Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (36 page)

The album’s potential hit songs such as “Stir It Up” and “Concrete Jungle” were gently hypnotic grooves tailor-made for dope smokers. Given a luxurious and suggestive sleeve evoking a Zippo lighter, the album, called
Catch a Fire,
only sold about 14,000 copies in its first year, but it earned the Wailers an appearance on
The Old Grey Whistle Test.
If the truth be known, Blackwell was bitterly disappointed at the public’s lack of interest.

Simplifying the game plan, they unanimously agreed to revert to a raw, aggressive follow-up album before year-end—
Burnin’,
which made no effort to Westernize the band’s Trenchtown sound. More political and explosive, it contained two potentially radio-friendly tracks,
“
Get Up, Stand Up” and “I Shot the Sheriff.” Throughout 1973, Island kept the Wailers on the road—not exactly touring, but
promoting
, a record-company euphemism for hodgepodge itineraries on which a wannabe act lugs its own show around indifferent halls and local radio stations, often providing supporting slots for established bands.

Buses, greasy cafés, dive venues—the Wailers were at a low ebb. After they were fired in Las Vegas by Sly Stone on their second American tour, the introverted Bunny Livingston, sorely missing Ital food and Jamaican home life, refused to go out on the road again. Then, in the depths of late November, a weary Peter Tosh, suffering bronchitis, trudged through a fourth tour around Northern England until he, too, threw in the towel.

Despite their long history singing their way out of the Kingston ghetto, the three-man gang split up after one year on Island. Dubbing Chris Blackwell “
Whiteworse,
” “because he isn’t black and he isn’t well,” Peter Tosh later accused the Island boss of manipulating Bob Marley into a solo career. Bunny Livingston also maintained he was mistreated and intentionally sidelined. David Betteridge, however, felt “they shouldn’t have been so harsh … The breakup of the Wailers was to do with the band and nothing to do with Island. There was undoubtedly a huge amount of jealousy because Bob got all the plaudits, because he was writing most of the material and because he had a lot more money in his pocket than the other guys. Plus, of course, they were putting too much ganja up their noses!”

Paranoia generally came with the genre. “The whole of the West Indian music community, generally speaking, didn’t like each other,” continued Betteridge. “In the days when the Jamaican labels were producing the Wailers, the Maytals, and all the others, half the time they just did not get paid. So there was a huge amount of distrust before we ever got involved with these guys.”

Throughout 1973 and 1974, as the Wailers lugged their reggae around England, Island’s core market seemed to be moving in the exact opposite direction. Among bohemians and art-school chin strokers, progressive rock and cerebral music were reaching their commercial peak. Handling sales for their new semi-independent label, Virgin Records, Island’s senior staffers looked on in envy as Mike Oldfield’s experimental
Tubular Bells
sold 2 million copies in Britain—far bigger than anything Island had at the time. In an A&R meeting, Blackwell suggested they create an Island sublabel specializing in avant-garde mood music. Guy Stevens interrupted the boss’s brainwave with his Cockney drawl. “Why don’t we call it Lukewarm Fucking Records?” Bursting into hysterical laughter, Blackwell let his idea gurgle gently down the drain.

Luckily, in the summer of 1974, fate threw out a wild card when an Eric Clapton version of “I Shot the Sheriff” rocketed to No. 1 in America. Although Clapton had struggled to play its offbeat groove, it was a resounding endorsement among the white-rocker demographic. For Trevor Wyatt, an Island A&R man and Marley friend, “the whole thing just came together … but certainly Clapton doing that song really opened it up for us, especially in America—well, everywhere, I think. People said, ‘Hmm, who’s written this?’”

Blackwell, sensing Jamaica’s hour was nigh, began pouring resources into Marley. With new musicians and a token Jamaican manager, Bob Marley’s touring machine traveled the world with a spring in its step. Learning from experience, Marley hired a Jamaican cook to keep the band nourished with locally sourced vegetables and fruit. The backing vocalists affectionately known as the I-Threes included his wife, Rita.

As well as providing tour support, Blackwell called in PR heavyweight Charlie Comer, who’d previously worked with the Beatles and the Stones. Wherever Marley performed, Comer ensured the best journalists in the local media were waiting pencil in hand. Above all, Comer was a hands-on operator—managerial, fatherly, straight-talking, tireless. Famous for his unstoppable tongue, he loved the lifestyle of grooming raw talent into stars.

