Like two punch-drunk zombies, we loaded our cases into the cab and drove silently to the airport. Getting away to where nobody knew us was probably the only thing to do. We needed to swim in the ocean, stare at the sun, and ease the pain away. Any other odd couple would have known this was a bridge too far, but there’s something about planes, flying above the clouds, and looking down on life. Knotted up in the tragedy of our situation, sobbing, clinging to each other’s hands for dear life somewhere over the Bermuda Triangle, a powerful magnetism was holding us together. Call it trust, sympathy, destiny, love, or just the liberated spirit of the times, but whatever the “it” was, it was there. We had to get married. I just couldn’t go through life without having a family, and Linda was so desperate to join me in the circus, I think she was able to accept that it was now going to be crazier than planned.
4. SURFING IN KANSAS
The actual wedding was the easy part—Linda’s father was a kosher caterer. A date was set for October 23, 1971, but as the big day approached, my father started asking the Adlers too many religious questions and incurred the wrath of Mabel. She clearly didn’t think much of us Steinbigles and was so appalled at my mommy’s-boy airs, she once called me a mocky. With all the cross-family tension, Linda and I had a monumental row on the Tuesday before the Saturday wedding, nothing unusual for us, except that this time, Linda locked herself inside her bedroom in public protest.
It didn’t take long for Mabel to hunt me down by telephone. “Seymour, I know you and Linda had a big fight. Now look, Ira’s working very hard on all this food. We’ve had cancellations before, usually due to a death in the family or something horrible. But here’s the deal—Ira can freeze just about everything: the roast beef, the lamb, the chicken, the soup, the vegetables, even those sweet breads you love so much. The one thing he can’t freeze is the Viennese table.” She was referring to the platter of dairy-free desserts that decorated Jewish banquets, usually kosher, nondairy variations of ice cream and custard pastries. “Now, Seymour, Ira makes the best Viennese table, but if there’s no wedding, he can’t freeze it. So, tell me, are you going to marry this girl?”
I never could tell if Mabel was a winder-upper or really as bad as she sounded. Like a good little son-in-law, I wasn’t taking any chances and asked my future mother-in-law to coax my future wife out of her bedroom. Linda unlocked her door and came to the phone, peace broke out, and the Viennese table was saved from who knows what fate.
When the big day came, my father, Richard, and I donned our matching suits and top hats, and with my parents, we drove up to the Conservative Jewish Center in Riverdale, where Ira’s crew handled the day’s events like a Swiss railway network. Although I sensed that not everyone on my side of the hall was entirely sure about Linda’s domineering personality, all the elders sang and wished us well. My folks had stopped trying to understand me years earlier, and now that I was officially terminating their contract as parents, even I was starting to not worry about what they thought.
Linda’s family were just as unsure about me. Our fights were already a secret all over the block, we’d once been seen exchanging slaps on a Riverdale sidewalk, Linda had even hinted to her kid sister, Arlene, about my sexual deviance. The Adlers, however, knew what Linda was like and accepted that she was marrying into rock and roll, the only place where she probably belonged. I think they were even a little impressed themselves. I was twenty-nine, I had a successful record company, and I owned a two-bedroom apartment on Central Park. Linda could have done worse.
I knew Linda was marrying into wealth and show business, but what nobody else realized was that she was the first person I’d properly come out to. Her admiration and belief in me was sincere, and yes, I felt a stirring male pride to get her out of the classroom and into a high life she’d long dreamed of. Okay, so our fairy-tale castle was maybe built on sand, but I somehow knew we’d make a rock-and-roll king-and-queen combo anyway—even if the roles were a little confused.
With all those eyeballs staring at us, the wedding was an exhausting experience, and I woke up the next morning with a burning urge to travel. Fortunately, Linda was busy with school, so I waited a while and then ran off on my own personal honeymoon with a story about doing business in India and Australia. I needed to be away from everyone—Linda, Richard, Sire, my parents, Mabel, and the whole nonfreezable Viennese table of my life.
