Siren Song_My Life in Music

by Gareth Murphy

  As soon as I started moaning about business, Linda started nagging me about Richard. “He’s not putting in the effort you are,” she’d say.

  Richard was my brother in arms, the guy I’d always idolized, so her accusations hit a very raw nerve. “You don’t know anything about our business!” I’d yell.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t see him running around the world like you!”

  “But I’m the business guy; he’s the producer.”

  “Why’s he not produced any hits lately? You’re finding stuff. What the fuck’s he doing when you’re off in London or wherever?”

  I never knew if Linda’s problem was really Richard or actually about my constant traveling. Or if it also had something to do with Richard’s wife, Judy, who did not even pretend to like Linda. In fact, Linda was capable of such paranoid jealousy, she actually suspected something going on between me and Richard, which was just absurd. Whatever it was, when Linda got a bone between her teeth, she’d snarl and chomp and slobber and grind. There’d be no letting go until the thing had been picked to death and buried in some unmarked grave.

  I ignored her bitching for months, but eventually, I had to admit to myself that Richard’s heart maybe wasn’t in it too much anymore. He was the best friend I’d ever had, I’d learned so much from the guy, but neither of us were twenty-five and single. I had a family, and Richard had plenty of shit on his own plate. For our own sanity, we needed to stop blaming each other for the way Sire was bumping along. It was hard to actually sit down and confess to each other that we maybe had personal problems, too. Your midthirties are a funny age: old enough to know your best years are mostly over but still young enough to keep fucking up and never ask yourself why. I think Richard felt my distance and began taking breaks, including one extended stay in New Orleans. Eventually, he moved his studio out to his own premises. When it was clear he wanted out for good, we struck a deal so that I could buy his stock.

  After months of avoiding embarrassing questions, the split was surprisingly cordial; he even seemed relieved. But for me, the months thereafter were Sire’s absolute low point. When Richard was gone, the building was empty. I had enough back catalog ticking over to pay the bills and take something home at the end of the month, but there was nothing happening on the horizon. Like steering a ghost ship through the fog, I was trapped in the music business until death do us part.

  To everyone’s surprise, Richard got divorced from Judy shortly afterward. That’s how far we’d grown apart; I knew he had problems at home, but I didn’t know they were that serious. We’d all noticed Judy’s overprotective streak—it was impossible not to. She was actually worse than Linda. Judy was basically a small-town girl from southern Illinois and would impose all these clingy house rules on Richard, like him coming home at 6:00 P.M., or stopping him from traveling at the weekends. Her insecurity was holding Richard back and probably putting huge mental pressure on him, not that I ever dared to tell Richard what I really thought, partly because I knew he had his own opinions about what Linda was doing to me.

  I guess we were both experiencing the record man’s equivalent of a midlife crisis. As anyone who’s lived a full life in music will tell you, it isn’t easy to adapt to middle age when you’ve enjoyed such a wild, carefree youth. Most experience some kind of wobble when suddenly your body starts changing and everything in your professional and personal life feels like a failure. Most don’t make it through to the other side. Thankfully, Richard and I both did in the end, but this was our career equivalent of “the difficult third album.” We each had to reassess, dig deep, and start anew.

  I was in no position to judge Richard’s problems, nor anyone else’s, because my own home was turning into a war zone. Linda didn’t hold me back professionally; her father had worked in a competitive, labor-intensive business that required total dedication. For Linda, working eighteen-hour Sundays was how you got ahead in New York City. But we had plenty of other things to fight about, and the domestic tension intensified once Linda was pregnant again while Samantha was a tiny toddler charging around. We loved Samantha with all the passion in our hearts, but the pressures of parenthood seemed to turn up the volume on all our problems as a couple. For me, it was always simple; career took precedence over everything, including fatherhood. All I wanted to do to was keep running around, which I did, to London or Cannes or Los Angeles or wherever I had fresh meat to chase. I felt immense affection watching Samantha playing with her toys, and I felt pride and accomplishment to see Linda’s pregnant belly. But in practical terms, I was the world’s most absent father, incapable of much except providing money.

