Tested and strengthened by the failed boycott, America’s regional independent radio promoters were gradually becoming the official gatekeepers to hitland. They even dared to raise their fees when Warner came back with its tail between its legs. In an industry that admires mischief, most onlookers couldn’t help but smirk. As every veteran knew, payola had been around since the late forties when getting R&B records on air meant slipping $50 into the paw of some underpaid jock. The big difference was that now, influential deejays were expecting as much as $10,000 to spin records all over a key region—a fee unaffordable to small record labels. These so-called promoters couldn’t turn shit to gold, but even in a time of recession, theirs was a proven system, which, by keeping out the poor, made it easier for the big labels to stay on top.
25. SHADOWS
As far as the moguls were concerned, the disco bubble had burst like a septic boil. Still, right under their runny noses, New York nightlife continued to foreshadow the future of pop music.
In Harlem and the Bronx, thanks to a new generation of club deejays, the turntable had become an instrument in its own right. In 1979, Sugar Hill Records was opened by a former soul singer, Sylvia Robinson, with the financial help of the notorious Morris Levy. Her first release was the seminal “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang. A few months later, Blondie mixed postpunk and rap ingredients into an eerie six-minute groover, “Rapture”—their first No. 1 in America, complete with a video featuring graffiti artists. Although what we retrospectively call hip-hop had yet to find its name, the last child of the New Wave was officially born.
“By 1979, disco had a negative connotation, and it took the blame for the recession,” explained Tom Silverman. “So we changed our name from Disco News to Dance Music Report. We didn’t really like the word disco anyway because it was just the place, not the music itself. We trademarked the term ‘DOR,’ dance-oriented rock, and began reporting any kind of music that people were dancing to in clubs. That’s when I made my calls to retail and discovered break beats.”
Silverman telephoned Downstairs Records, a popular deejay store on 6th Avenue and Forty-third Street, and was informed about their new Breaks Room. “I went down. It was a separate room about the size of a closet. There’s just a guy at a desk, and behind him is this strange selection of records: Bob James, the Monkees, Kraftwerk, the Incredible Bongo Band, Cerrone, Billy Squier, a certain record by the Eagles—all these records that seemingly had nothing to do with each other. But there’s this line of seventeen-year-old kids out the door—waiting to buy two copies of each!”
Knowing they were amateur deejays too young to have seen these records come out, Silverman asked, “How do you know which ones to buy?”
“We buy what Afrika Bambaataa plays,” replied a customer.
Bemused but curious, Silverman tracked down the mysterious name to a club in the Bronx.
“It was this crazy mélange of music: James Brown, Sly & the Family Stone, George Clinton—all this funk mixed with rock and disco and other things. But they were only playing four or eight bars and looping them.” Coming in as a reporter, Silverman was equally fascinated by the background story of Afrika Bambaataa, a reformed Black Spades gang member who began Zulu Nation, a community culture movement aiming to pacify and uplift New York’s ghettos. “There was still a lot of segregation back then and kids were getting killed. But break-dancing, graffiti, rapping, deejaying,” noted Silverman, “these were forms of expression available to people without any money.” Wanting to get Afrika Bambaataa’s electrifying performances on record, Silverman borrowed $5,000 from his parents and set up Tommy Boy in 1981. “I looked at Sugar Hill Records and realized you didn’t need to be a major label. You didn’t even need to be smart!”
Meanwhile, in downtown Manhattan, a new dance scene was rapidly evolving from where disco and punk had started. One eyewitness was Craig Kallman, who became the CEO of Atlantic Records in 2005. Kallman was a teenager at the time, sniffing around New York’s record stores, determined to get a deejay residency. “When the disco era died, it all moved downtown,” he explained. “It had been uptown with Studio 54, Xenon, and Copacabana, which were driven by the jet-set, celebrity crowd. But because living in New York City was more affordable back then, you had all these pockets on the Lower East and West Sides.” Multicultural, sociologically diverse, and distinctly seedy at the edges, these new hot spots were “black, white, Hispanic, gay, straight, transvestite. There were musicians, poets, painters, drug dealers, actors, journalists, you name it.”
