Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (34 page)

Due to the massive cost of the investigation, the powers that were needed a scalp. In May 1973, the attorney’s office confronted Bill Paley with their damaging, albeit petty, evidence. Due to the precarious nature of CBS’s federal license, Arthur Taylor ordered security guards to escort Davis out of the building. The stunned Clive Davis returned to his apartment overlooking Central Park—unemployed and humiliated.

In the bitter end, Project Sound indicted nineteen people including Davis, who was charged with filing false income tax returns. To maximize the political impact, the various judgments were announced the same day, ensuring news reports left an impression the entire record business had been punished for its culture of corruption.

If institutionalized drugs were what Nixon’s apparatchiks had hoped to expose, they should have been snooping around Los Angeles, where a whole generation of cowboy rockers were, one by one, checking into the proverbial Hotel California. “Decaying mansions,” said former Doors manager Danny Sugerman, “an uncleaned pool, palm fronds afloat … sunlight was out, night life was in.”

There was no better symbol of the shift than the sleek new theater on Sunset Strip opened in 1973 by David Geffen, Lou Adler, and Elliot Roberts, the Roxy. It was more than a deliberate attempt to put the folksy Troubadour out of business; its adjoining VIP club, On the Rox, became the scene of limousines, bodyguards, and celebrities powdering their noses in the half-light. “If you want to talk about what happened to the L.A. scene in the first half of the seventies,” mused local producer David Anderle, “you can sum it up with one name; David Geffen happened. A bunch of hippies had become major players and were now calling the shots. All of us stopped smoking pot and got serious.”

Problem was, record executives weren’t saying no to cocaine. Even Warner’s resident freak, Andy Wickham, sent Mo Ostin a damning memo in 1973, lamenting within the corridors of Burbank “a looseness, a smugness, an appalling lack of civilized behavior—secretaries using filthy language, executives shambling around in ragged jeans and dirty sweatshirts, endless silly parties in the conference room, cocaine-snorting in the lavatories.” At the time, as Elliot Roberts pointed out, “no one realized that it was
totally
addictive, that it ate your cells away and made your nose fall off. Everyone was like ‘wanna bump?’ It was so
mainstream.
”

Cocaine was influencing the California sound in a way that Linda Ronstadt eloquently described with the image of “a tight throat and a very flat mask.” The decreasingly innocent Joni Mitchell, at the time rooming in David Geffen’s Malibu pad, “wrote some songs on cocaine because initially it can be a creative catalyst”—but, as she eventually learned, “in the end it’ll fry you, kill the heart. It kills the soul and gives you delusions of grandeur as it shuts down your emotional center.”

Not everyone took years to realize how shallow the scene really was. One outspoken cynic on the Geffen roster was Tom Waits, who joked to a journalist at the time, that the Eagles “don’t have cow shit on their boots, only dog shit from Laurel Canyon.” The other group of urban cowboys being managed by the Geffen-Roberts agency was America. Waits found them vacuous. “How about,” he mused, “‘I rode through the desert on a horse with no legs’?”

Asylum was rocketing into the commercial stratosphere, but behind the scenes David Geffen was spitting fireballs. “I got fucked in that deal,” he realized of the Warner buyout, which “earned back one hundred percent of what the company cost on just a couple of records.” Worse of all, due to a collapse in Warner Communications’ share price, Geffen’s theoretical $5 million had since dropped to less than $2 million. From riches to bitches, Geffen, true to his growing reputation, went berserk with Steve Ross, who, true to
his
growing reputation, bent over backward to keep the cash cow happy.

“Geffen was a gifted screamer and by sheer energy he’d usually get his way,” explained Jac Holzman. “There was no ambiguity at David’s core. He was right, you were wrong. Q.E.D.” A practical solution was suggested by the Elektra boss, at the time both personally disillusioned and, since Jim Morrison’s death, struggling to keep his label hot. Negotiating a transfer to a technological wing of the Warner empire, Holzman gave Ross his blessing to merge Elektra into Asylum. Ross offered Geffen a bumper salary of $1 million per annum and promised to pay off the agreed $5 million balance on the contentious Asylum deal. Geffen accepted somewhat reluctantly, then purged two-thirds of Elektra’s artists and staff—in his own words “valueless.”

With Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon scoring smash hits for the renamed Elektra/Asylum,
Time
magazine hailed David Geffen as “the financial superstar of the $2 billion pop music industry.” Adding to Geffen’s growing status, Joni Mitchell even wrote him a song, “Free Man in Paris,” empathizing with his heavy burden of “stoking the star-maker machinery.”

