Siren Song_My Life in Music

by Gareth Murphy

  “Seymour, don’t you get it? If Rob Dickins is behind this, it can’t be good. That asshole is incapable of making hits. Everything he touches turns to shit.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Bob. You know that’s not true.”

  When Bob Krasnow was obsessed about some pet hate, there was no point even arguing. Luckily for me, Jill Sinclair was so fed up with everyone’s bullshit, she put her foot down and made it crystal clear to one and all that Seal was promised to Sire, end of story. I was incredibly grateful for the way she withstood so much pressure from Mo, who, being the strongest king of the whole empire, tended to win wrangles such as this. Jill was steadfast and strong, and for that, I cherish her memory and often think of her.

  About a fortnight after the deal was signed, I received a call from Trevor Horn about Seal. In passing, he mentioned he was flying out to Los Angeles for some session and asked if I had any leads on hot recording studios in the city. It wasn’t my domain, so I suggested he ask either Lenny Waronker or Ted Templeman, who formed the nucleus of WBR’s unbeatable production team.

  “Oh, I think I’ll just ask Michael Ostin.” Trevor sighed. “He’s given me some useful addresses in the past. By the way,” continued Trevor, changing his tone, “keep this to yourself. The one other person we would have considered for Seal was Michael Ostin. I don’t know why, but for some reason, he just never stepped forward.”

  Thank God, I thought and kept my mouth shut.

  “And maybe you don’t know this either,” continued Trevor, “but the last person we were going give Seal to, or anything else of ours, was Irving Azoff.” He then described ZTT’s near-death experience being sued by Frankie Goes to Hollywood with Irving Azoff allegedly pulling strings in the background as the band’s manager. Trevor was right—I didn’t know. I should have remembered, but I guess you can’t catch every snippet of gossip. The irony, however, almost made me crack up. The mighty Mo Ostin trying to shove Trevor Horn’s nemesis down Jill Sinclair’s throat? Was the old pro that out of touch? If Mo had just stopped meddling in everyone’s business and let his son get involved, the result might have turned out very differently.

  When I said goodbye to Trevor and hung up, I leaned back and smiled to myself. The smarter people around the music business were starting to wake up to what I’d been saying for years. Behind his nice-guy mask, Mo Ostin was a dictator, and like all aging dictators, years of purges, nepotism, and fast-tracking the wrong people into the wrong places would be his downfall. There comes a twilight in every dictator’s life when having it too easy for too long makes him sloppy.

  I’m happy to report, the battle for Seal was worth fighting. In May 1991, Sire released Seal’s self-titled album in the United States, and by September, “Crazy” had climbed to number seven on the Billboard Hot 100, a major North American hit all summer long whose spacey sound really did herald in the druggy, electronic feel of the nineties. In its wake, I signed up Primal Scream and the Farm, all ambassadors of this new ecstasy scene bursting out of England. Once again, I was surfing a new wave into the next decade of pop music.

  Little did I know what craziness was about to engulf the entire company. Above Rockefeller Plaza, dark clouds were gathering. Rumor had it that Steve Ross was terminally ill. He’d been the guiding hand behind Warner’s spectacular rise throughout the seventies and eighties into an entertainment superpower, which he merged into Time Warner in 1989, the world’s biggest media conglomerate. As his prostate cancer became untreatable throughout 1991, he sensed some kind of succession war was going to erupt and, in Steve Ross style, decided to fire the first shot himself.

  From his deathbed, Ross directed a surprise coup while his healthy young rival and cochairman, Nicholas J. Nicholas, was on vacation. Apparently, Ross got the idea watching TV. In August 1991, the last premier of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, was at his holiday home in the Crimea when his political opponents struck in Moscow. Nicholas had been the former Time boss with whom Ross had clashed on so many decisions since the controversial merger. Ross’s farewell coup succeeded in ousting his younger archenemy, but it didn’t bode well for the times ahead. Ross at least chose a nicer man named Jerry Levin to become his cochairman of Time Warner, which effectively made Levin the sole successor.

