Siren Song_My Life in Music

by Gareth Murphy

  But after the show, I turned to Gus. “What’s Mike talking about? That was a great band.”

  “I thought they were terrible,” said Gus just as dismissively. Whatever dumbfounded face I was wearing, Gus then looked into me. “Can I ask you something, Seymour?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Do you play a musical instrument?”

  “What on earth has that got do with this band?”

  “Because if you played an instrument, you’d have heard all the bum notes. God, they were awful.”

  Being condescended to by real-deal producers should have plunged my already shaky self-confidence into nuclear meltdown. Until that very moment, I would have given my left testicle to go back in time, learn the guitar, and become a studio producer like Mike Vernon, Gus Dudgeon, or Richard Gottehrer. For years, I’d suffered from a musical chip on my shoulder. Ironically, all that was about to be cured. I guess you have to take hard knocks to learn where your true strengths lie. This and other incidents were teaching me the virtues of musical illiteracy, or to put it another way, I was waking up to the dangers of technical virtuosity. Sometimes it’s better to be a dumb fuck just like all the other dumb fucks in the audience. In fact, it’s usually better not to know the disgusting secrets of how the sausage got made.

  Fuck it, I thought. I’m going to go after Jethro Tull myself. I sent an offer for the North American rights to the band’s managers, Terry Ellis and Chris Wright. Alas, Terry Ellis replied by typewritten letter a few weeks later. “We are, in fact, in the final stages of deciding between two companies, although it will probably be Reprise.” I was gutted, but them’s the rules. “We have been most impressed by the complimentary things we have heard about your company,” he signed off diplomatically. “We are most hopeful that we will be doing business in the future.” Probably untrue but never mind. Terry Ellis and Chris Wright would go on to great success as both artist managers and label bosses of their very own Chrysalis imprint. In the meantime, I’d have to look enviously at Jethro Tull’s rise to American stardom, much like I’d watched Donovan’s. This time, however, I was half smiling to myself. Yes, just like a prancing English flautist, there was a pleasurable relief in this particular whipping.

  Although Sire was gradually becoming an Anglophile label, we did sign some Americans in the late sixties. We released Silver Currents, a dreamy folk album by David Santo. On Broadway, we spotted Martha Veléz, a gutsy singer from the musical Hair. We sent her to Mike Vernon in London where they made Fiends and Angels, a romping R&B album we were very proud of. We weren’t scoring hits, but we were having fun, getting by, and there was every reason to be hopeful. Our audience was tuning in to a whole new network of new FM stations whose deejays and program directors were mostly our own age. It was like the previous fifty years of mono records and AM stations were becoming obsolete as demand for hip, stereo-produced rock albums was lifting the tide for so many young independents. A new generation of labels like Island, A&M, Immediate, Virgin, and Chrysalis were becoming big players on the psychedelic rock scene. All we had to do was keep shooting; our lucky strike would come.

  Even still, survival as a hand-to-mouth indie wasn’t easy. There were always barren financial periods between checks, and, of course, dipping into my savings was no way to run a business. Luckily, I’d picked up magic tricks from the likes of George Goldner and his promoter sharks. Looking at the stacks of unused promotional records being returned from our distributor, I salvaged an old iron from my mother. By heating the sleeve gently, Richard and I would take turns carefully peeling the Not for Sale—Promotion Only stickers without leaving any traces. When we had a freshly ironed pile, we’d call up a one-stop supplier and sell the fuckers for cash. It was more hassle than it was worth—we’d only get $100 or $200—but it paid the rent in those empty-cupboard months.

  Looking back, Richard Gottehrer and I made a funny team. I’d always been a hustler since my first jobs on Coney Island; Richard was more of a college kid who read books about Eastern philosophy and health food. He got me schlepping down to Souen, a macrobiotic restaurant just below Houston Street, which became our standard dinner through the hippie years. As for Sire’s circular S logo, it was an adaptation of the yin-yang symbol, which I think subconsciously befitted its two founders. I was the money guy, the ducker and diver; Richard was the artist in Cuban heels and Swiss watches. On our trips to Italy, I’d follow him to the flagship Brioni store on Via Barberini in Rome, where we both had Brioni suits made to measure, complete from scratch, for the ridiculously low prices of between $200 and $300.

