“Sorry, Seymour,” he announced. “You’ve spent all your budget for the year.”
“But listen, we gotta get this band. They’re gonna be big!”
“Well, can you not keep them on hold until the next financial period?”
“No, somebody else will get them by then. We’ve gotta move right now.”
There was no point crying down a long-distance call to Mo’s chief bean counter, who I knew was just following orders. What I wouldn’t know until years later was that Mo had addressed his top staff about me in a meeting. “Have you ever seen such a bloated roster?” he gasped. “He can’t stop signing. It’s a sickness!” I don’t doubt that my lucky roll must have seemed a bit crazy at first, but I totally believed that most if not all these bands would pay off in the long run. The problem always came back to Mo and his inner circle thinking California was the center of the solar system. Maybe it was in the early seventies, but they were thousands of miles from where tomorrow’s sounds were happening. Undoubtedly, they did make some important international signings, mostly licensed from UK indies. But they had the benefit of being well-heeled to wait and pay big bucks, which Sire didn’t have and which was not a way I wanted to operate.
I had to figure out a plan B right there in London, so I stayed up all night thinking. Top of my hit list was the head of Warner’s UK publishing division, Rob Dickins. He was eight years younger than I was, had sharp ears, and always struck me as someone with a bright future. When it comes to choosing partners for music ventures, you never can tell, but Rob’s father had been one of the founders of NME, Britain’s leading music magazine.
I called into Rob’s office the next day and played him a demo of Echo and the Bunnymen. He immediately recognized the good songwriting and original sound, so I pitched my idea. “Mo won’t let me sign anything for the next two or three months, by which stage this band will be somewhere else. You’ve got great ears. You should have your own label. Let’s start one together. We sign this band immediately, then we set up deals with Warner in London for the UK, with WEA for international, and Sire for North America?”
“Okay,” said Rob. “But I’m not leaving my job. I’ll have to do this on the side.” Rob not only put up all the money to sign Echo and the Bunnymen, but so strong was his belief in the band that he worked his ass off to break them.
“Of course, Rob. We’ll keep the whole thing dead simple and inside Warner. Believe me, they’ll be glad we did this in the end, you’ll see. I basically need you to be the band’s contact here in London, which won’t take up too much of your time. But I just wanna say, I think you’ll make a great record man.”
Insomnia and jet lag were the banes of my life, and this was one of many situations when I was nodding off midsentence like a hippie on downers. I had to get to bed, so I got up to leave. “Hang on, Seymour. We’re not finished yet. What are we going call this label?”
“I don’t care. You come up with any name you want.”
“No, Seymour, we’re not gonna start a label unless we both come up with the name.”
He was dead right, so I sat there for hours, dizzy but still running on nervous energy. On his wall, there was a framed poster for the Stanley Kubrick movie A Clockwork Orange. Looking at the images, I remembered the name of the stylish bar where the gang members pour milk from the tit of the white statue.
“What about Korova?” I suggested.
“That’ll do!” Rob smiled, obviously a big fan of the movie.
That little maneuver sneaked Echo and the Bunnymen into Warner through the back door. It also drew Rob Dickins out of publishing into cutting-edge record production, and what a bright future that would turn out to be. I advised the band to ditch the drum machine for a human, which they were already thinking about doing anyway. We’d have to wait a few months to receive their first album, Crocodiles, which I knew would make a bigger splash in England than in the States. Their sound was too dark for American Top 40 radio, but songs like “Rescue,” “Pictures on My Wall,” and “Do It Clean” were played by college radio stations, downtown clubs, and in specialist record stores.
In this magical period of signing pioneer bands almost every month, what I never saw coming was the small print of the Warner deal coming home to roost. According to the agreement I’d signed in late 1977, Warner Bros. Records could automatically buy the other half of Sire for $1 million, plus a token percentage of company value based on business. This meant that in 1980, during a major recession when record sales right across the board were down about 20 percent, I had to accept whatever Burbank’s bean counters calculated as Sire’s other half, and there was nothing I could do about it except negotiate an executive salary as Sire’s chairman.
