And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records

by Harris, Larry

  One perk of owning this block of offices was that it came with its own billboard overlooking Sunset, and we made good use of it. Each month, we would promote another artist with it, and soon those who thought they had the clout were angling to get the billboard for their new product. This led to some heated arguments with artists over whose album was going to be hanging over the Sunset Strip that month. We’d defuse these blowouts with a bullshit excuse: an artist had to sell over half a million units to be on the billboard. This was totally arbitrary. Anyone who was paying attention would have noticed that any number of our pet projects, all of which had sold very little, ended up on the billboard. We would do everything we could to make sure Hollywood knew we were big players.

  To decorate the new digs, Neil hired Carol Eisenberg and Lynda Guber. They were both into the LA scene, and both had husbands in the motion picture and television businesses. “Ah, there’s the rub,” I thought: this wasn’t as much about decorating as it was about networking with players. In Hollywood, the motion picture business is king, and the music business is a distant tenth on the list. Even though the music business generated double or triple the revenue of the motion picture business, it just doesn’t have the same prestige, and it never will. Neil was friends with Lynda Guber’s husband, Peter, who had a five-picture deal with Columbia and was a major Hollywood power broker. But the ladies were the decorators from Hell. Everything with them was “fabulous” this and “fabulous” that—it was like dealing with Zsa Zsa Gabor, dahling. They had a certain Hollywood flair that no one but Neil enjoyed, but we lived through it.

  Hollywood operated according to some strange mathematics. The bigger your office, and the more important people thought you were, and the harder you were to reach, the more power everyone assumed you had. Being from New York, we tried not to fall into this Hollywood mentality, and we developed (in truth, stole) this line to live by: “Assumption is the mother of all fuckups.” It’s hard not to make assumptions based on appearances, but we did try.

  I had the same interest in office decor as I had in fashion, which is to say none. I couldn’t have been more indifferent to what my office looked like. I just needed a phone to call radio and retail, and a turntable and cassette player to listen to albums or demos, and I was a happy puppy. I wound up with an office furnished with a couple of cane chairs and large desk that had cane embellishments along its edges. I guess it looked good, but the decoration made it difficult to write on the desk top unless you used a thick pad.

  The decoration scheme was, yet again, Moroccan. Where was the creativity in that? There were pillows, cane, and bamboo everywhere. Buck and I had similar rooms on the second floor. Cecil was on the other side of the floor from us in a little suite of offices that he shared with his secretary, Fran. He also had on his staff Renny Roker, who came from a very talented family. His cousin was Al Roker, and the late Roxie Roker (of The Jeffersons fame), was his sister. Renny was a robust guy, much like Al, and he would pester Cecil to demand more for their department. In the long run, his passion was a good influence, even if his constant requests were a pain in the ass.

  Neil’s office was also on the second floor. It took up half the front of the building. It had a bar (though it was never really used as one), faux-stucco walls, a large desk, and a huge conference table (it could seat about twenty people), all with bamboo accents. But the thing that immediately drew your attention upon entering the office was the speakers. They were enormous—maybe five feet by four feet—and they were as loud as they were big. In a Moroccan-style armoire, Neil kept his stereo equipment: record player, reel-to-reel tape deck (a big one), amplifier (the biggest), cassette player, receiver, TV, Beta video player, and professional three-quarter-inch video player. Neil would frequently change his office decorations just to impress visitors. He’d swap the artwork out, or he’d put up funny signs, like “All bad news is due by 4:00 p.m. tomorrow.” Anything to make a positive impression. He had a separate office for his secretary, as well as a waiting area, complete with a table, chairs, and a white canvas couch.

  Adjacent to Neil’s office was another large room. The two rooms were linked by an adjoining door. The question was: Whose office would it be? Neil, impressed with the job I was doing, decided to give me the adjoining office and make me executive vice president. He had initially offered the job to Jerry Sharell, but Jerry declined. He wanted to stay where he was, at Elektra. I was happy to be the beneficiary of Jerry’s decision. I actually had my choice of titles, and I chose to be called “senior vice president,” not knowing that “executive vice president” was a more prestigious title—but, what the hell, everyone knew what I did, and the title meant little. I moved into the big office and had the same sound system as Neil’s—an exact duplicate—installed. This was living.

