Siren Song_My Life in Music

by Gareth Murphy

  To be precise, I didn’t regret everything. I always knew that Warner was good for Sire’s artists, who never would have gotten the same breaks had I stayed independent with the likes of ABC as distributors. Talking Heads in particular were big winners, and for that reason alone, my grumbles should be mixed with due gratitude and relief that I didn’t fuck up their destiny. What was killing me was that I’d been so naive about other aspects of the deal.

  In music business mythology, Warner Bros. Records is often referred to as Camelot. Mo’s sycophants still believe it, but if there’s one key witness on this earth who can validate or shatter the Camelot legend, it’s surely me, right? Mo Ostin’s table was about as round as a pulpit. It was a table for one, protected on three sides and sloping heavily toward his pocket area. Oh, sure, you could gather around and clap your hands like plenty of misty-eyed WBR employees did, but that’s only saying something about their own faith in the mythology.

  To put it bluntly, there was nothing “joint” about what I’d ventured into. It was about as joint a venture as a whale swallowing a fish. Warner Bros. were the owners, the bosses, the bankers, the publicists, and the distributors. To Mo, Sire was just a pile of masters, artist contracts, and an A&R office of about ten expendable staffers. For $2 million, Mo basically bought me and all the contents of my filing cabinet, before and forever after. He’d dazzled me with flashy terms and big round numbers, and then he let me sign away for a few relatively undisturbed years. Then, when my playtime was up, his bean counters reeled much of it in.

  Why hadn’t I talked to David Geffen? Hopefully, he might have kicked some sense into me. In 1972, Steve Ross had done exactly the same thing to Geffen’s Asylum label. Even the most brilliant negotiator, David Geffen, had been charmed by $7 million and took a while to come to his senses. When he did, he was just an employee watching all his acts generate about $100 million. He’d even signed the Eagles, the biggest-selling band of the seventies. Geffen was the smartest record boss of us all, which tells you how cunning Steve Ross must have been. Ross had basically worked out the postwar record business mathematically; he understood its values and its time scales. Artists came and went, so you bet on the Erteguns, the David Geffens, and Mo.

  Mo used Steve Ross’s playbook on me. When Warner saw something happening, it bought in fast while the labels were still cheap and then fed them millions in operating capital for two or three years, which is about what it takes for new bands to break. From there, the buyer reaped the long-term returns. So successful was this method, Warner became the world’s biggest major in less than a decade—not bad considering it began as a handful of indies competing against major labels, some of which, like Victor (RCA Victor), Columbia, and the Gramophone Company (EMI), dated back to the turn of the century, while still others, like Philips (Phonogram), Deutsche-Gramophone (Polydor), Decca, and Capitol, emerged between the teens and the 1940s. Most amazingly of all, its music division was the most profitable side of the entire Warner Communications conglomerate. Hot record labels were automatic cash machines compared to movie studios, soccer clubs, arcade games, TV channels, and magazines, all of which cost a fortune to operate in comparison.

  To cut a long story short, Warner structured my deal so they held all the cards. A built-in buyout option enabled WBR to take my half of Sire when it suited them. I had become a glorified employee who had to get every demo, band, and budget sniffed, poked, washed, ironed, and folded by Mo and the Warner machine. Never again could I shake a manager’s hand with total confidence and say, “For sure, you’ve got a deal!” For a corporate salary, my job was now to convince artists and their managers to hold off for some more time so that I could squeeze money out of a building in California. As I was learning, asking nicely just doesn’t work inside a large corporation; only the squeaky wheel gets the oil. You actually had to rave down the phone and keep calling back like a pest until they cracked and gave you what you needed. Managers around Burbank used to say I was annoying, that I hounded them to get my artists money or special attention. I’d tell you who some of these critics were except that you’d never have heard of them, which sort of proves my point. Being liked was not my goal in life. My business was turning great music into hit records.

