Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (40 page)

That Sunday, a particularly angry voice telephoned Green at home. The previous night at the Speakeasy Club, Sid Vicious had attacked a key BBC figure—Bob Harris, both an
Old Grey Whistle Test
presenter and Radio 1 deejay. Knowing he’d be sucked into the latest Sex Pistols scandal, Harris was lying low in the North of England, utterly enraged.

“So, what are you going to do about this?” his agent demanded.

“The Pistols’ behavior is none of my business,” replied Green.

In the silence of that Sunday afternoon, however, Green began to seriously wonder what he’d got himself into. “The Pistols’ behavior just wasn’t sitting right in my conscience. The Bob Harris incident upset me.” Having tossed and turned all night, on Monday morning Green picked up his A&R man, Mike Noble, then drove his Rolls-Royce all the way to the Brighton seafront. They sat on the stony beach as Green admitted his physical discomfort at the press conference days earlier. “I felt a hypocrite driving a Rolls, sending my kids to private school, traveling first class and trying to pretend I was some kind of punk benefactor. In truth, I felt their music but never understood the punk ethic.” Throwing stones into the waves and working out his next moves, Green reached his lasting conclusion. “The whole thing had become a media circus!”

Back in the office, Green waited until breakfast time in Los Angeles, then telephoned Jerry Moss. Summoning McLaren and his lawyer, Green presented a draft press release stating that A&M was rescinding the contract. Green pointed at the blank space, then explained they had two hours to pencil in the sum of money before they sent the notice to the media. “Malcolm’s first reaction was utter disbelief. Then he pleaded to work things out to stay on the label,” remembered Green. “It was the only time I witnessed Malcolm off balance. But quite quickly he recognized the publicity value.” In that tense meeting, McLaren agreed to a severance package of £75,000—half of the original advance.

Apart from that one communiqué, “I had made a firm decision that I would not speak to the press,” explained Green, “so I took my family [to the country] and hid out.” When he picked up the next day’s papers, the
Daily Mail
headline read
FILTHY RICH—PUNK GROUP GET £75,000 FOR DOING NOTHING.
In the accompanying article, Malcolm McLaren dubiously claimed that in the contract-signing celebrations at A&M, “a window got busted. Some people made accusations that there were attempts to rape some of the girls,” to which Sid Vicious added a sarcastic disclaimer, “We wouldn’t have touched the girls with a barge-pole.” Each newspaper had a slightly different story; the
Evening Standard
quoted McLaren saying, “The Sex Pistols are like some contagious disease—untouchable. I keep walking in and out of offices being given cheques.”

Standing tall after yet another coup, Malcolm McLaren signed with Virgin. Richard Branson’s total lack of music culture has long inspired smirks inside the record business—Island’s Tim Clark once commented, “Richard Branson had cloth ears”—but the Virgin boss did have an eye for media value and had been chasing Malcolm McLaren with a personal zeal since the Pistols’ first firing from EMI. Because Virgin urgently needed a hot new act, “there was nothing Malcolm McLaren or the Sex Pistols could or would do to put off Richard or any of us,” explained Simon Draper, who admitted he wasn’t a fan himself. “Of course, there were some people in Virgin who loathed them. Sid Vicious used to come to our office and behave terribly. But there was no way we were going to be fazed by it.”

Virgin’s two-thousand-word press release proudly spewed out McLaren’s self-righteous schlock. “The Sex Pistols have remained unrepentant and adamant. They want to shock people out of apathy. They want other young people to
do something
!” To launch “God Save the Queen,” McLaren and Branson rented a barge to sail down the Thames during the Royal Jubilee celebrations—knowing they’d probably get arrested in full view of the media. By this stage, the publicity stunts were becoming so visibly staged, John Lydon was starting to feel uncomfortable.

With the Sex Pistols’ American rights still up for grabs, Mo Ostin dispatched two A&R men to London, Bob Regehr and Bob Krasnow. The eloquent McLaren made a lasting impression on the visiting Americans, then led them “down four flights of stairs. We went to hell,” recalled Krasnow. “Here are these scroungy, horrible guys that were just gross. It was like stepping in shit. And they can’t play their instruments. The whole thing was a disaster for me.” Back at his hotel, Krasnow called Burbank and left a message—“Mo, that’s the worst shit I ever saw in my life!”

A confused Ostin called back an hour later wondering if Krasnow had seen the same rehearsal as his colleague. Regehr had just left a very different message—“Mo, we’ve got to sign them. They’re gonna be huge!”

