Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (47 page)

In England, U2’s brief chart success in October 1984 was quickly eclipsed by the next Frankie Goes to Hollywood tsunami. Their long-awaited double album
Welcome to the Pleasuredome
was the big payoff after almost one year of singles and remixes. In November 1984, EMI’s distribution wing handed Island a £6 million check for preorders alone. Charting a third No. 1 single in December, “The Power of Love,” Island totted up the year’s spoils and celebrated its best-ever financial performance. After a long spell in the doldrums, the rusty Caribbean cruiser had sailed off into the rapidly expanding CD market of the mid-1980s.

Alas, as Robinson bleakly concluded, “all of that was not worthwhile because everything we made, Blackwell squandered on a couple more movies that never came out.” After just a year working together, relations between the two record men became strained as Dave Robinson realized large sums of money were being siphoned out the back door into Blackwell’s many projects. “In that year of 1984, we made something like £56 million,” explained Robinson. “It paid off all of Island’s debts, which was pretty amazing, and if you calculate my twenty percent profit share, it would have been £2 million from the £8 million or so profit.”

However, in spring 1985, Robinson was not paid his sixth installment for Stiff and realized “the profit share was bullshit.” In fact, the treasure chest was so bare, Island couldn’t pay U2 the £5 million they were owed in royalties.

Island’s CFO, Art Jaeger, attested, “The royalty check [U2] were gonna get was going to be their first big royalty check. And they were as excited as could be … And all of a sudden, that check wasn’t there. That gave those people the opportunity—the absolute opportunity—to do whatever they wanted, including [signing with] CBS Records [who] at the time had offered them a huge North American deal, which made a lot of sense because Island Records in the U.S. wasn’t really that great, it hadn’t broken them yet. So they could still stay with Chris for the rest of the world and be with CBS [for North America]. A lot of people back then said that Island was bankrupt; that if you had ten percent of Island or ninety-seven percent of Island, you possibly had nothing. Yet Bono decided to stay with Chris. And he took that ten percent and that ten percent became $30 million.”

Unlike U2, Dave Robinson was not offered any alternative deal. “Blackwell moved the goalposts constantly,” said Robinson, who felt cheated by the whole episode. On the question of how the original deal was undone, Robinson pointed to Blackwell’s fiercely loyal money handlers, who “would have taken a bullet for him … They were always trying to second-guess him and lead him onto the path of good, commercial sense, which he seldom was on. And so he allowed them to have the impression that I had up-sold them a company and not given them details of the contracts, the income, the money in the bank, etc. And that’s what Blackwell would always do with everybody; he’d sell his operators.”

Robinson left in August 1985. His severance was handled by Art Jaeger. “To cut a long story short,” Robinson said, “1984 was great, 1985 was shit because all the money had gone. The company was broke and had no more products. There was nothing for me to do. So in that second year, it was starting to get really messy because Blackwell didn’t want to address either the company’s problems or my problems. His inner circle figured the way to get rid of me was to unhinge Stiff.”

In the middle of this mess, Robinson spotted and signed to Stiff a peculiar trad-punk group—the Pogues, his last great discovery before the walls caved in. Although an acquired taste, their 1985 album,
Rum, Sodomy & The Lash
became a classic. Thirty years later, songs like “A Pair of Brown Eyes” and “The Body of an American” are on their way to becoming public domain anthems that future generations, stumbling home from a thousand pubs, will howl at the moon for years to come.

For Chris Blackwell, the battlefront had shifted to the ghettos of Washington, D.C., where millions of dollars were gurgling down a drain. “Oh God,” Charly Prevost shuddered at the mere mention of the dreaded film. “
Good to Go
had something to do with our demise—he and I. The deal we had with Atlantic Records was one where we got paid every month, after expenses and reserves. And sometimes the check was good and sometimes there was no check. And the reason there’d be no check was because Chris had taken it to put in the
Good to Go
production … Island Pictures was the Los Angeles outfit that he was funneling so much dough into.”

