Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (45 page)

Despite pocketing a record-breaking royalty of 42 percent on the wholesale price of every record sold, Michael Jackson was obsessive about staying on top. Walter Yetnikoff couldn’t believe how “I used to get calls from Michael in the middle of the night. ‘Walter, the record is not number one … what are we going to do?’ I said, ‘We’re going to go to sleep and deal with it tomorrow.’” Realizing that Yetnikoff didn’t share his panic, Michael Jackson came up with a stunt to push
Thriller
back to No. 1. Using the horror film
An American Werewolf in London
as a reference video for the album’s title track, Jackson contacted director John Landis.

The only problem was that Landis’s idea for a fourteen-minute “theatrical short” would cost half a million dollars. Jackson called Yetnikoff, explained the concept, and passed the phone over to Landis, who later remembered “this blast of flaming—‘You motherfucker! What the fuck’s the matter with you?’ The one conversation I ever had with Walter Yetnikoff—you know, in movies where they hold the phone away?”

“OK, I’ll pay,” Jackson told Yetnikoff. However, John Landis and his logistics man, George Folsey, found a better plan—to film forty-five minutes’ worth of behind-the-scenes footage to lead up to the actual short film. Thus they were able to pitch a sixty-minute documentary to TV broadcasters. They initiated a bidding war, until MTV and Showtime each pitched in $250,000 for the rights. The landmark “Thriller” video was broadcast in December 1983, a year after the album’s official release, sparking a second wave of Jackson hysteria.

Despite the drama, Yetnikoff was, well, thrilled with how the whole episode had played out. Thanks to the general excitement aroused by
Thriller
and MTV
,
the entire record industry in 1983 lifted itself out of recession, registering a 4.7 percent increase in business. Dick Asher, forced to forget his antipayola crusade, eloquently noted, “When the tide comes in, all the ships go up.”

It was probably no coincidence that just as
Thriller
exploded, Warner decided to pump serious resources into its most promising talent, Prince—a singing, dancing multi-instrumentalist, who’d released five critically acclaimed funk-rock records on Warner since 1978. Following his first Top 10 commercial success in early 1983 with “Little Red Corvette,” Warner talked its movie division into a risky gamble to relaunch Prince. Filmed throughout the year and released in 1984, the semiautobiographical musical drama film
Purple Rain
was an instant hit—the turning point in Prince’s long and colorful career. The film soundtrack went on to sell over 10 million copies.

As this new generation of televisual pop music exploded across the globe, a technological revolution was sweeping across Japan. Some Japanese and Dutch industrialists believed it had the potential to create a worldwide music boom of historical proportions—the compact disc.

Its most powerful champion was Norio Ohga, a former opera singer and senior executive at Sony. The other industrial giant involved was the Dutch conglomerate Philips, at the time merged with German manufacturer Siemens. Although Sony and Philips had each developed its own variation of the same principle, because Sony had just lost millions with its Betamax videocassette, both companies recognized the wisdom in pooling their patents for one standard format.

The first American company to yield to pressure from CD demonstrators was CBS, who since 1968 were in a joint agreement with Sony to sell their records in Japan. In Europe, it was easy to understand PolyGram’s enthusiasm for the CD; the company was owned by Philips. Crawling out of the disco wreckage, PolyGram had hired a new president from the Philips talent pool, Jan Timmer, a former accountant with a flair for spotting opportunities. Like Ohga, Timmer was convinced the CD was the most important invention of the times.

Realizing PolyGram lacked the music catalog to go it alone, Timmer began prospecting for a big American partner. He offered Warner Communications a merger, finding an ally in David Horowitz and a receptive ear in Steve Ross, who, having bought out Atari, was far better acquainted with new technology than his record moguls. Throughout the early eighties, Ross had even commissioned internal reports investigating whether video games were partly responsible for the waning demands for records. Walter Yetnikoff, however, lobbied Washington and kicked off a public debate in the press. Eventually, the Federal Trade Commission intervened and put an end to the Warner-PolyGram merger on concerns of antitrust.

Despite a few raised eyebrows in the predominantly Jewish record business because compact discs were a Germanic and Japanese collaboration, the figures coming out of Japan were mouthwatering. After just four months in Japanese shops, Sony was already at maximum capacity, selling 10,000 machines and 300,000 discs per month. Sales projections for 1984 were anticipating 10 million discs for Japan alone. The other key detail was price. Japanese consumers were lining up to pay the equivalent of $17, almost twice the price of vinyl, for records they already owned.