  Sire’s worsening corporate predicament, to be fair, also had something to do with a recession affecting the whole industry in the early eighties. Like every other major, Warner had to reduce spending across the board, so even though I knew I was on a roll, my budgets got cut back like everyone else’s. That said, it was personal; Mo felt I’d gone on an irresponsible shopping spree, the Pretenders had made a big splash but had drug problems, Talking Heads were still on the field but were looking a bit shaky internally at that point, the Ramones, in Mo’s mind, had probably reached their limit, and we’d had lucky strikes and one one-hit wonder along the way. None of Sire’s bands had taken off big-time, not by WBR’s major major-league standards, and Mo didn’t have the ears to hear what was just around the corner.

  Mo being Mo, he didn’t want to completely demoralize and humiliate me; that would just threaten the whole investment and potentially lose him points in Steve Ross’s good book. He needed to smile me through tolerable levels of pain; I was to be kept alive, just healthy enough to keep Sire growing, and who knows, maybe find the occasional zero-risk moneymaker.

  I don’t know if it was all this regret that made me sick. It certainly couldn’t have helped what I was doing to myself, anyway. Working around the clock like the transatlantic bachelor that I’d become, I was blowtorching the candle at both ends, and in mid-1982, I started getting pains in my chest. I thought I was getting a heart attack, so I didn’t waste any time seeing a doc. An EKG showed that the hole between the left and right ventricles was infected. My rare condition had a name: subacute endocarditis. The good news, however, was that it was fixable with open-heart surgery. I was checked straight into Lenox Hill Hospital for four weeks of penicillin to clear up the infection before they decided what to do about the deformation. And right there, feeling sorry for myself in that ass-numbing bed, was where the record man’s equivalent of Florence Nightingale walked in. Yes, you guessed it, she wasn’t really a nurse, though sometimes I do wonder if singers are types of faith healers.

  The series of events that brought Madonna to my hospital bed began months earlier when Mark Kamins started dropping hints. Danceteria was still the number-one downtown club, and Mark was arguably New York’s hottest deejay. Unfortunately, he wasn’t making enough money and knew he had to broaden his professional horizons while he was in such demand. We’d asked him to remix a David Byrne solo track called “Big Business,” but Mark was dreaming of becoming a real-deal producer and asked me for help. I told him flat out that no big artist would ever risk working with an unproven producer, even if he was New York’s hippest deejay. Remixes? Fine. But doing albums from scratch? No way. Like everyone else, he’d have to earn his stripes by finding nobodies and making them sound like stars. The best producers, I explained, are also A&R men who find and develop.

  I knew it wouldn’t be easy for Mark Kamins to make that jump to production, because he couldn’t play an instrument, and the best producers are generally musicians to begin with. He had something else, however. He already had a sound. Just the name Mark Kamins evoked a sonic picture in people’s ears, which is surely the sign of an exceptional deejay. He was also a natural-born digger who knew how to find really interesting stuff. So, doing as I’d done throughout my career when I encountered a red-hot talent magnet, I gave Mark $18,000 and set him a challenge: “Go find a few acts and make six demos for three grand each.” Crazy as it sounds, I chose the figure of eighteen for reasons of Jewish numerology. It’s the magic number of chai, the Hebrew symbol for life.

  Maybe I was being naive, but I just presumed eighteen grand was as good as a gentleman’s handshake. Imagine how I felt when I read about Mark Kamins working for Chris Blackwell at Island. The fucker! I thought. Where did my money go? It transpi
red that while I was off traveling and doing my usual thing, Mark had actually played his Madonna demo to various companies. Thankfully, I didn’t know until years later that he’d actually played it to Chris Blackwell first and then somebody at Geffen Records, both of whom turned him down.

  Never mind—youth and ambition were never known for their table manners. Mark was so desperate for a break, he was schmoozing all the labels he liked. I can’t blame him; he was spreading himself wide like I did at his age. He also played his demo to one of my staffers, Michael Rosenblatt, with whom he had become friends. Nobody really heard the fireworks going off in Mark’s head. They all thought he had love hearts in his eyes, and it’s true that he was romantically involved with Madonna when he was hawking her demo around town. Call me an old shellac-blooded cynic, but I don’t believe Mark Kamins was capable of putting romance before music. I’m sure a lot of stunning party girls floated around his deejay booth. His compass was his ear, not his dick. He knew Madonna was no ordinary young lady, and look how right he was proven.

