But of all the English indie groups on Sire, the most pro-American had to be the Cult. Their singer, Ian Astbury, didn’t just have stars in his eyes, he had red-and-white stripes as well. Long before he was famous, he’d lived in Canada and then returned to England, where he formed the band dressed up as a Native American. Originally called the Southern Death Cult, they’d been evolving through the early eighties as underground goth rockers until, in the summer of 1985, they released their classic anthem “She Sells Sanctuary,” which launched them in England.
They were signed to a UK indie named Beggars Banquet, with whom I already had a relationship though its sister label, 4AD. Even still, to secure the Cult’s North American rights, they were a rare instance when I had to fend off intense competition from Chrysalis and others, which I made an exception of doing, because I knew the unbeatable mix of Sire and WBR was perfect for their sound and image. We released “She Sells Sanctuary” as both a seven- and twelve-inch, but brilliant though it was, the sound was a little too spooky to get into Top 40 radio. The accompanying album, Love, was the commercial success that sold about 250,000 copies in the States, highly promising for a left-field debut.
Once the Cult got that first taste of American success, they basically moved over. Their following album, Electric, was produced by Rick Rubin, who gave them a drier, sharper, more immediate sound. It was such a musical departure, new fans could have been forgiven for never guessing the Cult were actually English. Their true statement of intention, however, was when they ditched their existing English manager for an American heavyweight named Howard Kaufman, a partner of Eagles supermanager Irving Azoff. For a British indie band, this meant business.
Martin Mills, the owner of Beggars Banquet, was so worried about how much the Cult were shifting their focus away from Britain, he flew to Los Angeles to gently win assurances from the band’s new manager. “Will you continue touring Europe as before?” asked Martin as diplomatically as possible.
There was a big map of America on the office wall, so Kaufman looked up and smiled. “Oh, yeah, Europe. It’s somewhere over to the right of that map, isn’t it?”
In the end, everything worked out fine for everyone. With extra muscle from Howard Kaufman and Canadian producer Bob Rock, the Cult’s next album, Sonic Temple, provided the sledgehammer effect they needed to sell over a million copies in North America alone, launching the Cult as a major global act. Depeche Mode and the Cult became Sire’s biggest indie bands, and it’s mostly down to big touring, big investment, and playing by local rules, much like U2 did in the same period.
I signed lots of other indie bands through the eighties like Modern English, Aztec Camera, the The, B-Movie, Everything but the Girl, James, My Bloody Valentine, Ride, and others. I signed both Depeche Mode offshoots, the first being Yazoo, who we had to rename Yaz for American editions. Yaz was the brainchild of Vince Clarke, one of Depeche Mode’s founders, who then teamed up with Alison Moyet in 1982 to make dance floor hits like “Don’t Go” and “Situation.” Stylistically, Yaz were obviously more electronic than “indie,” but they came from Daniel Miller’s Mute label, which was an independent using Rough Trade’s distribution. A few years later, Vince Clarke teamed up with a new singer, Andy Bell, to form Erasure. They gave Sire two top-twenty U.S. hits, “Chains of Love” and “A Little Respect” off their 1988 hit album, The Innocents.
It wasn’t a conscious strategy to sign so much British music. As in the seventies, I supported what I liked, and a lot of interesting newcomers just happened to be English. For the same reasons, I signed plenty of international bands that I picked up on my travels, many of which I found through my French connections. In the eighties, I’d fallen in love with Paris and bought an apartment on Avenue Carnot, one of the quieter streets that radiate out from the Arc de Triomphe. Hunting for art deco treasure in the flea market was my idea of a perfect weekend, and boy did I fill that beautiful little nineteenth-century Parisian flat so full of vases, paintings, and furniture, it was sometimes hard to move around. Yes, while scoring all these hits, I was a maniac for collecting. After a typical hundred-hour week in New York, I was jumping on planes and sometimes getting up at 5:00 A.M. in Paris to get to the flea market before the crowds arrived.
