“That’s not my problem,” said Granz. A lengthy argument ensued.
“I wanted us to settle this as friends,” said the father, “but if that’s how you want it, fuck you. Ricky’s only seventeen. The contract’s not worth the paper it’s written on!”
Granz hit the roof, Ozzie slammed the door, and guess who was quaking down the corridor? “Ostin!” yelled Granz. “Get me the meanest fucking lawyer in Hollywood!” This could only mean Frank Sinatra’s attorney and chief confidant, Mickey Rudin. Mo got Rudin on the line, but it was “Ricky who?” and “Who gave you my number?” Knowing his job was on the chopping block, Mo kept schmoozing away in desperation until Mickey Rudin gave in. “Okay, okay, pay me a retainer, but I don’t want to hear from you people more than twice a year.”
When Mo met Mickey Rudin for lunch, it went swimmingly. They discovered that both their fathers were commies in the thirties—a big deal if you’re into that kind of thing. Mo’s genius dropped some idea into Rudin’s soup that afternoon, because two years later, Rudin set up a record label for Frank Sinatra, called Reprise. Frank, who was getting on, could keep his masters, get a bigger cut as an artist, sign his Rat Pack buddies, and even claim expenses as “Chairman of the Board.” In theory, Reprise made perfect business sense. Unfortunately, Mickey Rudin knew what Sinatra was like—big ego, slight drinking problem, incapable of managing a business. What the plan needed was a reliable little mechanic, a master fixer in a butler’s mask to keep the books straight and deal with Sinatra. And that’s when Mo Ostin got his big break, cleaning up for the big boys.
With Mo running the new office, Reprise released modest hits from Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr., but within two years, the company began losing serious amounts of dough. As well as Reprise, Frank Sinatra had invested in other business ventures, like a radio station. Luckily, Mickey Rudin was thrown a joker once the movie Ocean’s 11, starring Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack buddies, became a Warner Bros. blockbuster. Jack Warner wanted to sign Sinatra for a three-movie contract, and buying Reprise was a small price to pay for Sinatra’s signature. It was rumored that Jack Warner was willing to pay big money for the label, and he eventually did. Mickey Rudin’s stroke of genius was to keep a straight face, refuse the fabulous offer, and suggest a convoluted stock transfer whereby Reprise would be merged into the existing Warner Bros. Records, which was already operating beside the film studios and releasing some successful pop acts like the Everly Brothers. And because all Jack Warner really cared about was the movie deal, he agreed to let Sinatra’s two-thirds stock in Reprise become one-third of the combined labels. It seemed like a costless reorganization, but in the end, Frank Sinatra swapped a liability for an asset and, years later, made a killing.
Once again, Mo Ostin’s bleak prospects had been turned around by a genius negotiator, except that by the time the ink was dry, Frank Sinatra had lost all interest in record labels. Not only did he hate rock and roll and early-sixties pop, Reprise’s problems had become personally embarrassing. Sinatra and his crew simply retreated further into the movie business. Apart from getting his daughter Nancy into the charts and picking up his checks as a minority shareholder, Frank became an absentee landlord and left Mo to his own fate.
It was probably a blessing in disguise. For a nuts-and-bolts guy with no ears, Mo had no choice but to find product himself. Simply by negotiating a few licensing deals with the French indie Disques Vogue and Pye Records in London, Mo landed Reprise the American rights for a string of British pop hits from Petula Clark and the Kinks. Thanks to smash hits like “Downtown” and “You Really Got Me,” Mo pulled in more than enough cash to keep Reprise evolving profitably through the midsixties.
To be fair to Mo, what he didn’t naturally possess in musical culture he made up for in intelligence. He understood how the business operated, and by watching London like a hawk, he scooped his next game changer in Jimi Hendrix before he took the Monterey Pop Festival by storm. When Hendrix stepped onto the Monterey stage and eventually set fire to his guitar, I imagine Mo sitting in the crowd, thinking, What’s Frank gonna say about this guy? Fortunately, within a year, Hendrix had the biggest-selling album in America, and of course Frank was very happy picking up his checks.
From there, Mo’s career went from big to bigger, thanks to two key people. The first was his new A&R man, Andy Wickham, an Englishman and former employee of Andrew Oldham’s, who pointed Mo to a slew of great acts, including Jethro Tull, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, and many more. But the person who really changed Mo’s destiny was Steve Ross, a devilishly astute New York tycoon from the car park and funeral home business. If anyone was possibly cuter than Mickey Rudin, it had to be Steve Ross, who, in 1969, bought up Warner Bros., Atlantic, and Elektra and reorganized the whole smorgasbord of film studios and record labels into an entertainment superpower. Ross renamed the mother company Warner Communications and began pumping money into its many tentacles.