In addition to clubs like the punky Hurrah on West Sixty-second and the Loft-inspired Paradise Garage downtown, there was a new superclub on West Thirty-seventh Street capturing the very essence of the moment. Opened in 1979 by an adventurous German impresario named Rudolf Pieper, “Danceteria was the ultimate melting pot,” according to Kallman. Mixing European artiness with New York multiculturalism, “it had different deejays and musical themes on four distinct floors. I became a resident deejay on Friday and Saturday, trading nights with my compatriot, the legendary Mark Kamins.”
Scouring Manhattan’s coolest record stores every Saturday, Kallman, like most other deejays of the nascent dance scene, moved between Downstairs Records, Vinyl Mania, 99 Records, Downtown Records, Rock & Soul, and Rocks in Your Head—a whole network of genre-specific vinyl hives. “I was buying everything from Fela Kuti to James Brown, New Order to Lee Perry, Eric B. & Rakim to Sylvester, Jorge Ben to Parliament-Funkadelic, Kraftwerk to the Clash. I wanted to be known as the guy that whatever night you were having—reggae, punk, funk, disco, hip-hop, Brazilian, or krautrock—you called Craig.”
Apart from its diverse mix of dance floors, Danceteria was also showcasing live bands from the cutting edge. Citing Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Depeche Mode, and Soft Cell as the pacesetters of New York’s nascent dance scene, Kallman concluded with audible nostalgia, “This was the post-punk, Sire Records era. Seymour Stein was king!”
From its Ramones-fueled liftoff in the late seventies, Sire Records had become New York’s most happening record label. Bohemian in spirit but plugged into the WEA machinery, the Brooklyn-bred Seymour Stein had sold half the label to Warner Communications in 1978. Just thirty-six, Stein had begun his career as young as fifteen compiling overseas charts for Billboard’s Paul Ackerman, the erudite editor who had also been so important in Jerry Wexler’s education. “When I first started working at Billboard, more hits were coming out of Germany, France, and Italy than the U.K.,” said Stein, who never forgot the lesson. “When I got into the business on my own, one of the first sources of repertoire I would look at is music from other territories.”
Having learned the actual business as an apprentice for Syd Nathan, the Cincinnati pioneer behind King Records, Stein gained a foothold in the American indie business by negotiating dirt-cheap licenses from EMI. From there, he and Sire cofounder Richard Gottehrer invested in a promising British indie, Mike Vernon’s Blue Horizon, whose classics included the original Fleetwood Mac. “When I first started coming over to England in the early sixties, I stayed in people’s houses,” explained Stein. “To save money, Mike Vernon insisted I stay with him. He lived in a Hampstead Garden suburb and his wife cooked a lot. I would have spaghetti on toast and beans on toast. If my mother knew that I was eating that kind of food, I would have been whipped!”
Stein’s trips to London became so frequent, he eventually set himself up with a bolthole near Baker Street. Warner’s millionaire executives at the time joked, “Seymour Stein, see less money,” but as events would illustrate, Warner’s fortunes in the eighties would owe much to his street-smart ways. As Pretenders singer and Sire signature Chrissie Hynde described their first meeting in London in 1979, “I was given Seymour’s address and walked over there, knocked on his door … Seymour answered, asking if I wanted to go out to a nearby antique market. Okay. So we walked over to a flea market and just rooted around.”
On a typical Saturday in London, Stein would
wander around the Portobello Market, then drop into the nearby Rough Trade store, which by 1980 was bursting at the seams, distributing from its back office hundreds of thousands of records for hot groups like the Specials, the Undertones, and Joy Division. Through his London connections, Stein signed up the North American rights to the Rezillos, the Undertones, Echo & the Bunnymen, Simple Minds, Madness, the English Beat, Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, and the Cure.
One of the fledgling labels being distributed by Rough Trade was also feeling the transatlantic pulse: Factory Records, a Manchester collective dreamed up in 1979 by Joy Division manager Rob Gretton. Five months after the suicide of Ian Curtis in May 1980, the renamed New Order was in New York as supporting act for their funkier sister group A Certain Ratio. Present on the trip were Factory codirectors Rob Gretton, Tony Wilson, and Martin Hannett, the label producer.
