And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records

by Harris, Larry

  The crash came on July 12, 1979. A popular Chicago DJ named Steve Dahl had lost his job when his station changed its format to disco. When he landed at another local station, he wasn’t shy about publicly sharing his white-hot hatred of the music. To vent his feelings, Dahl staged an event he dubbed the Disco Demolition between games of a doubleheader with the Chicago White Sox and the Cleveland Indians. He invited anyone wishing to destroy their disco albums to bring them to Comiskey Park on Chicago’s south side. He would stack the albums in the outfield and blow them to smithereens with a stick of dynamite, or some such explosive. The White Sox helped out by announcing that anyone with a disco album could gain admission to the park for only ninety-eight cents (Dahl’s station was at 97.9 on the FM dial). This drew a beyond-capacity crowd of over fifty thousand. The demographic was atypical—read: pot-smoking rock music lovers—and the crowd had no sense of baseball etiquette. Dahl gathered a huge pile of disco albums and, as promised, blew them sky-high. A small-scale riot ensued. Thousand of spectators rushed onto the field and refused to leave, wandering around in a pot-induced daze. Due to this, the White Sox had to forfeit the second game.

  In a moment of great irony, that very night I was in New York for yet another of Bill Wardlow’s Disco Forums. It hadn’t even been five months since his previous soiree. These gatherings had been a cash cow for Wardlow, and he thought that disco was still popular enough for him to now hold two forums a year. These events were normally a pleasure to attend; we won awards by the truckload and were always the belle of the ball. Who wouldn’t enjoy all that glad-handing? None of the other Casablanca execs attended this forum. It was just me, Christy Hill (Candy’s sister, who was still working publicity for us), and three or four of the disco department people; I felt lonely and not at all in my element.

  The forum was decidedly humdrum, and the fact that I remember so little of it shows how disengaged I was. The most noteworthy moment occurred before the event even got underway. We had arranged with Studio 54’s Steve Rubell to hold a forum-opening promotion party at the club on July 12. In each forum attendee’s welcome package we included special passes for the event, which was to begin at midnight. Once the forum’s opening night concerts at Roseland had concluded, pass holders walked the two blocks to Studio 54 to continue partying. But they were stopped at the door by Rubell, who refused to honor their passes to our party. This was a real slap in the face, particularly since just two weeks earlier we had released a special two-disc album for the club called A Night at Studio 54. Bill Wardlow was furious with Rubell, and there was a loud confrontation. Wardlow was so enraged that he vowed (quite publicly, too; it was in the newspaper the next day) to do everything in his power to cripple Rubell’s operation, including his plans to roll out Studio 54 locations in London and Tokyo. I doubt Studio 54 suffered much because of Wardlow, but he was not someone you wanted as an enemy.

  I had missed the entire dustup, but it was the talk of the forum the next morning, and I was not looking forward to mediating between Wardlow and Rubell in the days to come. On the evening of July 15, after the convention-closing awards banquet, I went back to my hotel room with an armful of trophies and laid them out on the bed. From a certain perspective, it was amazing to see them all spread out like that, but still I knew that they were arbitrary awards bestowed upon the products of a quickly fading genre—one that we had leveraged to the hilt for years. I sat there looking at them, gleaming and boastful. We’d had so many successes, we’d won more awards than I could possibly recall, we’d expanded more rapidly and with greater fanfare than any record company in history, and we’d been granted more opportunities than I could catalog. Gold, Platinum, Grammys, People’s Choices, Oscars, one hundred artists, and one hundred million fucking dollars—it all raced through my mind, and all I felt was a crushing emptiness.

  I was depressed. I was deeply affected by the changes I saw in Neil and by what I was discovering about the character he was becoming. He believed his own publicity, the publicity we had created, and that was the most dangerous thing you could do. The stunning, bold-faced lie he had told Bruce and me had crippled our relationship, and I no longer saw a future for myself at Casablanca—at least, I no longer saw any kind of future I wanted. Staring at a shining chorus line of trophies on a Manhattan hotel bedspread, I decided it was time to leave.