  I’d see all the hippie fathers in Central Park, rolling around on the grass with their kids. My own father had spent most of his life either at the garment center or in the synagogue, and I don’t remember him ever getting down on his hands and knees to vroom vroom my toy cars. I think I would have called the psychiatric hospital myself. All I wanted was to continue his orthodox model in my own rock-and-roll manner, which might have been possible had Linda been as motherly as Dora Steinbigle. Sure, Linda could hold the fort if she had to. Linda did hold the fort; she was a natural organizer. But the ambitious, fun-loving freewheeler I’d married hadn’t traded my niece’s classroom for a life of washing machines and diapers.

  To put it mildly, being motherly didn’t come naturally to Linda. When I was a boy, my doting mother used to creep into my bedroom every winter morning and hang my clothes on the radiator so that little Seymour would go out to school nice and toasty. Mabel didn’t exactly shove Linda’s clothes in the refrigerator, but she did force Linda onto diet pills because “You’re fat!” Linda had been dragged screaming through the School of Hard Knocks and left home with mixed feelings about the whole institution of motherhood. And once she got a taste of show business, she liked its effect so much, she couldn’t get enough. To put it bluntly, Linda wasn’t interested in being like anyone’s mother; she wanted to be like me. This became ever clearer once we hired nannies. Even though Linda had time to herself, her screaming continued.

  Linda’s frustration about being stuck at home became so unbearable, she’d yell at me in pregnant or postnatal fits that I’m sure frightened the neighbors. “You’re ruining my life!” was the scream, regularly accompanied by flying objects. With two pregnancies in four years, she’d put on a lot of weight, which of course gnawed straight into her deepest wound. She felt disfigured and ugly with the extra problem that she’d lost her career as well. For Linda, it was simple; if I wasn’t going to give her the life she wanted, she’d just take it herself. She’d thumb through my address books. “Look who’s in here?” she’d beam. “We’re gonna have a party!” She didn’t mind that I didn’t really know a lot of these celebrities whose numbers I collected. She’d schmooze, call people up, charm them into a dinner, party, or club date. I’d cringe watching her working so much strategy into jet-setters and pop stars she hardly knew, but on the night, she’d be fabulous, and I’d have great fun.

  One party led to another, until next thing I know, Iggy Pop is rolling a joint on the living room carpet and all these faces from the Andy Warhol crowd are lining up to do blow in the bathroom. On Thanksgiving 1974, we had Elton John and his band over for turkey and pumpkin pie. Linda actually hired her father to do the catering for that unforgettable banquet. We watched the parade from our balcony and the musicians ate up before they played Madison Square Garden that night. John Lennon, who was set to join Elton onstage, even dropped by for dessert. This was during his lost period, separated from Yoko Ono and partying like never before with his new girlfriend, May Pang. Imagine everyone’s reaction when he called for silence and handed Elton John a present. Elton unwrapped the little box and produced a gleaming cock ring.

  We certainly had the space to entertain. We’d done up this nice old library room where we watched TV or hosted late-night parties. If guests were too whacked to get a cab, they were welcome to pull out the sofa and crash, which they didn
’t mind doing, because it was so comfortable. Elton John slept on that bed so many times, we eventually bought him a piano. In the middle of all this madness, there were toys on the floor and milk bottles in the kitchen sink. Nobody seemed to mind. This was the midseventies when it was both normal and cool to mix kids with rock and roll.

  Our second daughter, Mandy, was born in January 1975, shortly after Linda’s mother died. Although I hadn’t been Mabel’s greatest admirer, I took my father’s wise advice and looked for a similar-sounding name as a show of respect to Linda’s family. I chose Mandy because I loved the old Irving Berlin song of the same name. By coincidence, Barry Manilow had a hit at the time called “Mandy,” which I hadn’t paid much attention to until I received a congratulations message from Clive Davis, the boss of Arista. “Thank you for naming your daughter after my hit,” said Clive, who was of course Barry Manilow’s Svengali, and, I hope, just winding me up.

