8. THE KILLING MOON
Until I was an old man, I didn’t realize something that should have been blindingly obvious at the time. I never once signed a major deal. The Julius Caesar of the Warner empire, Steve Ross, was now raking in blockbuster returns from the two million Mo had spent buying Sire. I had the A&R equivalent of a triple-A credit rating and could easily have thrown around million-dollar advances. Why didn’t I?
The major company sport of poaching big names off competitor labels just didn’t interest me. Even when it came to hot new bands, I thought bidding wars were pointless. Why waste a pile of money on one act when half as much money could get three up and running? Bidding wars, especially between indies, always struck me as a form of fratricide. I fought a few tussles over the years, but I lived by the rule that signing acts was a game of first comer. My job was to find great unknowns and hopefully do so before anyone else, and then help them become stars with the tools at hand. My technique for limiting risk was to spread small investments wide—hedging my bets, as British bookies call it.
As success came and kept coming, I had remained and was respected as an indie at heart and have always believed that the tricky business of talent hunting should stick to the old-school rules. You won’t get very far buying stars—you have to find them yourself. That’s one of the many reasons why I felt so at home and invigorated sniffing around England with all the other underdogs. In the late seventies and early eighties, the American music business got dominated by major corporations and big-money payola. It was costing in excess of a million dollars just in marketing funds to get an act happening coast to coast. This wasn’t the case in England, where radio managed to remain accessible, affordable, closer to the street, and far less corrupted by money. The BBC, Britain’s public broadcaster, had plenty of high-quality radio and TV shows that supported new bands and enabled independents to reach nationwide audiences. Plus, London had a special position in Europe. English hits generally spread to Holland, Belgium, France, Scandinavia, West Germany, and beyond.
In the eighties, the brand of alternative British rock that became known as “indie” bubbled up from this busy swarm of small, independent labels. It’s one of the few musical genres that refers to the business rather than the music, but it was just another way of emphasizing the homemade, low-budget, art house character of the market. Like so many genre terms, many musicians found the tag annoying, but it did help sell records and create a communal identity between fans, bands, and their labels. In reality, “indie” was nothing new. It was just a continuation of all the new wave and post-punk of the late seventies, except with bigger hair.
For me personally, the indie chapter began when I signed Echo and the Bunnymen in 1979. They were among a handful of pioneer post-punk bands that included Joy Division, Public Image Limited, the Cure, Bauhaus, Modern English, the Teardrop Explodes, the Associates, and others. On our Korova imprint, Echo and the Bunnymen had been steadily evolving through the post-punk years. Their second album in 1981, Heaven Up Here, yielded a fast-paced single, “A Promise,” which we even got into the downtown club scene as a twelve-inch. Then came Porcupines, their difficult but artistically ambitious third album in 1982, which gave us “The Back of Love” and “The Cutter.”
For four years, Echo and the Bunnymen bubbled under as a cult phenomenon, until in 1984, they produced Ocean Rain, a commercially accessible album and arguably their most beautiful. That’s when Ian McCulloch started getting famous in Britain and continental Europe. It’s also where “The Killing Moon” came from, one of McCulloch’s masterpiece songs that I’m sure will be played by English buskers for a thousand rainy Saturdays to come.
The Cure were my second indie signature. They’d started out in 1979 on a Polydor sub-label set up by their manager Chris Parry, a New Zealander and former Polydor staffer. Predictably, Polydor’s New York office found the Cure too weird and passed on their American rights, meaning their first records got imported into the States in small quantities through my Jem friends in New Jersey. The weird thing about the early to mideighties was how unadventurous nearly all the American majors had remained. I always think of CBS snubbing the great Leonard Cohen and actually refusing to release his Various Positions album, even though it included classics like “Hallelujah” and “Dance Me to the End of Love.” Leonard Cohen’s lawyer was left with no alternatives but to call up my old buddy Marty Scott and have Jem independently distribute Various Positions around the States as a European import. Believe it or not, an edition eventually came out on Passport, our joint venture indie label that I’d had to cash out of when Warner bought into Sire.
The big guy’s blunder is usually the little guy’s opportunity. Another example was the Cure, who Polydor’s New York office refused. I watched them like a hawk and found them very tempting, but I only committed to an American deal in 1982 for their fourth album, Pornography, while also negotiating a deal on their back catalog, which Sire subsequently rereleased. We then put out subsequent Cure albums like The Walk in 1983 and The Top in 1984. There would be bigger things to come from both the Cure and Echo and the Bunnymen, but in 1984, the field was opened up by the biggest indie group of them all, the Smiths.
In that crazy summer of 1983 when my father died and Sire exploded on all sides, I received a call from Geoff Travis, the founder of the Rough Trade store, who by then was running his own record label of the same name. “Seymour, I’ve just seen this great new band,” he announced. “They’re called the Smiths, and I think you’ll really like them.”
“When can I see them?”
“Well, they’re playing down here in London in two days, but I know that’s short notice.”
“Two days? Are you kidding me? Compared to when I signed Depeche Mode, that’s plenty of time!”
