Siren Song_My Life in Music

by Gareth Murphy

  Was I worried about this managerial alliance? No. I was relieved that Linda was being cast by a respected figure like Danny Fields into a role I’d never thought of. Co-manager for the loudest band in New York? This was so much better than me giving Linda some token job in Sire, something I never wanted to do. As for Danny, he was back crusading for a band he believed in—which was good for the investment, because people trusted his opinion. Even Craig Leon, who’d stayed on at Sire after Richard’s departure, was already trusted by the Ramones for having flagged them so early on. So, he was put in charge of producing the debut album. Everyone clicked effortlessly into place like everything was meant to happen.

  Linda co-managing the Ramones had benefits and disadvantages. The band knew my every move, so one day I received a call from Johnny Ramone only fifteen minutes after I walked into my flat dead tired from one of my English trips. “We’ve got some new songs,” he announced. “We really want you to hear them.”

  “Johnny,” I begged, as if he didn’t already know, “I’ve just walked in the door after ten days in London. Give me a day or two, and then come in and play them for me.”

  Then he called me back with a gig date. “Look, we know you’re not doing anything on that night, so we booked ourselves into CBGB. We want you to hear them live.”

  On the appointed evening, I went down to hear their new stuff. The opening act was meant to be one of Hilly’s bands that I had heard several times before and had no interest in signing. To avoid running into Hilly, I stood outside. It was mid-November, but yet a warm night. I was chatting to Lenny Kaye when all of a sudden I heard the warm-up band playing a strangely hypnotic air that I later found out was called “Love Goes to Building on Fire.” It was like nothing else I’d ever heard, and my heart started pounding with excitement.

  “This isn’t Hilly’s band,” I said to Lenny

  “No, of course not. This is Talking Heads.”

  As I was listening, I was being sucked in through the door, like a snake being charmed by an Arabian flute.

  The front man was this handsome short-haired figure with piercing eyes, singing something cryptic about love on fire. I had no idea what he meant, but the melody had hit qualities. Behind him was just a drummer and a girl bass player. The whole thing was dead simple yet so intense.

  After the set, I tried to help the girl down with her instruments.

  “Hello,” I said, stopping them. “I’m Seymour Stein from Sire Records. You guys are amazing!”

  They looked flattered, but unlike most young bands, they didn’t click into salesman mode.

  That’s when David Byrne spoke up. “We know who you are,” said the singer, who seemed a lot shier offstage than he’d appeared during his performance. His speaking voice, however, had the same lilting cadences I’d been struck by when he sang. “Why don’t you come down to our loft tomorrow?” he suggested, then scribbled down an address beside a phone number.

  It’s funny how the greatest moments in your life take years to sink in. Although I didn’t know it right there, this was one of the most important encounters of my entire career. I met up with the three musicians the following day on Allen Street, but once again, they didn’t engage in the way that bands generally do. They weren’t aloof; they were just young and unsure of what they wanted for their future, especially David. They’d only recently moved into New York and still had ties up in Rhode Island, where’d they’d been to art college and formed their group. I didn’t force the issue and just kept on their tail, going down to CBGB to hear them, always inviting them for a proper record company meeting that never seemed to happen. It wasn’t that they were playing hard to get; they just didn’t feel ready, and as I’d later discover, they were telling each other, “If we make a record with this guy, it’ll tank, and we’ll never get a second chance with anyone else.” Luckily, I didn’t know their exact reasoning and kept telephoning, saying hello, sniffing around after them like a stray Bowery dog.

  At the time, I had several other pots bubbling on the fire. In England—or, to be exact, in the Oxfordshire countryside—Mike Vernon was busy producing the Climax Blues Band’s seventh album in his very own Chipping Norton studio. He’d telephoned to warn there was a possible hit in the pipeline. Meanwhile, Linda was crawling up the walls about the Ramones’ debut album. During that period, Danny Fields was certainly the dominant co-manager, doing wonders for their self-confidence, but there’s no doubt Tommy Ramone was the natural leader. Joey was the sweet one, Johnny had the gang attitude that rubbed off on all of them, and Dee Dee was the wild one out on the edge. But Tommy had been the original manager and the main conceptualist who’d previously worked as a studio engineer. He held a special inside-outside position in the group, which probably gave the whole package such a cutting edge.