  Once Steve Ross was lowered into the ground, which was in December 1992, we were an unhappy family of spoiled brats staring right into a power vacuum. Because Levin had risen up through the Time hierarchy, he didn’t know much about Warner’s various businesses, least of all music. As a result, the existing Warner Music chairman, Bob Morgado, suddenly found himself enjoying new freedoms and powers that he was never allowed under Steve Ross. If you’re to believe most historical accounts of what can only be titled The Fall of the Warner Empire, Bob Morgado usually gets blamed as the catalyst for the years of civil war that followed. I don’t quite agree. Bob Morgado was certainly a tough personality who took no prisoners, perhaps too tough for his own good, but all the years of pent-up tension go back to what seemed to be Mo’s secret desire to step upstairs into some powerful corporate position, leaving Michael Ostin in charge of Warner Bros. Records. When destiny did not go according to Mo’s liking, it must have been very hard for him.

  Steve Ross had paid Mo handsomely and made him a very powerful man. And maybe because Mo was so wealthy, he thought he could get rid of Bob Morgado if he pushed. Morgado, however, was a politician himself and got so sick and tired of Mo’s sense of entitlement, he teamed up with Doug Morris to give Mo the treatment many people felt Mo had long deserved. Doug Morris, who’d been president of Atlantic and its de facto boss for over a decade, was promoted by Morgado in 1994 to a new position as chairman of the Warner Music’s U.S. companies. Mo was so shocked and insulted that he’d have to report to Doug Morris, he officially announced to the press he wouldn’t be renewing his contract at the end of the year. This was typical Mo; he made it look like he was leaving while giving himself a few more months to possibly fight back. In reality, Morgado and Morris had already decided to turf him out. They didn’t renew his contract.

  For the rest of my life, I would be chastised by former Warner staffers who’d say I was too hard on Mo, that he was a lovely man with a sunny disposition, that Mo built the greatest record label in the history of America. Sorry, I don’t believe the nice guy mythology. Oh, yes, the man clearly had a rare talent, and yes, WBR was a truly great record label that defined the seventies and enabled me to enjoy the best years of my life. But if Mo was such a nice guy, he’d have shared more of his bumper bonuses with me and the others who helped build Warner’s, right? And if the company was really such a family, he’d have secured his succession, he’d have made sure his flock were set up safely without him, because that’s what noble fathers do, right? So, go easy on the Californian bullshit; Mo was just as selfish as any of us old schoolers from the east. When Linda organized a big party for my sixtieth birthday, I saw his face come through the door and couldn’t believe he’d actually turned up.

  “Mo, I didn’t expect you here,” I said, caught off guard.

  “I made a lot of money out of you,” Mo said, smiling. He knew how much it hurt me to hear these words, and yet it appeared to be a compliment. Typical Mo.

  With Mo and Lenny gone, the vacuum left by Steve Ross was even bigger. We did, however, have younger talent coming up from elsewhere in the family, especially Rob Dickins, who I thought was by far the most interesting of the younger bucks. At that point, he may have been the hottest executive at any of the majors. The thing about Rob Dickins was that, unlike any of the other contenders for a promotion, he’d actually built something of his own and was in his prime. He had world-class acts like Simply Red, Enya, and Seal. He worked with Trevor Horn and William Orbit, the producers who in many ways captured the sound of the nineties. In mainstream pop, Rob had brought Cher and Rod Stewart back from the dead, proving that he could score winners in every genre and age group. And because he came from publishing and had great ears, Rob was a different
kind of boss who kept his hands free to handle all the label’s creative heavy lifting.

  Creative people usually aren’t good managers, but Rob had excellent instincts when it came to team building. For the company’s everyday nuts and bolts, he hired the brilliant Max Hole, who was such a rock-solid organizer, he went on to run Universal Music Group International. Rob found the best promotions and press duo Britain has ever seen, Moira Bellas and the Boston-born Barbara Charone. He also brought in Paul Conroy, another great all-rounder from the new-wave days who went on to run Chrysalis and later Virgin. You’ll always know a leader by the quality of his recruits, and Rob’s gang was the meanest of the younger generation.

  The underlying reason I think Rob Dickins was so unanimously hated by his American counterparts went back to the way Nesuhi Ertegun had been running Warner’s international division since the seventies. Nesuhi, who’d died in 1989, was a diplomatic and talented fellow, but he was a peacemaker who let the Yankees ride roughshod over the foreign companies, especially the UK office, which had been a puppet until Rob Dickins took over. Rob didn’t take anyone’s shit. He turned away lots of American dreck and was every bit as determined and discerning as any mogul in the game to find his own winners. But because he was a younger Englishman in an American group, it was easy for the older Yanks to paint him as an upstart troublemaker.