  There’s an old joke that when you have a kid, your whole life changes, and when you have two kids, you don’t have a life anymore. Linda’s solution was to hire more help. Teresa was our reliable full-time nanny from Barbados who, I think it’s fair to say, basically raised Samantha and Mandy over the subsequent roller-coaster years. At one point, we had a total of three women working different shifts, which allowed Linda to become the major-league socialite she wanted so badly to become. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all selfishness and ambition. When I met Linda, she was already a hard-core partier who lived to meet people, dance, booze, toke, and feel her head spinning in the bright lights. Fast, hard living was Linda’s true nature, and this was New York at arguably its wildest ever period in history. Focus had put me on the map and bulged my wallet; Linda had no intention of missing out on all the fun.

  I know that some of my old friends were sickened by Linda’s habit of off-loading Samantha and Mandy onto nannies, babysitters, grandparents, aunts, and friends. I was, too, and we had many screaming matches about the dysfunctional family we were becoming. But who was I to lecture? “Why don’t you ever spend any time with your children?” was a line Linda screamed at me at least five hundred times, possibly more. At the end of the day, I have to be honest with myself: Linda was putting me on the celebrity radar. My desire for success trumped whatever father instincts I possessed. As a team, we were doing what we’d set out to do: conquer New York and live life to the limit.

  Our eldest daughter, Samantha, was a galloping toddler, and as kids do, she found our little Mickey Mouse mirror and matching coke grinder yet somehow knew this particular toy was for adults only. Fortunately, no powder was lying around, not that it would have been a big deal in those days. Cocaine was like toothpaste or gum—you didn’t go anywhere without some in your pocket. I’m sure it sounds strange, but I discovered at the tender age of thirty-three that drugs actually suited me, especially blow because pot wasn’t my kind of buzz. What had I been missing? I still don’t know if drugs relieved stress or blew things nicely out of proportion, but they sure took Linda’s mind games to a whole new level. When Linda got stoned, and she really did smoke a lot of grass, she’d stare into me with this mischievous, goofy, horny grin.

  It took me years to figure out Linda’s king-sized personality, but I think she just wanted to be loved, as if by hanging out with all the beautiful people from New York’s gossip columns, her low self-esteem would be cured. Her drinking and drugging was the same; it made her feel good about herself. She came alive when she was partying. She also had this curious habit of taking lost characters under her wing, generally gay men, because she was easily jealous of pretty women. Her favorite of all was Danny Fields, a gay rocker you’d always find sniffing around at every dogfight. I already knew him; sometimes he was a journalist, sometimes he was publicist for record labels, but most of the time he was being Danny Fields. In late 1974, he tracked down Linda while trying to get photos of Elton John for 16, a teenager magazine where he was editor.

  For Linda, it was platonic love at first sight. Danny was a Harvard grad, he was Jewish, razor sharp, funny, charming, interesting, he knew everyone worth knowing, he got her black humor, and just like Linda, he was a closet sentimental, genuinely interested in people. Danny was the Oscar Wilde of New York’s rock underground who should have been included among the characters in Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.” In the sixties, he’d been one of the Velvet Underground’s friends at the Factory. He then worked for Elektra, where he did PR for the Doors and personally found both MC5 and the Stooges—major A&R scoops, which alone made him a legend. Being so openly gay probably didn’t do his career prospects much good in the relatively homophobic music business, but I knew he had great taste. Linda, however, was his number-one fan. She saw unsung genius in Danny that she wanted to help and feed off.

  In restaurants, Linda started asking for doggie bags. “Danny’s probably starving,” she’d tell me, and then ask the cab driver to swing by his place. Danny was such a night creature, he’d usually fall into bed at dawn and wake up late afternoon to an empty refrigerator. I’m sure he found it hilarious in his anarchic way that, ding dong, Linda would appear with these nicely wrapped half-eaten steaks for his evening breakfast. The pair of them were like the fawning Jewish mother and her naughty son who could do no wrong. I’m grateful to say, however, that this bond led to some life-changing surprises for all of us.

