Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (30 page)

Shortly after the Beatles signed with the burly New Yorker, Mick Jagger ran down the street and burst into Apple. Panting and feigning horror, he told John Lennon, “Don’t sign, man! We’re suing him.” Of course, it was too late. Lennon, Harrison, and Starr had already handed over the chewed-up and rotting Apple Corp to Klein. Complicating matters, Paul McCartney had his own personal manager—Lee Eastman.

Innocence lost—the Adam and Eve of British pop were now speaking to each other through American lawyers as a new generation of bands and record men were happily playing on Chris Blackwell’s paradise island. England’s future was migrating south.

18. TAURUS

On every horizon, it was a familiar pattern. In 1968, Elektra boss Jac Holzman, wrestling with the record man’s equivalent of a midlife crisis, took time out on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Alone on a double bed watching the fan revolve hypnotically, he savored the balmy stillness and, for the first time as an adult, contemplated a life beyond the music business.

Years of workaholism had taken their toll. He’d been feeling his age lately—a corporate president commanding operations deep inside the hippie revolution. His marriage was doomed; drug casualties mounted in the artist roster. Barefoot on the beach, looking out across the glassy azure sea, he promised himself, “In five years, somehow, I’ll be through with this. I’ll move here to Maui and start over.”

Despite all the commercial success, Elektra had seen its fair share of collateral damage over the previous year. The fiery genius of Arthur Lee had consumed Love. The angelic Tim Buckley was drifting down a path of self-indulgence and introversion that eventually led him to heroin. Elektra’s dark star, Jim Morrison, mainly as a result of alcohol abuse, now needed full-time care. “The Morrison storm warnings grew in volume and frequency, including Jim passing out on the studio floor, peeing in his pants,” Holzman remembered. On Paul Rothchild’s recommendation, he hired a suitable babysitter—Bob Neuwirth, Bob Dylan’s former sidekick.

“It became a matter of trying to keep him interested in making a record,” recalled Neuwirth, who found that if he drank at Morrison’s pace, he was able to gain the singer’s trust. “It was a lot of cajoling. I represented the record company. Jim knew that I was there to try to bounce ideas around him, and he didn’t want to be tricked into anything.” Engaged in a dangerous game of self-destructive exhibitionism, “he knew what he was doing,” Neuwirth believed. “He had a method behind all of it, he had great sense of his own image, and played it.”

Beefing up, with bloated jowls, Morrison was losing interest in his own sex appeal, but experience had earned him a subtle command of the fame game. The further he took his daredevil antics, the larger the legend grew. At a concert in New Haven in December 1967, he sassed back to a policeman and was maced. Exercizing his First Amendment rights through the sound system, he was arrested onstage. It was “a defining moment in pop culture,” Holzman believed, and it led to a multipage report in
Life
magazine. “Advance orders for their next album,
Waiting for the Sun,
shot up to three-quarters of a million units.”

Morrison kept up the same routine until, inevitably, he went too far. Performing to 13,000 on a hot March night in 1969, he taunted his Miami audience to strip off their bras and underwear, then allegedly pulled out his cock. He was arrested onstage for indecent exposure and incitement to riot. This time, however, promoters across America canceled dates, airplay dipped, and even the music press turned on him.

In the studio, Paul Rothchild had lost the will to pry vocal performances out of the singer, who for the previous two years had been stumbling into the studio, roaring drunk, with undesirables in his shadow. Following arguments with Jac Holzman over the inappropriately slick production on
The Soft Parade,
Rothchild reverted, somewhat reluctantly, to a raw, bluesy approach on
Morrison Hotel.
He swore to never produce the Doors again.

It was an eerie illustration of how much Jim Morrison’s stage persona had become his last refuge that, despite having plenty of other places to lay his head, he stalked Elektra’s L.A. office, coaxing staff to a bar across the road, and even vandalizing the office after hours. When one morning Morrison was found crashed out in the adjoining bushes, Elektra’s Los Angeles manager, Suzanne Helms, grit her teeth and ordered her staff not to call any ambulances. “Just leave him there,” she hissed. The boss in New York wouldn’t have disapproved, later joking that he’d have put traffic cones around the unconscious star. “Over the years, I purposely held back from getting too intimate with the artists,” explained Holzman. “I am not their best pal or hanger-on; I run their record company. To get too close erodes your objectivity and authority, and there may come a day when you will need both.”