There really is nothing quite like travel to get your soul back in tune. I’d grown up on forties and fifties movies in which plane journeys into the Orient were always geographically illustrated by a red line advancing slowly across an old map. Flying from Europe over Arabia and Persia down toward India was a sensation like no other flight I’d previously taken. I was venturing into the East, and who knows what I might find—maybe the next George Harrison or Ravi Shankar standing on one leg under a tree. Failing that, my ulterior motive was to experience real Indian food. There were plenty of Indian restaurants in London, but the only good one that I knew of in New York was the Ceylon India Inn on Forty-Ninth Street. Surely, I thought, there’d be nowhere to eat Indian cooking like India itself.
I was picked up at the airport in Bombay by a Polydor staffer who kindly drove me to the Taj Palace Hotel, where my room was booked. While chatting during the ride into town, I asked if Bombay had a Jewish community. The guy’s face lit up because, as he explained, his daughter happened to attend a private school run by an influential Jewish family. “Today’s Friday,” he beamed. “I’m sure they’d love to show you the synagogue!” So, as I checked into my hotel, my friendly Indian guide returned to his office and began making arrangements for me to meet this family at the local synagogue.
Unfortunately, with the killer journey and ten-hour time difference, I was so starving and disoriented, I sneaked out to a nearby restaurant called the Delhi Darbar, where I stuffed myself with delicious curry. When I turned up at the synagogue afterward, the family whisked me off to their palatial home, where I was then presented with a tableful of gourmet oriental dishes. It wasn’t typical Indian food, nor was it anything like Ashkenazi cooking. Indian Jews ate a spicy variety of kosher that reminded me of what I’d already tasted in Syrian or Sephardic restaurants. I continued eating like a pig, of course, and spent the whole next day groaning in bed.
I would have gladly spent a month eating my way across India all the way up slopes of the Himalayas, but having met with Polydor India and experienced the insane chaos of Bombay, I had to continue on my trip southward to Australia where I hooked up more music business contacts in Sydney and Melbourne.
I eventually returned to New York three or four weeks later via Los Angeles, my first circumnavigation of the globe. I’d found new overseas partners along the way who’d either sell our records or send us their releases. I’d technically done business, meaning Linda couldn’t eat my face off for having done a Houdini act straight after our wedding.
My apartment was now our apartment, and within months of being married, Linda was pregnant. When I broke the news to my parents, my father took me aside and advised that because mothers always did the hardest work, I should make a point of asking Linda to choose the name of the child. As he explained, it would create a stronger bond between mother and child and improve all-round family harmony. Linda adored her father, so, as a tribute to Ira’s deceased parents, Linda chose the name Samantha Lee for our first daughter, based on the Hebrew name Sara Leia. My father’s theory seemed strange at first, but it made a lot of practical sense.
It was a happy period when Elton John and John Reid were coming through New York all the time, regularly checking in to our guest bedroom. Thanks to global smash hits like “Your Song” and “Rocket Man,” Elton was getting recognized on the streets of New York. John Reid was both his lover and manager, and together they could easily afford the best hotels in town, which of course they sometimes stayed at, depending on their reasons for being in New York. But for whatever reason, they liked hanging out with us, even after our screami
ng newborn arrived. We loved having them over and always provided a great spread of food, grass, and entertainment.
Elton was in the eye of a storm, and I think he enjoyed being in a real home around friends who were sincerely happy for his success. That’s the thing about becoming famous; you don’t change—everyone else does. It’s natural for a famous person to crave the company of old friends. Unfortunately, it’s easy for old friends to feel inadequate or even jealous. For all our faults, Linda and I were the opposite of all that. We loved hearing their stories of conquering the world, and we were behind them all the way. Plus, of course, we were the last couple on earth who’d judge them for sharing a bed. If anything, they were more normal than Linda and I.