Convinced the so-called
go-go
scene of D.C. was the next big thing, Blackwell was signing up a whole pool of go-go acts. “We had this big commitment to go-go,” recalled Prevost. “We had to get it to go national. [But] no amount of push, bribes, publicity, or personal appearances could get it going outside the ghetto of D.C.” Meanwhile, the whole film production descended into disaster. The director walked out; nobody wanted to finance or even release it.

“It was sucking dollars out of the company, and at the time we were trying to break ‘Addicted to Love’ by Robert Palmer,” continued Prevost. “Chris was on the phone talking about
Good to Go
and ‘Why aren’t you down here? And how much are you doing to break this?’ He thought I did not have enough relationship with the urban community—the African American community—to be able to help him out. And he was right. I didn’t have it naturally. I was concerned with the rock side. There was a division in the company between those who helped him on
Good to Go
and those of us who were trying to make profits.”

Blackwell was like a gambler hypnotized by a slot machine. His commitment to
Good to Go
went from reckless to suicidal. Pulling out monthly checks as big as $600,000, he began to bleed the cash cow dry. “Look at the end of 1985,” sighed Prevost. “We had just released ‘Addicted to Love,’ and we knew we had a number-one record.” In fact, because Island had a reputation for not paying its bills, Prevost had to pay independent promoters a whopping $400,000 to get the song all over the airwaves. “I had at least sixty people working in the New York office, but we had to get rid of most of them. We came back to work in January with maybe fifteen, because we couldn’t afford the payroll.” Art Jaeger flew in to handle the mess—laying off staff and earning himself the nickname “
Art the Assassin
.” To his credit, Jaeger paid the skeleton staff with his own savings.

In a tense meeting in Blackwell’s apartment, Prevost was pushed out just a week before Robert Palmer hit No. 1 in the spring of 1986. For the Canadian, it was tough justice because “when I started at the company they were making one or two million a year. And when I left, we managed to get it up into the twenties. So over a two-year spread it was good. But Chris was, I dunno. You talk about money with him—I don’t know if you use a credit card, but if you do, you keep the receipt generally. Chris would always just throw ’em away. He didn’t care. So he always had a cavalier attitude about the amount of money we had. And it was tough because you can’t compete. And he wanted to compete.”

Meanwhile, back in Ireland, U2 was reeling from their royalty shock. Famous but still not rich, they spent over a year building a monster in their backyard—
The Joshua Tree,
a purpose-built American breakthrough machine. From his Principle Management office in Dublin, Paul McGuinness was investing in U2’s very own stage and roof company, Upfront/EGS, a state-of-the-art rig allowing tighter stadium scheduling, which they sometimes rented to other acts. When U2 exploded on tour in 1987, their T-shirt merchandising alone became a multimillion-dollar cash cow.

It was a stark contrast to the fate of that other Irishman, Dave Robinson, who crawled out of the wreckage with a Stiff on his shoulders. Although he got to keep the fifth installment of £250,000, once the £1 million loan was effectively recouped by four other payments, his lawsuit against Blackwell proved slow and costly. After two days in court, he accepted a settlement of £75,000, which barely covered his legal fees. “It altered my life, it altered my relationships, it altered my kids’ relationships,” confessed Robinson in a rare flash of emotion. “I think to myself, ‘What a fucking idiot you are, Robbo. If you’d been a nasty cunt—which you should have been—you would have put the boot in and you’d be like McGuinness sitting on ten percent or whatever. You were in the driving seat and you should have driven it then.’ I was the Irish geezer who was prepared to put up with an awful lot of shit and still fight on to pull his company out of the fucking mire. I was still wanting to stand there and say ‘I did it!’ It was foolish. It’s ego, and maybe Chris Blackwell knew more about me than I knew about myself!”

When trying to explain Chris Blackwell’s extraordinary knack of always riding into the sunset, Dave Robinson referred to an old Irish proverb, “The lucky man has only to be born.” While still laughing at its cruel simplicity, he pulled out another. “You have to believe in luck, because how else can you explain why people you can’t stand are doing well?”