  What actually happened was that one night in Danceteria, he had been approached by this dancing beauty who introduced herself. Madonna charmed the pants off him, literally, and played him a self-made demo of a song she wrote called “Everybody,” which she’d made with a guy called Steve Bray. Mark then reworked and revamped the whole tune from scratch in a better studio with better musicians. He even had the sense to test his mix on the dance floor before shopping it around. The crowd seemed to respond enthusiastically, so he made copies and went hustling.

  I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t been played this demo yet, so I arranged for my secretary to send the cassette into Lenox Hill Hospital, where I duly slotted it into my Sony Walkman. As penicillin dripped into my heart, I lay there and listened to Mark’s first find. I’m sure I was going nuts in that little room, but I immediately felt an excitement. I liked the hook, I liked Madonna’s voice, I liked the feel, and I liked the name Madonna. I liked it all and played it again. I never overanalyze or suck the life out of whatever I instinctively enjoy. I reached over and called up Mark. “Can I meet you and Madonna?”

  He called back saying they’d drop by the hospital that evening.

  “What?”

  “I know. I told her you were sick, but she really wants this.”

  Maybe it was the thought of Chris Blackwell that got me twitchy, but I just said, “Okay, see you this evening,” and hit all the panic buttons. “Get me a pair of pajamas,” I told my secretary. “Oh, and send me in a hairdresser as quickly as you can.” I then pushed the buzzer for nurse assistance. “Someone important is coming in. I need to wash. Can you unplug this drip while I have a shower?” I’d been rushed to the hospital a few days previously and hadn’t really emerged from the bomb crater I’d suddenly found myself lying in. My armpits were probably growing fungus, and all I was wearing was one of those embarrassing hospital gowns like some lobotomized weirdo in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  First, Ken Kushnick called in and gave me the lowdown. Then Michael Rosenblatt arrived and gave me his take. By the time Madonna walked in with Mark Kamins that evening, I had been fully briefed and tidied up by a team of ladies. My hair was good, I no longer smelled like a French farm laborer, windows had been opened, piles of magazines and tapes had been neatly stacked. All that was missing was the pipe, the monocle, the book, and the beagle asleep at my feet. Of course, Madonna took one look at the tube stuck into my skin and squirmed. Not that she really cared about my predicament. She’d come to get a record deal before some old record guy croaked, along with his check-signing hand.

  She was all dolled up in cheap punky gear, the kind of club kid who looked absurdly out of place in a cardiac ward. She wasn’t even interested in hearing me explain how much I liked her demo. “The thing to do now,” she said, “is sign me to a record deal.” She then opened her arms and laughed. “Take me, I’m yours!” She was goofing around doing a Lolita routine because I was twice her age. Or maybe I really was smiling back at her like a dirty old man, because she didn’t take long to cut through all the small talk and go straight for the kill. Peering into the back of my head with those Madonna eyes, she said, “And now, you give me the money.”

  “What?” I snapped back, which was unusual for me. As a rule, I’m always careful around artists, but Madonna had bigger balls than the four men in the room put together.

  “Look, just tell me what I have to do to get a fucking record deal in this town!” she hit back, sounding deflated.

  “Don’t worry, you’ve got a deal,” I assured her.

  And with that exchange, we finally met each other on level ground. Madonna had a power over men, a power over everyone that I think she was too young to control or even realize. For obvious reasons, her magic didn’t work the same way on me, which I think was a good thing for us both. I doubt she knew I was gay, and all I knew about her was the tape I’d heard. I had no idea she was stone broke and secretly hoping to leave the hospital with a check.