  Teaching each other various tricks of the trade and giving each other our different viewpoints on life made us great partners. At the time, I thought I was the responsible one. Truth is, I was lugging around a ball of terror in my gut. I kept hearing Syd Nathan’s words to my father: “Your son has shellac in his veins … if he can’t be in the music business, it’s going to ruin his life.” For me, Sire’s success was a matter of life or death.

  About nine months after Syd’s funeral, I heard a bizarre story through the grapevine about Nat getting arrested. This didn’t make any sense to me, because I knew Nat couldn’t ever steal or hurt anyone, so I telephoned Cincinnati to find out.

  “What happened?” I asked Nat.

  “Well, I went to see the Reds play, and I had a lot of money with me,” explained Nat, who, like his late father, was a huge fan of the Cincinnati Reds. “We were winning, so I wanted to buy everyone in the stadium a hot dog.”

  “And that’s why you were arrested?”

  “Yeah. They thought I was crazy. But, Seymour, you know I’m not crazy. It was a Wednesday afternoon game, there were only about a thousand people in the stadium. If I really was crazy, I would have bought everyone a hot dog at a weekend game.”

  What could I say except “That was nice of you, Nat”? He’d just inherited a ton of money and would have given it all away for the only thing he ever wanted: friendship. Syd had taken Nat from his natural mother when he was a teenager, I think when Syd realized he was sick and didn’t have much time left. Syd wanted to set up his only son with some kind of future. Unfortunately, he was so busy running King that Nat had felt neglected, which I’m sure he was—both medically and emotionally. To get his father’s attention, Nat used to run away or get into trouble until Syd put him in military school, hoping it might teach the boy some self-discipline. Nat just kept getting into trouble or swindled.

  I dunno, maybe I was finally starting to grow up, but in those months after Syd’s funeral, I made some big decisions. I invested $19,000 of my stash on a two-bedroom place at 75 Central Park West. It didn’t quite have a park view, but almost. It was facing Sixty-Seventh Street, just on the corner. With the dubious help of an interior designer who Tom Noonan recommended, I got an aquarium fitted into a wall and redid one bathroom in marble, complete with a sauna. I got ripped off on those refurbishments, a beginner’s mistake I’d never repeat. Still, it was an ambitious project which, when finished, enabled me to put up my London gang, who also put me up when I was in London. Mike Vernon was among the first to stay over with his girlfriend. He almost creamed in his pants seeing my collection of Billboard magazines, which he studied backward into the fifties like the hungry blues researcher that he was.

  I was coming up in the world, but I remember sitting on the subway heading out to Brooklyn to see my folks, thinking long and hard about the bleak prospect of never having children. I was twenty-six, and all I had for a private life were a few old secrets that still made me uncomfortable. It’s not that I felt lonely, I loved what I was doing, but the niggling thought of your family looking at you like a tragic loner will make you wonder. I’m sure my family was talking about me behind my back, because one day, innocent as a dove, my little niece Robin called me at the office, overjoyed with what she thought was a major scoop. “Oh, I just love my teacher. She’s so cool. You know what she did in class today? She asked us if we had older brothers or uncles that
were single and looking to go out. So, I told her about you.”

  “What?”

  “Seymour, I know you’d like Miss Adler.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I really think you should call her.”

  Whoever Miss Adler was, she could have been fired. Even in 1969, it was not kosher for third-grade teachers to hustle schoolyards for stray uncles. Unfortunately, I admired Miss Adler’s balls and dialed the number like a man under hypnosis. This loud, extra-large personality came thundering down the telephone line; Linda, a Riverdale Jewess who was obviously a bit crazy. When we met up, she was even more intense in real life. She was five-foot zilch and buxom with thick brunette hair, all eyes and mouth, raving about all the rock stars she loved, all the places she’d traveled, all the things she wanted to do. It was like standing in the main street of a small town looking at an approaching tornado. I was so put off, I took a while to call her up again, and by then, she’d disappeared. My niece said she’d taken a leave of absence and moved to France to learn French.

