The impending publication of my new book "Bumping Into Geniuses" made me reactivate this site. It is a memoir about the rock and roll business starting with the Woodstock Festival which I reviewed for Billboard when I was nineteen and ending with the death of Warren Zevon in 2004. It's my love letter to rock and roll and the rock and roll business which has sustained me all these years. The title comes from a story about Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun that David Geffen told after Ahmet died.
As a young man, Geffen had asked Ahmet how to get rich in the music business and was told "Keep walking around until you bump into a genius and when you do, hold on and don't let go." Among those I bumped into and was lucky enough to work with were Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Nirvana, Hole, Stevie Nicks, Bonnie Raitt, Steve Earle and Zevon.
After having taken a year off from the music business to be CEO of Air America Radio , I returned to artist management in 2006. My company Gold Village Entertainment represents Steve Earle, The Hives, Allison Moorer, The Old 97s, Rhett Miller, Tom Morello, Ben Lee and Care Bears on Fire among others. For more information on Gold Village go to
http://www.goldve.com.
My previous writing has mostly been about politics so I feel I should say: Plese support your local Democratic candidate unless they are a "blue dog" who votes like a Republican. Please vote for and contribute to you can to the Barack Obama for President campaign.
http://www.barackobama.comNo matter what happens in the election it is important to protect our civil liberties so please support the American Civil Liberties Union.
http://www.aclu.org.
EXCERPT FROM INTRODUCTION to "Bumping Into Geniuses"
"There aren't any secrets," Atlantic Records President Jerry Wexler growled at me, as if I were the dumbest person he had ever met. I was nineteen and it was the winter of 1969, more than thirty-five years before Wexler would be immortalized by Richard Schiff's portrayal of him in the movie Ray. I was writing a column for the weekly trade magazine Record World when Wexler had asked one of his executives to gather a group of young journalists who wrote about rock and roll. The real Wexler was far more imposing than the cinematic version. He was broad shouldered, with a salt and pepper beard and sunken eyes that gave him the look of an Old Testament prophet. He had a defiantly thick Bronx accent, an intimidating intellect, and the ultimate rock and roll and R&B pedigrees.
Some months earlier, at the storied Greenwich Village nightclub The Village Gate, I had seen a talented R&B singer named Judy Clay dedicate her hit, "Storybook Children," to Wexler who stood up and waved with an understated noblesse oblige.
I had no idea what a record company President did but I was stunned that such a soulful singer would publicly acknowledge a mere businessman. But I soon discovered that Wexler had also worked with Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, and Sam and Dave, and had been the person at Atlantic who actually signed Led Zeppelin.
My awe at Wexler's résumé was reinforced by seeing his house in Great Neck, Long Island, which had an entire room filled with gold records and a living room with original Legers. Amidst thick marijuana smoke, Wexler played records on his state of the art stereo, alternating an acetate of a forthcoming Delaney and Bonnie album with the Beatles Abbey Road. It was a relief to know that even an insider like Wexler was a Beatles fan. " Those guys sure know what they're doing," he sighed listening to the end of "Carry That Weight." During a moment between songs, in a lame attempt to enter the conversation, I asked Wexler if he was going to an upcoming conference on the music business. "I never go to those things," he snarled, "The premise is that you can go there and learn secrets. First of all there aren't any secrets." He paused dramatically and then with a wolfish grin concluded, "and second of all, if there were any secrets, we wouldn't tell them."
Over the next several decades I would come to understand what he meant. Although I never came close to equaling Wexler's historical contribution to the music business, I was lucky enough to find myself in many situations that would make rock history. I had a press pass to the Woodstock Frstival. I worked for Led Zeppelin from 1973 to 1976. I managed Nirvana when Nevermind came out and Bonnie Raitt when she won four Grammys. I did PR for Kiss and Electric Light Orchestra. At the peak of Fleetwood Mac's popularity I helped launch Stevie Nicks' solo career. And twenty-four years after meeting Wexler I was given his old job as President of Atlantic Records.
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I can't be objective about the music business. I know it hurt a lot of people; artists were often lied to, royalties weren't always paid, bad people sometimes got promoted while good ones were fired. Drugs, misogyny, and death stalked rock and roll. A lot of shlock was produced. A lot of pretense masked shallow, materialistic quests for fame and money. It's not like I don't know these things and it's not that I mind writing about them. It's just that the part of the music business I know best, the rock and roll business, also produced and popularized a lot of music that I love. And it gave me and a lot of my friends a place in the world.
One nonsecret of the rock and roll business was that no one became a rock star by accident or against their will. Bob Dylan's memoir, Chronicles, begins not with a reference to Woody Guthrie or Allen Ginsberg, but with a meeting Dylan had as a young man with music publisher Lou Levy. Levy showed him the studio on the west side of Manhattan where Bill Haley and the Comets had recorded "Rock Around the Clock," which is widely considered the song that made rock and roll music a part of mainstream American culture.
