I became a talent scout, record promoter, and record producer. That’s what you did then. Today the A&R (artists and repertoire) man has evolved to become the one who works with artists inside the company. But in the beginning the A&R man was the producer. That was my job. I had to find the artist, sign the artist to the label, help the artist find material, produce the record, get the liner notes done, work with the cover artist, call retailers, and go on the road to promote the record on radio. Everything I wished for I had. I was the jazz producer at Atlantic.
In those years, the record business was a cottage industry. There were studios all over midtown, the independents like Atlantic, Bell Sound, A&R. The majors were Columbia, Capital, and RCA. There was a neighborhood aspect to the music business in New York City, although the district was loose, not like the garment district. When I walked past the Brill Building, I thought it was the Taj Mahal. You would go there if you needed a song. But most of the time, they would cut demos and send them to you.
Talk about New York: Everything was bigger, better, shinier. In the Village they had all these jazz shops; there were gospel shops in Harlem. The first time I came to New York, I went to Sam Goody. It had so many records you could spend a day going through them. You’d see a thousand, two thousand jazz albums; five hundred different blues records; thousands of pop records. If I could have pitched a tent, I would have stayed there.
It was a different time. The publishers had relationships with the record companies; the songwriters had relationships with the publishers. It was a chain of people who interacted with each other. Musicians worked their material out on the road. You’d make a year’s worth of singles in two days and release them separately every three months. If the singles did well, you combined them to make an album.
The record companies stayed with artists longer; they developed artists. If it didn’t work, the record company would say, “Ah, we didn’t do it right; let’s do another one.” If you didn’t make it in three albums, it was, “Ok, we tried.” It was much cheaper to get in the game because radio broke records. Then you could make a record for a few thousand dollars, take a shot.
The company was more family-like in those days. If you had an artist who was successful and he wanted something, you’d give it to him. I had a very successful record with a jazz artist named Les McCann. He found a young singer in Washington and insisted we record her. As a consequence of Les’s insistence, I signed Roberta Flack and produced her first five albums.
When Roberta came to the label, she was just another club singer. She had worked in a DC club for years, where she had a loyal crowd that filled the club every weekend. I recorded maybe thirty songs and picked eight, including “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” a long slow ballad written by a Scottish folk singer. She’d been singing it for years.
One day I came into the office and someone said, “Clint Eastwood’s on the phone for you.” I thought it was a friend of mine. I picked up the phone, and I said, “Listen, Clint, I can’t really talk to you now. I’m on the other line with Winston Churchill.”
But when he said, “This is Clint Eastwood,” I recognized his voice.
“I heard this record by Roberta Flack you produced. I just directed my first movie, Play Misty for Me. And I want to use a song in a key scene, a love scene in a forest.”
I said, “It’s fine with me.”
He said, “I ran out of money. I can only pay you a thousand dollars.”
That’s not much to pay for a song in a film. So I went to Nesuhi and I said, “We can get this Roberta Flack song in this Clint Eastwood film, but he doesn’t have any money.”
Nesuhi said, “A thousand dollars is not enough. Tell him you need more.”
I called him up. He said, “I’m not bargaining; I don’t have any money.” I think the thousand dollars was from his own pocket. He had no budget left.
So I went back, and I finally convinced Nesuhi, “All he’s got is a grand.” Clint Eastwood put the song in the movie.
Now here’s an interesting story that shows you just how random success is. The next thing I know we’re getting hundreds of calls a week at Atlantic about the Roberta Flack song from the movie. The song was five minutes and four seconds, too long for a single. They wouldn’t play a single over 3:00, 3:10 maybe. But all the radio stations were getting calls: “Play this song from the Clint Eastwood movie.”
Bobby Mitchell, the program director of a pop station in New Orleans, calls Atlantic Records. “We’re getting phone calls by the minute for this Roberta Flack song, but it’s too long to play. Edit a single down.”
So I went to the studio and edited a single. In those days we put it on acetates, metal records that would take a few plays. We sent it by special delivery to the radio station. We get a phone call from Bobby Mitchell’s secretary. “Listen, we just got this edited version of the Roberta Flack song. You edited it all wrong.”
“What should I do?”
“Edit it like this.”
So for the hell of it, I did what she said. It was perfect. It sold four million records; it launched Roberta’s career. It was the number-one record of the year for Billboard; it won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year.
By now Roberta’s next two albums had come out, and I’m working on the fourth. She calls me at home from the airport in LA. “I just heard the most incredible song on the headphones in the plane.” There was a young singer named Lori Leiberman, and she did a song called “Killing Me Softly” by two songwriters named Norman Gimbel and Charlie Fox. Roberta sings it to me over the phone. She says, “Listen to the song. Pick out a rhythm section. I’ll come back, and we’ll record this.”
I hear it once; I pick out the players I think would be good for this song. She comes back. We record it in a half hour. Then for the next two days, we put all the vocals on—that was tricky. And for a couple of weeks, my engineer Gene Paul and I mix it. He wanted to make a record where the bass drum was a lead instrument. We spent a lot of time working on that. It had never been done before.
