Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (37 page)

“Hanging out with Herbie, I got to learn a lot about artists—their moods, their temperament,” explained the principled Jerry Moss, whose gentle, protective style as a label boss grew from that founding artist-manager relationship. “Herbie was smart, he came from a family of very smart people. But he was an artist. He could remain sort of aloof, dreamy or artistic—it wouldn’t get in the way of his image, and I would come in and do the stuff. But I’d be talking about it to Herbie all the way, whether we were together or on the road, I’d bring him up to date. Herbie was very knowledgeable. He participated in every major decision.”

As A&M evolved into a boutique label for acts as diverse as Burt Bacharach, Procol Harum, Sergio Mendes, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joe Cocker, Humble Pie, the Carpenters, and Supertramp, Alpert continued to record, tour, and produce various jazzy pet projects. A successful production deal with Creed Taylor’s CTI imprint also brought A&M a treasure trove of seminal jazz and funk. With the help of general manager Gil Friesen, Jerry Moss handled company operations and generally signed the rockier acts. As A&M opened offices in Canada, London, and Paris, new recruits immediately felt the atmosphere of kinship and musical excellence that gave it such a special aura. “There was that trust, that incredible trust,” Moss recalled, “and I think when people work for a couple of guys where there’s no question about the leadership of the company and how it functions, it just makes everything cooler and easier.”

Despite his twinkling eyes and Mexican mustache, Jerry Moss was very selective when it came to picking staffers and artists. “Because Herb and I had a complete trust in each other,” said Moss, “and absolutely would not tolerate corruption from anyone, we were able to make this work. The rules were very simple: If you lie or if you cheat on a deal, you don’t belong here. If you’re an honest person and you want to work hard, A&M was a place for you. Nobody lied. Because lying takes a lot of energy. And this way, we were able to put all the energy into the music. Therein lies the culture that Herb and I created—it became A&M.”

Whenever A&M’s new London boss, Derek Green, called up with a problem or doubt, Moss would repeat, “Derek, just keep signing good acts that we can sell in America,” always emphasizing the virtues of simplicity. Of course, such youthful innocence could not last forever. As Los Angeles became the city of decadence, the rising tide was seeping through A&M’s fabled gates. By late 1976, roomfuls of A&M’s promotion staffers were “visiting the bathroom” with an alarming frequency. Across the industry, the cult of crystal powder was quietly enslaving foot soldiers and record bosses alike, many of them barely thirty and ill prepared for the drug’s insidious side effects—including, among other things, cocaine’s thirst for alcohol.

As one recent arrival from England, Terry Ellis, explained, “L.A. is a show business town. If you’re doing well, and I really was, every door opens to you. You’re the toast of the town.” The conventional wisdom in those days was “
work hard, play hard
,” but as Ellis recognized with the benefit of hindsight, “the free love legacy of the sixties had got out of hand. Alcohol and drugs were free flowing in a way that seemed normal. I think a lot of people did damage to their health in those years. It didn’t seem abnormal to be at work drunk or stoned, because
everybody
was.” Or as Jerry Moss put it, “I loved the ideals the sixties created. I was so into the sixties and seventies in a cultural way—as a nation, I felt we were on the verge of something tremendous. And then we blew it. The drugs got more serious, AIDS came in. Late seventies, early eighties; things turned.”

With the big American corporations churning out music that evoked Woody Allen’s gag in
Annie Hall
about mellowness making you ripen and then rot, the A&R advantage was moving back to the hungrier independents—especially those of a theatrical persuasion who hadn’t got stuck in the Woodstock mud. Presenting Brett Smiley, a Broadway glam rocker, on British television in 1974, Andrew Loog Oldham predicted, “The music business has become very mundane. The music business thinks they make the stars. And I think, this year, they’re gonna find out they’re wrong.” Oldham sensed people were fed up with the sultry dysfunction of hippie rock. He pointed to Elton John’s breakthrough in America, rightly warning, “Entertainers are back!”

Sure enough, as the decade progressed, the theatrical dazzle of early seventies glam rock provided the electric shock that infused life into the rising monsters of the late seventies—disco and punk. A perfect example of Dr. Frankenstein was future Sex Pistols impresario Malcolm McLaren. Still looking for his break, he was swanning around New York in 1975 with his designer partner, Vivienne Westwood, making costumes and iconography for the New York Dolls, whose kitsch blend of lipstick, hair spray, and hard rock was almost like a transvestite’s parody of the Rolling Stones.