  One evening in the summer of 1975, Linda got an excited call from Danny insisting that she drag me down to the Bowery. There was a band called the Ramones I absolutely had to hear! I’d already heard the buzz and had been meaning to check them out. The problem was, I’d just returned from London and was dying with a flu. When it came to seeing bands or battling jet lag, I was a soldier by nature, but this time, I was truly wounded. I’d been to CBGB several times before and knew it would be best to be in top physical form to venture down into the Bowery, Manhattan’s very own Turkish toilet—definitely not a place to be stranded after dark, praying for a cab. This was the bankrupt, scum-encrusted downtown underworld of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, a merciless jungle for injured animals.

  Linda went down on her own, met up with Danny, and came home raving. They were so determined to hook me, I booked a studio the next day to see the boys rehearse. When I walked in, I was knocked sideways by the energy. It wasn’t that it was so electric or that they were squeezed into tight jeans doing all these funny moves; I’d sort of expected something heavy from the moment I walked in and saw them standing around in biker jackets. What left-hooked me were their quirky songs, which only lasted about one minute, like the Beach Boys driven through a meat mincer.

  I was standing there not sure whether to laugh. What the fuck was this? A hard-rock parody of early-sixties bubblegum? Whatever sick joke these guys were playing, they really meant it, and it was new and original. I loved it. The character on stage left, wearing his guitar like a pair of low-hanging balls, looked about as mean as a Nazi accelerating into Russia. Even his hair was a perfect cross between a Monkees mop top and a Wehrmacht helmet. But hang on, did I just hear the skinny malink singer actually say, “Second verse, same as the first verse”? On stage right, the bass player looked like a long story who really had sniffed glue and strangled girlfriends. The tiny drummer at the back played like Moe Tucker, and like his incessant whacking, the Ramones just kept banging out these miniature songs in battle formation—every one a chorus with some wacky slogan. The Ramones were pushing all extremes out as far as Johnny Ramone could stretch his legs.

  In about twenty minutes flat, they emptied all their artillery in my face, probably about eighteen songs, which gave us forty minutes of prepaid studio time to talk shit. I didn’t know what to say, except, “Wow, guys!” Their special something was hard to pin down, and I noticed that even Danny, our Harvard man of letters, couldn’t explain why they felt so good. This was the filthiest sugar and the sugariest filth either of us had ever tasted, a clear-cut case of “sign now, make sense of it later.”

  The c
ontract was signed in about two days, and when I ventured down to CBGB to watch them play to a crowd, the energy in the air was overwhelming. Among that performance-art scene on the Lower East Side, the Ramones were already well on their way to being the hippest show in town. Arty people just got it instantly. Photographers like Roberta Bayley and Bob Gruen were down there photographing them. In the underground press, they already had believers, such as Lisa Robinson, who first alerted Danny. Danny in turn wrote about them as did others in magazines like Rock Scene and Circus. And let’s not forget the owner of CBGB, the lovely Hilly Kristal, who gave the Ramones their first break. If anyone deserves special credit, he does.

  Talk about right place, right time. I later learned that Richard had almost signed the Ramones to Sire on a singles deal a few months before he left, while he and his trainee producer, Craig Leon, were working on a CBGB group called City Lights, one of those Sire releases that sold about eleven copies. The Ramones turned them down. I also learned much later that they’d failed a big test in Connecticut for an Epic sub-label called Blue Sky. Luckily for me, the crowd had come to see the headliner Johnny Winter and started throwing bottles at the Ramones, which of course was curtains for any record deal. They’d taken some knocks along the way, but by late 1975, the Ramones were fully formed yet nicely underripe.

  But here’s the thing: Danny was insisting that Linda co-manage the group with him, which of course she wanted more than anything. He had great contacts in the music press, his name was magic, but he wasn’t a businessman and felt Linda would make things happen the way she organized her star-studded parties. The fact Linda could squeeze dough out of me and frighten Sire staffers was a bonus, but that wasn’t Danny’s Machiavellian master plan. There was a feeling between Danny and Linda that they’d complement each other, and to be fair to them, they genuinely did. They probably wouldn’t have pulled it off without each other.