  I was running all the day-to-day operations of the company except accounting and legal. Trugman, who’d joined us after he helped close the Carson deal and found someone to lend us money after we left Warner, was running legal. Neil was overseeing the accounting department (which was run by our controller, David Powell), as it seemed that every day there was another major cash flow problem. Even though Trugman was ostensibly running the legal department, nothing was done without Neil’s approval—especially anything to do with artist contract negotiations. Neil was thus able to use Trugman to help him play a good-guy/bad-guy routine for managers and attorneys.

  Neil and I controlled the outer doors of our internally joined offices with buzzers under our desks. Most of the senior management staff would eventually have similar devices installed. Often, Neil and I would get so messed up on Quaaludes in the middle of the afternoon that we’d both take naps in my office. The corner of the office had been taken over by a couch, massive mirrors, and tons of throw pillows courtesy of our delirious decorating team. Neil usually crashed on the couch, while I’d grab half a dozen pillows and create a makeshift bed on the floor. When we wanted to get high, we would go into my office and close the door; we’d go back into Neil’s office for meetings. We thought we were fooling the entire staff. Of course, everyone knew. They could smell the grass on our clothes, hair, and breath, but we thought we were really putting something over on them. I’m sure the smell coming out of my office was responsible for more of the legendry surrounding Casablanca’s drug use than anything else. It probably didn’t help that Neil and I both loved to run the air conditioners in our offices at arctic levels, circulating the smoke throughout the entire building.

  I don’t believe that we at Casablanca did more drugs than people at any other company. The difference was that at Casablanca, the executives (except for Cecil), not just the employees, did the drugs. In the 1970s, everyone seemed to be doing drugs of some kind. For instance, in his autobiography, Walter Cronkite mentions that after CBS sold their record division to Sony and no longer occupied a few floors at Black Rock (CBS headquarters in New York), the one thing that changed for the better was that he could enter an elevator without fear of getting a contact high.

  I had a very seedy drug dealer in LA who had the worst complexion you could imagine. His name was Tom, but I nicknamed him Pockface. He would come to the office with three or four kinds of pot for me to choose from. There was Panamanian red, Hawaiian gold, Mexican, Thai sticks, and sometimes hashish. Quaaludes or cocaine—whatever you needed, he could deliver. He would come to see me at the office maybe once a week or once every two weeks. Selling drugs out of the office was never OK, but acquiring them for others at the going rate was just fine. I was brought up in the drug culture, so I knew that you did not try to make a profit on others. If you could help someone out by giving something to them for the price you paid, then you did it.

  Tom would bring bottles and bottles of Quaaludes. There were usually five hundred pills per bottle, and the cost was only twenty-five cents per pill. We went through them like they were M&Ms—not just me, but Neil as well. I recall that one evening a dozen or so of us were celebrating something in a private room a
t the Palm restaurant in LA when someone mentioned Quaaludes. No one had any on them. Neil fished around in his pockets and brought out a set of keys. “Someone drive over to my house and go into my closet. In the inside pocket of my brown suit you’ll find a big bag of ‘ludes.” With Howie Rosen, one of our promotions guys, I drove over to Neil’s house and rummaged through the bedroom looking for the brown suit. When we finally found it, I stuck my hand into the pocket and pulled out a gallon baggie filled with ’ludes. Everyone floated out of the Palm that night.

  I collected dozens of empty bottles and proudly displayed them at my house, like a kid lining up his Matchbox cars to show to his friends. Quaaludes were eventually outlawed, and the price jumped to one dollar, five dollars, even ten dollars a pill. An ounce of really good pot was maybe $350. It all went down on the expense reports. An ounce of weed was steaks and a nice Bordeaux with Alison Steele. A bottle of ’ludes was surf and turf at Roy’s with the sales department.