Rough, exciting, and often compared to the Velvet Underground, the New York Dolls were inspiring a crop of younger groups all playing at CBGB—a dank, windowless club on the seedy Lower East Side where regulars like Television, the Ramones, and Patti Smith first performed to audiences that included Talking Heads, Suicide, and Blondie. Curiously, the club owner, Hilly Kristal, was a folkie who, having previously managed the Village Vanguard, opened CBGB in 1973 to showcase country, bluegrass, and blues—hence its initials. Evolving organically with the music that walked in off the garbage-infested street, the now legendary CBGB was a folk experiment gone fantastically awry.

Something was in the air. At exactly the same time, London had its equivalent;
pub rock
, the new moniker to describe small gigs, where for the price of a pint, audiences could hear back-to-basics rock songs oozing wit, energy, and lager froth. Including groups such as Dr. Feelgood, Kilburn & the High Roads, Ducks Deluxe, and Brinsley Schwarz, many of the scene’s central characters were former mods, now approaching thirty and increasingly bored with the hippie detour in between.

One key figure in this emerging London scene was Dave Robinson, who would found Stiff Records, Britain’s most iconic New Wave indie of the late seventies. Somewhat similar to the owner of CBGB, Dave Robinson was an adventurous folkie who’d seen the sixties from a different angle. A tough nut with a soft brogue, the sharp, shifty Robinson had grown up in Ireland—then a banana republic sinking into the Holy See. Inheriting his father’s eye for graphic design and slogans, Robinson started out as a magazine photographer and, like so many other restless youngsters of the Irish sixties, set off for London in search of work. He was followed by an Irish R&B band, the People, who camped on his floor and got him evicted—but, one sleepless night in 1967, helped alter his destiny.

After a gig at one of Joe Boyd’s psychedelic UFO happenings, Dave Robinson, acting as manager for the People, collected the £10 fee but returned a few minutes later. “Joe, can you give me a hand? There’s some nutter in the dressing room upsetting the lads. He says he manages Jimi Hendrix and he wants them to open for him on a tour.” Boyd confirmed the man in the suit really was Mike Jeffery. Robinson “looked at me wide-eyed for a second,” he said, “then dashed back to the tiny dressing room.” So Robinson’s band, renamed Eire Apparent, flew away with the Jimi Hendrix Experience to tour the world and elsewhere.

When the road manager fell ill, the lucky Dubliner suddenly found himself lugging Jimi Hendrix’s amplifiers through airports. Playing fifty shows over fifty-four days on one of several backbreaking tours, the strung-out and suspicious Jimi Hendrix began quizzing Robinson about money and contracts. Equally puzzled by Mike Jeffery’s opaque ways, “I wanted to know how the machinery worked,” recalled Robinson, who had been particularly struck by the sight of Muddy Waters forced to play dives in America while Hendrix sold out the best venues to white audiences.

The Jimi Hendrix job experience left Dave Robinson with a head full of ideas. As a roadie and wheeler-dealer looking at London’s gig circuits through Irish eyes, he began contemplating the true meaning of folk—not the California format that was dominating England’s album charts but, as Robinson put it, “music that had a social connection to the environment that it came from.” He noticed a crippled Cockney poet, Ian Dury, to whom he explained his vision, sometime around 1972, of a grassroots, antimajor movement that would bring music back to the people. “Dave sat on the floor,” said Dury, “had a bowl of rice, and said he thought that music would grow by word of mouth, if you had an environment where it could develop in one locality.”

So, between 1973 and 1975, Robinson set up a recording studio above the Hope and Anchor, an elegant, high-ceilinged Victorian pub in a multicultural neighborhood in Islington, whose basement venue was perfect for unknown bands without vans or equipment. Although there were other venues in the pub rock circuits, the Hope and Anchor was London’s equivalent of CBGB. “He was a hustler. And we liked him accordingly,” attested Dury, who was then the singer of Kilburn & the High Roads. “I’ve seen him loading boxes in the back of the van and getting sweaty. For all his verbal, he still gets down there on the concrete, rolls his sleeves up, and gets stuck in. But I didn’t feel for one minute that I never saw him coming.”

