Siren Song_My Life in Music

by Gareth Murphy

  I don’t think there was any conspiracy to fuck me from all sides, even though that’s what effectively happened. The whole Warner Music group was in the grips of major turmoil, and Sire, being a lot smaller than WBR, Atlantic, or Elektra, was understandably not a priority. The chaos was more a case of every man for himself, rather like a game of musical chairs, except with fifty-year-old men trampling in all directions around a boardroom table as Doug Morris and Bob Morgado fought over who got to press the buttons. Maybe because I was an outcast who hadn’t really grown up into the kind of suit-wearing corporate executive that Doug Morris had become, I was one of the schmucks left standing with his dick in his hand.

  On the corporate chessboard, Sire was basically sacrificed, with all its artists going to WBR. I’m sure my critics will say that by then I was losing my edge as a talent spotter, but I don’t agree. You never lose your ears; what you do lose is your winning streak, your aura, or in my case, my biggest artists, including Madonna, and most of my staff.

  Fortunately, God, in his infinite wisdom, gave us the Jewish lawyer. Allen Grubman engaged with Doug Morris on my behalf and negotiated me a huge advance, which, I have to say, definitely softened the pain. Apart from the money, everything else about the deal stank, but it was a simple choice of stick with Sire or find a job elsewhere. I tightened my gut and moved into the office next to Sylvia Rhone, and to be fair, things were okay in the beginning. I fought off competition from Sony to sign a very successful band called Spacehog, which raised everyone’s spirits.

  Spacehog were a gang of Leeds boys who’d relocated to New York and proved to be very much a cool item in that midnineties Brit-pop period. They were fronted by two handsome brothers, Royston and Antony Langdon, who were so popular with the ladies, they managed to date Liv Tyler and Kate Moss, respectively. Their debut album, Resident Alien, sold over a million copies and provided a Top 40 hit single “In the Meantime,” just as groups like Placebo, the Dandy Warhols, Suede, Supergrass, and Pulp started blowing up around the world. We’d caught the wave just at the right time.

  I definitely tried to make something of the Elektra-Sire double bill. I soon discovered, however, that although Sylvia Rhone had definite talents and a certain charm, she had whirlwind traits that in the long run made her difficult to work with. She was always glamorous in designer outfits, and often accompanied by one or two assistants and a driver. Underneath all that glamour, she was one tough executive who had her own agenda. It quickly became obvious to me that my appointment was totally Doug Morris’s idea and not necessarily Sylvia’s.

  Not surprisingly, across the whole Warner Music group, Doug filled all the key positions with former colleagues who worked under him at Atlantic, all of whom he had been grooming for executive positions for years. Apart from Sylvia, another of his protégés was Val Azzoli, who’d been appointed as Doug’s successor at Atlantic. With his curly hair and big, affable face, staffers used to joke that Azzoli was straight out of a pizza place. Then, of course, there was Danny Goldberg, for the most part running WBR out of Atlantic’s office in New York, which was a big change for its Burbank roots.

  As the weeks turned into months, one plausible theory was that Doug Morris put me underneath Sylvia Rhone as a type of safety net. Sylvia did have ears, she knew how to work hard, and she’d handled hot product before. The problem for me was that she’d come up through Atlantic, where she’d worked with acts like En Vogue. Her natural habitat was black pop, as proven by the acts she had future successes with, like Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Busta Rhymes, and Missy Elliott. So Doug must have thought I could help Sylvia with her inherited roster of indie acts (many of which had been brought in during the Krasnow years) such as Björk, Moby, the Cure, Inspiral Carpets, the Prodigy, and Nick Cave, as well as metal heavyweights like Metallica, Mötley Crüe, and Anthrax. Plus, of course, Elektra’s back catalog carried all the original founder’s folk and psychedelic acts. The great Jac Holzman, who started Elektra in the fifties, had signed the Doors, Love, Tim Buckley, the Stooges, and MC5, thanks to Danny Fields and many others.