As the American counterculture scene radicalized, Jac Holzman, fast approaching forty, had to recruit clued-in hipsters to keep Elektra’s ears on the street. Among these
company freaks,
as they were called, the new face at the New York headquarters was Danny Fields, a close friend of Andy Warhol’s experimental pop-art group, the Velvet Underground. “I was a sixties kind of person,” said Fields. “I had started out as a New York Weavers Jewboy, and now I was Andy Warhol and hard rock and revolution and march on Washington and marijuana galore.” In contrast, the Elektra senior managers were, in Fields’s opinion, “suit and tie, Martini lunch, old school, Madison Avenue, fifties kind of people.” His discovery of a quasi-political rock ’n’ roll group from Detroit called the MC5 was, in retrospect, a natural step from what was already happening in New York. The MC5 were in fact part of a revolutionary commune. Their manager, John Sinclair, was leader of the White Panthers, an extreme left, antiracist political organization.

“I stayed in Sinclair’s house, in the commune,” remembered Fields. “I loved the whole situation, the Minister for Defense with the rifle in the dining room, the men pounding on the table for food like cavemen, and all the women running in and out of the kitchen with long Mother Earth skirts on and no bras … The men did everything but drag them by the hair … I’d never met anyone like Sinclair. He would sit on the can, taking a shit with the door open, barking out orders, like a Lyndon Johnson smoking dope … I virtually signed them myself, gave him a handshake and assured him that getting Jac’s approval was a mere formality.”

It was through the MC5 that Danny Fields was introduced to the Stooges, featuring a nineteen-year-old Iggy Pop. As Jac Holzman explained, “John Sinclair wanted to help his
mascot
band, the Stooges, and offered to sell them in the same package. I said, ‘Not without meeting them first,’ which I did on a visit to set up the MC5 live sessions. There really was never an audition, but because Danny was so hot on the Stooges, I succumbed and signed them, too. If I had heard them, I probably would have declined. Good thing I didn’t!”

That leap of faith cost Holzman a $15,000 advance for the MC5 and another $5,000 for the Stooges. As Danny Fields had been careful to explain over the phone, the MC5 was a brilliant live band selling out 3,000-capacity ballrooms. To best capture that revolutionary spirit, their debut album was recorded live—
Kick Out the Jams,
a sonic thunderbolt that grew into a classic over time.

Unfortunately for Elektra’s staffers, the group proved to be both unmanageable and intimidating. In-house producer Bruce Botnick described these communal warriors as “really gross … defecating on stage, as a cultural protest. Two of the guys bared their asses and took a dump and held it up.” They stole equipment, demanded Elektra organize free concerts, even took out a bogus advertisement using Elektra’s logo to insult record shops. An atmosphere of mutual suspicion quickly soured the collaboration. Feeling misunderstood, the MC5, for their part, were frustrated by what they saw as the record industry’s hostile reception.

Even by late-sixties standards, these were radical characters who lived their music all the way to the edge. “Iggy Pop was this demonic spirit who kept falling all over himself,” said Holzman. “He’s playing the Electric Circus, a major club on St. Marks Place. Covered in peanut butter and glitter, he swan dives into the crowd. And they won’t catch him. Iggy crashes ten feet to the floor.” Elektra’s promotions man, Steve Harris, remembered one unforgettable evening driving a war-torn Iggy Pop from a concert to an address on Park Avenue. Having cut himself up mercilessly onstage, Pop stepped out of the car, still bleeding and wearing a diaper.

“Who shall I say is calling?” asked the doorman in full uniform.

“Tell her Iggy’s here.”

“Send him up,” said the lady’s voice.

Harris stood mortified in the elevator; “all the way up, the elevator operator’s looking at Iggy in his diaper, bleeding. We get there and it’s this magnificent apartment, just like you see in the movies, and a girl answers in a negligee, slinky, a tall Lauren Bacall–looking woman. We had a couple of drinks, then I left and Iggy stayed.” The next day the singer telephoned Harris, apologizing, “I can’t work tonight. I had thirty-two stitches this morning.”

As it was all happening, record sales for the Stooges were modest. However, as Danny Fields accurately testified “the influence they’ve had on other musicians and around the world has been incalculable … They were really the proto-punk band of the world. There would have been no punk rock without them, no Sex Pistols, no Ramones or anything that was really important in the seventies.” Acknowledging Fields’s clairvoyance, Holzman described the whole episode as being “like an odd piece of art that someone strong-arms you into buying, and years later it turns out to be of lasting importance.”