Not only were London’s pub rockers struggling financially, the bleak economic context was affecting the public mood at large. As the saying goes, when America sneezes, the world gets a cold. The costs of the Vietnam War had prompted the
Nixon Shock
of 1971, when the U.S. government unpegged the dollar from its gold standard. With the West’s currencies all linked to the dollar, turbulence swept through the financial markets, provoking a global recession—particularly in Britain. By 1974, British GDP was shrinking at a rate of 4 percent per year, inflation was at 25 percent, and unemployment had spilled over the symbolic 1 million mark. With strikes paralyzing the country, mounds of garbage bags began piling up on street corners, and an international oil crisis caused penury in gas stations. Britain’s malaise hit rock bottom in 1976, when Prime Minister James Callaghan was forced to call in the International Monetary Fund.

It was onto these depressed, rubbish-encrusted streets that Malcolm McLaren returned from his New York adventures—determined to shock London out of its hippie coma. He changed his shop name to
Sex
and began specializing in hard-rocker outfits inspired by bondage. One customer, sporting his very own look made from destroyed clothes held together with safety pins, was a redheaded teenager by the name of John Lydon. A peculiar kind of streetwise intellectual who understood that Britain’s so-called working class had long since turned into a welfare class, he had a gang of friends, referred to as
the four Johns
, that included two characters who later invented the stage names Sid Vicious and Jah Wobble.

As coincidence would have it, another character who occasionally dropped into McLaren’s shop was Steve Jones, a kleptomaniac scavenger who had just stolen a vanload of guitars and amplifiers from a David Bowie gig and dreamed of starting a band. He consulted the well-connected McLaren, whose first suggestion was to give Lydon an audition. Standing beside the shop jukebox, Lydon contorted and wheezed to Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” and got the part. For a band name, McLaren came up with the
Sex Pistols
, effectively an extension of his boutique.

More interested in the fashion than the music, McLaren suggested that Lydon study the leather-gloved cripple Ian Dury, who wore razor-blade earrings and had an imposing stage pose of arching his back over a low-adjusted microphone stand. Dury had borrowed the trick from his childhood icon, fifties rocker Gene Vincent, who wore a leg brace as the result of a motorcycle injury.

The Ramones arrived in London on July 4, 1976, like the outbreak of a virus. They had just released their debut album on Sire Records and were being managed by Danny Fields. Despite a few supporters in New York’s music press, the Ramones were broke and going nowhere. Imagine their delight flying into London and performing to an enthusiastic crowd of three thousand at the prestigious Round House.

Just before the show, Clash members Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, and Paul Simonon climbed through a broken window backstage and hung out with the Ramones in their dressing room. John Lydon charmed his way in through the stage door and joined this prophetic assembly. With other nobodies watching from the crowd, including members of what would become the Stranglers and the Damned, if there was a seminal moment when
punk
was born, this was it—symbolically, on Independence Day in London.

At exactly the same time, disco’s rapid evolution from the New York underground to global pop phenomenon came together. Back in 1973, the first warning shot was Manu Dibango’s
Soul Makossa,
a French pressing shipped into Brooklyn by African importers. Found by David Mancuso in a Jamaican store, it burned the house down every night at the Loft. With other deejays clambering for the last remaining copies in circulation, in May
Billboard
ran a piece noting
Soul Makossa
was “fetching a record price of between $2 and $3 in New York shops because of its unprecedented popularity in the black community.” Observing the flood of cover versions, Atlantic secured American rights for the original.

As record labels started noticing this growing dance-floor community, in 1975, David Mancuso, with Steve D’Aquisto and journalist Vince Aletti, set up a nonprofit r
ecord pool.
Once a week, about one hundred deejay members converged on Mancuso’s new Loft at 99 Prince Street to pick up thirty to fifty new releases and prerelease promos. Record companies, both majors and indies, as yet inexperienced in the art of club promotion, only had to deliver a box of records to one address in return for precious feedback and support from all of New York’s trendsetting deejays. Once again, the idealistic David Mancuso was putting the scene first.

The first record mogul to invest heavily in disco was inevitably Robert Stigwood, the Cream manager turned
Jesus Christ Superstar
bankroller, who with his booming entertainment company, RSO, had produced the 1975 film adaptation of
Tommy,
starring Roger Daltrey and Elton John. In February 1976, Stigwood’s waning clients the Bee Gees had recorded their first disco smash hit, “You Should Be Dancing”—a spectacular comeback.