  Lots of people have written about Madonna’s natural star power, and it’s absolutely true that even when she was still a complete unknown, she filled up every room and oozed a dazzling aura that even a hardened vet like me wasn’t immune to. I gave her my promise and told her to go find a lawyer, but I still had to get the money and all the passport stamps from Burbank, which, under the circumstances, was not a foregone conclusion. The deal we agreed to was modest: Madonna would get an advance of $15,000 per single, for a total of three singles, with an option for an album. On top of that, there was an additional publishing deal by which she’d get a $2,500 advance for every song she wrote. It was more of a test run than a full deal, but that’s all she needed, and under the circumstances, that’s about all I could offer.

  Knowing what we know today, that tiny agreement looks rather comical. However, all she had right then was one clubby song that you couldn’t get on Top 40 radio. She wasn’t a musician, she didn’t have a band, all she really had was the name and sound of Mark Kamins behind her. He’d produced “Everybody” as a six-minute twelve-inch for clubs like Danceteria, so, in real terms, I was taking a small bet on Mark’s first studio production for the sheer interest of seeing where it would go. To be honest, I was doing him the good turn; there was no reason to believe I was looking at a female Elvis. The fact Madonna wasn’t even on the cover of her very first single tells you how much it all began as a downtown dance experiment. I would eventually see Madonna as a regular pop artist—we all would—but at that first meeting point, my job was to get both Mark Kamins and her in the net before anyone else. We’d get to the next bridge when we came to it.

  The biggest joke of all was that I couldn’t even get the fifteen grand out of Warner. I spoke to Mo while lying in Lenox Hill Hospital unsure if I would survive. He said absolutely not. He told me I was signing too many acts and didn’t want me to sign any more for a while. I told him Madonna was special, like no one I had ever seen or heard before, with immediate appeal to international and domestic audiences. Still, he refused.

  As we now know, Madonna ended up selling over three hundred million records for Warner. Over two decades, she clocked up twelve number-one hit singles and forty-eight top tens. She scored eight number-one albums, and all that’s just in the States alone. Madonna is as big as it gets, up there with Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles, and Michael Jackson. So let me just repeat that detail for posterity: had Mo gotten his way, Madonna would not have been signed to Warner Bros. He was never very talkative about his initial resistance, so I can only presume he thought the deal was pointless twelve-inch bullshit that wasn’t even worth the small change. Thankfully for all of us, the deal was saved by the blind faith of Ahmet Ertegun’s brother, Nesuhi.

  Nesuhi Ertegun had been one of Atlantic’s old crew with Ahmet and Jerry Wexler. But in 1970, when the Warner group came together under Steve Ross, he’d been given command of Warner’s international division, which handled all the lab
els overseas. Nesuhi was a slightly eccentric jazz connoisseur from a bygone age, and although his division had become a giant component in the Warner group, he did his best to avoid all the corporate politics. He couldn’t bear Mo’s maneuvers any more than most, so I figured he’d believe me and would be sympathetic to Madonna’s cause. All I had to do was track him down to the South of France, where he was on vacation, and tell him the truth.

  “Nesuhi, I’m so sorry to disturb you on vacation, but I’ve got a young artist. She’s great, but Mo’s trying to sink it. I hate having to ask for this, but please, I need your help. It’s just a fifteen-grand deal.”

  I guess Nesuhi could hear the passion and despair in my voice. He didn’t even ask to hear the demo; he was more interested in hearing about my health. He told me to rest up and, yes, he’d gladly pick up the tab. “Don’t be nervous,” he tut-tutted. “My brother tells me you’re in the hospital. It’s not good for your heart. I want you to forget about this, and let me handle it.” You had to love the Ertegun brothers. They had true class and were both great music men.

  So, I’d break out in a rash whenever I heard this nasty myth about how Madonna somehow screwed her way to the top. I could see she was the real deal. I certainly didn’t know then just how big she would be, but I did believe with all my heart she would be really big. I defy anyone to screw their way to number one and stay there for well over three decades. It can’t be done. But please, be my guest—have fun trying! If you only knew how twisted and perverse the office politics could get inside the Warner group, you’d understand what it meant that I had conspired with Ahmet’s brother to wriggle through a deal that Mo had totally rejected.