By that stage, Mo was a black belt politician who helped Steve Ross buy out Frank Sinatra’s remaining stock and, over time, even managed to turn Steve Ross against Ahmet Ertegun, the very person who’d helped Mo get a big promotion to run WBR. Mo suddenly found himself standing at the confluence of Wall Street finance and Californian flower power, running the Burbank HQ alongside the talented Joe Smith, whose subsequent fate you can guess. Seizing the day, Mo read The Greening of America by Charles A. Reich and went about transforming Burbank into what Andy Wickham eloquently described as a “college campus.” The WBR staffers were mostly young, hip, and focused on intelligent singer-songwriters, especially that whole Laurel Canyon scene. It was adios to the old school of jukebox jobbers and Brill Building cheesecake, and it was “Hey, man” to the new world of what Mo called “creative services,” basically quirky, high-brow advertising aimed at underground magazines and college radio. A liner notes writer named Stan Cornyn became the mastermind of all these clever slogans and alternative techniques that in many ways gave not only WBR but the entire Warner Music Group a serious edge in hippie marketing. Stan Cornyn was a genius.
I sometimes wondered whether to stay in control, Mo liked to hire people with drinking, drug, or sexual problems and then play the daddy figure. I should know. Let’s just say that over corned beef sandwiches in the warm bosom of Fine & Shapiro, the term joint venture sounded dandy. I mean, doesn’t it still sound lovely? It’s team-y, it’s adventurous, it’s a deal you can roll up and smoke. And it sounds so equal. Especially when your half looks miraculously bigger than theirs. As Mo explained, WBR would pay me a million bucks for half of Sire’s stock so that his heavyweight marketing division, working in concert with the equally powerful distribution company WEA, could do all sorts of promotional tricks for my records. It was like all my birthdays had come at once.
Did I have a choice? I probably did. Then again, I was thirty-five years old, right at that midlife showdown where the past, present, and future are looking at each other like the final scene in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I’d been in the game for twenty years and had seen plenty of tragedy. It was bad enough that Syd died in his sixties; the decline of King was a lasting reminder of how fast things can change. But even King’s fate was pretty compared to George Goldner’s, who died in 1970, stone broke at the age of fifty-two. Or what about my man in Paris, Lucien Morisse, who committed suicide the same year—driven to despair by loneliness, overwork, and bitterness about his father being gassed by the Nazis? Even right there in the late fall of 1977, my old mentor Paul Ackerman was dying in reclusion, surrounded by his beloved cats and pigeons. He died on New Year’s Eve, by which stage the biggest star of my generation, Elvis, was already pushing up daisies in a king-sized box. There were innumerable ways of becoming a casualty. The game I’d chosen was a gladiator sport.
I’d nonetheless survived long enough to understand the tidal forces that wise old Paul Ackerman was the first to predict ten years previously. “The trend toward bigness, mergers, and corporate maneuvers” w
as how he described it. The shock sale of Atlantic Records in October 1967 had prompted Paul, who was almost sixty at the time, to write a milestone piece for the front page of Billboard. “The great era of the indie,” he lamented, “was the late 1940s and 1950s. Toward the end of the 1950s, it became the fashion for the once-pure indie to be tied with an umbilical cord to a film company, a broadcaster, or even a non–show business corporation looking for new money-making outlets … The pure indie was evaporating. He could no longer take it. He was even preyed upon by his indie distributors, many of whom were derelict in their payments and would pay only when the indie produced another hit … The indie distributor developed the habit of running with a hit single while leaving his established lines dormant on the warehouse floor.”
Tell me about it. After wearing out six distributors in the ten years since Paul’s grim prediction was published, I was truly sick and tired of forking out money without ever knowing our records would get properly promoted or even released. And it’s not like I didn’t understand why. The United States wasn’t like little old England with its entire media and distribution circuits centered around one city. We were a sprawling continent of fifty states with hundreds of radio stations and newspapers. Even if you could get jocks in Nebraska or New Mexico to spin your records, there was no telling if interested listeners could actually find them in local stores. The odds were cruelly stacked against independents and getting slimmer as the majors kept growing.