The living in Paris was easy. I was just a stone’s throw from my favorite Moroccan restaurant, Le Marrakech, and Paris being Paris, there was a large choice of outstanding restaurants in all directions. My favorite haunts were a Vietnamese restaurant named Tong Yen and an Italian restaurant named Le Stresa. There were countless French bistros, but my favorites were Chez L’Ami Louis and Le Taillevent, both local. In all these cozy little eateries, I hung out with friends and lovers, and sometimes we’d head out afterward to the hippest club in town, Les Bains Douches, which was just off the Champs-Elysées and also a pleasant stroll from home. Once you knew your way around and had enough bullshit French to not get ripped off by taxi drivers, Paris was all yours.
There, I discovered and signed various local delights like “Marcia Baila” by Les Rita Mitsouko, a sizzling French pop classic. While at Midem, I heard and proudly signed a mixed racial South African group, Juluka, led by Johnny Clegg, whose international hit, “Scatterlings of Africa,” was a landmark anthem containing some words in Zulu, quite a big deal during apartheid, and it reached number one in France and stayed there for three weeks. The eighties for me were a golden age of world pop, and I also discovered and signed Ofra Haza, the Israeli pop diva of Yemenite origin, who became known as the Madonna of the Middle East.
I think it’s fair to say the eighties were when my lifestyle became gay. I can’t say that I ever really came out. I didn’t see the need. Not only did I have two daughters who were still too young to understand, there was something about all that badge-wearing, flag-waving gay-parade ideology that I never identified with. Physically, I was never turned on by the raving queens who were so unbelievably gay, they were almost women. I was attracted to real men, the tall, handsome, intelligent hunks that women melted for, too. I had a lot of gay friends, of course, some of whom almost were women, but I had no interest in coming out only to close myself off into some frock-wearing ghetto. I was happy living in the real world, if the music business qualifies as that. And yes, my proudest, happiest exploits were with straight men who couldn’t resist my charms. It was not simply the physical attraction; it was intellectual also. I loved the company of smart men who had something to say and were living interesting lives.
My mother died in 1986, just three years after my father. As was her way, she put on a happy face throughout her final years, even though she was truly lost without him. It was as if she wanted to lie down beside her husband and close her eyes. In their own private way, they were very much in love, and I still believe they got their happy ending after a long life of work and sacrifice. They say that when your parents die is when you truly become an adult. In my case, however, I think I just let go and indulged the irresponsible boy I’d always wanted to remain. No more kidding myself now. I was a balding, graying, fortysomething man-child who never wanted to grow up. It certainly hadn’t been easy as a sexually confused teenager in the 1950s, but I can’t complain, because unlike so many people I met throughout life, I’d come from a loving family. My folks didn’t fuck me up; I got to do that all by myself.
I doubt my folks ever guessed I was gay, which tells you how innocent they were. They were born at the turn of the century and remained old-fashioned throughout their long lives. I kept my sexuality to myself as a matter of respect to them, and to this day, I don’t regret that I did. I never saw privacy as cowardice or dishonesty; I told the truth to anyone who was interested. The reality was, straight people were always more uncomfortable about homosexuality than even the most tortured closet queens. I always understood and respected that fact of life. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think we become more enlightened by kissing on subways or by talking the life out of our quirks and kinks. Privacy is a greatly underestimated necessit
y for living together. Sometimes the best way of winning people’s respect is to shut up and keep your bedroom door closed.
Despite all the progress made in the seventies, once AIDS hit, the world suddenly felt a lot less gay-friendly. When my parents died, it was like a whole decade of funerals was winding the clocks backward. It first began mysteriously with reports on TV, and then it started getting closer until you didn’t stop hearing friends bawling their eyes out over the phone. There were rumors and announcements every day, funerals every week. Testing positive for HIV was as good as a death sentence, because in those first ten years, nobody got out alive. When it comes to AIDS, there are only two types of people, and it’s not a matter of gay or straight. I know straight people whose eyes well up at the mention of the word. Count your blessings if you only ever saw it as a news story, somewhere far away on a TV screen. Those of us who watched a friend or a brother die in agonizing pain will never forget the horror.