I hadn’t really taken in the reality of not owning my company anymore, but if anything symbolized the seismic changes taking place both in my life and the record industry in general, it was that Sire had to move out of the old brownstone on West Seventy-Fourth Street and be put into WBR’s East Coast office at 3 East Fifty-Fourth Street. The indie days were fading fast. Despite Mo’s promises to keep Sire an indie, it was slowly becoming a Warner imprint. I still had a team of my own, though smaller, but nevertheless was determined to keep making the most of what we had, even though it was obvious Mo was doing everything to control me.
While I was dealing with all of this, Talking Heads were off around Europe on their Fear of Touring, this time with guest musicians like Adrian Belew and Busta Jones. Apart from the electrifying shows I caught here and there, I had no reason to think anything was turning sour in their dressing room. What I didn’t know was that in late December 1979, the night they wound up the whole tour in West Germany, some journalist lady had come from behind the Iron Curtain to interview the band. For whatever reason, David Byrne was demanding to do his interviews separately and talked to the journalist alone behind closed doors. When Tina, Chris, and Jerry were called in afterward, the journalist innocently asked them, “What are you going to do now that David Byrne’s leaving the group?”
Chris, Tina, and Jerry were totally stunned. They were also well accustomed to David’s strange behavior. Because they’d been on the road for six months and just wanted to get home for Christmas, they bit their lips, tidied up their gear, and took the plane to New York. “Let’s just catch up with some sleep before dealing with this,” they told each other. After all, maybe it was bullshit? Maybe it was the journalist’s bad English? The problem by then was that nobody dared confront David Byrne about much. The other Heads preferred to tread on eggshells, which is what I, the manager, the crew, Brian Eno, and just about everyone else did, too. Believe me, there’s nothing easier or more normal than to appease a troubled genius. Not least because we were all in awe of him.
A few weeks later, Chris Frantz got a call from Brian Eno, who was producing something privately with David Byrne. Chris was not really told what the project was, but being a team player, he laid down drums on an instrumental track that would eventually be called “Regiment.” Still scratching his head, Chris went home to his wife having to explain that Busta Jones was on bass. He then called Jerry Harrison and broke the news that Robert Fripp was the guitarist. All this must have looked and sounded a little ominous to the other members of Talking Heads. In the end, Brian Eno and David Byrne’s side project would become My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, an experimental album exploring their African influences from a more technological angle. Its release, however, would be held up for almost a year due to contentious samples.
They moved work to a studio in San Francisco called Different Fur, but when they came home to New York in early spring, Chris and Tina decided to confront Brian Eno, who seemed to be pushing David Byrne into a solo direction.
“Will you produce Talking Heads’ next album?” they asked.
“No,” replied Eno uncomfortably without explaining why.
“Well, will you come over to our loft and jam with us?” they asked.
“Sure, but what can I
play?”
“Play one of our keyboards. Create sounds. Have fun. Let’s try out something new.”
“Okay,” agreed Eno, who already knew how to get there.
When Brian Eno arrived, Chris, Tina, and Jerry had already spent days taping jams on a cassette recorder. They played their demo, which Eno liked, and then they all started jamming with Eno on synths. Once things started to cook, they called David Byrne and invited him to join in, and of course David was too curious to stay away. What followed was like one of those old cartoons where musical notes are pouring out of a window. A collective decision was made by all four Talking Heads and Brian Eno to move work down to Compass Point in the Bahamas and work as a five-piece team. Those sessions would become Remain in Light, probably their most acclaimed album among hard-core fans, but by no means their bestselling.