The fact that Warner was the slickest outfit on the field made my choice a no-brainer. Plus, Mo Ostin’s valuation of Sire at upward of $2 million represented more than just a resounding personal endorsement; it was a huge amount of cash in 1977. I knew that if I invested my million wisely and got in tight with Warner’s top brass, we Steins would be secure for many years ahead. Here was my chance to ensure I could have a lifelong career running Sire. So, I took that giant leap of faith knowing Warner needed skin in the game to get behind us and keep spending.
At Sire, everyone was waiting when we danced in the door, singing old songs together like two drunk teenagers carrying home the school trophy. All the Sire staffers were just as ecstatic. Even the cleaning lady knew we’d just been promoted. This deal could turn our oddball artists into international rock stars and, by extension, dazzle up the staffers’ résumés forever after. Everyone was going to be a winner, especially the bands, and that’s all I really cared about.
Looking back, I was no match for Mo Ostin, a brilliant and smooth operator who’d been negotiating multimillion-dollar deals for fifteen years alongside killers like Mickey Rudin and Steve Ross. And I wasn’t just inexperienced at big business, I was dizzy with excitement about the scene Sire was sitting on. Don’t forget that at that ripe moment, in 1977, punk felt like New York coming back to life after more than ten years of British and West Coast dominance. When I was a small boy, New York had been the heart of the global record industry, but one by one, other cities like Nashville, Memphis, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and London all rose up and became synonymous with particular record labels and genres of music. All that diversity had been healthy for the industry as a whole, but somewhere along the way, dear ol’ New York had slipped into relative decline.
Admittedly, not everyone knew what to make of punk. Around 1977, a lot of people hated it, but a change was in the air, and right across the record business, the term was suddenly on everyone’s lips. Britain had been gripped by Sex Pistols fever over the previous year, and God knows the Brits love nothing more than a dirty scandal to complain about. In New York, it was the Ramones, the Dead Boys, and Richard Hell who personified this crowd-spitting, gutter-puking, bed-pissing subculture. On one hand, it didn’t do us any harm to encourage journalists to bullshit hifalutin theories about this so-called punk movement that to me was just a return to the fast, immediate, ugly-faced rock and roll I’d loved in the midfifties. If the punk ticket got kids to run out and buy our records, fine. I wasn’t going to complain.
The problem was radio, especially in America where the word punk sounded about as appetizing as jerk or scumbag. In England, it didn’t have those connotations. We needed all the help we could get, so I stumbled on the idea of new wave, pilfered from the French cinematic movement Nouvelle Vague. I don’t know if I first read it somewhere or heard it in a conversation, but it popped into the air and became my standard telephone spiel to win over every plugger, program director, and hippie jock. “No, Talking Heads aren’t punk,” I kept telling everyone, “they’re new wave!” Ain’t the art of selling all about perception? You have to have hot product to get away with it, of course, which we did. Plus, it was broadly true; Talking Heads didn’t sound anything like the Ramones or the Dead Boys, and they certainly didn’t deserve to be kept off American radio just because the Sex Pistols were winding up the Queen of England.
The new wave term caught on fast because so many other publicists, managers, and record labels buzzing around the same scene had to tease the same long-haired gatekeepers of Top 40 radio to get hip to the street. And it was effective. There hadn’t so much hair chopping since the recruitment centers of the Vietnam War. The idea of a “new wave” was so successful in changing perceptions, I think it even had an effect on the music itself. Talking Heads, Blondie, Ian Dury, the Stranglers, the Clash—if you listen to all these acts, you can hear a giant sonic leap between 1976 and 1978. They’d all been trying to capture the rawness of their early gigs, but as the audience grew and airplay on FM radio became a possibility, all these so-called punks started making tighter, slicker, more commercially ambitious new-wave records.
I’m sure some purists out there regret this, but I don’t. There’s only so long any artist can keep living in vans, playing to sixty people. Try it yourself. It’s every artist’s dream to sail the airwaves on a seven-inch masterpiece. Lesser talents of the punk era who now claim they never wanted to get on the radio are only kidding themselves. In most cases, the cream rose to the top, and a lot of what didn’t has been lunching out on punk mythology ever since. In reality, the best “punk” bands generally disliked the term and had only ever dreamed of making great rock and roll. They all fed off punk energy and humor when it was new and interesting, but as creative people do, they got bored quickly and kept pushing themselves into new territory. Some had the talent to do so; others didn’t.