  The heart of the enterprise was a flashing metronome, which Tommy placed above his kit to stay in time, because he wasn’t really a drummer. That pulsating light created the hypnotic, almost disco feel behind Tommy’s drumming and Dee Dee’s thumping bass lines. It’s subliminal, but it’s a big part of what made the Ramones sound so modern. The other trick they used on their debut album was Beatles-style hard panning. Guitars were stacked up in one speaker, bass in the other, vocals in the center—like a sonic representation of their stage formation. Everything was designed to be extremist pop art. And again, that was Tommy talking in conceptual language with Craig Leon, who came from contemporary music and understood what Tommy wanted.

  Just six grand bought me twenty-nine minutes of electrifying rock and roll—the likes of which hadn’t been heard in years. The hard part was getting the public to like it. And let me tell you, in early 1976, way before the idea of “punk” was even invented, radio stations wouldn’t touch the Ramones with a toilet brush.

  In the middle of all of this, Paramount shut down, with its assets sold off to ABC. Gulf and Western had enough of the music business and wanted out. My new distributors were ABC, Sire’s sixth. We could have gone elsewhere, but we stuck with ABC mainly because I respected their boss. Jay Lasker, a veteran who started at Decca’s Chicago branch in the 1940s, was Mo Ostin’s partner during the Sinatra days of Reprise, then at Vee-Jay and Dunhill, and came along after ABC bought Dunhill. He’d hired some talented characters like Charlie Minor, one of the greatest promotion men ever, and chief marketing man Dennis Lavinthal, who went on to cofound Hits magazine with Lenny Beer, and producer Steve Barri. Knowing the Ramones needed to be explained, I flew out to ABC’s head office in Los Angeles and presented this high-voltage rock that I knew wouldn’t make much sense to anyone outside of that Lower East Side art scene. I think ABC only took the record because in that same batch of releases, I was also giving them a potential hit album from the Climax Blues Band.

  When Ramones was officially released in April 1976, the record was physically delivered to record stores in tiny dribbles of two or three copies, and of course, nobody cared or even noticed. If anyone was capable of pulling off a miracle for the Ramones, it was Charlie Minor, who I begged for special help. According to legend, the previous year he’d been plugging a record called “Love Hurts” by English rock group Nazareth. On his rounds, he’d called a radio programmer who sounded unusually depressed. “What’s up?” asked Charlie, who was then given a grim story about the guy’s ex-girlfriend being killed in a plane crash. After some words of sympathy, Charlie couldn’t resist, “You see, it’s true, love hurts. That’s why you’ve got to play this song!”

  The guy was a scream, so I played the Ramones to him, thinking if there was one plugger crazy enough to sell this record, it was Charlie Minor. “Look,” he said, scratching his head, “I really don’t get these guys, but I get what you’re doing at Sire. If this is the band you want me to go after, I will.” Even for the legendary Charlie Minor, plugging that first Ramones record to hippie jocks was like head-butting a brick wall. He did, however, convince a few mavericks to spin “Blitzkrieg Bop,” which was a start.

  The on
ly instant reaction was negativity from people inside the business. The worst was Miles Copeland, the manager of the Climax Blues Band and Renaissance. He was so appalled by the Ramones, he threatened to take his acts off Sire in protest. Pretty rich considering I’d given him the Climax Blues Band. Clive Davis was another. Lots of music business players thought the Ramones were an insult to musicianship and just could not see the charm. In the long run, I have to say, although unpleasant at first, all this hostility succeeded in rallying my troops.