“The three weeks saw the team spending a lot of time either playing or hanging out at Hurrah’s and Danceteria,” remembered Wilson. “Cool design. Clubs as venue and disco and style lounge all in one. The kind of clubs that David Byrne could go to the toilet in.” That winter, a crazy idea took root as Wilson and Gretton asked themselves, “If New York had them, then why the fuck didn’t Manchester?” With profits from Joy Division’s posthumous breakthrough pouring in, Gretton and Wilson dreamed up their biggest gamble, a New York–style superclub in Manchester. Including a stage, discotheque, and adjoining lounges, the contemporary-designed Hacienda was built in 1981.
Of all the British indies being distributed through Rough Trade’s back office, there was one with a particularly modern tang that New York dance floors were going crazy for. Mute was the synth-pop label behind Depeche Mode—Seymour Stein’s biggest-ever American import. Mute’s founder, Daniel Miller, was also the producer of Soft Cell’s seminal 12-inch “Memorabilia,” released in 1981 on Some Bizarre.
As the commercial success of British synth-pop acts like Gary Numan, the Human League, OMD, and Visage illustrated, the synthesizer was in vogue. Unlike all the competition listening to Kraftwerk, Daniel Miller had a special feel for Germanic futurism. He was the son of Austrian refugees—effectively a love child from the Vienna exodus in 1938. “My parents didn’t know each other before they met in London,” explained Miller. “My father when he came to London didn’t speak a word of English, which is tricky if you’re going to be an actor. But during the war, he ran quite a renowned cabaret club for Austrian émigrés called the Lantern, which turned into a meeting point for Austrian and German refugees. My mother joined as an actress, and that’s how they met.
“During the war, my parents both worked for the BBC German service,” continued Miller. “Because he was a great impersonator, on one April Fool’s Day during the war, he spoofed a Hitler speech, which was broadcast in Germany. It was on the edge of being believable. It was hilarious; a lot of people actually thought it was Hitler.”
When Daniel Miller was born in 1951, the dark shadow of the war was locked away out of children’s reach. In the cosmopolitan neighborhood of northwest London, Daniel Miller’s childhood was immersed in the postwar spirit of rebuilding. “In those days kids were allowed to play on the street, and there were lots of kids my age. But one day when I was about four or five, I must have heard something at school, because I asked them, ‘Who is Adolf Hitler?’ And I just remember them looking at each other as if to say, ‘Okay, we weren’t expecting this quite so early … er … what are we going to say?’”
His father, Martin Miller, was regularly in demand for British TV, films, and stage plays. He appeared in the first one thousand performances of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap and played roles in The Pink Panther, The Prisoner, Doctor Who, and The Avengers. Daniel remembered going to film sets as a child. “One memory in particular stands out; my father was in the film Exodus, which was made in Israel. We made that a big trip, just my mum, my dad, and myself. I must have been about nine at the time.”
Following their own brand of humanist, liberal Judaism, the Miller family wasn’t religious, although they did treasure the cultural side of Jewish history. Daniel also inherited some of his parents’ darker memories, which he began to understand as he entered manhood. “My father never went back to Vienna after the war. The bitterness I felt from my parents was very much geared towards Austria rather than Germany because it was so personal, because of the nature of the Anschluss and what happened in Vienna—how people from one day to the next turned against the Jews. You turned up for work and suddenly they’d say, ‘We can’t employ you any more,’ you were thrown out of university, you had trouble getting into the hospitals, you had to wear a star, you had to clean the streets. It was very direct for my parents, the Austrian experience.”
At the heart of these old wounds, his parents saw faces of friends and family. “A lot got out just in time,” explained Miller, “but not everybody did. Especially the elderly. It was tragic. The leaving behind of people is the most traumatic thing for those who survived. And it forged their characters for the rest of their lives.”
As a sixty-three-year-old man, Miller had come to accept “all that probably did creep into my character. I was very conscious of it.” At the same time, “when you grow up in that environment, it is very normal. And I had friends who had similar histories.” Also, as a young man, Daniel Miller felt a certain affinity with young Germans, who, like himself, had been born into a type of haunted house. Not only was Daniel Miller’s first girlfriend German, his parents didn’t object.
Although he had been heavily into music as a boy, Miller’s big awakening occurred shortly after his father died in 1969. “There was a combination of things that happened around the same time,” explained Miller. “I was looking for something new and then I came across an Amon Düül record in a shop and I heard Can on John Peel. I just thought, ‘Wow!’ It wasn’t Anglo-American, it wasn’t based on blues, it wasn’t based on traditions of British pop music.
