And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records

by Harris, Larry

  But, as it turned out, even pulling Wardlow’s strings couldn’t elevate us to the top spot. This triggered a huge blowup between us. I screamed at Wardlow over the phone for reneging on his promise. It was a good demonstration of how much ego and a sense of entitlement had grown at 8255. We had so gorged ourselves on our own press that we had completely lost our perspective. We thought we owned the charts, and to be shafted out of the No. 1 slot when it had been promised to us made me absolutely livid. How dare he! After shredding Bill for fifteen minutes, I slammed down the phone and gradually calmed myself. Fortunately, Bill was forgiving, and the incident was pretty much forgotten after a couple of weeks had passed. I’m sure that Neil was torn between thinking I was insane to go off on someone as powerful as Wardlow and impressed that I had it in me to stand up to him.

  This will give you an idea of what I was up against. I read somewhere that RSO top man Al Coury had flown to Venice in early May for the 1978 IMIC (International Music Industry Conference). I remember wondering why. I later discovered that it wasn’t the conference he’d been interested in; what he wanted was the chance to sit beside Bill Warlow on the plane. Why? Because he wanted to ensure that Yvonne Elliman’s “If I Can’t Have You” (the fifth and final single from Saturday Night Fever) hit No. 1. Sure enough, if you look at the May 13, 1978 issue of Billboard, you’ll see the single sitting pretty atop that week’s Hot 100 chart. If Al would travel halfway around the world for a single, what would he do to get Bill to keep the LP at No. 1 for another week?

  Donna Summer in 1979, during her Bad Girls era. (Harry Langdon/ Getty Images)

  The full-sized Mothership is set up for Parliament’s headlining performance at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on June 4, 1977. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

  Donna Summer and producer Giorgio Moroder sit on a couch, circa 1978. (Echoes/Redferns)

  1977, Angel’s dramatic finale: the band members would climb into the box, which would then rise above the stage and explode. Goodnight! (Barry Levine)

  Angel in 1979, during their Sinful era. Left to right: Felix Robinson, Gregg Giuffria, Frank DiMino, Punky Meadows, and Barry Brandt. (Barry Levine)

  KISS Manager Bill Aucoin, NARM President Joe Cohen, Meatloaf, Gene Simmons, Cher, and Larry Harris at the March 1979 NARM banquet in Hollywood, Florida. (Collection of Larry Harris)

  Casablanca VP of Promotion, Bruce Bird, looks on as Bogart leads Dick Sherman, Pete Jones, Irv Biegel, and Larry in “In the Navy” at the March 1979 NARM Convention. (Collection of Larry Harris)

  At the NARM banquet in Hollywood, Florida, March 1979. Back row: Village People members Victor Willis and Glenn Hughes flanking their managers Henri Belolo and Jacques Morali; front row: Larry Harris (in sailor suit) and NARM President Joe Cohen. (Collection of Larry Harris)

  The Village People perform “In the Navy” onstage during their 1979 Go West tour. (Richard E. Aaron/Redferns)

  The Village People get sleazy in their first photo session with new “Hot Cop” lead singer in 1979. Left to right: Ray Simpson, David Hodo, Randy Jones, Glenn Hughes, Alexander Briley, Felipe Rose. (GAB Archive/Redferns)

  KISS visiting the locals outside Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, California, on February 20, 1976, as their head of security “Big John” Harte and DJ Rodney Bingenheimer look on. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

  Gene Simmons pumps up the crowd on the tail end of KISS’s Alive! tour in 1976. (Fin Costello/Redferns)

  PolyGram couldn’t have been happier that we were tussling with RSO over the top spot on the charts: they distributed both albums. From the careful-what-you-wish-for file, they soon became so swamped by the success of the SNF soundtrack that all they did for months was scramble to keep up with the orders. This indicates just how huge the album was—for a short time, the entire industry suffered a manufacturing logjam due to its enormous volume of sales.

  With most of 8255 Sunset hip-deep in disco, Peter Guber and the FilmWorks division had begun work on their next project. Guber had acquired the movie rights to a 1977 book by Billy Hayes entitled Midnight Express. The book, which had topped the best-seller lists, was the true account of Hayes’s 1970 arrest and imprisonment in Turkey for attempting to smuggle hashish back to the United States. The first I heard of the movie was when I was invited, along with Giorgio Moroder, to attend a screening of it. Neil had done a sales job on Peter and convinced him to get Giorgio to compose the film’s score. Giorgio’s initial reaction to the offer was cool, but he eventually capitulated, and for his efforts he won the Academy Award for best original score. The book was adapted for the screen by a young ex-military man by the name of Oliver Stone, who won an Academy Award for his work on the film.