Mo Ostin flew out to London and tracked down the increasingly elusive McLaren. “I finally found him,” said Ostin. “We agreed to meet, but every time we set a date, he’d break it. It was incredibly frustrating. Finally we sat down and I offered him a deal. Malcolm said yes, but only if Warner Bros. agreed to finance a film he wanted to do.” Thus began the Sex Pistols mockumentary,
The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle,
starring Malcolm McLaren as “the Embezzler.”

In a fast-moving business where timing is crucial, almost a year of red-hot demand had been spent creating hype. By the time the Sex Pistols’ debut album hit British stores, it was November 1977, at which point the scene was moving on from raw punk. Malcolm McLaren’s subsequent claims about masterminding a great pop heist therefore merit due questioning. As Simon Draper put it, “The Sex Pistols didn’t sell that many records. But they really cemented our image.” Malcolm McLaren couldn’t have put it better himself.

On the question of Sex Pistols mythology, Draper thought “McLaren was a totally exaggerated figure who invented himself and invented all kinds of stuff. He liked to keep everyone on edge. He liked to keep everyone guessing. He got fun out of it. He obviously had some really good ideas, particularly his own records; the first two I thought were great. But he was an awkward person to deal with because he was always trying to subvert everything … He wanted to manipulate them. He wanted them to be
his
creation, and who knows, perhaps to some extent they were his creation—initially. But he’d chosen these strong characters, and John Lydon was not going to submit.”

For Draper, there was one revealing incident when Lydon gave a radio interview in which, by picking a selection of records, he showed his musical culture. “Malcolm must have been away, but he would never have let it happen. What came across was that John not only liked reggae, he liked Van der Graaf Generator and Can and all these other groups the Sex Pistols were meant to be anti. You know, anti-prog-rock, anti-everything that had gone before—when in fact they weren’t at all!”

By late 1977, two independent labels were standing out as the pace-setters of the New Wave: Sire in America, Stiff in England. Securing a distribution deal with EMI in the summer of 1977, Stiff represented a hipper, more humorous variation of the punk attitude. As well as giving away merchandise with slogans like “
If it ain’t Stiff it ain’t worth a fuck
,” they sent out questionnaires to deejays and record shops asking, “How would you like to die?” and “What is your favorite perversion?”

Throughout the summer of 1977, Robinson and Riviera were busy launching their new hopeful—Declan MacManus, a London-Irish singer-songwriter, whom they restyled with Buddy Holly glasses and an improbable stage name, Elvis Costello. Hoping to export him to America, they talked the ambitious musician into busking with a battery-powered amp outside a CBS convention on Park Lane.

Although they didn’t tell him, the plan was to get him arrested on film. As soon as he started his routine, Stiff anonymously called the police complaining that a suspicious Irishman was making a nuisance on Park Lane, then contacted news reporters. Fortune favors the brave; Lisa Robinson, the respected American journalist who had introduced the Ramones to Danny Fields, happened to be attending the conference. Struck by Costello’s songs, she tracked down Walter Yetnikoff in his hotel and begged him to take a look.

“He has hits. You must sign him,” she insisted.

While rushing to the convention, “I turned around,” recalled Yetnikoff, “and standing on the street, his guitar hooked into a little amp, was a little gawky guy with glasses.” When Costello was finally arrested later that day, he gave the police Stiff’s phone number. They denied they’d ever heard of him. Meanwhile, back on Park Lane, Walter Yetnikoff was calling his A&R men in New York.

With momentum building, Costello was given the cover of the August 1977 edition of
Sounds
magazine, which emphasized Stiff’s plan to present him as a cool geek. “Elvis Costello looks like a creep, a weed. The paste-on glasses, the skinny face, the pinstripe suits and executive tie. The sort of face that begs to have sand kicked into it. Elvis Costello, do you know, is a pop star. Last month he was a computer operator.” Although the term
New Wave
wasn’t yet the moniker for this emerging brand of jerky, ironic pop-rock, by late 1977 the so-called punk movement was entering a new phase. In New York, Sire’s Seymour Stein was launching his next CBGB discovery, Talking Heads. At Virgin, Simon Draper signed up XTC—the group that pointed Virgin to its pop future.