  None of it made sense considering the stakes were so high. Warner Music was the biggest record group in the United States, controlling 22 percent of the market. It was also Time Warner’s most profitable division, earning $900 million annually on $4 billion turnover. So, it’s not like our civil war didn’t have consequences on hundreds of bands and, arguably, the health of the whole music industry. There’s nothing journalists and readers love more than a boardroom massacre, and because we were the biggest gang on the block, every national newspaper was reporting the latest whacking in the turf war. As well as office gossip at every water cooler and worried managers calling up nonstop, we had journalists crawling through every keyhole. Bob Morgado and Doug Morris were barely on speaking terms, and everyone knew the next big casualty was only a matter of time.

  With all the bad press affecting Time Warner’s share prices, our corporate guardians couldn’t sit on their hands any longer. Investors wanted a head on a stake, and at that point, Bob Morgado seemed to be the common denominator in all these feuds. Bob Morgado should’ve backed off and given Doug Morris free rein. Instead, Morgado had fallen out with every last label chief, which didn’t make him look good in the eyes of the corporates. Outsiders, however, didn’t understand the personalities he was dealing with. As I kept trying to remind everyone who bothered to listen to me, all this power lust had been fomenting for years.

  I’ll never forget the scene on May 2, 1995, when my office door swung open and a pizza deliverer appeared carrying three boxes. “I didn’t order these,” I told the kid, who stared back at me, clueless. It was then that I was overwhelmed by giant stench of cheap industrial cheese wafting through the door behind him. I walked into the main office and almost vomited. Pizza boys were crawling around like ants handing out boxes to every desk. “What’s going on?” I asked. And that’s how I learned that Bob Morgado had just been fired. Sylvia Rhone was so over the moon about Doug winning the war, she ordered in pizza for every one of the hundred-plus staffers.

  God, I hated that office and everything we did in those lost years. A while later, Sylvia celebrated O. J. Simpson’s acquittal with another office load of stinking pizza, which struck me as even weirder. Hadn’t a woman and her lover been murdered? But these, dear reader, were the naughty nineties in all their tacky splendor. Hubris had taken over. There was too much easy money, too much cocaine, and no way of feeding all these hungry egos who I’m sure look back today and cringe at their own appetite for power and excess.

  Warner Music was officially a madhouse, and crazy as it sounds, for the first time in many years, I suddenly felt a lot saner than everyone around me. The midnineties were when I stopped taking cocaine, and apart from a wobble here and there, I had mostly emerged from my wild years. Seemingly, I wasn’t the only bemused witness of this corporate tragedy. The boss of HBO, which was then part of the Time Warner group, was handed Morgado’s responsibilities and took a long, hard look at some of the people around me. His unlikely name was Michael Fuchs, and because he had his own TV empire to command and kept working out of his regular HBO office, everyone in the Warner labels wrongly presumed he was just an interim caretaker, pending Doug’s total ascension.

  Just weeks after Fuchs was nominated, Doug Morris strolled into a meeting at HBO on a hot June morning expecting his Warner Music U.S. chairmanship to be expanded to the entire world. Fuchs instead presented a draft press release announcing that Doug Morris was fired. After what I can only presume was total shock followed by screaming, Doug was escorted by security guards back to Rockefeller Plaza to clear out his desk.

  I was in a Hall of Fame meeting, where I received a call from Sylvia Rhone wailing down the phone, “Doug’s just been fired!” She kept calling back, borderline hysterical, like it was the end of all our lives. She had a hotline into Doug’s mind and probably knew all the details of whatever motivated Fuchs to pull the trigger. Sylvia knew I was with Ahmet Erteg
un and begged me to interrogate him. “Do you think Ahmet had something to do with this?” she seethed. I don’t believe she meant it. She was frantic and upset.

  “Of course not,” I said. “Doug’s always been respectful of Ahmet. I can assure you. He’s told me that himself.”

  I pulled Ahmet out of the meeting and told him what was going on across town. He shrugged with one of his Turkish smirks that could have meant anything. Doug Morris had been Ahmet’s protégé, who’d done a solid job throughout the eighties of making Atlantic hot again, which in turn had enabled Ahmet to enjoy a long and happy period as the elder statesman of a freshly restored superpower. I was certain by the expression on his face that Ahmet had not played any part in this coup or even knew about it.

