But how hip were David Chase and HBO for hiring someone with emphysema? Just hiring someone older was unusual. My brother Billy was in TV the whole first half of his life (he’s got a great book about it, Get in the Car, Jane!), and he was a big fan of older actors, but the networks always gave him a hard time about hiring them.
And Sil got a new wife. Sort of. During the first season, we only saw his wife a few times. As Sil’s character developed, David decided he was not only the consigliere but also a kind of ambassador to the outside world. So as the writers emphasized the “showbiz” connection in the family (after all, he was running a strip club!), they decided I needed more of a trophy-type wife, maybe a former showgirl.
When they decided to recast, either Georgianne or Sheila called Maureen and suggested she audition. Like I said, she’s actually the actor in the family. I’ve seen her do serious drama: Tennessee Williams, Miller, Ibsen. She went down and read with a hundred other girls. That was one of the things about the show. They didn’t do any favors. Edie Falco’s mother auditioned to play her character Carmela’s mother and didn’t get the part. I never knew Maureen had auditioned until she got the part.
It was fun for her to revisit the old neighborhood—she grew up in Newark, right near where the show is set. Unfortunately, Maureen and I didn’t get to be on-screen together much. There was one arc late in the show when Tony was in the hospital and Silvio was temporary boss, and we had a few nice scenes together. Otherwise, she was with the girls and I was at the Bing.
Over those first seasons, the cast warmed up to each other. We were mostly all from Jersey or New York. I was determined to do whatever I could do to turn the Sopranos into a Rock band.
Speaking of which, I happened to be in an actual Rock band at the time.
When the E Street Band was in Zurich, we spent a night off seeing a Bob Dylan show at the Hallenstadion. About halfway through, a guy came over to me and Nils and said Bob wanted us to play the encore.
I don’t usually do it, but sitting in with someone onstage usually includes rehearsing something at soundcheck, but this was parachuting blindly into the chaos.
I walked on and said hi to my friend Charlie Sexton, who was just beginning his run with Bob’s band. A roadie was desperately trying to hook up a guitar and amp for me. The audience was on their feet going nuts. Bob came over. “Hey,” he said. “I saw you on TV!”
“Yeah, Bob. I’m doing some acting now.”
“Oh, man. You were wearing a wig!”
“Yeah, well…” My mother had said something similar. She had watched an entire scene with me and rewound the take only because my voice sounded familiar. “You see, the character…”
The roadie was trying to adjust the guitar strap. I was half talking to Bob and half adjusting the tone to something in between a clean rhythm and a dirty lead in case he threw me a solo.
“Man, I wasn’t sure it was you!”
Bob was so comfortable on the road that he might as well have been in his living room. That’s how he arranged his band onstage. Very close to each other, like a club, even though he was playing a ten-thousand-seat arena.
“Well, that’s the idea, Bob… uh…” The crowd was screaming louder. “How about I tell you all about it a little later?”
We played “Not Fade Away” and never did finish the conversation. Always memorable seeing Mr. Dylan.
One day a guy came to me from this new thing called XM Satellite Radio. My radio show had been on for a few years, kicking ass all over the country.
The XM guy said he wanted my show on this new satellite format. He wasn’t offering much.
“First of all,” I said, “to create my two-hour weekly show, I had to create an entire format. I have a whole channel ready to go.”
“Whoa,” he said. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves!”
As we talked, I realized that he thought he was in the hardware business—that the ultimate purpose of the company was selling radios!
“You don’t understand what you’ve got here,” I said. “You should be giving the radios away. The money is gonna be in the monthly content subscriptions. That’s the business model of the future. HBO proved it!”
He looked at me like, Why do I even bother talking to these idiotic Artists?, and said he’d get back to me.
I wasn’t holding my breath.
Chris Columbus recommended me to Joe Roth for music supervision on a movie called Christmas with the Kranks, and Joe became a good friend.