The AIDS epidemic was an apocalypse. In their thousands, people were wasting away and disappearing right in the middle of New York City. They even looked the same: skeletal faces in oversized clothes, ghostlike figures, hidden away, ignored, ostracized, sneered at. It’s the mental image of an entire corner of a city, vacated, disappeared, nothing left but old photographs. The sadness of seeing so many young men dying was hard enough to swallow. What made it even worse was that polite society didn’t give a damn. In fact, for a lot of people, we were the new lepers who deserved this.
HIV had actually been identified in Lenox Hill Hospital while I was there getting my heart fixed. Throughout the decade, I was in and out of hospital like a yo-yo and was basically kept alive by my doctor, Alan Pollock. With all my heart problems and bouts of septicemia, I had to get tested for HIV of course, which was an experience so terrifying, I can understand those who didn’t and just waited to get sick. Like every gay guy who’d partied through the late seventies and early eighties, I was convinced I’d be next, but somehow I wasn’t. Without drawing you any diagrams, there were certain sexual practices I didn’t like, and I can only presume that’s how I avoided infection. I was very lucky. I can think of people who weren’t promiscuous at all and yet they died. There really was no moral justice to who got infected and who didn’t.
Whenever I think of all those faces, I’ll always see David Geffen stepping up. That guy has taken so much fire over the years for apparently being the record industry’s greatest ever prick. He quietly gave money to people, some he barely knew, so they could die with dignity. Not even close friends—some were faces he’d seen around from the disco days, friends of friends. Death because of AIDS complications was slow and ugly. Victims were too weak to work, many were rejected by their families, and they had no savings or safety nets. Many were dying stone broke, unable to pay hospital bills, facing eviction. I’m sure thousands died on the street or on people’s sofas. David couldn’t help all of them, but he helped many slip away peacefully without any financial humiliation hanging over their deathbeds.
For this alone, I will not tolerate a bad word about David Geffen. If ever he was rude in business, it was only because he was ten moves ahead of everyone else. It was torture for such a fast mind to sit there listening to everyone dragging out what he’d understood in the first five seconds. He was constantly being held back and sometimes his patience would snap. He’s the classic example of the star student who comes first every time, but as a result, can never win in playground situations because of course everyone’s so jealous. It’s lonely at the top, but make no mistake, the rest of us are better off being barked at by the best. The alternative is mob rule.
I was spared from AIDS, but there would be other tragedies along my journey. Any time a bomb fell through my ceiling, Geffen was always the first person to pick up a phone and help me out of the wreckage. He’d listen and handle all the shit you can’t handle when you’re depressed or in shock. He’d keep calling back until you were on your feet. To this day, I love and admire him, and I know he did the same for others, always offering concrete help and never once seeking gratitude or public attention as a showbiz nice guy. The man has soul.
Linda was a big fan of David Geffen, although I’m not so sure if her admiration was as reciprocal. He knew she had a heart of gold, but her lack of tact was often toe curling. Once, on the French Riviera, David, Linda, Elton John, and John Reid were in a restaurant when David noticed a handsome waiter looking back at him. Elton and John bailed out early, but David asked Linda to hang around until the waiter finished his shift. Linda never needed much persuasion to keep the night young, so when the place was empty, David asked her to check out if the guy wanted to go out partying. Typical Linda, she arrived back with her arm around the bemused waiter and screamed, “David, he’s straight!” then laughed out the door, dragging the guy to who knows what.
There’s no doubt that Linda became a lot happier as she found a career and tasted her own success. We had our regular feuds over money and me not seeing enough of the girls, but on the whole, we started getting along better. We’d never be normal friends, but we did become abnormally friendly considering what we’d been through. As well as the Ramones, she’d managed Steve Forbert for a while, but in the mideighties, she wound up in real estate simply because she knew so many rich people who talked endlessly about their Central Park penthouses and beach villas in the Hamptons.