I’ve only made two records in my life that I knew would be hits while I was recording them. The first one was “Killing Me Softly”; it went to number one in two weeks. The other one was in the early seventies. A friend of mine, Doc Pomus, who’d written a lot of great songs like “Save the Last Dance for Me,” called me up and said, “I got your next star.”
I said, “Who’s that?”
“This lunatic from Hawaii. Sign her up.”
Bette Midler had grown up in a Samoan neighborhood in Hawaii. Her father was a housepainter for the navy. I met her in a joint on 56th between Fifth and Sixth called Upstairs at the Downstairs. She looked like a Jewish parrot, all colors and that nose. A bizarre but original look. Before she sang a note, I had the feeling if she was good, she’d be good like Jolson.
The stage was tiny. She had a piano player, a drummer, a guitar player, and a bass player. She goes up on stage. Because I make records, I shut my eyes to see what she sounded like. I figured if she was a dynamic performer, I could get tricked.
She’s in the middle of her second song, I’ve got my eyes closed, she stops and she says, “Hey, you, big shot; what’s the matter? You going to sleep?”
I said, “No. I’m here from the record company. I’m trying to listen to you.”
Atlantic was a little reluctant to sign her because the word was that she was a terrific visual act that wouldn’t translate to records. But I knew she could.
We got two hits from her: “Do You Want to Dance?” and “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” She was like Sophie Tucker; she just nailed them.
With the rock revolution and the Beatles, the recording industry exploded. People who didn’t listen to music before started listening. Conglomerates started buying up the record companies. Atlantic was bought up by Kinney Parking Lots, which was then bought by Warner Seven Arts. By the mid-1970s, the record business I dreamed about and grew up in was over. Music had become big business.
; Today a record company owns a distribution company. So you don’t have dozens of distributors all over the country fighting to distribute the different labels. But I can remember when a guy named Murray or Harry or Sol was on the phone with a distributor from St. Louis. I can remember when the business was filled with wildcatters and con artists and gangsters. There had always been a mob element in show business; the mob had a piece of a club, a piece of this, a piece of that. That’s just the way it went.
There were places where all these characters hung out. A bar called Jim and Andy’s on the West Side in the ’50s where all the musicians went between their recording sessions. A steakhouse called Al and Dick’s, also in the ’50s. All the record guys would come there. Everybody was hustling, everybody was conning, everybody was scheming, everybody was bobbing and weaving. You’d get one story after another. “I got a record in Detroit.” “I just heard a girl—she’s the best ever.” “I cut a session last night. You never heard anything like it.” “We’re gonna ship three hundred thousand.” “I’m on the air.” They were peddling dreams.
DAVE HART: After the war when my father became a copywriter, we became more affluent and moved from Queens to New Rochelle. My mother was a pianist, and it was a very rich cultural life; there were a lot of books, art, and of course music.
We had a black maid who would come in, and after my mom would leave for work, she’d go over to our record machine and put on records. I was about nine then and a rebellious little kid, so I loved it. She’d play the B side of a Ritchie Valens record called “Hey Señorita,” which was a Latin-flavored rock tune, high powered. And she’d sweep me off my feet, and we’d dance to “Hey Señorita, please let me take you home.” I loved it; I loved the rhythms of rock ’n’ roll.
I was bored stiff in New Rochelle and wanted to get into New York City. Starting when I was twelve, I’d get on a train with my friend and go to Carnegie Hall to see Ray Charles and the Raylettes. His music was the R&B basis of rock ’n’ roll.
In 1965, I went off to the University of Miami, and when I came back the next summer, my hair was very long and my musical tastes had changed. I was into the much heavier English-based rock ’n’ roll, like Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton and the Yardbirds and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
That September, I began film school at NYU. Martin Scorsese was the professor. This was before anybody knew he was going to be great. He was like a little Il Duce; he would wave his arms around and wax poetic about films. But even though it was wonderful to have this exciting guy as a teacher, I was bored stiff because it took so long to make a film happen. I was young and impetuous, excited about life.
NYU was on Washington Square, but some of our classes were over on Second Avenue between 6th and 7th Streets. It was a mixed neighborhood, Polish, Irish, and Ukrainian. Young people were living there too, including a friend of mine who had an apartment on Avenue B. It was a drug-infested slum, a great place to be when you’re eighteen years old.
I saw Cream at a theater on Second Avenue, a big place that held about twenty-five hundred people and did some wonderful rock ’n’ roll shows. It was Bill Graham who rented this theater, which was now renamed the Fillmore East. Bill was a promoter, but he also had the idea of selling chunky cookies and granola bars at rock concerts. He took this San Francisco vibe and brought it to New York.
A friend of mine worked there as an usher. One day he called me up. “Why don’t you come and work on my crew?”
Normally the Fillmore East schedule was two shows on Friday and two shows on Saturday, with the ushers getting paid fifteen dollars a night. Then we got a string of shows with Crosby, Stills, and Nash for only one show a night. The word comes down through the house manager that the ushers would be paid $7.50 for the night. The ushers complained. “Dave, why don’t you say something about this?” they said to me. I was something of a mouthpiece.