  Blow put me to sleep, and Quaaludes made me want to stay up and talk, which is the opposite of what these drugs do to most people. Same with Neil. He did not smoke as much grass during office hours as I did. I started smoking most days after lunch. I kept the ’ludes and grass in an unlocked drawer in my office. Just about anyone could go to the desk when I was not there and take what they needed. The atmosphere at Casablanca was open and loose, and I usually left my office door unlocked and open unless I was in there stoned, taking a nap, or doing drugs with a visitor.

  Despite the prevalence of drug use in the office, to my knowledge we never sold drugs to people or used them to buy airplay. We did invite radio people or artists to join us while we did drugs, but we did not exchange drugs for spins. While I say that, I do admit that I would have given drugs for airplay if Neil—or, for that matter, a DJ—had asked me to. But the fact that we simply did drugs instead of selling them alleviated any worries we might have had that the cops or feds would come crashing through the door and bust us for possession. Actually, we never thought about it. Bankers were doing it with us. Lawyers were doing it with us. Even doctors. In those days, it was expected. It was very much a part of everyday life in our world.

  The only time I worried about the police was when I went to the acupuncturist. Sounds weird, but, believe it or not, acupuncture was then against the law. The acupuncture therapist we used had a house in Laurel Canyon that was fifty steps above the street. These steps were on what seemed like a seventy-degree incline, and I nearly had a heart attack every time I had to climb them. Bobby Klein was the acupuncturist’s name, and he had been recommended to us by Evelyn Ostin, Mo’s wife. (Before taking up acupuncture, Bobby had been an album cover photographer, and he may have met the Ostins via that pursuit.) He had a guru-ish way about him. His house was open plan, incense burned everywhere, and bees buzzed around inside, but they’d never sting you. Bobby was a very calming influence. During the sessions, he’d stop every fifteen minutes, walk over to a window, and look down at the street to see if the cops were there. He was very paranoid about it, and the paranoia soon rubbed off on me.

  But when it came to drugs, I never worried, because I figured everyone was doing it. There was safety in numbers. I even did drugs in front of Alison Steele’s husband, who was an assistant district attorney in New York. He didn’t join me, of course, and neither did she, but this just goes to show how accepted and commonplace drug use was.

  While pot, hash, ’ludes, and coke were prevalent, we steered clear of the really heavy stuff. I tried mushrooms once, and they did nothing for me. I never took acid, and I don’t think Neil ever did either (except once, when Tom Donahue from KSAN-FM spiked the punch at a get-together), and we never did heroin. If anyone brought a needle within twelve feet of Neil, he’d start to sweat. I took him to my acupuncturist once because he had a problem with his knee. It was so bad that he’d be walking along, the joint would buckle, and he’d lose his balance and fall. Bobby started the treatment, and Neil screamed like a stuck pig. I was receiving treatments every week, and knew it didn’t hurt anything like his level of screaming would suggest, so I told him to calm the fuck down. After the treatment, his knee didn’t bother him again for months. But Neil never saw Bobby again.

  As 1976 began, Alive! was selling faster than anything we’d ever released, and the Donna Summer album was not far behind. Parliament’s Mothership Connection had also landed in stores, and it was exploding right out of the gate. Buddy Miles and Hugh Masekela still had some legs. This was all great news, right?

  Not really. The sudden jump in sales began to cause some major problems for us. When we’d had no money—which was almost all the time until late 1975—we would pay the record manufacturing plants in credit to press our albums. Now we had used up so much credit with these plants that it was getting difficult to find one that would trust us enough to press the large quantities of albums we needed to keep up with consumer demand. The manufacturing plants were comfortable pressing twenty thousand units on credit for us; this wasn’t that big of a risk for them. But half a million or a million units? No way—not gonna happen.

  Neil got on the phone with the manufacturers and begged and cajoled them to extend us more credit. Only because of his personal relationship with many of the manufacturers and his unbelievable tenacity were we able to keep our product in the stores for the duration of the 1975 holiday season. Neil finally made a deal with an LA plant called Rainbow to extend us the credit we needed to fill our orders. Rainbow became our saviors, and I am sure they were happy they took the chance.