We staged a national Underground Garage Battle of the Bands, which aired on MTV.
Joe Strummer died, and Bruce and I played a tribute to him on the Grammy telecast with Dave Grohl and Elvis Costello.
Meanwhile, my friend Scott Greenstein got a gig at the rival satellite radio company, Sirius.
I met Scott sometime in the ’90s; I would run into him from time to time at clubs and events. We became friendly. One night at a party, he asked if I could give him a little advice.
At that time, Scott was a lawyer at Viacom, and he wanted to make a move. He asked how he could make a connection to MTV.
“You don’t want to be at MTV,” I said. “They’re on their way out of music. They’re doing teenage reality programming, and it’s gonna be a whole different scene. What other offers you got?”
He rattled off a bunch of companies.
“Wait,” I said. “What was that last one again?”
“Miramax,” he said.
“Well,” I said. “Let me tell you something. Through learning the hard way, I’ve come to realize creating content is only half the story. Marketing is the other half. Except it’s actually not two different things. It’s two halves of the same thing.”
I was a little bit of an expert in this area. I had been creating things my whole life that nobody knew about.
“I only know one thing about Miramax. Whenever they have a new movie out, I always know about it. That means whoever is calling the shots has real balls and knows what he’s doing.”
So Scott took the gig at Miramax with the infamous Weinstein brothers. After a few weeks, he came back for more advice. He had never been in a situation like this; one minute a lawyer was pushing papers around, the next he was in the social center of showbiz, celebrities, Agents, Managers, Publicists, all that. It was disorienting.
“You want to get things done?” I said. “Make contact with the Artists directly. Get close to the people who matter. The actors and Directors. Everybody else, the Managers, Agents, lawyers, accountants—they’re all a pain in the ass. It’s part of their job. What they do best is say no. Fershtay?”
I’ve given a lot of people a lot of good advice. Sometimes they take it, sometimes they don’t. I have never seen a guy learn so fast in my whole freakin’ life as Scott.
He went from a quiet shy lawyer nobody had ever heard of to the schmooze king of the world in like two years, and he ended up the number three guy at Miramax.
Let me say right here that neither Scott nor I ever witnessed anything having to do with Harvey Weinstein’s horrifying sex life. When the news came out, we could not believe it was the same guy.
But other things began to worry me.
Scott had become close with the actors and Directors, like I suggested, and Harvey began to take advantage of Scott and use him as his hit man. Since Scott was friends with everybody, Harvey let him deliver the bad news.
Harvey was very good at knowing what was commercial, but he started to get heavy-handed, pissing off Directors and Producers by editing their pictures without their involvement.
I believe it came down to a Sean Penn project. Harvey was fucking with Sean. Scott had gotten friendly with Sean, as I was (my brother Billy had been in the movie Taps with him), and now Scott was caught between Sean and Harvey.
“Scott,” I said. “That’s it. I suggested you go there, now I’m telling you to get out. You’ve come a long way in a very short time, but you’re gonna blow all your relationships if you stay
there one minute longer. Your reputation has to be one where you are always on the side of the Artists and not the company. Get the fuck out.”
Once again, Scott wisely listened. He got another gig at USA Films, won an Oscar or two, and eventually ended up as a consultant at Sirius.
XM, the first satellite radio company, was promoting the hell out of itself, something Sirius has never learned to do to this day.
“What can we do?” Scott said to me. “How do we compete?”
I looked at the existing content at both networks. “Everybody’s treating this thing like it’s regular terrestrial radio in the sky,” I said. “It’s a new medium. What would be hip is new-style content. Like mine for a start, which is ready to go.”
“Obviously,” he said. “But what else?”
I gave him a list of ideas, from a poetry channel that would feature the Beats and more (Langston Hughes, Kerouac, Maya Angelou, Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Ferlinghetti, the Dark Room Collective, Nikki Giovanni, etc.), to TV channels on the radio like CNN, to music channels devoted to individual artists.