  Sylvia Rhone was never the same after that day. It was obvious she depended on Doug. Doug was her mentor, and what of it? He was a damn good one. Who am I to talk? Where would I be without all the mentoring I received from Syd Nathan, Jerry Wexler, Ahmet, and the others? Full-blown paranoia followed her every move. She began imagining that rivals were out to get her, which I can promise wasn’t the case. Not only did Elektra’s biggest acts prefer her to Krasnow, there’d been too much bad press for her to be added to the list of casualties. She held on for another few years, but the fall of Doug Morris was instant curtains for Danny Goldberg, who lasted only nine months as WBR boss. I must admit, I really enjoyed those last few months working with Doug. He was totally hands-on. I was well into my fifties and thought I knew everything, but I learned quite a bit from Doug. I was not at all surprised to see him move on to become head of Universal and finally Sony, after a rocky start running his own Rising Tide Records.

  Fuchs needed to stabilize the chaos. His problem was there wasn’t enough talent in the ranks capable of stepping up and making a difference. In another panicked compromise, the keys to the Burbank castle were handed to Russ Thyret, the only old boy left. The bright idea was to get WBR back to something resembling Mo’s old crew, and it’s most definitely true that in his prime, Russ had been a great promotion man, responsible for bringing Prince to WBR. While he was a really great and dedicated music man, it seemed to me that, like many other others, the hard-charging lifestyle of a music executive had taken its toll on him.

  As we’d all eventually learn, the same old story just kept repeating itself. I say this as someone with a certain distance from events. Like all the protagonists, I had an ego and a habit of irresponsible, selfish misbehavior. I was certainly no choirboy and had consumed my share of blow, (which by this time I had all but cut out). The difference was that I didn’t harbor any dark fantasies to take over labels or companies that other people had built. All I’d wanted from life was to keep sailing the good ship Sire into my own personal sunset. But by letting them all do what they were going to do anyway, with or without me, I was one of the very few who survived.

  To stay in the game, I knew I just had to keep signing hot new acts. The problem was I’d lost so much clout, staff, the ability to secure budgets, and, perhaps worst of all, my little halo as Warner’s indie maverick that what used to be so easy had now become much more difficult. You’re only as good as your name, and ours had become toxic. Warner Music Group was in deep trouble. Sadly, Warner was in disarray. I wasn’t there, but Steve Baker and Howie Klein were far from ideal choices to run Warner and Reprise. Klein was not a star at A&R. He had strengths, but that was not one of them. He was good at marketing and promotion. Steve Baker was one of the smartest and best at A&R, and an all-around music man. The problem was, in my opinion, he didn’t want all the responsibilities heaped upon him. I’m not sure, as I was not there at the time. That said, to this day, I would trust his ears more than most.

  For example, people always ask me why the song “Seymour Stein” by an indie band named Belle and Sebastian came out on another label. The truth is, I wanted to sign Belle and Sebastian and chased them all the way to Scotland. I showed up at gigs, charmed them, took them out to dinner, but I felt so bad about the Titanic I’d be luring them onto, I eventually let go when a hot little indie named Matador Records offered them a deal. At the lowest point of my career, I was very honored and still am that any artist would name a song after me. Whenever it comes on, I drift back to that lost period in the mid- to late nineties and can almost smell the pizzas. I love the line “It’s a good day for flying,” because it really was.

  I got so fed up and depressed about everything, I decided to do what to my father would have done. I jumped on a plane full of orthodox Jews to visit the tomb of Rebbe Nachman in the Ukrainian town of Uman. Such a trip had suddenly become possible because, since the old Soviet Union had collapsed, Jewish pilgrimages were no longer illegal. I’d been invited by a holy man, Rabbi Jesse Kramer, who was the son-in-law of my old Talmud Torah teacher, Rabbi Leo Rosenfeld, long since dead. Kramer and his followers from the family synagogue were all dressed in their black suits and hats. I must have looked like an embarrassing schlub tagging along in my T-shirt and sneakers, but they welcomed me into their experience. I needed companionship and some kind of higher fix I wasn’t getting from music. We sang and laughed and prayed ourselves into trances. It wasn’t the tomb itself that did it for me, it was the people and all the happiness stirring around Rabbi Nachman’s legacy.

