And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records (33 page)

Several weeks later, Neil told me that he was going into the studio with Robin to edit the live performance for the album. He emphasized that he did not want to be disturbed, which meant that I would be temporarily presiding over everything, including stuff he’d probably forgotten to tell me about. After a week of neither seeing Neil nor hearing from him, I began to wonder how a live comedy album could take so long to edit. I stopped by the studio to check on their progress, only to find them in the middle of a weeklong cocaine bender. This, naturally, was making the editing task a lot more difficult than it needed to be. Eventually, they muddled their way through the process, and the album was released, quickly earning Gold status.

Robin was hardly the only comedian with a drug habit—the lifestyle of a stand-up comic is as brutal as that of a rock star. As vice president of artist development, Don Wasley would spend a lot of time on the road with our artists, and he told me that the wildest guy he ever traveled with wasn’t a rock star at all: it was Rodney Dangerfield. Rodney always kept a Noxema jar filled with cocaine in a pocket of his leisure suit. One day, they were both at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport waiting for their bags when Don noticed Rodney partaking. Don said, “Rodney, you can’t do that here.” Rodney just replied, “What are they going to do, arrest me? I’m Rodney Dangerfield!”

After that successful incursion into TV, Neil thought it would be a good idea to sign the Lenny and Squiggy characters from ABC’s
Laverne & Shirley
(both
Laverne & Shirley
and
Mork & Mindy
were spinoffs of
Happy Days
).
Laverne & Shirley
was one of the most popular programs on TV, and Lenny and Squiggy were a major part of it. I loved the characters, so I was all for signing them, and we did. I never became close to Michael McKean (who portrayed Lenny), and, as far I know, he never did drugs; however, David Lander (Squiggy) was always happy to indulge with me.

We planned a show at the Roxy featuring the duo performing as Lenny and The Squigtones and arranged to tape it for a live comedy album. We loaded the Roxy with TV insiders and Hollywood people for the taping. The place was so crowded that it was hard for the band to get to the stage. Finally, when Lenny and The Squigtones began to play, we experienced a big letdown. The music was terrible. It was meant to be funny, but it was just bad. I left way before the show was over. The next day at the office, I found out that everyone had had the same reaction: this was a bad idea, and we should stop pursuing TV acts. We did issue the record, but we didn’t put much effort into marketing or promoting it.

Lewis Merenstein, a producer who had worked with Van Morrison, was a good friend of Neil’s, and he’d worked with us at Buddah for a time. He knew some McDonald’s Corporation executives, and he brought Neil an idea for a project involving the restaurant chain. They would produce kid-oriented record albums that would be marketed by McDonald’s and sold in their restaurants. The guy who had coined the term “bubblegum” was again thinking about the younger audience. These albums would be both entertaining and educational. The market was there, too: kid’s music was a growing niche; a recent
Sesame Street
album had even hit Gold status. It was an idea that would have given Casablanca the financial success it so desperately needed. If it had worked, it would have catapulted us into the stratosphere.

Once the idea was hatched, Neil had to come up with the actual product before McDonald’s would even consider becoming involved with us. The corporation was famous for testing new ideas; they tested their television commercials for months before running them. This was a very conservative outfit, and they would take no chances when it came to their brand. Who could blame them?

As he’d done with
Thank God It’s Friday,
Neil brought in Ellen Wolf and Walter Wanger from our creative services division and put them to work. We conjured up a division name for the product, to boot: Casablanca KidWorks. No one at PolyGram knew what we were doing, and we kept it that way on purpose. In fact, most of the people in the company had no idea what was happening; news was communicated on a need-to-know basis only. We knew that PolyGram would not have wanted us to make the expenditures necessary to realize the project.

The project began slowly. Ellen and Walter consulted some well-known child psychologists and researched what would work for children, as well as for McDonald’s. They hired songwriters known for their understanding of children’s music. They met with Neil often to report on their progress and to get his input. I saw and heard their reports after the fact, and I was very impressed with the quality of their work. I liked that the concept behind the project was uplifting at a time when what was happening in the world seemed so dire. Ellen and Walter did a magnificent job creating the albums, which were titled
Rainy Day Fun Starring Ronald McDonald, Ronald McDonald Visits America,
and
Birthday Party Starring Ronald McDonald Dee-Jay.
They all had interactive (long before the term started to be applied to everything) elements—puzzles, books, or maps that kids could work with and learn from. The songs were geared to the appropriate age group, and they had a seal of approval from every child educator we spoke with. We tried them out on our own kids and our friend’s kids, and they worked. The artwork was also first class, as we had spared no expense in developing it.