“Why do that?” he said. I told him regular radio wasn’t playing the greatest music ever made anymore. And since the Renaissance was over, there were only a finite number of truly great artists. They needed to be accessible at all times for future generations.
“You will be the museum where the Rembrandts, Renoirs, and Dalis hang,” I said. “Where on radio can you hear Frank Sinatra? Elvis Presley? Nowhere. The Beatles? The Stones? On a regular basis? Only on my station. The best artists, from the Byrds to Led Zeppelin to Springsteen to U2 to Pearl Jam, should have their own stations.”
No matter what was trendy, I said, people still wanted to hear the greatest music ever made.
“And by the way, I have a second format ready to go.”
A quick digression (I should call this book Unrequited Digressions).
Ten years earlier, Lance Freed, my publisher, had sent me to Nashville to meet a wild dude named David Conrad who was running his Nashville office. I love characters, and he was one.
At the time, a new guy named Billy Ray Cyrus had a monster hit, “Achy Breaky Heart.” The single was so big that the wiser executives felt he needed his next record to establish some credibility, or he’d be a flash in the pan. They asked me to write a song for him.
I didn’t have the heart to tell them that if you don’t start with credibility, it’s a long slow climb up that mountain, but what the hell, I went. I had nothing better to do. Plus I was feeling grateful to Lance.
Billy was in the studio working on a new album. He turned out to be a really great guy. Probably as confused about what I was doing there as I was.
After the session, his band was packing up. “What’s going on?” I said.
“We’ve got a gig tonight,” he said.
“A gig? In the middle of recording?”
“Yeah. You don’t do that in the Rock world?”
Fuck no.
We got to the arena. The crowd was coming in, and his band was setting up their own equipment.
In front of everybody.
I was appalled.
“Billy,” I said. “What the fuck? You have a big hit. You’re a big star. This is your band. They don’t have to do that anymore, if they ever did!”
“Well,” he said, “we have kind of an old-school Manager and he likes to save money, I guess.”
After the show, the artist was obligated to go to a special fan area and sign autographs for an hour or two!
The Country world was sure different.
During that trip, I met Tony Brown, who had been Elvis Presley’s piano player and was now a successful Producer running his own company. I was expressing my shock that Johnny Cash was no longer welcome at Country Radio.
“I can’t get anything I do on the radio anymore!” he said. “George Jones, the Mavericks, Emmylou Harris.”
“How do you establish a new format?” I asked him.
“Damned if I know,” Tony laughed, “but if you ever figure it out, let me know. We sure could use it.”
While I was there, I wrote Billy Ray a cool song that he didn’t use. Somebody somewhere in Nashville has a hit sitting in a desk drawer waiting to happen.
And, by the way, Billy ended up doing just fine, and I’m very happy about his continued success. Nice when the good guys win.
So I started the format Tony was waiting for; I called it “Outlaw Country.” It begins with the classics: Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, David Allan Coe, at the least. I added all three generations of Hank Williams; Alt-Country like Jason and the Scorchers, Uncle Tupelo, Drive-By Truckers; in-betweeners like Emmylou Harris, Delbert McClinton, Dwight Yoakam; newer Country like Sturgill Simpson, Kacey Musgraves, Jason Isbell, Margo Price, Hellbound Glory; and, finally, the Country side of Rock, the Byrds, Dylan, Buffalo Springfield, the Youngbloods, Moby Grape, the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Band, the Eagles, Jackson Browne, and Bruce.
How could the Band have no format? They had one now. But I didn’t know what to do with it until almost a decade later, when I told Scott Greenstein that I had a second format ready to go.
“Don’t you think we should get the first one going first?”
“Nope. This is too important to wait another minute.”
For both formats, I wanted DJs who were either old-school or could tell stories firsthand.