  I’d been thinking for months about leaving Elektra, which I’d never wanted to be involved with anyway. No matter how nominal my new title was, Elektra to me would always be the baby of its founder, Jac Holzman, a long-retired mensch whom I subsequently lobbied hard to get inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Luckily, there was a reliable old nuts-and-bolts man in Elektra’s engine room who campaigned for my rehabilitation. His name was Aaron Levy, Elektra’s chief operating officer, more of a treasurer and fixer than a record man. I’d first met him in the early seventies when he ran Paramount Records. He was a veteran by the late nineties, nearing retirement, but Aaron was one of the few sane people left, and I’m pretty sure he spoke to the men upstairs about what was really going on in the asylum below.

  Thanks to Aaron’s help, I was eventually thrown a lifesaver by the Time Warner chairman, Jerry Levin, who I got to know better than I’d ever known Steve Ross. Because Levin had risen up through the Time hierarchy, he’d long been regarded suspiciously as a hapless outsider by the Warner Music family. But I understand why Steve Ross made him his successor. Jerry genuinely cared and learned about our business. In our conversations about Warner Music’s problems and in particular our international operations, which he felt I had an eye for, I told him to hire Roger Ames, London’s PolyGram boss. Roger was an old pro and everything we needed: good ears, good manager, business literate, internationally minded. To my surprise, Levin called me up a few weeks later and announced, “I’ve just hired Roger Ames to run international!” To lure him over to New York, Warner had to buy out Roger’s stake in London Records for a juicy $200 million. The price tag was more than a little heavy, but Roger’s arrival marked the long-awaited turning point in Warner’s misfortunes.

  It also provided an urgently needed change for me, because Roger didn’t want London Records rolled into Elektra as Levin had first suggested. He specifically demanded that London be teamed up with Sire. After a bit of haggling, the end result was London-Sire, another label merger. It was smaller than Elektra, and at face value, it was lower than where I’d come from, but I much preferred small and felt more at home in a transatlantic experiment. For a year, we put out interesting British electronica from the likes of Aphex Twin, Paul Oakenfold, Orbital, the Avalanches, and other innovators of that Y2K period.

  Roger Ames shot up the ladder faster than even I imagined. Within months, Levin made him CEO of the entire Warner Music Group. That’s when the right people started being placed into the right slots.

  As for me, London-Sire was an expensive experiment at a time when the industry began tanking and when corporate flab all over the Warner Music Group, which we were still carrying from the bad old days, w
as being trimmed into shape. Following about two years of limited commercial success, Levin called me to his office.

  “Am I going to be fired?” I asked him straight out.

  “No, Seymour,” he replied with a smile. “You’re too emblematic. We want you to sit back for a while and slowly revive Sire as a stand-alone label, except this time, within Atlantic. You’ll have your own label and office attached to Atlantic’s. You can feed into them for promotion and marketing, but you’re basically on your own again.”

  Not only had I been saved by the kindness of Steve Ross’s chosen heir, everyone from the old days was long gone. I was maybe old, washed up, and diminished, but I was the last man standing. And so, like a bearded veteran hobbling back from ten years of civil war, I returned to where I’d started. Well, almost. Sire had been stripped of its entire back catalog in the nineties; I was just a little office with an assistant. Nominally, however, I was good old Mr. Sire again. No double-barrel bullshit—just me and the Sire flag. Call me simple, but all I ever wanted was to keep sailing my own boat into the great unknown. Looking back, I honestly don’t know how I made it through. I guess I didn’t know what else to do. My kids had grown up and were ignoring me, living their lives as twentysomethings were supposed to. All I had was my art collecting and the Hall of Fame.

  What kept me going, I think, was my Brooklyn spirit. Even when things were rock bottom, I always knew it wasn’t the end of the world. I was still in play and doing okay considering. If my ego was as inflated as my worst critics claim, I would have slammed doors and taken a big executive job at another company. I didn’t. Because it wasn’t a career I ever wanted, it was a full and long life. Mine was always about the story, the adventure. I held on to Sire because, folks, this precious life we’re given is about knowing where you belong and surviving as long as you can. The good times are only a bonus. I’d enjoyed more than my fair share. How could I be ungrateful? There’s an old proverb that I’ve whispered to myself through every dark moment: “And this, too, shall pass.”