  Christy, my sister-in-law, became good friends with one of the film’s producers, David Puttnam (she’d befriend just about anyone with a British accent), who for months sat downstairs at FilmWorks and edited the movie. During production, I often visited his editing space—a trailer parked in the employee parking lot—to check on his progress. I never had anything to say to him, but I was intrigued by the editing process, and when I needed to get away from the chaos of Casablanca I found Puttnam’s trailer to be a great hiding place. I’ve no idea how closely it paralleled actual events, but the story depicted in the film was harrowing. This was a far, far better product than The Deep, and there was zero comparison between it and the throwaway disco movie that Neil was making across town. Stone and director Alan Parker took Midnight Express to the 1978 Cannes Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Palme d’Or, the festival’s highest honor. Guber’s first two FilmWorks films were a summer blockbuster followed by a critical darling. Midnight Express opened the door for David Puttnam, who would to go on to make Chariots of Fire and later run Columbia Pictures.

  There had been so many new people added to the company, so many new acts, a merger, and a buyout—all in the space of a year. We were very fortunate that throughout it all, KISS, our premier act, had sailed on so smoothly with comparatively little attention from us. But by May of 1978, there were growing divisions between the band members. One of the advantages of KISS’s signature makeup was that onstage it gave all four band members more or less equal importance, and that helped keep egos at bay. However, KISS had always been (and always would be) the vehicle of Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons: they wrote and sang almost all of the songs, and they were the dominant personalities. But now Ace Frehley and Peter Criss had begun to rebel. Their behavior was becoming more erratic, although most of it was of the drug-and-alcohol-related kind, which was still the acceptable standard in the rock and roll world. In May, the band began shooting a TV movie of the week called KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park; we started hearing reports that Ace and, in particular, Peter were showing up late for shoots and were generally moody and difficult.

  Most of these headaches fell under the purview of Bill Aucoin or Glickman/Marks, and we were more than happy to let them wage the war for us. Then, on the morning of May 27, 1978, Neil received an urgent a phone call from Aucoin, who explained that Peter Criss had been involved in a car crash. The circumstances surrounding the accident weren’t yet fully known, but what we did hear wasn’t good. Peter and one of KISS’s roadies, Fritz Postlethwaite, had totaled a Porsche on Sepulveda Boulevard. Fritz had been found in the burning wreckage; Peter had been thrown through the windshield onto the pavement. Both had been rushed by ambulance to a hospital in Marina del Rey.

  The movie had wrapped that day, and the two had been up all night at a high-stakes poker game. As the sun rose, they had jumped into their rented Porsche and taken off, destination unknown. At around 6:00 a.m., they’d hit a tree at a very high speed. September 18 was the target release date for four new KISS albums, and the KISS movie was slated for an October premiere on NBC. Any negative news about the band at this point would be pure kryptonite. Again, I was not told what strings Neil pulled to keep the story quiet, but the lack of press coverage was impressive.

  The
specter of four new KISS albums was very troubling to me. They weren’t KISS albums per se, but solo records by each of the band’s four members. As far back as mid-1976, when Glickman/Marks had arrived on the KISS scene, solo albums had been mentioned in their contract. Under the terms of their agreement, one such solo effort would count as half an album; this meant that by releasing four solos at once, they would eliminate two full albums from their contractual obligations. For a long while, very little had been said about doing solo records, and the idea was largely forgotten, at least around our offices. Then, probably in the summer of 1977, the idea began to heat up and take shape, and by the beginning of 1978, Aucoin was pressing it hard. This may have been an attempt on his part to appease Peter and Ace, to soothe egos and repair the band mates’ relationships.

  We hated the idea and did our best to stonewall Aucoin. Solo albums were a lose-lose proposition for a record company. They rarely did well, so financially they made little sense, but by saying no to your artists you ran the risk of fracturing the always-fragile act-label relationship. KISS wanted to do four at once? No thanks. It wasn’t until Bill implied that the band would break up if we refused that we finally agreed to it, but we were still skeptical about their motives. We thought that they might be attempting to fulfill their contract with us quickly so they could find a new record company or that they were trying to force us into offering them a sweeter deal.

  Faced with no other alternative, we began to look for ways to make it work. Neil initially thought that we could release a total of two million albums (which was by now standard for KISS, anyway)—half a million units for each guy. It had been over a year since KISS’s previous studio album, an eternity for them, and the opportunity to offer their huge fan base four new albums at once certainly held some appeal. A half million each; sure, we can do that. But Howard Marks balked. Sticking the contract in our faces, he pointed out that in order to abide by its terms, we’d have to press one million copies of each solo album. This would amount to a minimum of four million dollars in recording and advertising costs, to say nothing of manufacturing and promotion costs. At that point, albums still sold for less than ten dollars each, so we needed to ship a large number in order to cover costs and maintain the KISS hype machine. PolyGram was not happy about this. Wow, big surprise. We didn’t like it much either. We had to beg, plead, and cajole them into it.

  Considering that all of KISS’s previous albums had gone Gold, Platinum, or better, shipping a million of each album didn’t seem too ridiculous, or so we told ourselves. Neil, gambler that he was, eventually embraced the idea. We not only came out with the four solo albums, but we also issued a limited edition of each album as a picture disc for collectors. The picture discs did very well, so, true to the Casablanca “damn the torpedoes” attitude, we quickly printed more of these not-quite-so-limited editions.