Folk music did have an aesthetic that existed separate and apart from commerciality. But the very point of Dylan "going electric" was not merely that he was adapting a more complex musical backdrop for his songs but that he was consciously entering a world and a business defined, at the time, by the Beatles. One of the salient points about Dylan's rock single "Like A Rolling Stone" was that it went to number one on the pop charts. If it hadn't been a hit, it wouldn't have mattered anywhere as much. Members of the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, The Lovin Spoonful, and The Byrds all started as folkies. Far from selling out, they were buying into a rock and roll culture and business that from the very beginning had been as much or more about money and success than about the nuances of the art. The tradeoff was that rock and roll was a vehicle that could impact millions of more people and yes, make artists lots of money The contradictions between art and commerce were not something that took folk artists by surprise, but was in implicit in their decision to enter the world of rock and roll in the first place.
I was one of millions of rock fans who went to High School in the nineteen sixties and one of a thousand or so who figured out a way into the business of rock and roll in the years that followed. I had all of the contradictions of rock and roll. Like most of my colleagues, I soon got caught up in the sometimes grim reality of what did and what did not make money. And like most of them I never stopped being a fan.
At a memorial service for Ahmet Ertegun the founder of Atlantic Records and Wexler's partner and boss, David Geffen repeated one of Ahmet's aphorisms about the rock business. The way to get rich was to keep walking around until you bumped into a genius and when you did --hold on and don't let go. Of course no genius was likely to let you hold on very long if you didn't have anything to offer them. One had to know something valuable about aspects of the way the business worked. Some successful rock businessmen started as record producers. Some began as tour managers or concert promoters .Many offered financial expertise. I began in the subculture of rock criticism and publicity but, over the years, developed a reasonable number of clues about radio promotion, the workings of record companies and the dynamics of touring as well.
I was in tenth and eleventh grade in 1965 when the rock and roll business was in the middle of a dramatic expansion and reinvention that began with the launch of The Beatles the year before. Although The Beatles had initially come across like a turbo-charged version of the pop pin-up idols that had preceded them, they soon spawned an intensification of focus on rock and roll by both artists and fans. In March, 1965, Dylan released his first "electric" album, Bringing It All Back Home, a coherent and brilliant body of original material such as "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Gates of Eden" which was a dramatic contrast to disposable pop/rock albums that had one or two hits and lots of filler. (Even The Beatles' early albums had contained a number of "cover" versions of old songs to pad out the band's original material.) In July 1965, the Rolling Stones released Out Of Our Heads, much of it edgy and rebellious for the time (this was the album that had "Satisfaction," and the first ironic commentary on the record business itself "Under Assistant West Coast Promo Man"). Responding to the challenge in December 1965, The Beatles released Rubber Soul, which was widely considered their first "serious" album. These albums and others created and defined a new business. Previously, the primary rock and roll product was the "single," which sold for around a dollar. After 1965, the dominant creative and business product of rock and roll was the album, which sold for five to ten times as much.
To the new generation of rock fans like me, these albums were worth every penny. Every photo, every word of the liner notes, and every single song was another window into the minds of artists who were perceived by their fans as the coolest and most interesting people in the world.
Among the biggest and most talented rock stars I would meet when I got into the business, even those with the fiercest sense of integrity balanced their artistry with streaks of pragmatism.
In 1980, I worked with Bruce Springsteen in the context of making No Nukes, a political concert documentary that featured several live Springsteen performances. While waiting for the editors to cue up an edit one night, Bruce mused about how elusive a Top 40 hit single had been for him. (Born to Run was a press phenomenon, and the title song had been a huge album cut on rock radio stations, but Top 40 barely touched it.) I was amazed to hear that Bruce had recently met with Kal Rudman who ran a radio tip sheet called the Friday Morning Quarterback, filled with radio and promo hype. Rudman talked fast with glib high-pressure shtick. Although, like Springsteen, Rudman was based in New Jersey, he was the personification of the old school pop business hype that was the ultimate contrast to Springsteen's intense, poetic, unpretentious rock and roll persona. (In Rudman's tip sheet, a hit song was called a GO-rilla.) "Kal explained to me," said Springsteen in his urgent, hoarse drawl," that Top 40 radio is mainly listened to by girls and that my female demographic was low. And I thought about the songs on Darkness and I realized that the lyrics really were mostly for and about guys," he concluded, shaking his head ruefully. "So on this new album I'm working on-there are some songs for girls."
Just to hear the Boss utter the word "demographic" was a shock to my system, but then again why wouldn't he want to appeal to as many people as possible? Indeed, The River album was released several months later, and, in addition to its many poetic gems and macho celebrations that protected Springsteen's identity, the album included the first single "Hungry Heart," which featured a sped up vocal, a romantic lyric, and retro harmonies by the sixties pop duo, the Turtles, with the result that Springsteen did, as planned, finally have his first Top 40 hit.
Of course, the fantasy of rock and roll liberation was often dashed by the reality of the business. Drug and alcohol abuse were far too common. The tragic arc of Elvis Presley's career was a metaphor for the dark side of rock and roll: materialistic, druggy, and predictable. Kurt Cobain, the greatest rock artist I would ever work with, shot himself to death. He was only one of dozens of brilliant rockers who died decades before their time.
No one artist or group of artists can contain the sprawling and complex totality of rock and roll but I believe that between them the artists I write about here, Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Stevie Nicks, Bonnie Raitt, Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Hole, Warren Zevon and Steve Earle among others represent a broad and powerful portion of the psychic real estate of the rock and roll kingdom. I am not objective about any of them. I love them all.