Professionally, I wasn’t in Elton John’s league at all, but by Sire’s own indie standards, we were selling healthy numbers of records from our main acts, the Climax Blues Band and Renaissance. I was getting so good at delivering cheesecake to London and walking back out with bargains, I even managed to leave EMI’s head office in 1972 with the American rights to “Power to All Our Friends,” a single by Cliff Richard, England’s answer to Elvis. Another steal was Stackridge, an English rock group produced by George Martin. However, it was our Dutch group Focus who started to take off throughout 1972 and eclipse everything else we had on sale.
For this their second album, Moving Waves, Mike Vernon had given them a ballsy, electric sound that took their playing to a whole new level. When we received the master, Richard and I felt we had a potential winner on our hands, but lo and behold, our new distributor, Polydor, passed. I couldn’t get a clear answer why, so I knocked on the boss’s door. “Okay, I’ll tell you why,” said Jerry Schoenbaum, who ran what was the American branch of the German-owned conglomerate, Deutsche Grammophon. “There’s this asshole over in Holland, Freddie Haayen, who runs Polydor, and he’s got this fucking horrible Dutch band called Golden Earring that he keeps pushing me to release. Listen, I don’t mind Focus, but I really don’t want to release Golden Earring. So sorry, I just can’t take anything Dutch right now.”
“But, Jerry, Golden Earring are great. You’re missing out on something here.”
“Oh, puh-leeze, Seymour. You sound like him.”
Jerry Schoenbaum was an old-school folkie who had good ears in the genres he liked. He’d been the right choice for distributing Blue Horizon’s catalog in the States, but he just couldn’t stomach all the glitter and pomp of glam and progressive rock. In the States, we had our own Frank Zappas, Captain Beefhearts, and Dr. Johns, but Britain and continental Europe were leading the left field and getting more experimental by the year. Some acts like Jethro Tull and Yes had shown that just about anything could be imported into America, and that audience was ours to chase. If we were serious about breaking Focus in the United States, then we had to find the appropriate distributor. After a bit of shopping around, we managed to bullshit ourselves an incredibly high percentage with no advance from Tony Martell at Famous Music, a division of Gulf and Western, who, in their own way, were desperately in search of success. They were our fifth distributor in six years, and this was probably rock bottom, but never underestimate the determination of underdogs.
I’ll never forget our first Paramount gala in honor of the boss’s late son, T. J. Martell. In T. J.’s dying months, Richard and I had taken him to an Elton John show and brought him backstage to meet the artist. We knew how much the poor guy’s subsequent death had affected his father, who was our new distributor, so Richard and I showed up to the charity dinner in our matching wedding suits. The master of ceremonies was the entertaining Warner vice president, Joe Smith, who often performed the comical speeches at the United Jewish Appeal. As Smith introduced the ballroom’s many guests, he turned to us. “Next, we have Seymour Stein and Richard Gottehrer from Sire Records. What, you’ve never heard of them? Sire is as important to the music business as surfing is to the state of Kansas.”
We gritted our teeth and smiled as a wave of chuckles rolled around the ballroom. But ouch, that one hurt. Luckily, the gods of music watching overhead also had a sense of humor. In the madhouse of music, all it takes is three minutes for the proverbial state of Kansas to run out and buy surfboards. Yes, in 1973, Sire suddenly and unexpectedly hit the big time thanks to a Focus single. To be exact, three minutes and forty-two seconds of hard rock interrupted by a Dutch flautist yodeling operatic scales. I’m serious. Add some drum breaks like Animal from the Muppets and you get the idea of “Hocus Pocus” by Focus, probably the only ever perfectly rhyming number-one title and artist.
One million singles and five hundred thousand copies of the accompanying album unleashed this six-month monsoon of dollar bills all over our laughing faces. It was glorious. We even had the export rights to the world except Holland, which meant nearly every sale on planet Earth came through our bank account. We’d made it. All those years lugging cheesecake through the desert suddenly felt like a passage to the promised land.