  The receiver weighed fifty pounds when I picked it up to call Neil and tell him of my decision. He asked me to take some time off before I made it final. I don’t believe he saw it coming; we had always been so close, and we had gone through the bad times as well as the good together. In my heart, I did not really want to leave, but I saw no other choice. Casablanca had been my life for many years, but I wanted to be able to look at myself in the mirror, and going to work frustrated every day was not my style—never was, never will be.

  Neil told me to take a few weeks off, probably figuring that if I had time to reflect, I would change my mind. I returned to work almost immediately and for a few days conducted business as usual. On maybe my third day back, Paul Schaefer, one of the attorneys who had worked on the contract details for the PolyGram buyout, stopped by my office. We were chatting about various things when I mentioned that I was thinking of leaving. Paul let slip that if I left, according to the contract, Neil and Peter would have to buy out my stock, which would amount to half of what I’d received from the initial PolyGram payout. And they would also have to pay out the remainder of my contract. I knew that Casablanca would never make a profit, and I strongly suspected that PolyGram would never promote me to president, even if Neil vacated the position for a more hands-off chairman of the board role. I could leave this situation and get paid nearly half a million dollars to do it. There wasn’t even a decision to be made here.

  On Monday, July 23, 1979, I packed a few personal items, said one or two goodbyes, and quietly walked out the door onto Sunset.

  20 Now and for the Rest of Your Life

  Who knew?—A golden parachute—A job with Ray Stark—

  Profitless prosperity—Shown the door—Meet the

  new boss—Casablanca gutted—The remaining shell—

  Flashdance—Neil starts anew—Life on the Boardwalk—

  It’s not the flu—Departure—Elegy from the

  industry—The image still remains

  July 1981

  Nate ’n Al Delicatessen

  Beverly Hills, California

  Nate ’n Al is a delicatessen on Beverly Drive, just south of Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills. It’s an unassuming little place, but Hollywood cognoscenti have flocked there for breakfast and lunch meetings since the late 1940s. In the summer of 1981, two years after I had left Casablanca, I was at Nate ’n Al finishing a lunch meeting over a salad of some sort. I don’t remember who was dining with me, or why we were there. As the meeting wrapped, I happened to look up and see the unmistakable form of Peter Guber walking toward the door. We made eye contact, and he walked over to say hello. I hadn’t seen him since I’d left the company, and it was good to meet up with him again. Guber said to me, “How did you know?”

  When I left Casablanca, in July 1979, I did not take any time off. After years of working at Neil’s side, I knew that you did not leave him and stay on good terms. My immediate task was to find an attorney who could extract me from our messy contract situation. Attorneys are a dime a dozen in LA—the trick was to find someone experienced in entertainment law who had no ties to either Casablanca or PolyGram. After some fretful searching, I hired David Braun. David, an Ivy Leaguer, was a tall, solid-looking guy in his mid-forties who had represented some high-profile clients (such as George Harrison and Bob Dylan) and who came highly recommended. He knew the biz, but he’d spent most of his time practicing in New York and had no links to Casablanca or PolyGram that we could discern. David quickly dug into the contract and did an exemplary job of helping me navigate the legal obstacle course in front of me. Per the terms of my deal, Neil and Peter were required to buy the
remaining portion of my stock in Casablanca for 50 percent of what had originally been paid to me, and PolyGram had to pay me my salary for the duration of the contract, which translated into a severance package of a little more than a quarter of a million dollars. On top of that, David managed to land me two Mercedes: Candy and I could keep our Casablanca vehicles.

  This left me free and clear from a contractual standpoint, but I still needed to put a public face on it. One of my last projects at Casablanca was to craft my exit announcement for Billboard, Cashbox, and Record World. To avoid making either party look bad, we announced that “Larry Harris is on an extended vacation, and talks about his own label or a production deal with Casablanca are underway.” This was complete crap. No such talks ever took place, and we never intended them to. It was simply a way to get me smoothly out the door. We’d spent years filling as much column space as possible and making mountains out of the tiniest Casablanca molehills, but my departure went almost entirely unmentioned in the trades. Billboard ran a very low-profile blurb, as did Record World, and that was it. The cherry on top of it all was that Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” was No. 1 on the Billboard charts the day I resigned.