It wasn’t only inside Elektra; all record companies surfing the late sixties were struggling to comprehend what appeared to be a culture of self-destruction. Over at the rapidly mutating Atlantic Records, still torn between R&B and pale-faced rock, there was Buffalo Springfield, who, despite their artistic promise, had become a sorry saga of egos and vampire managers. Their fate had been sealed within the extortionist clauses of a management contract—75 percent of their composition revenue was being gobbled up by their manager’s publishing arm, Ten-East Music. While they were enjoying their first hit, “For What It’s Worth,” Neil Young’s first royalty statement had amounted to just $292.

It didn’t get much better from there. As the story goes, whenever the sensitive Neil Young failed to turn up for a rehearsal, the ambitious Stephen Stills would hunt him down to his Laurel Canyon bungalow, where, wielding a guitar over his head, he’d scream, “You’re ruining my career!” When Young began having epileptic fits before shows, Stills dismissed him as “full of shit,” believing the Canadian was simply a drama queen, shirking his responsibilities.

In one recording session, when Stills and Young locked horns over who should play a guitar solo, Young had a seizure in the control room. “You will have to stop this,” demanded Ahmet Ertegun. “If you two guys beat each other bloody, no one cares … Understand?” They didn’t. In May 1968, Buffalo Springfield split up while the Atlantic sultan wrestled with another smoking meteorite—psychedelic shredders Cream, whose wild-eyed drummer, Ginger Baker, had been a heroin user since his jazz days in the early sixties. “On their third tour of America, there were rows and fighting every night,” said Cream manager Robert Stigwood. “Ginger was going to murder Jack. Jack was going to commit suicide. And Eric was dying and saying, ‘Get me out of here. I hate the two of them.’”

Rumor has it that when Ahmet Ertegun heard Cream had split up, he begged them, “Oh no, man, you have to do one more for me. Jerry Wexler has cancer, and he’s dyin’ and he wants to hear one more album from you.” Imagine the musicians’ surprise when, after they had dug deep to deliver a swan song, Ertegun announced the good news. “Jerry isn’t dying, he’s much better, he’s improved.” Nonetheless, thanks to the decisive crisis management of Stigwood and Ertegun, Cream bowed out elegantly, performing several farewell shows at the end of 1968. Fifteen million Cream records had been sold since their debut, the majority of them in America, on Atlantic.

In this age of high stakes, Cream, Buffalo Springfield, and the Yardbirds had popularized the idea of the
supergroup
—a dream team of famous musicians invariably represented by a supermanager. As the crossroads year of 1969 marked profound changes in the very structure of the record business, a young, curly-haired agent by the name of David Geffen was getting noticed. He was the perfect symbol of the new era.

David Geffen’s personal Goliath was the entire entertainment industry. Called “King David” by his doting mother, he had found a role model when, still just a teenager, he read a biography of MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer. He fibbed his way into the William Morris Agency by faking UCLA qualifications, and his lowly job in the company’s mail room proved to be an effective trampoline. By reading the letters he was sorting, he not only followed the agency’s affairs, he learned the art of negotiation.

Clive Davis was the first record mogul to notice him. One of the flower children who had enchanted Davis at Monterey was sultry singer-songwriter Laura Nyro, and Geffen was her agent. Although Nyro failed to make a major breakthrough on CBS, the twenty-five-year-old Geffen had the wisdom to set up her own publishing company, Tuna Fish Music, taking a 50 percent equity share for his troubles. Pending the settlement of a legal dispute with impresario Artie Mogull over Nyro’s publishing rights, Geffen negotiated the sale of Tuna Fish Music to Clive Davis—a contentious, messy deal that in the end earned Geffen a couple of million.

Galloping closer to the hippie sunset, Geffen relocated to Los Angeles, where he and partner Elliot Roberts set up a management agency. They tapped straight into the growing singer-songwriter community in Laurel Canyon—a sort of rural-scented mountain retreat overlooking the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles where David Crosby, Eric Burdon, Mama Cass, Frank Zappa, Jim Morrison, Carl Wilson, and Paul Rothchild all lived. Their first giant break was with Crosby, Stills & Nash, or CSN.