  To sell the Ramones, we were going to have to tour them. We knew that most people became believers when they witnessed the band live. This meant hiring an in-house booker and playing a whole new game of gigs and underground press—working city by city. There was CBGB and Max’s Kansas City in New York, there was also the Rat in Boston, but apart from these three clubs, there weren’t that many obvious clubs. In fact, it’s a telling indicator of how the music business had changed by the midseventies; there were big theaters for established rock bands and a growing number of dance-floor discotheques where records were played. But small-capacity clubs for emerging rock groups? There really weren’t that many options, and of those that were small enough, not many would stomach the Ramones.

  In the beginning, the boys played wherever Linda and Danny could find them an audience. They’d squeeze into cars, sleep three to a hotel room, play colleges, basements, anything, anywhere. Colleges were the most inventive with turning spaces into makeshift venues, but none of these road adventures would have been possible had the Ramones been precious artistes. No matter how shitty the shitholes were, they took every show seriously and always stuck around afterward to sell and give away their merchandise to any stragglers who’d been bitten by the bug. One of the few things we spent money on were pins, T-shirt, and miniature Ramones baseball bats. The bats were a reference to the chorus “Beat on the brat with a baseball bat.” They were also cute little mementos that summed up the joke: the old-school American dream that slugged you in the face.

  The one city where Linda and I managed to pull off a promotional heist was in London, but even that was a ramshackle accident where the headline was another of my bands, the Flamin’ Groovies. The just-formed Stranglers would open as the first warm-up before the Ramones took to the stage on this triple bill. I don’t know how it came together so perfectly, but you really couldn’t have made it up. It was July 4, 1976, the bicentenary of American Independence, and we somehow managed to sell out the Roundhouse: two thousand tickets by word of mouth. The crowd was way bigger than anything the Ramones had played to in the States, but like all great acts, they rose to the occasion once fate presented itself. They blew away the Stranglers, the Flamin’ Groovies, and the two thousand people watching, many of whom were musicians and tastemakers, including our label manager at our UK licensee, Nigel Grainge at Phonogram, and his thirteen-year-old brother, Lucian Grainge, current chairman of Universal and recently knighted. Lucian and his brother have both told me it was seeing the Ramones and Talking Heads that made him want to be in the music business.

  The following night, the Ramones headlined Dingwalls, a smaller venue where, once again, they sold out and brought the house down. I was there watching this momentous occasion, and so was every punk wannabe in the kingdom. Johnny Rotten, the Clash, the Damned, the Stranglers, Billy Idol, Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks, Keith Levene of Public Image Limited—a whole generation of future punk stars got hypnotized by this new high-energy art rock from New York. Talk about a bolt of lightning hitting the primordial soup; the Brits are still recovering from that weekend.

  So much has been written about this “birth of punk.” The joke is, as it was happening, it took months to notice any effect. The Ramones didn’t have time to hang around London. They had to get back to more shithole gigs in American towns you’d happily drive through without stopping. By August, however, they got a glowing review in Rolling Stone, their first major-league plug. Even still, Linda and Danny had to keep calling and begging promoters and colleges to keep the boys on the road. That’s where Linda’s skills really shone. Danny’s name opened doors in the big cities, but Linda’s brass neck proved vital in breaking them out of the usual circuits. Thankfully, the Ramones were so motivated and so electrifying, the promoters got their money’s worth, the crowds got thicker, the fees got better, and everyone at Sire started wanting a second album. Let’s not exaggerate here; the Ramones were barely paying for themselves, but the band was determined to conquer the world, as were Linda and Danny. Meanwhile, I was getting itchy fingers about all these other acts in CBGB.

  It’s amazing how the old feeds the new. Sire had already released six albums by the Climax Blues Band since 1969, but their seventh, in 1976, produced the hit single “Couldn’t Get It Right”—number three on the Hot 100, ensuring massive orders for the album. I have to be honest, however, that for this hit, I solicited “the help” of Billboard charts man Bill Wardlow. As a former Billboard vet, I had access to Bill who, as everyone knew, was taking the charts into a shadier era than the age of innocence I’d known under Tom Noonan. My other secret weapon was ABC’s promotion man Charlie Minor, who was busy treating the gatekeepers of radio to all kinds of recreational enticements. Don’t blame me; that’s how it worked in the midseventies, folks. So, just as the Ramones were starting to smoke, I hit the jackpot with the Climax Blues Band, which gave me the cash and the lucky feeling to take several rolls on a handful of CBGB acts.

