And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records

by Harris, Larry

  Munich Machine came courtesy of our original European disco import, Giorgio Moroder. It was another project Giorgio had developed with songwriter and producer Peter Bellotte. It, too, stuck with the prog-rock-length song idea—“Get on the Funk Train” took up the album’s entire A side. The album was released in May, and it was quickly followed by another of the pair’s Euro-disco experiments (bearing only Giorgio’s name, however) called From Here to Eternity. Both albums followed the Casablanca disco trend: a hit in the clubs; not as much buzz on the air or in the stores.

  Another signing soon became the favorite artist of almost everyone in the company: the pushy, very talented, very confused-about-everything (including his own sexuality) Paul Jabara. Paul began his relationship with Casablanca by hanging out with us at clubs and then endearing himself to us and many of our artists. Industry luminaries like Barbra Streisand, Donna Summer, and Cher all took a liking to Paul and recorded his songs. It didn’t hurt that he was managed by Ron DeBlasio and Jeff Wald, both of whom (along with Joyce) were also overseeing Donna’s career.

  Paul would come into my office and dance and sing his latest song. He was a breath of fresh air. Though he was a funny sort of character, we initially didn’t take him all that seriously. Paul released his first album for us, Shut Out (which we pressed on cherry-red vinyl), in May 1977. The album’s title track featured a duet with Donna Summer. Despite his talent and the success other artists had with his songs, Paul never had a hit album of his own, but he was always humble and fun to be with. His manic energy and occasionally neurotic behavior sometimes grated on one’s nerves, but he made coming to work fun. Thirty years later, I still love to listen to his albums.

  Another of our disco albums originated in an entirely different fashion: Frankie Crocker and The Heart & Soul Orchestra. Frankie had been a DJ for years before landing the program director job at WBLS in New York. Black DJs and PDs got paid very little by their white bosses, who had little regard for black music or the black community; the bosses were just in it to make money, and they’d do it on the cheap if they could. Black radio employees in general were paid far less than their white counterparts. As PD at WBLS, Frankie had been involved in payola. You’d pay him three thousand dollars to play a new release for a specified number of weeks—if the record did well in that time, then he would keep it on; if not, it was off. All the record companies knew about this, and it was actually a cheap way to see if you really had a hit: if it worked on WBLS, then it would work throughout the country. This eliminated the hassle of testing a record all over the place, which could cost tens of thousands of dollars. One of Frankie’s friends, Rocky G., turned state’s evidence on him, and Cecil (among many others in the industry) was called in to testify. Though a federal court in Philadelphia later overturned the conviction, Frankie lost his job at WBLS, and after that everyone in the industry treated him as a pariah. Except us—Neil wanted to help him. In order to give Frankie some money to live on, we made a deal with him to do his own product release. Of course, Frankie was not a musician, but he did know R&B—he was one of the best ears in the biz when it came to that. The record he did for us didn’t do great, but quite a few programmers, especially in the black community, played it because they believed that he had been given a raw deal.

  When you sign that many bands that quickly, some are going to bomb before they even get started. David Joseph and Chris Bearde (whom we knew through the Hudson Brothers and Angel) brought us one of Bearde’s acts, Greg and Paul, who had a new CBS Television show called A Year at the Top, which was about two musicians trying to get signed by a record company. Despite being backed by a production team that included Norman Lear (of All in the Family fame) and Don Kirshner, the show, slated for a six-week run, failed almost before it went on the air; it was canceled shortly after the pilot was broadcast on August 5. We’d already agreed to release a self-titled album by Greg and Paul, which featured songs from the series. The program flopped so badly that I don’t think we ever mailed the album to radio. But Greg and Paul did go on to become famous: Greg Evigan as the star of BJ and the Bear and My Two Dads; and Paul Shaffer, who was already the bandleader on Saturday Night Live, as David Letterman’s longtime musical director and sidekick.

  To capitalize on the disco revolution and help make something of all our new signings, Neil began to look for the best disco marketing/ promotional person in LA. The name that kept coming up was Marc Paul Simon, a good-looking, very bright disco-marketing genius. Marc had his own company, Provocative Promotions, and it was so good that we eventually absorbed it into Casablanca so that we could have Marc’s services exclusively. With Marc came two of his associates, Michele Hart and Ken Friedman. Ken worked out of New York, and his influence over the club scene there was so great that he practically owned it.

  I worked with Marc and his company in planning and organizing our marketing and retail campaigns. Marc also had direct access to Neil, and they would dissect disco in great detail in an effort to distill the formula behind the hits. They would discuss things like beats per minute (most disco hits had almost exactly the same number of beats per minute, and the formula seemed to change every four months or so, keeping things fresh). I explained Neil’s promotional philosophy to Marc and showed him how to implement it at the clubs. The clubs became our research and development labs; we would ask them to test our songs before we put them out for mass consumption. If a song kept club patrons on the dance floor, we knew we had a potential hit, but if they didn’t enjoy the song, we didn’t release it.