“What [Chris Blackwell] was brilliant at was choosing creative people and giving them their shot. He was not a great boss,” said former managing director Tim Clark with a firmly punctuated silence. “He was great at spending money. There were plenty of occasions when there’d be a film in the pipeline and he’d say, ‘don’t worry, we’re just going to put in a little bit of feed money and that’s it, I’ll raise the rest.’ But the money didn’t get raised and he carried on spending. And that was just bonkers! But you know, Chris, when approached about this sort of stuff, would just behave like a naughty schoolboy. He grinned and chortled and charmed his way out of it. And at the end of the day, he was actually the one that found the solution to the financial problems.”

Another Island lifer, Lionel Conway, offered his own take on the Chris Blackwell enigma. “He’s a gambler, always has been a gambler. When we were in Nassau, he’d go in and he liked a bet.” It wasn’t just movies, said Conway. “There were other things he financed that put a complete dent in what we were doing because he needed cash. He financed this woman with a whole series of exercise videos, plus venues, the equivalent of Jane Fonda. I know we put a lot of cash into it … and it was a huge cash-flow problem. The thing about Blackwell, he’s an entrepreneur. You couldn’t stop him from doing things if he really wanted to see if there was anything in it.”

When it came to replenishing the treasure chest, “his deal-making was just amazing,” exclaimed Conway. “The
way
he always had the upper hand. Because everybody wanted to do business with Island. They were a phenomenal label and he was a phenomenal A&R magnet. People wanted to be with him … He was a terrific deal-maker. And it was his charm. ‘The baby-faced killer,’ yes, absolutely.”

As Art Jaeger remembered “In 1985 or 1986, whenever it was, Chris sends me down to South Beach, Miami, to buy this hotel called the Marlin. So I go down there, and the whole place is just a total slum … Basically, he was on the absolute forefront of what now is one of the hottest areas for music and young people and great hotels. After the Marlin, other hotels were bought. A little bit later, he asked me to try and sign this young designer that had just graduated so that he could be the chief designer for what would be the Island Trading Company. And this guy’s name was Marc Jacobs.”

Ultimately, the secret to Chris Blackwell’s long and successful career was probably his capacity to go with the flow yet remain determined. Rather like water, Chris Blackwell easily changed directions yet remained bound by the force of nature to seek one final destination, the ocean-wide vista of his own success. As the man himself admitted, “You adjust, deal with whatever you have to go through at any time. Human beings are very adaptable. I believe you have to play the cards you’re dealt as well as you can play them. You can’t just throw in the hand.”

28. ROMANS

If anyone stood above the fray looking down on Britain’s landscape of tribal chieftains, it had to be Maurice Oberstein. Notorious for his silly hats,
Obie
was a gay, eccentric New Yorker who became the most powerful vinyl warlord in Britain.

Although his father, Eli, had been an A&R man at RCA, young Maurice did not inherit the musical ear. Taking command of CBS’s London office, where he clocked up forty British No. 1 singles in ten years, Obie was a red-blooded conquistador who viewed the record business as an animal kingdom. “Think of us as being in the jungle,” he told Derek Green in one tense negotiation. “I’m an elephant and you’re an ant. I tread on you. And kill you. And I don’t even know I’ve done it.”

According to one rumor in the early eighties, every time his A&R man, Muff Winwood, came looking to sign a band, Obie demanded that he beg on his knees like a dog. Another rumor was that if his red setter, Charlie, didn’t wag his tail to a visiting band, Obie wouldn’t sign the contract. His number two at CBS, former Island managing director David Betteridge, suspects that many of the tales following Obie around began as jokes that lower-level staff, through a process like the telephone game, exaggerated into horror stories. What Betteridge did vividly recall was the eerie manner in which, due to polyps on his vocal chords, Obie’s legendary fits of screaming flipped in and out of falsetto.

All who worked closely with Obie agreed that behind his burlesque rudeness was an immensely astute mind. He was a natural-born general who understood how a large record corporation should be led from the front and supported from behind. Parading with his dog, he would inspect the floors, listening intently to employees’ organizational problems.

Earning himself the posthumous title of “the Architect,” Obie was the first to express highly prescient theories about where the record industry was moving. In the late seventies, Obie warned, “Majors and indies have been competing on ‘
my music is better than your music
’ basis. But now it’s gonna be my marketing clout is better than yours.” From that realization, Obie began to understand the wider consequences of what chess players call material advantage.