  Leaving Casablanca was bittersweet. My feelings of doubt in the company, my disappointment over Neil, and my growing frustration with my own inability to pull away from the mess had combined to make me dread going to work. Assessing the situation months later, after I had some perspective on it, I could see that it had been worse than I’d realized at the time. Neil had begun to drive a wedge between Bruce Bird and me, telling Bruce negative things I had supposedly said about him, and then telling me negative things that Bruce had supposedly said about me. This was Neil’s Machiavellian way of holding on to power, though the motivation was pure paranoia: neither Bruce nor I had any designs on his position.

  I was sad that by leaving Casablanca I would lose my relationship with Neil. But I should have given him more credit than that. Neil wasn’t angry with me at all. In fact, he almost seemed to envy my ability to leave it all behind, and he was surprisingly sympathetic to my circumstances. A few months after I’d gone, he happily recommended me to Ray Stark (Peter Guber’s old mentor) for a position at a record company Stark wanted to launch. I had a meeting with Stark, but due to some bad advice, I brought Jeff Franklin along as my negotiator. Had I gone in alone, which was my first inclination, I would have jumped at Ray’s initial offer and that would have been that. Jeff, a notorious hardballer, kicked Ray’s offer back and made some overly aggressive demands. Stark balked, and the opportunity vanished almost instantly.

  I soldiered on, and so did Casablanca. Neil immediately promoted Bruce Bird to fill my spot, and Bruce assumed the duty of running the company’s day-to-day operations. Howie Rosen, whose enthusiasm had waned as mine had, left two weeks after me, and Danny Davis replaced him as VP of promotions.

  It was the fall of 1979, and global economic conditions were still tenuous, so Neil, perhaps biding his time until the other shoe dropped, maintained a noticeably low company profile (low for Casablanca, at least). He particularly kept things low-key in the trades, as reports of any extravagant expenditure on Casablanca’s part would certainly be seen by PolyGram execs, who were watching him with increasing skepticism. The entire industry had seemed to notice that we’d been moving suicidally close to the brink for the better part of a decade. In fact, all of the big boys—like Warner and Capitol—were in trouble, and industry-wide changes were being instituted to stem the bleeding. Return policies were made much stricter, and PolyGram eliminated free goods entirely and instead began offering cash discounts. This would have been unthinkable just two years earlier. Neil did, however, make a couple of high-profile TV appearances during this time—on Dinah! and Friends; and, with Peter Guber, on Tomorrow with Tom Snyder. He also branched out into the field of education (briefly), teaching a course on the music business at UCLA in the fall semester.

  Casablanca kept issuing product, so much of it bad, at full bore. It had become a throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks operation. In the six months between August 1979 and February 1980, the company released thirty-six albums, most of which were just filler. The artists (ever heard of Platypus, Mike Heron, Bad News Travels Fast, or Loose Change?) should never have been signed in the first place.

  As 1979 wound down, Neil continued to expand the Casablanca portfolio by pushing ahead with projects related to Broadway and country music that he’d been developing for the better part of a year. He started a new division called StageWorks to mount the Robert Klein–Lucie Arnaz vehicle They’re Playing Our Song. He also partnered with Snuff Garrett (famous for his work with Sonny and Cher, as well as with the young Phil Spector) to create a Nashville-based country imprint label called Casablanca West. Though this agreement folded after a single release, it did produce a hilarious piece of label art featuring a team of cowboys, apparently extras from a western movie, taking five outside the Casablanca Record & FilmWorks casbah. Neil’s KidWorks project with Lew Merenstein and McDonald’s was still moving forward. They debuted the three albums at a McDonald’s national sales meeting that fall and hoped to sell them in the chain’s five thousand restaurants and through a special record club.