The biggest hurdle was McDonald’s. Walter, Ellen, and Lewis went to Chicago and presented the project to McDonald’s numerous times, and finally McDonald’s came to LA to view the commercials, which had been created in the McDonald’s mold. After listening to our masterful sales pitch, McDonald’s agreed to all of it, including the marketing plan that Neil had presented.

Having McDonald’s, with their impressive advertising capability and massive customer base, market the albums in their restaurants would have ensured their success. But, like many huge corporations, McDonald’s did everything very slowly and very cautiously. The three albums were manufactured in very, very small quantities just to test the project, and they were eventually released to some critical acclaim. However, coordinating in-store sales in McDonald’s restaurants would prove to be a lengthy endeavor, and we were already on borrowed time.

 

 

In the middle of 1978, about nine months after PolyGram had acquired a majority stake in Casablanca, I drafted the quarterly sales forecast. I was responsible for generating Casablanca’s sales projections, and although much of it was guesswork, I based the projections on the previous period’s sales and the level of commitment we were planning to give our projects. I ran the numbers and showed them to Neil. He told me that we had to show PolyGram a rosier picture and I should add millions of records to the sales column. I did as I was told and added enough sales to the projections to make PolyGram comfortable, even though I knew we would never hit such lofty heights.

PolyGram never questioned the figures. Whether they weren’t familiar enough with Casablanca to be suspicious or simply weren’t paying close enough attention, I cannot say. In retrospect, the fact that they had no clue that we were unprofitable speaks volumes about their lack of due diligence prior to the buyout and/or our ability to shape reality out of thin air and good PR. I think PolyGram’s ignorance stemmed from the fact that we had painted the building so well they never realized that they’d bought twelve coats of paint without a building underneath. It was just a question of when they would finally poke a finger through the layers and figure out it was an empty shell.

After the four KISS solo albums had emphatically bombed, we knew that PolyGram would at last realize that we were losing a fortune. They were handling all distribution for us, and it was impossible that they would fail to notice two million returns. No amount of cooking the books was going to hide truckloads of unwanted records, especially since those trucks were backing up to their doorstep, not ours. When at last the ruse was up, PolyGram insisted on dramatic changes. Our marketing and advertising budgets were slashed and then watched closely with very wary eyes. Loss of freedom was the trade-off for big-bother corporate protection. By June 1979, PolyGram wanted more, and they demanded that we start cutting staff. Our employee roster was in excess of 175, and PolyGram expected us to cut big. Neil called Bruce and me into his office and informed us that he needed a list of expendable people. Bruce and I both knew that this had been coming, but that made the task no easier. Even though the company had long since grown so large that I couldn’t know everyone intimately, axing over a third of our workforce felt like sawing off my left leg.

So we sat down to create a death row roster. One person Bruce and I agreed should be let go was Irv Biegel, the former cohead of Millennium, who had been running our New York office for some time. I’d had little interaction with Irv, as I rarely visited New York, and, frankly, I hadn’t trusted the man from the moment I met him. At our first meeting he’d made grand claims like, “Larry, I’m just here to look out for your welfare.” After knowing me for five minutes,
that
was his primary motivation? No way. He registered high on my bullshit meter. Irv was near the top of the Casablanca pay scale, too, and he did nothing that we felt had produced results, so his name went to the head of the list.

We tried to be as fair as we could, consulting with all the department heads and asking them who should be kept on. This was hard on them, of course, as they were friends with many of the people they would have to fire. When the list was finished, it contained the names of dozens and dozens of people. Bruce and I brought it to Neil. He crossed off Irv’s name: we were not allowed to fire Irv. This stunned me. Neil hadn’t even asked us why Irv was on the list—he’d just vetoed the cut immediately. Bruce recovered quickly and asked why Irv was protected, since he was clearly overpaid and did nothing to generate dollars. Neil claimed that Irv had a contract. I was completely astounded by this response. Of all the reasons Neil could have offered, it was the last I would ever have expected to hear. In fact, it was an out-and-out lie. I felt insulted and incredibly pissed off. I knew that Irv didn’t have a contract. The only people with contracts were those who owned company stock: Neil, Peter, Cecil, and me. Even Bruce did not have a contract.