  Mo thought Rob was arrogant, Krasnow and Rob clashed over their very different tastes, but I think Doug Morris had a special ax to grind. When it comes to global corporations, it’s amazing how one little incident between two men can be like a grain of sand fucking up the clockwork of destiny. In the decline of Warner Music and all the chain of events that affected my own fate, I always think of Rob’s biggest artist, the Irish singer Enya. It had nothing to do with Enya personally, but her success in the late eighties forced Rob to make some tricky moves that came back to haunt him in the midnineties when civil war broke out.

  Back in 1986, just a year after Rob Dickins took the reins in London, he gave the American rights for Enya’s debut record to Doug Morris at Atlantic. That record didn’t happen, so Rob licensed Enya’s second album, Watermark, to Geffen Records, which was half-owned by Warner at that precise moment in 1988. Geffen’s promotional team were on a roll and broke Enya wide open, selling over four million albums in the States alone. Then Geffen suddenly sold his label to MCA in 1991 just as Enya’s third album was ready for release. To keep Enya in the Warner family, Rob Dickins had to, once again, find a new home for Enya’s American operations. That’s exactly when my Seal episode also happened.

  Rob wanted to move Enya to WBR, but because he had such a terrible relationship with Mo over all the WBR titles he felt weren’t suited to the British market, Rob called me up trying to get me to lure Lenny Waronker out to England to meet Enya.

  “What do you think I should do?” asked Rob.

  “It’s not my place to tell you what to do, but if you really think Lenny Waronker is the right choice for Enya, you’re going to have to put your hand in your pocket and pay for her and her manager to go out and meet him. But before you do, Rob, listen to me—Doug Morris is gaining so much steam right now, I actually think you should call him up and say, ‘Look, Doug, Geffen broke Enya, but that record was way better than the first, so please just take the ball they’ve given you and run with it.’ Because if you don’t try to put things right with Doug Morris, he’s never going to forget.”

  Instead of going back to Doug Morris and stitching up the old wound, Rob stuck with his hunch to make Lenny Waronker Enya’s new custodian in America. Enya did live happily ever after with WBR, which is what helped get her music into movie soundtracks and sell millions more records without ever touring. Rob had made all the right choices commercially, but politically, I'm sure Doug Morris never forgave the snub, and if there’s one thing an alpha male like Doug Morris will remember, it’s watching everyone else score smash hits with an artist that was snatched out of his hands.

  Considering Doug Morris was doing about $900 million at Atlantic at the time, this Enya business should have been no big deal in itself, but the simmering resentment bubbled over in 1994, straight after Mo got the chop. Bob Morgado saw Rob Dickins had immense talent and offered him a life-changing promotion to take Mo’s place. It was Rob’s dream come true—I’d never seen him so happy—but behind the scenes, I can only imagine that Doug Morris was seething. Morgado should have never taken this step without first consulting Doug, who was by then the head of Warner Music Group in the States.

  I imagine many onlookers thought it was risky to put an Englishman in charge of such a large American major. I nonetheless supported Bob Morgado and still believe Rob Dickins would have taken WBR into interesting and successful musical territory, and just as importantly, would have hired a new generation of talented staffers. Rob had the ears, the judgment, the experience, and the audacity to do in the States what he’d done in the UK. He was exactly the young conqueror to fill the giant vacuum left by Mo. I’ve always believed that Brits are among the best music men because they take a more global view of music. It is not surprise to me that the heads of the three remaining major record groups today are all Brits—Lucian Grainge at Universal Music Group, Max Lousada at Warner Music Group, and Rob Stringer at Sony Music.

  Alas, poor Rob wound up in a New York hotel waiting and waiting for days while Bob Morgado and Doug Morris remained and battled it out. Because of Morgado’s missteps, Rob Dickins was never given Mo’s old crown. Instead, one of Doug Morris’s former colleagues from Atlantic, Danny Goldberg, was appointed. Surprisingly, Goldberg didn’t think it was necessary to relocate to WBR’s headquarters in Burbank, and he spent most of his relatively short tenure as chairman of WBR based in New York.