  Miss Adler had definitely made a big first impression, but not a very good one. Never mind, I was too busy to give the whole incident much thought, because our first business crisis erupted in London. Fleetwood Mac’s new manager, Clifford Davis, had just stabbed Mike Vernon in the back. In the middle of recording “Man of the World,” Davis suddenly announced the band had left the label on a contractual technicality. Mike’s brother Richard, who was in charge of Blue Horizon’s paperwork, hadn’t noticed the option to renew their contract had expired, which allowed Davis to negotiate a bigger deal elsewhere. To make matters even messier, the label in question was Immediate, owned by my old friends Andrew Oldham and Tony Calder.

  I jumped on a plane to London with Richard Gottehrer, even though we didn’t have a legal leg to stand on. Blue Horizon’s contract for Fleetwood Mac was a one-page document signed only by Peter Green for a one-year period, with an option for two further years that hadn’t been re-signed on time. In an effort to work around the hardball manager, we met up with Mick Fleetwood in an Indian restaurant. He was mortified, but there was nothing he or the band could do. The contract with Immediate had already been signed.

  In a crunch meeting with Clifford Davis, we agreed to accept £5,000 as a sort of thank-you-but-fuck-off gesture. He also promised to let Mike finish “Man of the World,” which Blue Horizon could release as a last single. Imagine how Mike felt when Clifford Davis gave the finished master to Immediate. “Man of the World” was another smash-hit single, reaching number two on the UK charts and top ten all over Europe. Mike had invested all the hard work, but from here on in, others would harvest the biggest rewards. He was devastated, we all were, but Fleetwood Mac were his friends and proudest creation that he’d supported since the Bluesbreakers days. It wasn’t just business for Mike; it was the best years of his life.

  Further complicating Mike’s nightmare, Clifford Davis insisted Immediate put Mike’s name on the single’s sleeve notes as some kind of half-assed guilt-redemption gesture. That little credit landed Mike into hot water with Columbia, who, of course, were steaming with rage about losing such a great band. After various legal threats, Columbia didn’t sue Mike, but the whole episode left a very sour taste in everyone’s mouth, compounded by the fact the band told Mike in private that the only reason they didn’t stop their manager pulling such a nasty stunt was because Columbia weren’t breaking them in the States. It was time to blame the Yanks, even though that Columbia deal had nothing to do with me and Richard Gottehrer.

  To cap everything off, Immediate Records went into receivership soon after and couldn’t pay the advance. Talk about a disaster. In the States, however, Reprise got Fleetwood Mac’s North American rights and, to be fair, had better success than Columbia ever did, but only marginally. Even with TV appearances, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac never really broke America like they deserved to, and I’d bet the whole door-slamming mess was one of the reasons for Peter Green’s disillusionment over the subsequent eighteen months. Mick Fleetwood and John McVie say it was a damaging LSD trip in West Germany that cracked Peter Green’s mind and drove him into reclusion. I don’t doubt it, but I wonder how Peter Green might have rolled with the punches if he’d avoided so much bad business and just stuck with the original gang. Put it this way: if you had to pick a song that marked a turning point in Peter Green’s downward spiral, it would have to be “Man of the World.” Between its lines, you can hear something breaking. And that’s exactly when Clifford Davis was bullying him into screwing a friend to get famous.

  The very definition of regret is wishing you’d done things differently. I know that Richard Vernon still kicks himself for not having taken more care with the paperwork. I still kick myself for not having kicked both Vernon brothers into hiring a lawyer the minute “Albatross” hit number one. From that moment, it was only a matter of days before bigger labels came crawling out of the woodwork waving their checkbooks. What were we expecting? Sadly, such are the pointless gremlins that will haunt your sleep for years after a major crash. At the end of the day, we were all in our midtwenties and making it up as we went along. This was London in the late sixties, a time when music came before business. The troublemaker was the manager, an old-school shark. Managers are supposed to prey on mistakes and make money for their bands, but he should have been more open and let Blue Horizon make a counteroffer. For this and many other shenanigans, the remaining members of Fleetwood Mac ended up suing Clifford Davis a few years later. As they say, Oh, well.