All the African experimentalism they’d started on their previous record was taken a step further, as with their masterpiece hit “Once in a Lifetime.” That’s also when David Byrne started making arty videos with his then girlfriend, the talented dance choreographer Toni Basil. Out in Los Angeles, they shot a video for “Once in a Lifetime” featuring only David Byrne spinning around on a wheel, trying not to puke. When the other Talking Heads were presented the video as a fait accompli, they were understandably a bit taken aback, but Chris, Tina, and Jerry had to admit it looked pretty cool. For another track, “Crosseyed and Painless,” Toni Basil found a dance troupe called the Lockers, who performed what was then called robotics or creeping, the precursor to break dancing. There’s even moonwalking in that video, years before Michael Jackson made it famous.
To re-create their bigger sound onstage, Talking Heads went back out on the road with something like ten musicians and as many crew. They put on a brilliant show, but at the end of that tour, they hit another brick wall. The band’s accountant crunched the numbers and, ouch, they were almost broke. People today probably have difficulty believing this, but it cost five bucks to see them play in venues that held one or two thousand people. Their first four records had sold nearly a hundred thousand copies each, good numbers, but they kept breaking the first commandment of show business: thou shalt not overspend.
I don’t know if it was money, heavy touring, or David’s solitary nature, but all the unspoken shit that had been building up inside that dressing room started to hit the fan on my desk. In came the manager, Gary Kurfirst, who announced that now David was writing songs for a Broadway musical called The Catherine Wheel. He wanted money to produce the soundtrack as a solo record for Sire. What? We were already having such difficulty clearing the samples for My Life in the Bush of Ghosts we hadn’t even released that side project yet. I nonetheless agreed to an advance without ever asking David myself if this spelled the end of Talking Heads. I chose to shut up and give him what he wanted, knowing that when David Byrne set his eyes on some new artistic mountain, you’d only get injured holding him back. He was someone I’d always support even if he wanted to make a concept album about toothpicks.
Gary Kurfirst found himself in the tightest spot of all, because he was negotiating David’s solo deal but had to share the information openly with the other members of the band, who of course were feeling left out. Next thing I knew, he was back on the phone saying Chris and Tina wanted money to make their own side project. Then, of course, Jerry Harrison wanted his solo album, too. All this was turning into a mess, and it’s not like I didn’t have plenty of other things happening. I’d always lived by the philosophy that songs were the magic ingredient in music, so I reasoned that David Byrne, being the main songwriter, deserved special treatment. I did offer Chris and Tina a deal, although—and here was my diplomatic goof-up—a smaller advance than what I was giving David.
Gary came back to tell me that Chris and Tina were taking an offer from Chris Blackwell of Island Records—modest enough, but bigger than mine. I could have upped my original offer, but I let it go. Gary was an old friend of Chris Blackwell’s, and when it came to dub, Island was a logical fit for whatever rhythmic experiment Chris and Tina had in mind. So, I just concluded, “Yeah, whatever,” thinking all this was a classic case of a band getting lost up their own asses. Who’d have guessed they’d start pulling out gold discs?
Calling themselves Tom Tom Club, Chris and Tina began jamming with one of Chris Blackwell’s protégés, Steven Stanley, a Jamaican keyboardist and producer. Their first experiment was “Wordy Rappinghood,” not really a song in the old-fashioned sense, but it was a funky whistler with a fabulous cartoony sound. Released by Island in February 1981, it made a splash in Europe, Latin America, and on the dance floors of New York. Tina’s rhymes weren’t exactly rap as we know the term today, but that twelve-inch caught the immediate attention of all the black pioneers who were inventing what we now call hip-hop.
Meanwhile, we were having serious difficulties with David Byrne and Brian Eno’s collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. They’d sampled some truly obscure sounds, which had us chasing around after faith healers and the Council of Muslims in Britain. For religious reasons, some samples were denied, meaning a few tracks had to be redone or left off. The final cut of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was nonetheless a fascinating creeper, a cult record that influenced so many experimental artists in its wake. We released it at exactly the same time as Island released Tom Tom Club. Although the release dates were accidental, it nonetheless set up a terrifying duel between the two sides of the not-really-talking Heads.