  Decision-making was difficult because there were so many problems happening all at once. The other drifting ship was Elektra, where Bob Krasnow was shown the door. Like Mo, Krasnow knew his game was up. I’d never had an easy relationship with Bob Krasnow. Then again, I don’t think many people did. He was a great A&R man who had turned around Elektra in the mideighties. He knew how to get what he wanted, but he’d earned himself a bad reputation for overspending, doing too much coke, and making other people miserable. For a while in the early nineties, horror stories about Bob Krasnow were a stock genre of music business comedy. But let me reiterate, Kraz had incredible ears, among the best ever in the business.

  The last straw was when Krasnow and some guests took one of the Warner jets down to South America. Krasnow eventually picked up some hookers and flew off into the sunset, leaving his guests stranded. I’m sure Elektra paid for their airline tickets home, but their story grew more legs than a millipede. Morgado was already fed up with Krasnow’s chicanery and had made up his mind to throw him out with Mo.

  With Mo and Krasnow out on their asses and Rob Dickins sent back to London under a black cloud, things got very complicated for me. Since 1978, Sire had been owned by and plugged into Warner Bros. Records, which never made sense to some onlookers, because by this stage, I was based in Rockefeller Plaza beside Elektra and the Time Warner corporate headquarters. To make his mark, Doug Morris began thinking about structural changes that he felt should have been made long before. It wasn’t simply a question of geography; in the eighties, he’d turned Atlantic around through label acquisitions and all that “economies of scale” stuff that consisted of making juicier profits by getting one office to handle several catalogs.

  He had a close relationship with one of his protégées, Sylvia Rhone, an attractive black lady originally from Harlem, who had been working at Atlantic. To everyone’s astonishment, Doug gave Sylvia the CEO position at Elektra, and I was offered the dubious honor of being its president, which in reality meant I was just a nominal number two and Sire would cease to exist as a stand-alone label. Like the East West and Nonesuch imprints, Sire was to be rolled into Elektra.

  When this absolute shock of a plan was unveiled to me, the first person I called was Alle
n Grubman, which tells you how I felt. Grubman advised me to shut up, grit my teeth, and bear it. He did his own checking as I did mine, and we both came to the bleak conclusion that I had no viable move; it was wind up on the scrap heap or just roll with Doug Morris, who was clearly on a path of conquest. Once we moved our attentions to the nitty-gritty, there were all kinds of legalistic pitfalls to the plan. For starters, Madonna would never move to Elektra. I’d been slowly losing her anyway, but now it was definitive.

  In 1992, I’d helped Madonna and her manager, Freddy DeMann, set up their own Warner sub-label, Maverick Records, 50 percent of which was still owned by Sire. Mo was dead against it, but I supported Madonna and made sure she got her way. It pains me to admit that Mo’s fears about Maverick, at least at the beginning, were largely founded. This was all well before the signing of Alanis Morissette and others. Apart from Madonna’s own Erotica album, which was a huge hit, her label had signed artists who’d achieved moderate, or slightly better than moderate, success. So, with all the changes happening, I’d basically have to kiss goodbye to that investment as well as Madonna herself. I understood she didn’t need me anymore and would just stay where she was, working through her LA label straight into WBR’s promotional machinery, where she was still their main act, bigger even than Prince.

  I’d also lose Depeche Mode, who, for the same general reasons, wanted to remain plugged straight into WBR. To make things even messier, Sire’s main manager, Howie Klein, was offered a golden opportunity by Danny Goldberg to run Mo’s old Reprise sub-label. Although Howie was a great talent in other ways, I felt he didn’t have the ears to run a label, but I couldn’t get in the way of his big break without looking like an evil prick. His departure spelled double trouble for the carcass that Sire was fast becoming, because Howie was a popular character who’d worked closely with most of Sire’s artists. I knew that some might want to follow him to Reprise, which of course would be a way of staying part of the Burbank network that my artists had previously been going through for promotion and marketing. So, while I was supposed to be schmoozing my remaining artists into this visibly smaller Elektra offshoot, it was like a flashing exit was knocked through the back wall behind me.