  I wasn’t the only one sniffing around the Bowery. Richard Gottehrer had been to CBGB before I had, and along with Craig Leon, they were producing a group called Blondie, who he had just been hawking around town. No big labels had been interested, so Richard ended up signing them to Larry Uttal’s Private Stock label—not a great home, but that’s how underground the CBGB scene was in 1976. That little deal turned out to be a huge mistake that just about everyone regretted. Except Larry Uttal, of course. Blondie’s first album sold only eighteen thousand copies, but everything changed when my old friend Terry Ellis stepped in. Onlookers thought he was crazy, but farsighted Terry fell so head over heels in love with Blondie, he forked out a million bucks to buy the contract off Larry Uttal. Thus began Blondie’s lucky run on Chrysalis.

  I’m embarrassed to say that like so many others who saw Blondie perform in the very early days, I just didn’t see any star of Bethlehem twinkling over the stage. I saw that Debbie Harry was a beauty, and I knew she was a friendly lady who had a great voice of her own. I definitely saw some potential, but the songs being written by Chris Stein in the early days were nowhere near the level he’d reach about two years later when Blondie began scoring hit after hit. I guess Chris Stein hadn’t fully tapped into his own imagination yet. As the very best songwriters all seem to say, you generally have to write forty songs before you stumble on a killer. It’s a craft even the very best have to earn.

  For me, of all the unsigned CBGB regulars, Talking Heads were top of my shopping list. From day one, they had some knockout tunes like “Psycho Killer” and my personal favorite of their early stuff, “Love Goes to Building on Fire.” I had to sign Talking Heads.

  It took me almost a year. In all that time, I still can’t believe that nobody came along and gave them an offer they couldn’t refuse, like dangling David Byrne from a top-floor window. When you’re chasing a band, it’s natural to address the main man, but David Byrne was a tough nut to crack. For a guy capable of such fearless performances, offstage he seemed to want to be left alone. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a five-year-old kid get handed a telephone by his mother. “Hey, Billy. It’s Grandpa. Say hello.” Well, trying to cozy up to David Byrne made you feel like poor old Grandpa, asking dumb questions and filling up the silence, saying anything to feel some love back, but only getting yes and no, all the while knowing Billy can’t wait to hang up and get back to his playing. I thought David Byrne was a genius, and I’m sure he felt my awe. But I think extreme talent just doesn’t want to be disturbed or distracted
; it’s constantly busy and enjoying its own company. You could see his mind working nonstop, and I guess he just wasn’t interested in hanging around at the bar, talking business with a record guy like me.

  Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz was the friendly one. He was a happy, smiling, unpretentious Kentucky kid who’d known David Byrne since college. They were best friends. The bass player, Tina Weymouth, was Chris’s girlfriend, who the guys had talked into joining the group. She was a classy young lady, half-French and always polite, but maybe because she was only just learning her instrument, she hung back slightly, too. When you spoke to the three of them, they seemed to let Chris Frantz give the appropriate reply, which he always did without ever being bossy. Chris and Tina knew all eyes were on their singer, and I think understood David’s bizarre genius needed constant support—both on- and offstage. Tina even cut her hair short to look as plain as possible. She didn’t want audiences to look at her instead of David. I hadn’t yet figured out the complex chemistry between the three of them, and I doubt I ever fully did.

  Luckily, the Ramones started offering them support slots, so “the Heads,” as they quickly become known in our circle, were being gently pulled into the Sire orbit by everyone else who revolved around me. By winter 1976, the Ramones were recording their second album, and there was this amazing energy carrying them to cult status, which started to rub off on the Heads when they played together. I guess David Byrne got thinking, If Sire can give the Ramones a serious break, maybe this Stein character can do something for me.

  One night after playing a show together, Chris Frantz cornered Danny Fields. “How is it dealing with Seymour?” he asked.