To be honest, I didn’t know what to make of all this instrumental experimentation, but looking back, between Remain in Light, Tom Tom Club, and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, new genres were being discovered right under my nose. These were the sounds of the eighties and beyond. The music scene hadn’t stopped evolving since the Ramones hit London in 1976, but I think it’s fair to also single out 1981 as another major milestone that points all the way into the digital era. This was the very beginning of dance music, hip-hop, electronica—all the generic terms we’d be using much later.
The year 1981 was also the beginning of MTV, the Sony Walkman, the Roland TR-808 drum machine, the Fairlight CMI sampler. John Lennon had just been shot, Ronald Reagan had just been elected, and everyone was hooking up to cable TV and buying VHS recorders. New technology was taking over in a big way. My corporate masters, Warner Communications, had bought into Atari, and even my own daughters couldn’t get enough of all that arcade stuff like PAC-MAN, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, Scramble, Galaga. Every kid was hooked. Between 1981 and 1982, the number of arcade machines in the United States tripled from half a million to 1.5 million. I guess all these bleepy electronic sounds were forging the ears of a new generation.
I was living on my own in a big new place on Central Park West, just down the street from the old Kenilworth apartment where Linda and the girls still lived. It was a three-bedroom beauty that I’d paid three hundred grand for. Unfortunately, I had to build a staircase to an upstairs room, and because the place was so big, it took a few years to furnish. Coincidentally, the Bee Gees manager Robert Stigwood lived on the top floor of the neighboring tower, not that I ever saw him. I was doing quite a lot of coke at the time, so when I wasn’t traveling or working late, I remember sitting there in a sparsely furnished room for hours just flicking through the channels. Images were pouring in from all over the globe—revolution in Nicaragua, the Space Shuttle, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Leonid Brezhnev’s funeral, Richard Pryor blowing himself up freebasing cocaine, “Bonkers candy bonks you out!”
Meanwhile, hip FM stations like WBLS, WKTU, and most importantly WLIR were playing the threads out of our records. Also on those stations, a new generation of deejays like Shep Pettibone, Marley Marl, Red Alert, Chep Nuñez, and the Latin Rascals performed what was called “cutting,” a technique of rhythmically alternating between two copies of the same record to create all these chops, scratches, and dub-style echoes. There was also the “mega mix” using the same tricks but with different records. These
live radio tricks and the growing demand for danceable records in clubs was what pushed labels such as Sire into releasing twelve-inch remixes of our coolest stuff.
Meanwhile, art house theaters were screening Downtown 81, a movie that documented our local music scene, including a hot new Latino band, Kid Creole and the Coconuts, whose percussionist, Coati Mundi, was putting out his own quirky records. Both acts were on an interesting indie called ZE Records, whose progress I was watching carefully. In the modern art museums, the big thing was video installations from around the world and the tribal art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, a New Yorker originally from Haiti who you’d see hanging out at the Mudd Club. Laurie Anderson released “O Superman,” a cult hit among the performance art crowd, and although the landmark movie Koyaanisqatsi didn’t come out until the following year, it was being filmed around New York to the music of Philip Glass. In Los Angeles, Ridley Scott was busy making Blade Runner.
It was an incredible time for creativity, most of it futuristic and global in flavor, and for me personally, the year’s discoveries were only just beginning. In the early hours of April 28, 1981, I was wide awake in bed, reading a copy of NME, when one review glowed in the dark. Its headline read “Basildon à la Mode” and profiled a new English group named after French fashion magazine Depeche Mode. This was the kind of reading that’d usually slip you into the Land of Nod, but what kept me up all night was the name of their producer, Daniel Miller, the guy I’d first met in Rough Trade three years before. Since then, I’d released his second record, under the name Silicon Teens, a pretend group that was all his work. It hadn’t sold much either, but I thought the guy had brilliant ideas.
Siren Song_My Life in Music Page 19