Creeping slowly throughout 1983, the volume of American CD trade rose to $103.3 million. Although record labels couldn’t have guessed what lay around the corner, the compact disc was poised to become the biggest boom in the record business’s century-long history. Like the radio giants of the twenties and thirties, the world’s media and hardware conglomerates of the eighties were gazing down from their towers, salivating over this truly global, multibillion-dollar gold mine.

As the most powerful record executive in the world, Walter Yetnikoff, described the sudden sea change from bust to boom, “In a few years, just as cocaine contributed to the decline of what was left of my moral character, Michael Jackson, who never touched a drug, soared into the stratosphere, creating a buying frenzy that consolidated my power base even further. MTV, compact discs—the decade would see a series of innovations that fattened profits and led to excess on my part. Soon the eighties would make the hedonistic seventies appear altruistic.”

27. LEGENDS

In the autumn of 1983, Dave Robinson got an unexpected phone call. It was Chris Blackwell fishing for a new managing director. Although flattered, Robinson at first politely declined, citing his commitment to Stiff, then a seven-year-old indie employing twenty-six.

Still, Robinson didn’t flatly close the door. After Chris Blackwell helped Stiff Records weather the storm of Jake Riviera’s sudden departure in 1977, “we became pretty close,” admitted Robinson. “About three times a year we’d have dinner. When he’d come to town, I’d be high up on his list of people to meet and talk about things.” Now aged thirty-nine and awaiting his second child, Robinson was feeling the pressure to provide security. As for the prestige, “Island was the model.”

Eventually, Blackwell came up with an offer too good to refuse. “He said, ‘I’ll buy half of Stiff, you run Island, I’ll give you a share of Island’s profits.’” The two men met for dinner in a Chinese restaurant in Mayfair, where Blackwell wrote a two-clause contract on a sheet of facsimile paper—one clause for 50 percent of Stiff’s shares, valued at £2 million, and the other clause for the 20 percent profit-share system. They signed their names on the page, shook hands, and ordered their desserts.

Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out so simple. “It never occurred to me that Island would not have money,” sighed Robinson. “When I got into the company and started looking through the accounts, they had no money; they were broke, and in actual fact, they were probably insolvent.” Confronting Blackwell, the legendarily blunt Irishman said, “Look, I should really pull out of this because it’s not happening. Number two, how are you gonna pay me for the Stiff shares?”

Producing another carrot on the table, “Blackwell said, ‘Look, I’ll buy half of Stiff, and three or four years down the road, we’ll sell the whole shooting match. I’ll do very well and you’ll do great.’ So I agreed—foolishly—that the money for the Stiff shares was to be paid quarterly, in installments of £250,000, to help them with cash flow.”

Walking in from Stiff, where he made his employees work hard, “I found Island a little baffling to begin with,” explained Robinson. “I listened to all the albums lined up for release, and I thought, ‘What’s going on here? This is terminal. This can’t work. We haven’t got the money, we haven’t got the release schedule. Who’s been doing all this?’” There was also the bizarre office politics. “I’d be having these very enthusiastic meetings with the guys and then I’m getting no reaction. And I’m very people conscious, I see when people don’t meet your eye. So I’m thinking, ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ It took me a while to suss it out. Then I got a tipoff from one of the staff. Basically Blackwell would get up late in Jamaica, he’d have a few spliffs, and he’d call people in London and ask, ‘What happened today?’

“In those days the fax machine was very new and there was only one in the whole company, so I asked my secretary to copy everything coming in and out. And I read every fax because it was the only way I could find out what was really happening. I was amazed by the faxes. Of course Blackwell was on the end of most of them. Everything was being sent to him—acetates, cuts, artwork. But it wasn’t like he ever got back to anything the following day. He’d have a few spliffs, he’d go to Miami, wander around. No decision would be made. So there was an awful lot of apathy inside the company where staff would send something off knowing they wouldn’t hear anything back for two or three weeks.”