Chris Blackwell considers Bob Marley’s crowning moment the sold-out Lyceum concerts in London in July 1975, where the now legendary live performance of “No Woman No Cry” was recorded. With the cost of tour support eating into the modest album sales, however, the financial payback was still a long way off. In the midseventies, it was Island’s entire roster and affiliated labels that enabled Chris Blackwell to expand his London head office into a stunning new premises in the pretty surroundings of Hammersmith. Choosing his office directly above the studio at the back of the building, Chris Blackwell, they say, wanted to remind his company that true leadership had to retain its proximity to the creative action.

Or so the legend goes. “He’s got a huge, fertile mind and imagination, but I think he got bored of things easily,” reasoned David Betteridge. “He never wanted to get involved in the nitty-gritty … He was the absentee owner. He wanted to do things his way, which is fair enough; he was the majority shareholder. But ya know, you need to talk to the troops! You need to tell people, ‘I wanna do this and I wanna do that!’” The company’s number three at the time, Tim Clark, also admitted, “He did sort of do a disappearing act. He spent a lot of time in America: He was messing around with films and the film industry, and he wasn’t very much available for us at Island Records in the UK.” As events would illustrate, Chris Blackwell and the U.K. indies in general, despite their immaculate taste, were generally not as rigorous as their American counterparts when it came to running businesses.

As with most record men’s idiosyncrasies, it’s arguable that Chris Blackwell’s aversion to management can be largely explained by his early life. “There’s no doubt about it, he is a loner,” David Betteridge confirmed with audible empathy. “Sometimes I didn’t get to talk to him for two months as he disappeared off doing this, that, and the other, causing all sorts of problems.” For those clocking in at the office every day, ol’ Chris was like the classroom rebel who regularly blew off school—and when he was there, he could barely stay seated at his desk.

In fact, the only time Chris Blackwell appeared to be fully available was when he was barefoot by the sea. “We used to have meetings in what we called
the Western Office
, which was actually a beach in Nassau called the Western Shores,” recalled Betteridge. “There, we used to discuss strategy sitting under the palm trees, eating sandwiches and drinking something. But when he came back to London, trying to sit him down and have an actual meeting was extremely difficult. So you had to guess a lot. When we would have a meeting, it was in a corridor, five minutes, and away we went again.
Undisciplined
is a good description.”

It all came to a head in 1976. When Virgin’s three-year distribution deal came to an end, Richard Branson jumped ship, and within months, Chrysalis also left. “Island had been like the mother ship, but we could do it ourselves,” explained Chrysalis boss Chris Wright. “We could cut the middleman out and go straight to the distributor. So all we needed to do was marketing and promotion, which we increasingly wanted to do ourselves anyway … There was no personal aspect to us leaving. It was just a natural progression.” As they rode off into the sunset, however, Chrysalis inherited key aspects of Island’s character. “Terry and I would have always ended up doing what we did. But you know, you can’t reinvent the wheel that much,” said Wright.

On the delicate question of emulating Island, Virgin’s A&R man, Simon Draper, recalled that “we went into reggae because we loved it, too. We started out small and then got into it in a big way, and I don’t think that Chris Blackwell liked us for that. We particularly fell out over Peter Tosh, who we signed … Chris Blackwell was
incensed
! I clearly remember going into a meeting with Blackwell in a pancake house in Notting Hill Gate. Richard Branson was there also. We worked out some kind of compromise in the end, even though I think Island were in the wrong. But it was all to do with whether or not they owned Peter Tosh because he was in the Wailers. And of course with Jamaicans there’s a lot of gray areas when it comes to contracts.”

David Betteridge estimated that both Chrysalis and Virgin represented about 20 percent of Island’s overall turnover—a loss compounded by the money they were throwing down the drain of their American company on Sunset Boulevard. “There were about seventy to eighty employees in the U.K. company,” explained Betteridge. “In those days, there were only fifteen radio stations in England and five thousand in America. Everything from distribution to marketing was on a far bigger scale. The danger with America is that although the rewards are huge when you’re successful, it’s so much more expensive to get there … Once our American operations became a record label, it sucked huge amounts of money out of the European company, and it was never discussed properly.”