Then, on Stiff’s multiartist revue in late 1977, Robinson’s old acquaintance from the early seventies, Ian Dury, began to take off. With backup by his brilliant funk band, the Blockheads, his “Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll” became the rousing anthem of the nationwide tour, while his first album,
New Boots & Panties,
began selling like hotcakes. And from that first lift, Ian Dury began cooking up his sizzling No. 1 English breakthrough, “Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick.”

As the New Wave went big-time in both London and New York, it was all happening the way Robinson and Dury had imagined it in the early seventies—through word of mouth, a grassroots movement was rising from clubs and record shops, bringing music back to the people. There was no better symbol of the antimajor phenomenon than Dury himself, aged thirty-six when he became a star. His body had been so deformed by childhood polio that his handsome face looked enormous on his emaciated torso. He had such difficulty walking, he lurched painfully with the aid of leg braces and a cane. The authentic Quasimodo of the punk eruption, Ian Dury proved that
anyone
can be star, even a cripple—or a “raspberry ripple,” as he described himself in Cockney slang.

For clued-in A&R men, it was a dream harvest. At the London office of United Artists, Andrew Lauder spotted the Stranglers and the Buzzcocks. At Island, Chris Blackwell signed up the Slits and the B-52s. Dave Robinson added to Stiff’s happening roster Devo, Lene Lovich, and his big jackpot, Madness.

The biggest financial winners of all were the middle-weight independents with clout in America. In May 1977, Chrysalis signed a raw, unripe CBGB band with a beautiful blond singer, Deborah Harry. “I signed Blondie,” explained Terry Ellis, “because I thought they had tremendous potential to be a major pop group. And that’s also what
they
wanted to be.” The previous year, his partner in London, Chris Wright, had signed Generation X, technically a punk band but with a handsome, ambitious singer. “I also saw Billy Idol as a potential major pop star,” continued Ellis. “The whole punk ethos that you didn’t need to play an instrument to get up on a stage didn’t appeal to me at the time. But there were important people who came out of that movement.”

Throughout 1978, punk began to cross over into disco. Symbolically, Blondie’s first global smash hit, “Heart of Glass,” was a dance-floor groover complete with pulsating synths and disco high hats. Mick Jagger was another well-traveled opportunist splashing his feet in both waves. For the Stones’ 1978 hit “Some Girls,” “the inspiration for the record was really based in New York and the ways of the town. I think that gave it an extra spur and hardness … Punk and disco were going on at the same time, so it was quite an interesting period.”

Although the term
punk
probably helped certain bands get a start, the word means little to most record men. “I saw nothing punk in the Ramones, I saw a great band,” reasoned Seymour Stein, who always preferred the term
New Wave
. “To me they were a bit influenced by ABBA and Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. I don’t look at what people are wearing, I listen to the music, and their music was commercial from day one.” Watching David Byrne’s intense performances at CBGB, Stein rightly sensed Talking Heads also had pop hits in their belly.

“Seymour does hear songs in any genre or style,” said Byrne. “In the case of the Ramones, he saw past the image and the press and heard that they had some classic—if hilarious—pop songs. I suspect he heard something similar with the Talking Heads, as he could warble some of our material back to us over drinks and Chinese food. He wasn’t making huge promises like some of the major labels were. He genuinely seemed to like some of the songs.”

In much the same manner, a cash cow landed on the plate of A&M’s London boss. “Following the public firing of the Pistols, I felt no credibility to look around the punk scene,” admitted Derek Green, who had endured the lowest hours of his career following the embarrassing saga. “Going to the office felt like going through the motions. I started to see my workmates and record-biz contacts as outdated.” Absent and depressed, Green was coasting around London in his Rolls-Royce when a pop song with a pumping synth came on the radio. Green phoned the deejay for details, then tracked down the band’s manager and producer, Miles Copeland, “an old music biz hippie, who like myself had cut his hair and embraced the new scene.”

It was a lucky coincidence. Because Green had helped Copeland set up his own label some years earlier, the manager happily signed over Squeeze to A&M. Then, hey presto, Copeland presented his brother’s group, the Police, with their punky-reggae debut, “Roxanne.” “I was back on a crusade,” sighed Green, “working with my staff again in a positive way. They had shifted their positions on punk and were no longer seeing it as the end of good music. With the Police, Squeeze and Joe Jackson, we had New Wave acts that could be marketed in America … A&M was back on the cutting edge.” In fact, A&M was now surfing several waves at once. Another English discovery, Supertramp, having relocated to Los Angeles, exploded in 1979 with their blockbuster
Breakfast in America.
As a new decade approached, A&M was becoming the biggest independent in the world.