  In an interview with Billboard that fall, Neil remarked on the increasingly dire music landscape: “I have learned the good stores, good racks, good retailers, good record companies will survive. The people who have lived off of each other and worked in the business that for the last four to five years has mostly been profitless prosperity will not survive.” If I had a hundred years to think about it, I don’t think I could come up with two words that described Casablanca better than “profitless prosperity.” It had been that way since Alive! had broken, at the end of 1975. We’d had many, many successes, but our excesses always outweighed them. Neil had orchestrated a marvelous juggling act and sustained it for years, to the company’s apparent benefit. But, in the final tally, you can paint the building as much as you like, but no matter how many times you do it, or how pretty the colors are, in the end it’s just paint. Casablanca always looked good. But I’m not sure it ever was good.

  Neil’s demise was a long time coming. Rumors that he was going to be bought out by PolyGram began to surface upon my departure in July 1979, though Neil strongly denied them. But, between the flood of returns of the KISS solo albums, the unforeseen downturn in the US economy, the looming death of disco, and the loss of his second in command, Neil had to have sensed a change in the wind. His personal and business lives were both suffering. In the fall of 1979, a fire severely damaged part of his and Joyce’s Holmby Hills estate, forcing them to take up temporary residence in Diana Ross’s mansion. And then, in February 1980—more than eight months after I had given them the inside information about Joyce and Abe Somers—Donna Summer’s attorneys finally filed her multimillion-dollar lawsuit. Donna sought termination of her contract and ten million in punitive damages. Casablanca, Neil, and Joyce were all named in the suit.

  This was finally enough for PolyGram. On Friday, February 8, 1980, Neil Bogart’s reign as president of Casablanca Record & FilmWorks ended. Depending upon whom you believe, and people I trust have told me both stories, he was either forced out by PolyGram or he engineered his own way out because he had again grown tired of big-corporation bureaucracy. He did not receive any payout from PolyGram whatsoever. A few miles away, at the Century Plaza Hotel (the site of the Casablanca launch party nearly six years to the day earlier), yet another Billboard Disco Forum was getting underway. Casablanca won its usual glut of hardware from Bill Wardlow, but word spread quickly through the crowd that Neil had been ousted. During the forum, several panel discussions turned into unplanned tributes to the man. Neil walked out on top, with Captain and Tennille’s “Do That to Me One More Time” at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100.

  I was surprised by none of this. I’d seen it coming for months, if not years. I knew that despite all the awards, the glad-handing, the industry spotlight�
�despite all the public successes—we were just kidding ourselves. When Peter Guber and I ran into each other at Nate ’n Al that summer day in 1981, what Peter was asking me was how I knew. The answer was simple. Since before the PolyGram merger, I had been responsible for drafting pro forma sales projections. I knew what the real sales figures were, and I at least had an idea of what the future numbers might be. Nearly from the moment PolyGram merged with Casablanca, Neil had me create rosy sales forecasts for our Dutch and German bosses—much rosier than the facts could support. There at the deli, contemplating Peter’s question, my first thought was, “How could anyone not know?” If PolyGram (or anyone else, for that matter—Peter included) had paid any attention to the music side of the company, then they would have seen that the sales projections were fiction.

  PolyGram named Bruce Bird as Neil’s successor, but without Neil, the Casablanca that I had known ceased to exist. Neil was to remain on as a minority shareholder and consultant. I doubt that anyone believed that this meant anything. Neil’s firing was the first domino to fall in a tremendous run of changes implemented by PolyGram. Within weeks of Neil’s departure, they terminated sixty-five of Casablanca’s remaining one hundred and fifty employees—including Irv Biegel, which meant that the largely useless New York office would be closed. PolyGram then divided their domestic music company into PolyGram East and PolyGram West, with Casablanca remaining part of the PolyGram West division, along with Mercury Records. Additional cutbacks occurred when PolyGram reduced the number of affiliated pressing plants from twenty to four. By the end of March 1980, another thirty to forty people were trimmed from the Casablanca staff, and the company name reverted to Casablanca Records. The FilmWorks division became PolyGram Pictures; Peter Guber remained on to chair the company.