Sire was undergoing major changes, too. We were still an indie in mentality, working out of the same old brownstone, but the combination of the Warner joint venture and the commercial success of the whole CBGB scene gave me the means and the credibility to sign far more acts than before. Increasingly, we were becoming an A&R office plugged into a giant marketing and distribution machine that fired out twenty new releases every month. Warner constantly needed hip records, and I was only too happy to keep feeding the monster. I knew we were on a roll.
I swung my binoculars over to London, which was once again teeming with fresh meat. One of my main sources was a record store in Notting Hill called Rough Trade, a tiny Aladdin’s cave of weird and wonderful indie activity that opened in the summer of 1976. I’d fly in from New York, dump my bag in my flat on Gloucester Place, then head straight over to rummage around and talk to people. That was more or less how I signed Sham 69 and an interesting character I actually met in the Rough Trade store. His real name was Daniel Miller, but he performed as the Normal. All he had to play me was a self-produced, self-pressed seven-inch with two tracks called “Warm Leatherette” and “TVOD.” I released his single in the States not expecting many sales; his record was as avant-garde as it gets. I just had a gut feeling about him in the way I’d had a feeling about Mike Vernon a decade before. Sometimes you look into people and just know they’ve a bright future.
I hired a local A&R man, Paul McNally, and an assistant, Geraldine Oakley, to keep me up to date on English news. If I liked a record, we’d check out the band live, which was the only way of knowing what they were really made of. That’s how I heard “Teenage Kicks�
�� by the Undertones. Paul and I were driving to see the Searchers when the song came on John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 show. It was such an obvious classic, I almost wet my pants. I sent Paul to Belfast to see the Undertones playing live, and there, he met Terri Hooley, the owner of Good Vibrations, the indie label that first released the single, and we struck a deal to release “Teenage Kicks” and other Undertones records in the States. In those months, I also signed the Rezillos, a punk group from Scotland.
I’m making all this sound easy, which of course it wasn’t. To find the best stuff, you had to put in the miles and move fast. When I was in London, Paul and I went out to gigs almost every night, and if we had to, we’d bundle into his car and drive off to towns and cities outside London. If we didn’t find what we wanted, which we mostly didn’t, we’d console ourselves with a shark’s fin soup in the Gallery Rendezvous, a late-night Chinese restaurant on Beak Street. Or, if we got back to London at dawn, the tradition was fresh bagels on Brick Lane. The fact my body clock was running on New York time probably made all this midnight English hunting a bit easier.
One of my great disappointments of that otherwise fantastic year was not breaking the Paley Brothers, who I got Phil Spector to produce in LA. They were the kindest guys you’ve ever met, and Andy Paley was a great songwriter. Jimmy Iovine, who would later become a giant in the music industry, was an up and coming engineer at the time, and had his first credited production as an Executive Producer on their E.P. When I met with Andy and Jonathan to discuss producers, Andy suggested Jimmy, who was a protégé of Ellie Greenwich. Jimmy had already engineered the John Lennon album Rock & Roll produced by Phil Spector. Andy told me that Jimmy was a great engineer and that he could work under pressure. I played Jimmy the four songs I wanted to cut with The Paley Brothers, and he loved them. The boys came down from Boston and stayed in the Holiday Inn on West Fifty-Seventh Street and drove to House Of Music in Orange, New Jersey every day to make the E.P. With overdubs and mixing it took three days. Jimmy brought in the late Ray Bittan (of Bruce Springsteen’s E-Street Band) to play organ and piano. Jimmy booked horns for one song. The Paley Brothers brought in Jersey native Leigh Foxx (now with Blondie) on bass. Other than that Andy and Jonathan covered all of the instrumentation. The four song E.P. “Rendezvous,” “Ecstasy,” “Come Out And Play,” and “Hide & Seek” is a classic on many levels and is often cited as a power-pop trend setter. In fact, Rhino named their first POWER POP collection after the song “Come Out & Play.” Ahead of its time in many ways. It still stands up today. But for some reason, the spark didn’t ignite. We had other disappointments, too. In Germany, I picked up “The Rivers of Babylon” by Boney M from Trudy Meisel at Hansa Records in Berlin, which broke into the Top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100—pretty good, but nowhere near the smash hit it was in Europe. I always needed to provide some straight-up pop hits to justify all the weirder stuff that Mo’s crew in Burbank didn’t always like. I also needed to ensure we had career artists, which meant spending more time and money on production than I could afford in the old days.
Siren Song_My Life in Music Page 15