  On September 18, we shipped over 5.3 million albums. It was the biggest release in industry history to that point. We had to make sure that PolyGram saw that this four-million-dollar investment was going to succeed, so we created an equally enormous marketing campaign. We supplied retailers with half a million white plastic bags printed with the four solo album covers, along with an assortment of point-of-purchase displays and foam-board signs. Hundreds upon hundreds of lavish press kits went out. We spent $1.2 million on ad buys in various forms of media. We bought sixty-second radio spots on over one hundred stations nationwide. We placed expensive thirty-second spots on youth-oriented prime-time TV shows like Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley. There were bus and subway ads in Manhattan, as well as billboards there and in LA. We did four digital ads—one for each album—on the nineteen-month-old JumboTron in Times Square. We shipped out looped videocassettes of a two-minute presentation on the pressing of the solo albums to over four hundred retailers, as well as promotional calendars for 1979. The campaign seemed endless.

  It wasn’t just PolyGram that was pissed at us—it was the entire industry. Neil’s aggressiveness had always been the subject of water-cooler gossip in the various record companies. At first, we’d seemed like ambitious underdogs. Our naïveté was probably endearing: “Oh, look at those Casablanca guys going a million miles an hour.” But then raised eyebrows became contempt because we started to promote to ridiculous extremes—and, worse, we even promoted ourselves, as record company execs. This unquestionably made life difficult for our counterparts at other record companies. Now Warner execs, for instance, had to field calls from artists asking, “Why can’t you promote us like Casablanca promotes their acts?” Our rampant spending was forcing other labels to keep up with the Joneses, whether they wanted to or not. The new KISS albums were the worst example of this, because not only had we spent more on a single campaign than any other record company had ever spent before, but we’d also done it for solo albums, the bane of the record exec’s existence. You could just imagine the top guy at MCA grumbling, “God, if Townshend and Daltrey come in here screaming for three million each for solo albums, we’re fucked.”

  Not long after the KISS albums hit the stores, it became apparent that we were royally screwed. The Gene and Paul solos, the ones we thought would do the best, were miserable failures, as was Peter’s effort. The best seller of the lot was Ace’s, which scored with a relatively strong single, “New York Groove,” but that wasn’t enough to save us, nor was having four Platinum albums (only because we’d shipped a million each). Our projected sales figures were frighteningly off, although I’d bragged in an interview that they would be at six to eight million by Christmas. We had another Carson album on our hands—times four. The albums actually sold about half a million units each: Gold status. Had we fought Howard Marks and shipped them Gold to begin with, everyone would’ve survived. But given our cash outlay for recording, pressing, and advertising, we needed to sell the entire run just to approach the breakeven point. To eat two million returns was a crippling blow.

  PolyGram, unbeknownst to us or to KISS, sold the lion’s share of the returns to discount retailers and flea markets, contravening the terms of our contract with KISS. If your albums landed in the cutout bin, it usually meant that you were finished. This certainly didn’t help KISS’s career, which by 1979 would begin to decline in the US. Years later, KISS would sue PolyGram for this infraction and win. For Casablanca, there would be no such salvation.

  18 Cracks in the Casbah

  Prestige—Foxes—Rejected cover—The worst year ever—

  Ambition undimmed-Merv Griffin—Dance Fever—President

  Ford—Cher—The shotgun approach—A meeting with Bob

  Dylan—Another Wardlow soiree—Village People—NARM

  agnin—Lip-synching?!—Robin Williams and the TV

  connection—Business with the golden arches

  October 28, 1978

  Hilton Hotel

  Manhattan, New York

  If you’re Jewish, one of the highest honors you can receive is having a dinner thrown for you by the United Jewish Appeal (UJA). In the fall of 1978, Neil was chosen. This was the major honor of his life to that point, and he was beaming when the announcement was made.

  It is understood that UJA honorees will use the event to raise funds for the appeal. All my life, I’d heard plenty about the monetary and political sides of religion, so this was no surprise to me. The UJA dinner would highlight Neil’s entire career in the business, and so he wanted it to be the organization’s most successful fund drive ever. He had Ellen Wolf, Walter Wanger, and Chris Whorf plan a multimedia presentation based on his childhood and his career, and he assigned Casablanca’s press department the task of laying out an industry campaign to make everyone aware of the event. He also instructed Dick Sherman and his sales staff to sell an ad in the UJA Journal to everyone we dealt with—every manufacturer, every printer, every major chain store. These ads were the primary vehicle for raising money for the organization. Casablanca’s art department, its finance department, and everyone who spent a nickel of the company’s mon
ey were ordered to get an ad from all of their vendors, no matter how small. Millennium, Chocolate City, and the rest of our subsidiary labels took ads, even though we actually put up the money for many of them. Finally, we made sure that every one of our artists took ads.

  As the dinner drew near, Neil followed up on stragglers who had committed to a donation but hadn’t yet paid up. He was tireless in his drive to ensure that everyone he knew contributed to the effort. At least half of our employees would be attending the dinner, and the per-plate ticket prices weren’t cheap. Many of the companies we dealt with were expected to buy an entire table plus take out an ad in praise of Neil in the UJA Journal, which included an extended professional bio of Neil Bogart.