Considering that Asylum Records and its innocently named publishing arm, Companion Music, had been envisioned a year earlier as a boutique independent, Mel Posner, one of the survivors of Elektra’s mass purge, rubbed his eyes as “this Wall Street guy” from Warner Communications asked, “How come you have Carly Simon down here for three hundred thousand records when you sold a million records last time?”

“Because I don’t know what this record’s gonna do,” explained Posner.

“What kinda business you got here?” chortled the suit.

Then came the first of several negative Geffen incidents. On the last night of Dylan’s comeback
Tour ’74,
the singer announced to the standing ovation, “We want to thank a legendary guy who put this whole tour together. Without him, this thing just wouldn’t have happened.” In the front row, Geffen stood up and began beaming proudly among his VIP guests.

“Can you give a warm round of applause,” said Dylan, “to Bill Graham!”

Geffen, utterly humiliated, shrank back into his seat.

After the show, Geffen sobbed backstage as the Band rolled their eyes to heaven. The following day, Robbie Robertson, feeling a debt to Geffen, telephoned Dylan. “Whether or not he was on the road putting up lights and carrying equipment, he played a big part in this. We should thank him,” pleaded Robertson. “It’s the decent thing to do.”

“Oh Jesus,” groaned Dylan. “Okay, okay, let’s do it.”

After talking it over with Geffen face-to-face, Dylan sensed he wanted a public apology. After taking out full-page advertisements in the trades acknowledging “immeasurable thanks to David Geffen who made possible Tour ’74,” Dylan and Robertson then consulted Cher, who at the time was Geffen’s controversial fiancée. When she suggested they organize a surprise party for Geffen’s thirty-first birthday, Dylan rented a grand ballroom at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and ordered an impressive birthday cake on which the acknowledgment “For the Man That’s Responsible
”
was pasted in sugar. Mo Ostin was given the job of luring Geffen to a bogus meeting with his favorite icon, Barbra Streisand, when lo and behold, the doors swung open and a cheer erupted from seventy-five smiling faces including Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, and Ringo Starr. Dylan even performed “Mr. Tambourine Man” for the birthday boy.

In the weeks thereafter, Dylan and the Band began doubting the handshake deal to release their live album,
Before the Flood,
on Elektra/Asylum. Not only was Dylan starting to feel queasy about Geffen’s appetite for magazine celebrity,
Planet Waves
had thus far only sold 600,000 copies—below his batting average on Columbia. So Dylan and his lawyer, David Braun, consulted the out-of-work Clive Davis regarding an alternative idea to sell the live album directly to the public by way of a free phone number. In a meeting in the Beverly Hills Hotel, Davis warned such a stunt would cheapen Dylan’s image and instead suggested an alternative. Liking Davis’s idea, Dylan then summoned the unsuspecting Geffen to the meeting.

“David, we’re not going to put the concert album through Elektra/Asylum,” announced Dylan straight out. “I’m going to do it myself.”

“You can’t do this!” screamed Geffen. “We have an arrangement!”

“No, I’m not going to do it,” insisted Dylan firmly. “Besides, it’s not
your
money, David. It’s Warner Communications’ money.”

“What ever happened to the guy who wrote ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’
?
” sneered Geffen, storming out.

Not wishing to see Jerry Wexler’s beardy grin, Geffen in the end outbid Columbia for the live album. Speaking to an interviewer years later, however, Geffen obliquely alluded to “the biggest artist of them all, a legend … who turned out to be so mean, so jealous, so cheap, ego-ridden and petty, such an ingrate.” In another confession, Geffen claimed “that Bob Dylan is as interested in money as any person I’ve known in my life.”

It was time for Dylan to leave Malibu. Moving his family back to Greenwich Village, he began taking art lessons with a Jewish philosopher and master painter, Norman Raeben—whose novel technique was to teach students how to perceive objects from a variety of angles and even through time lines. Although the classes taught Dylan “how to see,” they probably, in the long run, lost him his family. “My wife never did understand me ever since that day. That’s when our marriage started breaking up,” said Dylan. “She never knew what I was talking about, what I was thinking about, and I couldn’t possibly explain it.”