Despite what real estate agents like to pretend, it’s not an easy life. The killings are big, but even the best go through barren patches when they sell nothing for months, sometimes a year. Linda was determined and quickly earned her reputation as the real estate broker to the stars. Over the years, her clients included Harrison Ford, Sting, Madonna, Sylvester Stallone, Elton John, Billy Joel, Christie Brinkley, La Toya Jackson, Steven Spielberg, Liam Neeson, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Michael Douglas, and many others. In fact, Sylvia Miles, the actress who played the real estate broker in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, took Linda out to lunch to study her accent and mannerisms. Linda had become the caricature.
I was becoming one myself. Because everyone knew how much I loved music business history, I was asked to be a founding member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, alongside Ahmet Ertegun, lawyers Allen Grubman and Suzan Evans, and Rolling Stone cofounder Jann Wenner. There was already a Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, and a Songwriters Hall of Fame, so it seemed natural to some of us who’d reached the upper slopes of the rock industry that we should build some kind of mausoleum for our own community. Cleveland of course ended up being the site. Yes, Memphis could have fit the ticket, and New York would have gotten the tourists, but the city of Cleveland was the only credible candidate to engage aggressively and put up the millions of dollars needed to build it. They wanted it more than anyone else, and in the end, that always makes the difference. Cleveland was where Alan “Moondog” Freed first aired his seminal radio shows and where the term rock and roll was arguably popularized.
Although I was only forty-three, I always considered the launch of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a rite of passage. This was the beginning of the rest of my life as a sort of music business elder. I’d never been to college, so it was a particular honor for me to contribute to these formal meetings. We all had to do our own private research, prepare notes, debate inductees, and basically map out the story of popular music, both behind the scenes as well as musically. That genealogy is largely taken for granted today, but in the mideighties, it was far from clear who were the branches and who were the leaves.
Ever since I was a kid, I’d always felt that black music was the big event of the century. My first records were mostly R&B, the first label I worked for was King, the first record Sire produced was an R&B singer, Mattie Moultrie, and when I invested in Blue Horizon, one of the first projects I supervised was recording the Memphis Country Blues Festival in 1968. Even with all the white bands I’d signed in the late sixties and seventies, from the British bluesmen to Talking Heads, there was always a connection t
o black music. So, when hip-hop arrived, I felt like I’d missed an important train. It was the one new genre that completely eluded me, and I have to say, for a few years in the mideighties, that failure really bothered me.
I began looking laterally at the first wave of hip-hop, and the one detail that struck me as strange was how all the pioneers had come from east of the Mississippi. Can there really be no rap in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle? I wondered. The answer, as so often, came from an unexpected source. In 1986, I got a call from a character named Ralph Cooper, the son of a tap dancer, actor, and band leader of the same name. Many years previously, I had become friendly with the father, even though there were two generations between us. He’d lived a full and fascinating life, he’d performed at the Apollo in the swing years, he’d been in Hollywood movies, where he’d been nicknamed “the Dark Gable” because he was black and so handsome. Anyway, his equally handsome son was the last person I expected a hot tip from, but A&R is as random as pigeon shit. Ralph junior told me to urgently check out an artist named Ice-T. Once I heard the words rap and Los Angeles, I dropped everything and investigated.
I hate to use the term blown away so often, but it’s the only way to describe the shock and awe of a direct musical hit that really does feel like a ten-ton bomb going off between your ears. I didn’t know anything about hip-hop, but I immediately connected with Ice-T’s lyrics and realized as I kept listening what I’d been prejudiced about. On a subconscious level, I’d considered rap a threat to R&B in the way that I believed that authentic country music from the thirties to the sixties was cheapened by all the “countrypolitan” dreck that followed. The intelligence of Ice-T’s word games, however, made me look at the genre as something in and of itself. Rap had nothing to do with R&B; it was black poetry.
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