I mentioned it to the house manager, and he said, “No problem. Bill will talk to you after the show tonight.”
After the show, we go up to talk to him, all twenty of us. Bill was a tough, forthright guy, willing to put his position out front. “Okay, what’s the problem?” he says.
I stand up. “Normally we get paid for two shows. Now we got a string of Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and we’re only getting paid for one show. Our pay is cut in half, we still have the same expense of getting here, being here. We think we should get more.” I sit down. I must have had a little snort of coke. I was energetic that night.
“Okay,” Bill says, “I’ll think about it.”
I come back the next day, and he calls me into his office. “You know you’re a smart kid.”
“Thank you.”
“First thing,” he says, “you’re gonna get your raise. Everybody’s getting ten bucks for the Crosby, Stills, and Nash show.”
“Fine.”
“Second thing,” he says, “you want a job?”
“Sure, I’d love to have a job.”
“Want to go to San Francisco?”
“Well,” I say, “I just met this girl, and I got this great apartment over in the West Village.”
He says, “Don’t worry about it. How about working upstairs? Go up to the third floor and see Herb Spar. You’ll be an agent.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, go ahead.”
That was Saturday. Monday, I go up to the third floor. I walk in and I meet Herb Spar, who has just left William Morris to come and run the Millard Agency for Bill Graham. I introduce myself. Herb interviews me. I know a lot about English rock ’n’ roll because it’s my love. I tell him about a group called Yes, for instance. He freaks out; he just heard about it. I had hit the right chord. He offers me $125 a week, which back then was a lot of money.
I’m an agent. I represent It’s a Beautiful Day, Santana, Janis Joplin, Sea Train—some pretty spectacular groups. I have a territory. I get on the phone and call colleges and local promoters and try to sell them these groups. This little agency isn’t your standard agency. It’s fresh and exciting. It has the power of Bill Graham.
At the same time, all the new cutting-edge acts were coming into the Fillmore, setting the tone for a new kind of rock ’n’ roll. If you played the Fillmore and were successful, you would explode across the country. It was like playing the Palace in the days of vaudeville.
I saw all this because I had also become a security specialist, the front-door operator, and a roamer, who roams around to solve problems, because I was always a good talker, able to use my mouth to negotiate people out of situations.
The first night the Allman Brothers came to the Fillmore East, they were the opening act. I’m not sure exactly when this was; you know what they say about the sixties—if you remember it, you weren’t there. But I do remember they showed up in a converted schoolbus that broke down on 6th Street. They came out and did a fifty-five-minute set and just blew the sold-out house away, completely plastering everybody who was there up against the wall.
The first time the Chicago Transit Authority performed, the first time Elton John performed—as the opening act to Leon Russell—were amazing nights. There were so many of them at the Fillmore East. It was such a powerful time in terms of music taking a quantum jump in its ability to push into your brain. It was incredibly exciting to see these bands come on stage and blow people away with volume, with talent, with new sounds, with the blues-based gutsy, nasty music that came out of the blues of the black man. Bill was great at seeing that his shows were racially mixed. He loved the Chambers Brothers, would bring then in all the time.
The crowd was your typical long-haired, late sixties–early seventies youthful audience. There was a light show; the psychedelia would flow. Drugs were always there. It was easy to obtain just about anything, and it was okay to take a drug any way you wanted to—intravenously, rectally, nasally.
As for sex—it was a wide-open situation. There was a lot of experimentation; you could do just about whatever you wanted. It was part of the cu
lture—free sex, free drugs. There were none of the fears then that there are now except for the fear of getting arrested. But the police were very understanding and knowledgeable about the crowd; if there was a problem, they would solve it. There were frequent fights, but we had a real good security staff to handle them,
We were a nice bunch of friends who worked at the Fillmore East who did lots of different drugs and had lots of different sex. We had a magical life. One of my friends was Michael Emerald. He came from Massachusetts and lived in a car until he got a little apartment on the Lower East Side. He had long black hair, was incredibly strong, a well-built character, and a wonderful sculptor. At the Fillmore, he was the sweep. Someone throws up, call Michael. After the shows, Michael sweeps up. That’s what he did.
When the Grateful Dead came to the Fillmore East, we would make special arrangements for people who took LSD. There was an artists’ office off the stairs to the second balcony where we put kids who were freaking out. We had a doctor on call who was real good at dealing with freak-outs.
Once, near the end of a Grateful Dead show, when the crowd was crazy, I see this kid come running down from the upper balcony. He was just going va-va-va-voom! He runs past the break between the upper balcony and the mezzanine, hits the mezzanine stairs, goes right past me and another security guy, dashes up to the rail, and jumps over the rail. We try to grab him; we miss him. I’m thinking there will be a couple of dead kids down there in the orchestra. But luckily right in front of the balcony was kind of a light stanchion, a box that held equipment. He hit that, and we were able to get ahold of him and pull him up. It was one of those moments when your heart is in your throat.
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