For years, Betteridge had adapted to Chris Blackwell’s nomadic lifestyle, but “Island was no longer the company we had started; it had become too unwieldy and I became disillusioned,” he confessed. “People began taking sides. There was a lot of backbiting going on when I left … Three or four indies came and went quickly because the whole company was sliding around in different directions. It was partly my fault, partly other people’s fault, partly Chris’s fault. But a knife should have been taken to it. It should have been reduced in size. We all would have been much happier. It should have remained a smaller, tighter, creative company.”

As Island’s new managing director, Tim Clark, put it, “The problem for us at that time was Island had a number of retail arms, if you like. We were still distributing a certain amount of Jamaican stuff directly to retailers; we’d got into the whole thing of starting a factory because we had such terrible difficulties getting records pressed. But of course it suddenly became a machine we had to feed, both the distribution network and the factory. So when Virgin and Chrysalis left us, it meant we weren’t feeding the machine enough and it started to cost a lot of money.”

A perfect storm had formed over Chris Blackwell’s island. “We had a real financial crunch in 1976, and it wasn’t that long after I’d taken over as managing director,” explained Tim Clark. “It was one evening and Chris Blackwell had just flown in from New York and he was just
drained.
And he said, ‘You know, I just really don’t know what to do.’ We chatted a bit and I honestly didn’t know what to do either. Eventually he said, ‘We’ve got to do a license deal with EMI,’ so we got on the phone, talked to them, and we got a check for a million pounds.”

It took a few years to restructure Island Records, and its near-death experience marked the end of its halcyon days as a gang of kindred spirits. Not only had key players left, two vital sources of talent, Guy Stevens and David Enthoven, were sliding into addiction. From that season of upheaval, though, two important British indies had stepped out into the world: Chrysalis and Virgin. With Terry Ellis moving to Los Angeles, Chrysalis as a label was determined to conquer America the way Jethro Tull had done as a band. Meanwhile, commanding Virgin’s various businesses from his London houseboat, the fiercely ambitious Richard Branson began imagining ways of consolidating his foothold into continental Europe.

22. HIGH TIDE

“Fuck Warner,” read the slogan. “Fuck the bunny!” Its eloquent author was Walter Yetnikoff, Columbia’s new boss. Thus began a despotic reign that would end in rehab. “The appointment went to my head, went to my dick, and over a period of years turned me into a madman,” Yetnikoff admitted to himself on a therapist’s couch.

Yetnikoff’s war against the market leaders, declared at a CBS sales convention, was just a humorous gimmick designed to conquer the spirits of his own troops. His real problem was that “I had a great new job, yet I couldn’t help questioning my qualifications … I was tone deaf.” He knew he needed to invent a king-sized persona to fill the corporate vacuum left by Goddard Lieberson and Clive Davis. “War is exhilarating,” he thought to himself. “War elicits loyalty, solidarity. War gives us purpose and drive. War was what I wanted. War was who
I
was.”

Shouting into telephones in fuck-littered Yiddish, the rumpled, hard-drinking Walter Yetnikoff personified the sickness dripping out the nostrils of the American record industry. Inside the American majors, musical literacy was in steep decline. Jerry Wexler, John Hammond, Goddard Lieberson, Jac Holzman—the erudite crusaders were riding into the sunset. Although the industry’s two fallen kings, Clive Davis and David Geffen, would both return from the dead, their subsequent influence on the story of pop music would be as businessmen—peddling artists of little cultural significance.

Even Warner’s halcyon days were over. Following Geffen’s resignation, Joe Smith was transferred to run Elektra/Asylum, where he inherited the cocaine-frazzled Eagles. With Smith’s transfer, Mo Ostin became California’s biggest mogul, presiding over a corporation that had grown so large that Walter Yetnikoff was warning big artists leaning toward signing with Warner, “Be careful, you’ll get lost in there!”

A short drive away, the last remaining bastion of purism had locked itself inside the gates of Charlie Chaplin’s old film studio—A&M, for some
the
label of the early seventies. Whereas inferior imitations such as Asylum had been dressed up as artist havens, A&M was the real thing. An organically grown fairy tale, it all began with two friends listening to records—their bond forged in the fires of Herb Alpert’s meteoric rise to stardom.