  Neil took to disco like a duck to water. He began to establish the company as the genre’s home. The competition was slim, as none of the major labels were embracing the music. Even when they did take a chance on disco, they had a hard time dealing with the gay mindset that pervaded the genre. Many also failed to understand that, much like bubblegum acts, disco artists usually had little to do with the music; they were just the drivers of the race cars built by the writers and producers.

  The problem with having a glut of disco product was that our rock promotion department, which was second in size only to publicity, had little to work with. Seeing a department of two dozen people with nothing to do didn’t sit well with me, so I went on a tear to get some rock product into the pipeline. This wasn’t easy, because we only had one noteworthy rock group on our roster, so most others didn’t consider us the best label to sign with—they only turned to us after everyone else had passed on them.

  Not long after I started this drive to acquire more rock, Scott Bergstein from our international department brought me an exciting tape. The songs were great, and some tracks had the added bonus of including a saxophone—I’m a huge sucker for the sax. I got so excited that I ran into Neil’s office and told him I had found the next great group, but it would cost a hundred thousand dollars to sign them, so I needed his approval. He said, “Why sign a band for a hundred thousand when we could sign four or five disco acts for that amount?” He never even asked to hear the group. I was disappointed, but there was nothing I could do, and so Casablanca lost out on signing Dire Straits. The band signed with Warner Brothers and released their first album maybe a year later, scoring a nice hit with the single “Sultans of Swing.” Under the stewardship of Mark Knopfler, they went on to become a multi-Platinum monolith in the mid-1980s with the enormous hit “Money for Nothing,” a touchstone moment in the history of MTV.

  The Dire Straits strikeout wasn’t our only big swing and miss. In 1976, not long after he’d left Genesis, Peter Gabriel came to see us. We met with him and his manager and had them looking for a pen in a matter of moments. They would have signed with Casablanca on the spot had it not been for a poison-pill, oh-by-the-way stipulation Gabriel threw in at the last moment. He wanted half a million dollars per LP. Had we been clairvoyant enough to see “Shock the Monkey” or So in our crystal ball, then the half million wouldn’t have seemed so ridiculous, but at that point Gabriel wasn’t much more than the ex-singer of Genesis who
hadn’t proved himself as a solo act. Neil felt it just wasn’t worth the risk.

  A host of new acts and dozens of new employees would seem to be the earmarks of a successful record company. But we were spending so much money on paint—placing full-page ads in the trades by the gross, racking up mind-numbing figures on our expense accounts, increasing our payroll several times over—that despite the successes (even the real ones) we were still nearly broke. We had no cash flow even when we did have hits. We were having record sales months: $5.8 million in May, followed by $6.3 million in June. In July, seven of our albums were on Billboard’s disco charts. And all that money was gone as soon as we made it. We spent so much time keeping the wolves from the door that it cut into our ability to run the company as we would have liked. That was just part of the game, and we were used to the wolves, but things were getting worse.

  Our motion picture deal with Peter Guber had given us the appearance of being a rising player in traditional Hollywood. The first picture in the deal, The Deep, was released in June, and within three days it was apparent that it was going to be a big hit. It bolted out of the gate with a first-weekend gross of nearly seven million, on its way to pulling in over $125 million (adjusted for inflation) in ticket receipts. We kept the cast constantly in the public eye—they appeared on Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, Dinah Shore, and Phil Donahue, as well as in the pages of Time, Newsweek, Playboy, and Cosmopolitan.

  Just before the movie was released, Neil arranged a screening for all of our promotions people. Then he announced that we were not going to promote the movie in the traditional Hollywood fashion. Instead, we would have a heavy radio focus. The promotions guys, of course, had all appreciated the infamous and alluring scene at the beginning of the film where Jacqueline Bisset emerges from the water after a scuba dive wearing a transparent T-shirt. The publicity brainstorm was obvious: we organized wet T-shirt contests around the country (which must have been among the first events of their type ever staged) in conjunction with local radio.

  The soundtrack album was released on transparent blue vinyl, and it came with a poster that featured an incredibly sexy image of Jacqueline in her wet T-shirt. The record featured original music by John Barry of James Bond fame, as well as songs by Donna Summer and Beckett, another of our recent disco signings. It was a decent seller, and we added to the din by releasing not only the making-of book, penned by Guber, but also a sixty-minute documentary film called Making “The Deep,” the brainchild of Peter Lake. The documentary aired as an ABC Television prime time special on September 11, nearly three months after the feature film had been released—a lag time that would never occur in today’s marketplace. The Deep was the fourth-highest-grossing film of the year, so things looked rosy for Casablanca’s FilmWorks division. That might have solved our cash flow issue, except that by September we’d yet to be paid by Columbia Pictures. They were trying to screw us out of our share of the profits—something unheard-of in Hollywood. Luckily, Guber, who had worked for Columbia, knew about their accounting practices and worked with Columbia chieftain Ray Stark to figure out a way for us to get paid. We were owed eight million, but we settled for five. However, the funds were not available when we needed them most, leaving Neil to face several courses of action, none of them appealing.