  It felt awfully good to have hit product that was selling huge numbers, but our joy was eroded by the fact that we could be making so much more money. Had we been a large corporation with supporting infrastructure, like Warner or Capitol, we likely would have had twice the sales. We faced the worst problem a small company can have: too much success too soon. The public wanted our product, but we couldn’t get it to them fast enough. Our distribution system was too small. It was imperative that we keep this a secret. If anyone found out, then our artists would go crazy on us and all of our creditors would demand that we bring our accounts current, thus forcing us out of business. Neil’s approach was to spend every dollar that came through the door, but that meant that we couldn’t build up enough cash to improve our infrastructure, which we desperately needed to do to keep pace with the exploding demand for our product. With each passing day, the pressure grew, and we inched closer and closer to bankruptcy.

  12 Breakthrough

  A two-hundredth birthday party—New label—Buck

  departs—Helming promotions—Gold and Platinum—Scott

  Shannon—Destroyer—Rock Steady—Billy Squier—The

  arrival of Glickman/Marks—Million-dollar contract—Lost

  in England—Rosalie and “Beth”

  January 1976

  Casablanca Records Offices

  8255 Sunset Boulevard

  Los Angeles, California

  As 1976 opened, America began the yearlong celebration of its two-hundredth birthday. Sounds dull now, but it had a profound effect on business: bicentennial sales, bicentennial advertising and marketing plans, bicentennial special editions—it was everywhere. As for Casablanca, we were lagging 198 years behind, but that didn’t stop us. We’d just moved into prime real estate on the Sunset Strip, and the fact that we were about to turn two seemed like a good reason to change our logo. More painting the building, you could say.

  At Neil’s behest, Chris Whorf drafted a few versions for us to look at, and after a couple of passes he hit upon the right look. The logo, literally just “Casablanca Records,” remained faithful to David Byrd’s original neon tube design, but the rest of the artwork had been completely overhauled. The dark-blue background, the white skyline of Morocco, and the Humphrey Bogart icon were gone, replaced by a more natural Moroccan scene with camels, a casbah, and palm trees in a palette of desert colors. The new artwork was completed early in the year, but we had only a few pendin
g releases, so it didn’t make its debut until May, for Angel’s sophomore release—Helluva Band.

  Just after the year began, Buck Reingold told me he was leaving. He’d been offered a position at Chelsea Records, a new company founded by Wes Farrell. Wes had made a big splash with the Wes Farrell Organization, a music-publishing company famous for a string of hits in the late 1960s and early 1970s like “Hang on Sloopy” and “Knock Three Times.” Buck told me that I should come with him, as Wes had far more pull in the industry than Neil (which was true) and I could make more money (also probably true). There was no way I was going to go anywhere with Buck, for numerous reasons, not least of which was that Neil was my mentor and I owed him everything.

  Buck’s relationship with Casablanca—and Neil, in particular—had been eroding for a long time. After Neil and Beth’s marriage had crumbled, Buck started complaining about Neil spending company money on things like renting a house in Beverly Hills, and later buying a house in the equally affluent Holmby Hills. This house was a magnificent four-acre estate with a pool, a tennis court, ten-foot-high wrought-iron double gates, and a guesthouse the size of a normal family’s main abode. Neil had purchased the house for about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, with the company footing the bill. Richard Trugman’s brother, Marty, a big-deal Hollywood real estate agent, had found the property for Neil (nearly a decade later, it would sell for a reported $7.5 million). Buck felt that Neil was taking money right out of our pockets. I don’t know what the hell Buck was thinking, because were it not for Neil, Buck would still be slinging hash. Plus, Neil had given up all his stock in Viewlex to launch Casablanca in the first place. He had taken tremendous personal and professional risks, and it was his reputation that would be ruined if things didn’t work out. Neil was the one who’d gone to Vegas to get the payroll money. He was living this every hour of every day, and he was under more stress than all of us put together.