What was worse was that Neil knew that I knew, but he still lied. Bruce and I strongly suspected that Neil was sheltering Irv because Irv had close ties to Jeff Franklin, and Neil was afraid of upsetting Franklin. Neil read through the rest of the list and approved it, looking like he wanted to crawl under his desk and hide. Bruce and I met again with the department heads and gave them their final cut lists. They handled the firings themselves. The bloodletting took place on June 29, 1979.

To make this ugly situation worse, when a few of the people who had been fired went to say goodbye to Neil, he feigned ignorance. “What? You were fired? I had no idea!” He had the damned list on his desk and he’d had no qualms about cutting anyone loose—except Irv, of course. He was making Bruce and me out to be the bad guys, and probably me most of all. I would ultimately be perceived as the executioner. People lose their jobs every day, and when Neil had told us that PolyGram was demanding the cuts and then asked us to get it done, I wasn’t angry. It’s never a fun scenario, but it’s part of doing business, and I accepted it. But his acting surprised at the firings when he had approved them himself was to me a betrayal.

To add to the turmoil, Bruce Bird came in one day with some shocking news. He and Nancy had had dinner with Donna Summer’s lawyer and his wife the night before, and the lawyer had told them that Donna was going to hire the famed and feared music attorney Abe Somers to represent her in her bid to break her contract with Joyce and Casablanca. Neil might have been skittish about pissing off Jeff Franklin, but at the mention of Abe Somers’s name, he cowered under the table. He called Joyce right away and told her to retain Abe before Donna could, which would force Donna to find another attorney. We’d actually been expecting Donna to try to get out of her contract for months, but Neil never expected that we’d be going up against Abe Somers. Back in the Sherbourne days, someone represented by Somers had threatened to sue Neil. Neil had agreed to an immediate settlement. So, either Abe was an incredible attorney or he had done something in the past that had made Neil extremely wary of him—I was never certain which.

One of the legal arguments that Donna’s lawyer would make was that Joyce was in conflict of interest, since she was both Donna’s manager and the wife of the president of Donna’s record company, and this was detrimental to Donna’s career. I believe that Joyce was also making as much as 25 percent of Donna’s adjusted revenue stream—a very sizable take for a manager. Another point was that Joyce sometimes placed Casablanca’s interests above Donna’s interests. It was a legitimate argument. From my perspective, Neil and Joyce were perfect for one another. He used her as a sounding board for every business idea that came into his head. Joyce had a keen sense of business herself, but she was loyal to Neil to a fault, and she almost always agreed with him, at least publicly; whether she could privately sway him to her way of thinking, I’m not sure.

Neil believed that with Joyce as Donna’s manager, he could control Donna’s career much more effectively, but he also thought that in helping the company in that way he would benefit Donna herself. He was probably right. Through Joyce, he heard all about Donna, and based on what he learned, he came up with some great marketing and sales schemes for her. He always had Donna on his mind. Joyce’s relationship with Neil also helped loosen the company’s purse strings when it came to her client. This situation is not quite parallel, but it’s instructive: when Mariah Carey and Sony head Tommy Mottola became an item, there was no way a record of Mariah’s was not going to become a hit, no matter what it cost or what Sony employees had to do to make it happen; but the first record Carey released after divorcing Mottola sank like a rock in quicksand. The pressure that comes with this kind of relationship is enormous. Are you going to let your wife, girlfriend, or sister fail? No. Not if you have the power to prevent it.

I was now in a quandary. I liked Donna and her comanager Susan Munao, and I thought that they were being screwed by their lawyer and by Neil. The lawyer, who also represented Casablanca in numerous deals, had a definite conflict of interest. After much soul-searching, I decided that the only honest thing for me to do was to betray Neil and tell Susan that Joyce was planning to hire Abe Somers. This was a hard decision to make, especially because I knew that Donna would go to Geffen Records if she got out of her contract with us, and this would really irk me, as I didn’t like the company president, Eddie Rosenblatt. I didn’t know David Geffen, but I knew that there was no love lost between him and Neil. I still loved Neil and respected what we’d tried to build together, but our relationship and everything around it had changed. I had begun to dread going into the office.

