell and Schrager had crafted in midtown Manhattan. We always called ahead, and either Steve or Ian would usher us into his private office to discuss business; in Rubell’s filtered world of beautiful people, we were top-flight celebrities. Studio 54 was a disco club, and Casablanca, especially to Rubell, was the very essence of disco. For us, Studio 54 was flash money—a name and a place we could use to impress anyone, from members of the press to potential artists.

  We included Bill Wardlow in the events and parties at the infamous club to make it even easier for us to exert influence over the charts. Wardlow began to visit our offices just to feel more involved in the disco phenomenon. Neil might have been in his company only half a dozen times, but he always made those times count by lavishing attention on Bill. I felt that Bill had been on my side from the start, but a movie called Thank God It’s Friday put him in my back pocket for good. In early 1977, Neil had the idea to do a disco movie featuring Donna Summer, Paul Jabara, and a few of our other artists. If that sounds like an expensive and lengthy commercial for Casablanca, that’s exactly what it was. Neil and Peter Guber had a meeting about the project with the powers at Columbia Pictures, and after some prodding they agreed to the movie, pending their approval of the script. Neil enlisted Ellen Wolf and Walter Wanger, our two brightest publicists, to begin work on the screenplay, with input from our disco people and Paul Jabara. Neil kept a tight rein on the script, adding his own ideas and corrections as it moved along. When it was almost finished, Columbia called to say there was a problem: they had promised Motown that they could make a disco movie, too.

  This led to all kinds of bickering, but finally it was agreed that the movie would be a coproduction, with Neil representing us and Rob Klann representing Motown. Casablanca would release the soundtrack, but it would contain songs by both labels’ acts. The budget, as I remember, was pretty skimpy, even for those days—under a million dollars. This would not have presented such a big hurdle if we had been able to find a discotheque willing to serve as our movie set. But no discotheque in the LA area wanted to shut its doors for two months and forgo thousands of dollars in income while we shot our crappy little movie. Eventually, however, we did find one: Osko’s. The odd-shaped, thirty-thousand-square-foot property, located on La Cienega Boulevard, had just been overhauled to the tune of one hundred thousand dollars, and it had been transformed into a veritable Studio 54 West. This gargantuan, multilevel, multiroom club had everything from an arcade to an ice cave to a series of hidden enclaves, all of which ringed the dance floor; an egg-shaped DJ booth was suspended above the stage. My favorite feature was an elevator operated by a guy in a gorilla suit.

  Throughout the 1977 holiday season, Neil was always on the set at Osko’s. Whenever I needed to see him, I had to go there. I took Bill Wardlow to these on-set visits as often as I could, knowing that in return I could write next week’s charts. Thank God It’s Friday not only kept Bill Wardlow under our influence, but it also gave a significant boost to the careers of Donna Summer, who starred in the movie, and Paul Jabara, who also appeared in the movie and who wrote the award-winning song “Last Dance” for its soundtrack.

  This was Neil’s baby, and it was our first real venture into the world of film (The Deep was mostly completed by the time we’d merged with Guber). We now kicked everything else to the curb. Everyone at Casablanca had to be focused on Thank God It’s Friday. The marketing campaign had to be nothing less than spectacular. The title song, performed by Love and Kisses, had to be huge. Cost was no barrier. The song had to be a hit before the movie was released; it needed to be big enough to get people interested in the movie. We spent two million dollars promoting the movie and the soundtrack—almost double what it cost to produce the film itself. Premieres, each attended by a large portion of the cast and followed by a massive party, were held at Studio 54 and at Osko’s; there was a third gala in San Francisco. A thirty-minute making-of documentary was produced for syndication by FilmWorks, as was a fifty-minute promotional film, which was taped on the Osko’s set. The latter featured Donna host
ing a disco fantasy party at which she, Love and Kisses, Paul Jabara, and others performed songs from the soundtrack for an audience of paid extras; it was aired as an episode of The Midnight Special. We purchased billboards all over the country, and we sponsored Thank God It’s Friday dance contests, which were heavily advertised in high school newspapers. Five promotional 12-inch singles were issued to radio, and we even had a deal with Real cigarettes to print ads on the backs of cigarette packages (try doing that today.) Promoting this movie with a straight face wasn’t easy. The script suffered through several rewrites and conflicting input from the Casablanca and Motown camps. But the movie’s obvious shortcomings didn’t really matter. What finally sank us was the one thing we could not control: the competition.

  That competition was one of the biggest movies and soundtracks of the decade, if not of all time: Saturday Night Fever. There was only room for one picture centered on dancing, and RSO’s Robert Stigwood (famous primarily for managing Cream and the Bee Gees) had the better one. Yes, we did have a hit album, with sales approaching one million, which should have inspired more people to see the movie than eventually did, but Saturday Night Fever left us in the dust. The motion picture was overwhelmingly successful, and the accompanying two-disc soundtrack album spawned five No. 1 singles.

  The biggest Thank God It’s Friday promotion of them all came during the last week of May, when two ninety-minute TGIF-themed episodes of The Merv Griffin Show were broadcast. Neil and Bill Wardlow were featured on both episodes as celebrity judges of a disco dance-off. Neil was an easy sell to the show’s producers, but convincing them of Wardlow’s value took more effort. Failure was not an option here: I had to get Bill on the show. After months of enticing him with various carrots—allowing him onto the Osko’s set while Donna performed “Last Dance”; getting him into Studio 54’s first anniversary party—I was finally poised to push TGIF to the top. Our LP (which also included a bonus 12-inch single) had debuted in the May 13 issue of Billboard at No. 74 and had been quickly moving up the Top 200 LPs and Tapes chart. The chance to put the fifty-eight-year-old Wardlow on national TV—for three hours, no less—would come once in a lifetime, and it would be a real dream come true for Bill, who loved the spotlight maybe even more than Neil did. A few weeks after the Merv episodes aired, Bill promised me our soundtrack would be No. 1 for the week ending July 1. I was over the moon. This was the first time we’d ever had a No. 1 album, and, best of all, we’d go down in the history books as the LP that pushed Saturday Night Fever from the No. 1 spot after a twenty-plus-week ride. I told Neil, and everyone was ecstatic.