  In the end, what actually launched Sire turned out to be a contact Syd introduced me to when I was still a teenager. The jovial L. G. Wood, or Len as everyone called him, was managing director of EMI, Britain’s biggest major, which had licensed the entire King catalog all over Europe. Len had worked his way up through EMI’s sales ranks since the Depression, a long career interrupted only by his service in World War II as a flying control officer for the Royal Air Force. In the early fifties, however, EMI was dealt a body blow when both RCA and Columbia refused to renew their matrix exchange agreement, depriving EMI of surefire American hits. This existential crisis for EMI explains why, in 1952, they spent nine million buying Capitol, one of America’s big four. In London, however, EMI had to take bigger A&R risks and gave more signing power to their in-house producers such as Norrie Paramor and George Martin, who in large part sowed the seeds of Britain’s golden age in the sixties. As Len Wood told Billboard: “Looking back, these setbacks were the best thing that could have happened to us. They put EMI on its mettle and forced us to re-think our policies fundamentally. We have been much better for the experience, although I must be quite honest and say it did not seem so at the time.”

  Throughout EMI’s soul-searching years, Syd had been one of Len’s chief American confidants, and they became such close friends, the Englishman usually visited Cincinnati on his annual American trips. I think Len never forgot Syd’s loyalty, especially when the tables turned. In the first six months of 1964, EMI artists held America’s number-one spot for a record sixteen weeks, thanks mainly to the Beatles. Funnily enough, it was actually Len who had to fix the absurd situation of Capitol refusing to release the Beatles’ first singles in America.

  When I met Len again around 1965, he was on top of the business, but to his credit, he was just as friendly as the first time I’d met him. He told me to contact him once I had my own label, which, at the time, I was still about eighteen months from doing. People make empty promises all the time, but even after Syd was dead, Len kept his word and gave me a red-carpet welcome into EMI’s engine room. In many ways, he breathed life into Sire’s future when we urgently needed it. Without Len, I don’t think we could have survived as a Broadway indie for more than five years. In that period of English dominance, American indies who didn’t have any special connections to London generally got left behind and went bust.

  In urgent need of hot product, I was picked up at Heathrow Airport by a young EMI staf
fer named John Reid, whose Scottish accent was so strange to my untrained Brooklyn ears, he may as well have been speaking medieval Viking. Pushing my trolley through the arrivals hall, I asked him if he was driving us to EMI. He replied, “Ham on-lee tse-venteen, aye kayne drrryfe,” which I eventually translated as “I’m only seventeen, I cannot drive.” I won’t spoil the surprise of who this virtual child later became. At this point, he was just the office junior who got sent to airports to meet small fries like me. Never mind, we took a cab to EMI, which gave me time to attune my ears to the wild cadences of Scotland. John Reid was from Paisley, one of the poorest parts of Glasgow, and he’d arrived in London about a week earlier. Even through his rough Scottish accent, what struck me were his feminine traits. I later learned that he was the lover of a Scottish TV boss who’d just been moved down to London. It was through London’s gay networks that John had landed his new job.

  At EMI, Len Wood introduced me to the managers of his international division, the in-house lawyers and clerks who issued foreign territory licenses for EMI product. Our arrangement was dead simple: for little or no advance, I could sign North American rights for EMI records that hadn’t been picked up by Capitol or anyone else. It meant rummaging through their trash cans for leftovers, which didn’t put me off me because I knew that Capitol and other American majors were constantly turning their noses up at good English records.

  Len Wood was so eager to set me up for the long haul, he would arrange for additional sub-publishing deals on top of the records, which was generous considering I wasn’t really a publisher yet. To make my trips to London easier, LG also made a few calls so that I could borrow a desk and office at EMI publishing, Ardmore & Beechwood, which was on the second floor of the original HMV record store on Oxford Street. I could even use their telephone. So, thanks to the wonderful Len Wood and the simplicity of international licensing, Sire found a regular source of hot product that Richard and I didn’t have to spend much money on. For $1,000 or $2,000 in manufacturing costs that we could get our distributor, London Records, to advance and deduct from our sales reports, we could take relatively safe bets on lesser-known British rock. Like transatlantic phone operators, it was as simple as plugging the right cables into the right channels. The first of many EMI licenses was the self-titled Barclay James Harvest, from a psychedelic rock band from Oldham, a northern town just outside Manchester.