  Neil and I, along with Richard Trugman, met in Neil’s office. I sat on a barstool while Neil paced around the big conference table running over our options. He was trying to convince us that selling the company made sense, but he was just convincing himself. It was hard to watch. There seemed to be only one taker: Clive Davis at Arista. Clive had offered us two million, and Neil was seriously considering it. I wasn’t all that worried about myself, about not having a gig if this went through. I knew Clive a little, and I’d heard from others that he liked me. To me, the problem was that Casablanca was much more successful than Arista: we had stronger acts and far better promo people. It would be like the Yankees being bought out by the Milwaukee Brewers. I could abide selling the company, if that’s what it came down to, but to a smaller and less-talented one?

  Neil also had an offer to run MCA for an annual salary of one million dollars with bonuses, and I knew that if he decided to accept the job he’d take me with him. But the MCA deal, as attractive it might sound, meant little or nothing to Neil. MCA was known as a crummy label to work for; they didn’t care about their employees. The music end of the company had gone through a new president every year. Also, MCA was part of a huge corporation, which meant that Neil would be forced to run through endless bureaucratic gauntlets—a situation that had driven him away from both Buddah and Warner Brothers. Rumors of our sale to ABC, or Columbia, or Capitol—depending upon which source you believed—ran rampant in the trades, and Neil flatly denied them, even though they weren’t far off the mark.

  When Casablanca first signed with Warner, in 1973, the deal was set up for us to go out of business. After a specified period of time, the controlling interest in our label would be bought out and rolled into the Warner family. But our sentiments had changed by the time the 1974 split occurred, and we remained an independent company. Now we were really missing that big, warm security blanket. Like the cavalry coming to the rescue, Neil’s close friend and ATI chief, Jeff Franklin, showed up with an offer. And this offer was so good that rather than cry in our soup over losing Casablanca, we were ecstatic. After failing twice to broker a deal with ABC Records to merge with Casablanca, Franklin had gone to PolyGram, which was co-owned by two old and very powerful Dutch and German corporations, Philips and Siemens. As early as 1962, both companies had begun expanding their international operations by acquiring several American music and film companies, including Mercury, MGM Records, and Verve, plus Robert Stigwood’s RSO Records in the UK. It was an impressive list, to be sure. Talks between PolyGram and Casablanca went on for weeks, and when PolyGram seemed to be dragging their heels, Neil played them in the trades. Blurbs started appearing in Billboard with gossip-column copy like, “Is the gleam in Neil Bogart’s eyes fading over the prospect of a PolyGram buyout?” It was pure propaganda. Neil was using the press to leverage negotiations in his favor. PolyGram finally offered us ten million for just half the company, with a guarantee to purchase the remaining shares of Casablanca within five years at five times earnings. Plus, they weren’t experienced in our market niches and could probably be bent to our wishes. This wasn’t the death of Casablanca: this was our lottery ticket. It was turn-off-the-lights-we’re-flyin’-to-Bora-Bora-to-count-our-money time. It’s not that PolyGram had bought into the vision we’d cultivated that Casablanca was the four-hundred-pound gorilla of the record world; in their eyes, our motion picture division, with its five-movie deal with Columbia, was a license to print money. The record company was nothing more than a shiny bonus.

  Once the offer was made, Neil pulled the trigger quickly. Then Guber decided he could improve it, and that’s when things got interesting. Guber waited for PolyGram’s check to clear the bank, and then he told them that he was going to the beach—Hollywood jargon for “I’m not working for you unless you give me more money.” Guber wanted an additional five million to cut short his vacation, so to speak, and he got it. The already lopsided deal improved by 50 percent when PolyGram caved and bought half of Casablanca for fifteen million dollars total. I never asked and was never told what Jeff Franklin got to put the deal together; but I do know that he didn’t get any of the fifteen million, so I assume he received a finder’s fee from PolyGram. Jeff often told people that he owned part of Casablanca, but he never did; the only owners were Neil, Peter Guber, Cecil Holmes, Richard Trugman, me, and Buck Reingold, who had relinquished his share when he left the company.

  Soon after the deal was signed, Neil, Cecil, Guber, Trugman, and I gathered at the main branch of Security Pacific Bank, a major financial institution in LA. As a group, we were escorted to the room where the PolyGram buyout checks had been made out to each of us. We signed some legal documents, we each had our picture tak
en, and then the money was placed into accounts that investment firm Bear Stearns had already opened for us. Guber received 20 percent of the ten-million-dollar payout. Trugman and I each received about 8.5 percent, Cecil took about 10 percent, and Neil pocketed the remainder. Neil had made sure to retain a bit more than half so that he would never lose controlling interest in the company. The percentages on the additional five million Guber had been able to get for us were paid out some months later.