Did everything change? After the initial shock, no, not really. If anyone has ever accused me of being cheap, here is the proof. I was thirty-two, rich, and should reasonably have invested in a gold-plated bowl of coke and matching bedside table. However, I just kept doing what I’d always done. The only thing I splashed out on was a bigger apartment, because Linda was pregnant with our second child. For $110,000, we found a three-bedroom apartment in an elegant French-style building at 151 Central Park West, or the Kenilworth, as the building is called. At the time, Richard was living in a nice ground-floor space on West Seventy-Sixth Street looking at the planetarium and the American Museum of Natural History, but I nagged him to buy a bigger place of his own. As the old proverb goes, make hay while the sun shines.
Getting a majestic view over Central Park was a big step up the social ladder for the expanding Stein clan, but I’m glad Richard and I didn’t go too insane with all that “Hocus Pocus” money, because the comedown was faster and harder than we saw coming. Like all record labels who score their first smash hit, we thought success would get easier, so we hired some new staffers and pushed the roster in different directions. The office was suddenly buzzing with activity; we had an art guy, radio pluggers, a tape copy boy, secretaries, and a constant stream of managers and agents dropping by.
As well as putting out a batch of new releases from our main acts, I began compilations and reissues like Nuggets, The History of British Rock, The History of British Blues, and offsets by early Duane Eddy, the Turtles, Paul Anka, and others. I couldn’t produce original music like Richard could, so carefully researched compilations were my way of telling musical stories, complete with elaborate liner notes. At least digging up old stuff and negotiating nonexclusive licenses was cheap. The expensive bit was producing new albums that sold seventy-two copies. We threw a load of fresh shit at the wall that didn’t stick—stuff like Chilliwack and Nucleus. What, never heard of them? Yeah, I know.
There was one third-party investment that came out of that period. The Focus connection led to a strange encounter at a David Bowie concert around 1972. I was lining up to take a piss when this young guy tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Focus?” I thought he was on drugs for criticizing my aim, but then he said, “Thijs van Leer?” He introduced himself as Marty Scott, one of the owners of a New Jersey import company called Jem Records, who I knew had imported copies of Focus’s first record directly from Europe—not something I was too happy about. The guy then explained that a year previously, I’d talked at a music business seminar that he’d attended, and that’s how he recognized me. He seemed friendly, and I was definitely curious about whatever he was getting up to in New Jersey, so I told him to drop by the office.
When he called in, he told me his full story about how he and his two best friends had started selling imported records in the three different colleges they had attended. Their importing started as a student hobby that grew so successful so quickly, they rented out a warehouse in Plainfield, New Jersey. What got my ears standing to
attention, however, were his references to obscure artists and record labels in Britain and Europe that only a pro could possibly know. These guys were sniffing down the same dark alleys as I was. We began hanging out, Marty met Richard, Linda, and some of my friends, and over the next months, Sire invested some “Hocus Pocus” profits into a joint venture called Passport Records, Jem’s very own label that Sire half owned. Passport signed experimental and krautrock acts like Nektar, Tucky Buzzard, Lucifer’s Friend, and other obscurities, as well as Synergy, actually a solo artist, Larry Fast.
The thing about pop music is that no matter how hard you work the land, you’ll always be at the mercy of the weather. The mainstream scene just wasn’t that great around 1974 and 1975. Like Linda and me, millions of young adults had gotten married and were having kids. For this increasingly domesticated hippie audience, American majors kept churning out blockbuster albums from established names, generally aging stars from the sixties who were also juggling babies and careers. In England, glam and progressive rock had grown along the edges, but apart from Elton John, David Bowie, Jethro Tull, and a few others, not much new English stuff was gaining traction in the States. It had been a decade since the Beatles first landed, when virtually anything with a British accent would sell. Since then, American companies had been quietly opening offices around London, which meant it was harder for small fries like Sire to compete. Up against CBS, Atlantic, Warners, A&M, MCA, EMI, Decca, Island, and the big continentals like Polydor, Phonogram, and Ariola, our one-hit wonder with Focus meant nothing. We’d have been laughed out of any bidding war.
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