My first call was to Wild Bill Kelly, whose completely insane format on WFMU was inspirational. He had worked there for like thirty years for free, so I felt good giving him his first paycheck.
I got my old friend Kid Leo out of the record-company business and back where he belonged, on the radio. He also became my Program Director until he moved to the Carolinas and Dennis Mortensen took over.
Andrew Loog Oldham had stolen the Rolling Stones from Giorgio Gomelsky and had publicized and produced their crucial first five years. I offered gigs to both Andrew and Giorgio, but only Andrew took it. Giorgio just wanted to talk. Andrew became my morning guy until he wasn’t. Michael Des Barres, the Marquis MDB, enjoys that position now.
I tried to talk Jerry Blavat, one of the last of the legendary DJs, into it, telling him he would become a legend to a whole new generation, but he said he really couldn’t relate to anything after 1959.
On the Country side, I knew I wouldn’t be able to watch the channel as closely. A girl named Gloria who worked for me recommended Jeremy Tepper as Program Director. I got lucky; he got it right away and has done a great job ever since.
Again, I wanted characters, personalities who could deliver stories in first person, and I got them. Cowboy Jack Clement, Elizabeth Cook, Steve Earle, Shooter Jennings—and who the hell else would hire Mojo Nixon?
And so Underground Garage (Channel 21) and Outlaw Country (Channel 60) were born, and Sirius Satellite had its first two original formats.
By 2004, my syndicated Underground Garage format had really come together, and it became obvious to us that we should celebrate our uniqueness with an annual festival, broadcast on Sirius.
I entrusted the planning to Alex Ewen, who had started out as Director of my Solidarity Foundation and had pretty much taken over all my businesses.
We had quite an impressive lineup, I must say. A lot of reunions.
Iggy and the Stooges, the New York Dolls, Bo Diddley, the Strokes, Nancy Sinatra, Big Star (band), the Pretty Things, the Creation, the Electric Prunes, the Chocolate Watchband, the Chesterfield Kings, the Pete Best Band, Joan Jett, the Dictators, and twenty-five others.
We were snakebit right from the start.
First of all, we had two deaths before we started. A few months before our festival, the New York Dolls had reunited for a show in London curated by Morrissey. A few weeks after that, the band’s bassist, Arthur Kane, came down with a flu and went to a doctor in LA. It wasn’t a flu. It was leukemia. Two hours later he was dead.
Richard Tepp, lead singer of Richard and the Young Lion
s, also succumbed to leukemia, just days after we had finished recording the vocals for the band’s first proper album.
But we soldiered on. I had a vision for the festival. There hadn’t been a 3-D movie in a long time—and maybe never a concert film shot in 3-D—so I wanted to bring it back. Chris Columbus was going to shoot it, and we had a distribution deal under discussion. The day of the concert, Chris received word that his young daughter had fallen off an exercise machine and injured herself. He rushed home to Chicago.
Even though Chris had positioned the cameras and designed the entire shoot, because he didn’t actually physically shoot it, the deal fell through.
That same morning, Hurricane Danielle changed direction and headed straight toward New York.
Weathermen advised everyone to stay home.
Those brave enough to come to Randall’s Island that day saw a miraculous and historic lineup of artists, along with equally historic technical difficulties.
I designed the show to resemble the old Alan Freed / Dick Clark multiact shows. We had a special rotating stage built so that one act could go right into the next. The stage broke after the third band, Davie Allan and the Arrows, so we went crazy with changeovers all day, but we got it in.
Even given the headaches and hurdles, there were so many highlights: Alex Chilton’s Big Star, the reunited Creation, the rarely seen Pretty Things, Bo Diddley still rockin’ thirty years after we’d done the debutante party, Nancy Sinatra with sixty go-go girls choreographed by Maureen, and Iggy running and leaping onto the huge 3-D camera.
We’ll never see it because the amazing footage from the show, 3-D and video, was stolen or lost.
Unrequited Infatuations Page 29