In a terrible bargain, as Dylan’s wife and four children drifted over the horizon, his mojo returned. He spent a pensive summer living near his brother, David Zimmerman, by the Crow River in Minnesota, writing stream-of-consciousness songs about two lovers breaking up. Mixing up tenses and speaking in first, second, and third person, Dylan applied Raeben’s techniques to the songs that became
Blood on the Tracks.

When he signed a new record contract with Columbia, Dylan returned to one of the last remaining vestiges of the old school—his discoverer, John Hammond, who was honored to prepare the homecoming. “Our first record date happened to fall on the Jewish New Year,” remembered Hammond, who at the artist’s request booked the old studio where Dylan’s first three albums were made. “Promptly at sundown, Bobby brought out a Bible and some wine and we drank a ceremonial toast.” That evening, a bluesy number called “Meet Me in the Morning” was recorded.

“It was clear from his mood and body language that he was vulnerable,” recalled the session engineer, Phil Ramone, who was fascinated by Dylan’s trancelike techniques. “Bob would start with one song, go into a second song without warning, switch to a third midstream, and then jump back to the first … I saw them as a spiritual release—a letting out of the man’s insides … For four days, Dylan stood at the mic and bared his soul on record.”

Hammond had advised Ramone and the session musicians to give Dylan space, but two months later, a doubtful Dylan, feeling the album was too acoustic, asked to re-record certain tracks in Minneapolis with his brother taking over as producer. Columbia had to destroy pressed copies of the first draft, as the Zimmerman brothers reworked five tracks with bigger arrangements.

With critics and fans hailing
Blood on the Tracks
as a masterpiece, Dylan released, just five months later, a double album of homemade recordings from his Woodstock sabbatical in 1967—
The Basement Tapes,
a colorful treasure trove of altered-state folk-rock. Simultaneously touring with the Band on his
Rolling Thunder Revue
throughout that busy summer of 1975, Dylan recorded another classic album,
Desire.

Dylan’s return to form was a source of immense pride for John Hammond. “His genius has been the acuity of his vision of American life, his ability to internalize his observations and experiences, and his artistry in retelling them in a penetrating and dramatic poetry that overwhelms his hearers. He helped shape the attitudes of a generation, and God knows his unique and uncompromising albums transformed Columbia Records!”

Meanwhile that summer, Bruce Springsteen was working on his elusive breakthrough:
Born to Run.
Back in September 1973, his promising second album,
The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle,
earned him critical acclaim as “the new Dylan.” Even so, as Columbia president Walter Yetnikoff bleakly concluded over the subsequent months, “that kid’s not selling any records for us.” Columbia A&R executive Michael Pillot confirmed that throughout 1974, “we had a lot of meetings about the artist roster, and there was a lot of talk about dropping Bruce.” Fortunately, a music critic by the name of Jon Landau wrote a glowing review of Springsteen’s electrifying concerts, predicting, “I have seen the future of rock ’n’ roll and his name is Bruce Springsteen.” It was enough to lift Columbia’s hopes and convince Yetnikoff to test one last single before deciding the young man’s fate. So Bruce Springsteen began writing his last-chance epic, “Born to Run.” The writing was slow but the effect was instant. CBS executive Bruce Lundvall, visiting the studio, told an incredulous Springsteen, “You’ve just made a hit record.”

The increasingly estranged John Hammond winced at its cathedral-sized rock sound, but the radio deejays who received a test pressing were unanimous in their enthusiasm. A conscious attempt to mix Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, and Phil Spector
,
“Born to Run” was a blood-strirring cry for stardom that convinced Columbia to get firmly behind a third album coproduced by Landau. Splashing out $250,000 on tour support, ads, posters, and radio promotion, Columbia took full advantage of Landau’s “future of rock ’n’ roll” endorsement. With
Newsweek
and
Time
giving the hunky singer their front pages in October 1975, the album climbed to No. 3—in Springsteen’s own words, “the dividing line” in his life.

Managed success can be disappointing. “It’s going to piss people off,” Springsteen warned of the dreaded “future of rock” slogan. “It pisses
me
off.” Fearing a media backlash and eager to maintain a human proximity to his audience, Springsteen turned down lucrative offers to play stadiums, even though he was still effectively broke. Hearing reports that, in one fit of rage, he tore down a hall full of “future of rock” posters at a gig in London, Columbia staffers began realizing they’d overhyped their product. Walking onstage “it’s like I’m ten points down,” Springsteen felt. “You’ve got to blow this bullshit out of people’s minds.”