“Don’t forget, there wasn’t just krautrock,” continued Miller who at the time was studying film and television at the Guildford School of Art. “There were all the German filmmakers like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders. They were redefining a sort of new German culture that wiped away the hangover from the war, but at the same time, they were conscious of not basing this new culture on American or English influences.”
Miller got his first jobs editing commercials, then deejayed in Switzerland. Drawn back to London by the punk explosion, he bought a Korg 700S synthesizer and TEAC four-track recorder and made his own homemade recordings. One fateful day in 1978, aged twenty-seven, he stepped nervously into the Rough Trade shop with a test pressing under his arm. Geoff Travis appeared from the back office and played the record on the store’s sound system. Travis nodded his head to the edgy electronica interlaced with abstract spoken word, as customers continued browsing through the bins. When the music came to an end, Travis nonchalantly ordered 2,000 copies. Mute was in business.
When returning from a tour, Miller found a pile of demos on his doorstep. Apparently other musicians who bought his first single had mailed their demos to the address on the sleeve. He started listening to the creations of his admirers, and in 1979 he signed Fad Gadget. The following year, he found Depeche Mode, who in 1981 broke into the British charts with their second single on Mute, “New Life,” shortly before scoring their first major hit, “Just Can’t Get Enough”—whose American rights Seymour Stein gladly scooped up.
Also listening to Mute’s early releases was Jamaican beauty Grace Jones, one of the Studio 54 regulars who in 1977 had struck gold with a stirring disco remake of Edith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose.” Since then, Chris Blackwell had taken over her production at his Compass Point studio in the Bahamas. Reoriented and repackaged in stunning sleeve designs, her bizarre poetry was dubbed up by Sly & Robbie, then plasticized by French-Beninese keyboardist Wally Badarou. As well as dance-floor gems like “Pull Up to the Bumper” and a haunting electro-dub remake of Ast
or Piazzolla’s “Libertango,” she even covered Daniel Miller’s first single, “Warm Leatherette.”
Despite plenty of interesting traffic coming through Blackwell’s Compass Point, including Talking Heads offshoot Tom Tom Club, Island Records was drifting into the doldrums. In the snakes and ladders of the music business, Chris Blackwell’s elusive muse had found a home in Jamaica. Experiencing Bob Marley’s global rise as a crowning moment in his own life as a record man, Blackwell understandably hadn’t dived into the New Wave with adequate gusto. Inevitably, Island’s vulnerability was laid bare in 1981, once Bob Marley died at the unjust age of thirty-six.
Compounding the feeling that an era was over, just four months later, Guy Stevens, the estranged A&R man who had been so instrumental in Island’s early history, died after a long battle with drug addiction and alcoholism. “Guy got heavily into drugs, and we sort of got him off of it,” remembered David Betteridge. “He did a year in jail because of it—ridiculously long—then he took the cure but, what happens quite a lot, he got into drinking. I’d left Island, but I saw him at CBS with the Clash, who he was producing. He was a wreck of a man by then. It was a great, great shame. When he died in 1981, he was only thirty-eight.”
Another bereaved friend was Andrew Lauder, one of London’s most respected A&R men, whose signatures for United Artists included Can, Motorhead, Dr. Feelgood, the Buzzcocks, and the Stranglers. “When we had Radar Records,” recalled Lauder of his subsequent job, “Guy used to come around, usually in a horrible state … stinking of alcohol. I used to dread it but I couldn’t not see him. Just the other day when I was opening a box, I found a book he’d given me because I’d lent him some money so he could go see the kids. He went soon after that.”
In that dark summer of 1981, Andrew Lauder was cajoled into becoming Island’s new A&R man. Flattered but skeptical, Lauder asked his old friend, Island managing director Martin Davis, whether Chris Blackwell really would allow others to sign acts to Island. Davis made a call, whereupon it was suggested that he and Lauder fly out to the Bahamas. Blackwell welcomed him with a smile and “It’s great to have you with us!” Too embarrassed to quibble about A&R freedom while enjoying Blackwell’s hospitality in the palm-tree setting, Lauder accepted the inevitable, “so by the end of the weekend, various carrots had been dangled; I was head of A&R and a director at Island.”
Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry Page 33