Convinced Blackwell’s absentee control was the source of the company’s dysfunction, Robinson put him on the spot. “What do you think you’re doing? What the fuck? You’ve got no money. You’ve sold me a pup.” Although Blackwell didn’t like getting his nose shoved into the rug stain, in choosing a tough nut like Dave Robinson, he may have been subconsciously asking for a reality check. So, with Blackwell’s mixed blessings, Robinson began a series of unpopular but necessary reforms.

Years of rust had eaten into every nook and cranny of Island. Robinson felt it could only be wiped away by a brief but decisive reign of terror. “I put intercoms on all the desks so that I could listen in to their phone conversations. It drove them potty, but they were all talking to fucking girlfriends, or their mother, or their granny, or booking their American holidays. I had several meetings and I said this isn’t how it’s going to be.”

One staffer in the sales division, Ray Cooper, recalled the unforgettable dawn of the Dave Robinson era. “Island was the only company in the U.K. with open-space offices. It was like a charming big war room with gold discs on the walls. There was a massive board on one side where everything was written down—chart positions, live, artist info. But when Dave got in, he threw out all the potted palm trees and plants. He wanted to make it a little more sterile. Then he put a tannoy [intercom] system in, so you’d press a button and he’d tell you what he wanted you to do. When it was installed, his first command was to a guy called Ken Hallett who did things for Chris. The tannoy suddenly spoke in that voice of Dave’s. ‘Ken Hallett, get me some cheese …
now
!’ Everyone just turned and looked at each other.”

To Robinson’s single-sensitive ears, the one obvious contender in Island’s otherwise “crap” release schedule was “Relax” by an unknown group from Liverpool called Frankie Goes to Hollywood. It had been produced by “Video Killed the Radio Star” creator Trevor Horn, whose Island affiliated sublabel, ZTT, had just been set up in the old Basing Street studio. Throughout the autumn of 1983, “Relax” was languishing around No. 70, failing to break through.

Robinson ordered from America 5,000 copies of a seven-minute remix called the “Sex Mix,” which he’d heard visiting Island’s New York office. Sensing that Christmas was an ideal time to make noise while other record companies were on vacation, Robinson ordered twelve salesmen to tour the strategic retailers, greasing the palms of assistants who played “Relax” on the store’s public address system. The 5,000 copies sold out so that after Christmas, the record sneaked inside the Top 40. That week, a big act pulled out of
Top of the Pops
and, grinning in ominous leather suits, Frankie Goes to Hollywood got their first TV appearance. “Relax” shot up to No. 6 in the second week of January.

Then the media outrage erupted. BBC Radio 1 deejay Mike Read lifted the needle midbroadcast, branding the song “obscene.” Then BBC Radio 1 producer Ted Beston telephoned Robinson personally. “We’re banning ‘Relax’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood,” he announced. “I don’t understand, why would you ban it?” Robinson asked.

“It’s all about ejaculation.”

“Well, how can you say that?” Robinson asked with an air of beguiling innocence. “If you were to ban records that
might
be about something like that, you’d be banning an awful lot of them. The other thing,” continued Robinson, “is that I’ve met Holly Johnson’s mother last week, and this is the first job that Holly’s ever had. He’s been on the dole all his life and suddenly he’s in a band that’s happening. His mother was very pleased—very Irish she was. I can give you her number. You can tell her you’re banning her son’s first record.”

“I’m not talking to her!” blasted Beston with increasing irritation.

“Well, the least you could do is talk to the press and explain why you’re banning it,” responded Robinson with equal force.

To Robinson’s utter amazement, Beston agreed. “Okay, I will. If you set up a press reception, I’ll talk to them.”

That afternoon, 175 media operatives were cordially convened to hear a spokesman for BBC Radio 1 explain, as Robinson put it, that “‘Relax’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood is a song about ejaculation.”

Bingo! Adding to the song’s rebellious cache,
Top of the Pops
was sucked into the affair and banned “Relax” for the five embarrassing weeks it stayed No. 1. In total, the record sold 2 million copies, the third-biggest single of the year in Britain. “I’m happy to accept that ‘Relax’ wouldn’t have
happened
if I hadn’t been there.” said Robinson. “The records wouldn’t have arrived on time. They wouldn’t have got out to the sales force. We wouldn’t have seized the
Top of the Pops
opportunity, and we wouldn’t have had the press conference. They were all Stiff techniques.”