My outlook was dimmed even further by what I saw happening around us in the industry: disco was about to crash. All the telltale signs were there—the too-rapid expansion, the market saturation, the growing contempt among the music-buying public. Despite our penetration of various areas of the entertainment industry (much of it via cheap signings that held little hope of long-term profit), the Casablanca ship was afloat on disco waters, and disco waters alone. Without disco, we had almost nothing to sustain us. Remember that even our lone rock act of any value, KISS, had edged into disco territory. Our fortunes were pinned to disco, and no amount of spin doctoring was going to change that.

The crash came on July 12, 1979. A popular Chicago DJ named Steve Dahl had lost his job when his station changed its format to disco. When he landed at another local station, he wasn’t shy about publicly sharing his white-hot hatred of the music. To vent his feelings, Dahl staged an event he dubbed the Disco Demolition between games of a doubleheader with the Chicago White Sox and the Cleveland Indians. He invited anyone wishing to destroy their disco albums to bring them to Comiskey Park on Chicago’s south side. He would stack the albums in the outfield and blow them to smithereens with a stick of dynamite, or some such explosive. The White Sox helped out by announcing that anyone with a disco album could gain admission to the park for only ninety-eight cents (Dahl’s station was at 97.9 on the FM dial). This drew a beyond-capacity crowd of over fifty thousand. The demographic was atypical—read: pot-smoking rock music lovers—and the crowd had no sense of baseball etiquette. Dahl gathered a huge pile of disco albums and, as promised, blew them sky-high. A small-scale riot ensued. Thousand of spectators rushed onto the field and refused to leave, wandering around in a pot-induced daze. Due to this, the White Sox had to forfeit the second game.

In a moment of great irony, that very night I was in New York for yet another of Bill Wardlow’s Disco Forums. It hadn’t even been five months since his previous soiree. These gatherings had been a cash cow for Wardlow, and he thought that disco was still popular enough for him to now hold two forums a year. These events were normally a pleasure to attend; we won awards by the truckload and were always the belle of the ball. Who wouldn’t enjoy all that glad-handing? None of the other Casablanca execs attended this forum. It was just me, Christy Hill (Candy’s sister, who was still working publicity for us), and three or four of the disco department people; I felt lonely and not at all in my element.

The forum was decidedly humdrum, and the fact that I remember so little of it shows how disengaged I was. The most noteworthy moment occurred before the event even got underway. We had arranged with Studio 54’s Steve Rubell to hold a forum-opening promotion party at the club on July 12. In each forum attendee’s welcome package we included special passes for the event, which was to begin at midnight. Once the forum’s opening night concerts at Roseland had concluded, pass holders walked the two blocks to Studio 54 to continue partying. But they were stopped at the door by Rubell, who refused to honor their passes to our party. This was a real slap in the face, particularly since just two weeks earlier we had released a special two-disc album for the club called
A Night at Studio 54.
Bill Wardlow was furious with Rubell, and there was a loud confrontation. Wardlow was so enraged that he vowed (quite publicly, too; it was in the newspaper the next day) to do everything in his power to cripple Rubell’s operation, including his plans to roll out Studio 54 locations in London and Tokyo. I doubt Studio 54 suffered much because of Wardlow, but he was not someone you wanted as an enemy.

I had missed the entire dustup, but it was the talk of the forum the next morning, and I was not looking forward to mediating between Wardlow and Rubell in the days to come. On the evening of July 15, after the convention-closing awards banquet, I went back to my hotel room with an armful of trophies and laid them out on the bed. From a certain perspective, it was amazing to see them all spread out like that, but still I knew that they were arbitrary awards bestowed upon the products of a quickly fading genre—one that we had leveraged to the hilt for years. I sat there looking at them, gleaming and boastful. We’d had so many successes, we’d won more awards than I could possibly recall, we’d expanded more rapidly and with greater fanfare than any record company in history, and we’d been granted more opportunities than I could catalog. Gold, Platinum, Grammys, People’s Choices, Oscars, one hundred artists, and one hundred million fucking dollars—it all raced through my mind, and all I felt was a crushing emptiness.