Geoff Travis was, and still is, an English connoisseur whose taste and knowledge you could trust with your eyes closed. He also grew up in a Jewish family, not that we ever talked about it; I knew music was Geoff’s only religion. Behind the counter of Rough Trade, he’d worked at the heart of the whole punk scene, not just selling large quantities of vinyl for such a tiny store but also setting up a distribution network of like-minded indie stores all over Britain. They called their network the Cartel and distributed bands such as the Undertones, Joy Division, the Specials, Cabaret Voltaire, Scritti Politti, the Raincoats, Depeche Mode, Modern English, and hundreds more. Behind all these alternative groups was a new generation of labels such as 2 Tone, Mute, 4AD, Creation, Cooking Vinyl, and of course Factory, whose inspirational founder, Tony Wilson, I always had immense respect for.
Britain’s indie community was regionally diverse, but Rough Trade in London was unquestionably the heart of this nationwide organism that was even starting to spread into continental Europe. Business grew so quickly that by 1980, Rough Trade’s distribution wing had to move into a large warehouse, complete with a record label of its own. Geoff Travis’s long career had only just begun, and there would be plenty more names to add to his early list of exploits, but even in 1983, there wasn’t a man in England who knew more about alternative rock. If Geoff Travis was calling New York about a new band, you’d better sit up straight and grab a pen.
I jumped on a British Airways the following day, and just as Geoff had promised, I instantly loved the Smiths. They were from Manchester and were about as northern as you could get, but again, the songs were so well written, I was confident an American audience would gather round. For a twenty-year-old, Johnny Marr was an incredible guitarist—the kid wrote riffs in his sleep. Coincidentally, one of his biggest influences was the clean sound of James Honeyman-Scott, the Pretenders’ just-departed guitarist.
As for the Smiths’ larger-than-life singer, Morrissey, he was like a character off a Shakespearean stage—witty, profound, theatrical, yet looking squarely at reality. He was a true original whose lyrics were so well written, an English teacher, a vicar, and a psychotherapist could have spent all night fighting over the meanings. The drummer and bass p
layer at the back, Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke, fit in perfectly, but it was clearly the songwriters, Morrissey and Marr, who were the magical force. In fact, that’s what I said when I shook hands on a North American deal with Geoff Travis after the gig. “The whole band were great, but Morrissey and Johnny Marr would stand out anywhere.”
In early 1984, Sire released their self-titled first album, The Smiths, which did well for an underground debut. I was most moved by “Reel Around the Fountain” with its opening line, “It’s time the tale were told of how you took a child and made him old.” That debut album was followed by Meat Is Murder in 1985. Its eight tracks featured a guitarist’s masterpiece, “How Soon Is Now?” which we pushed as a stand-alone twelve-inch. I called it “the ‘Stairway to Heaven’ of the Eighties,” because for a while, it was all you heard in indie record stores. A “guitarchestra” was how Johnny Marr described this method of layering up to ten guitar parts into a type of sonic painting. The Smiths had plenty of melodic pop songs like “Hand in Glove, “What Difference Does It Make?” and “William, It Was Really Nothing,” but thanks to “How Soon Is Now?” the Smiths had a heavyweight classic, which won the unanimous respect of American alternative rock fans.
For their third album, The Queen Is Dead, which they began making in the summer of 1985, Morrissey and Marr wrote an absolute beauty that’s probably Morrissey’s most popular anthem, “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” His lyrics were so effortless, so hard hitting, they had to have been lived. Any time it comes on the radio, my heart sinks for whatever inner torment Morrissey was going through at the height of the Smiths’ adventure. It reminds me so much of situations I’d been in myself, secretly in love with a straight friend you knew you’d never have.
Brilliant as they were, the Smiths unfortunately weren’t made to last. Geoff Travis always says it’s because they never had a manager to guide them through the choppy seas of success. They did try but kept firing the unlucky candidates, always expecting Johnny Marr to resume his old duties as the band’s temporary problem solver. Marr now admits that his coke and alcohol consumption at the time were partly to blame for the unmanageable chaos the Smiths were becoming, which included the bass player’s worsening heroin habit. I don’t doubt any of this for a second. However, from hanging out backstage and reading their body language, I’ve always wondered if maybe Morrissey harbored a deep unrequited love for Johnny Marr, which I suspect Johnny Marr felt and couldn’t handle. That was always my gut feeling, and I wasn’t surprised when, years later, Morrissey confessed he was living with a man. It’s none of my business, of course, but I’d add Morrissey and Marr to the very long list of mysterious love-hate relationships that created some of the best songs ever written.
The Smiths suffered a tragically young death, but they’d at least left behind five classic albums. Without any singles on the Billboard Hot 100, we ended up selling about half a million copies of every Smiths album in North America, which wasn’t exactly the big time in that period of booming sales, but it’s nonetheless a measure of how wide their cult status grew. American fans adopted the Smiths solely by word of mouth without any payola or marketing trickery. In fact, they only played a sum total of thirty shows in the United States, basically one small tour in June 1985 and twenty dates in August 1986.
That glorious stretch between 1985 and 1986 was really the midsummer moment when this “indie” fashion broke out of the British underground and infected America with a new bug. In November 1985, Echo and the Bunnymen released their biggest hit single, “Bring On the Dancing Horses,” which became their MTV anthem. Their cause was helped by my old partner in the Korova label, Rob Dickins, who was handed a life-changing promotion to run Warner’s UK record company. With power and budgets at his disposal, Rob invested in the classy video for “Bring On the Dancing Horses” that gave Echo and the Bunnymen the look of a major-league band.
We released a longer twelve-inch version for American clubs and put the track on a compilation album called Songs to Learn & Sing, which we intentionally didn’t present as a greatest hits because all these superbly written songs from the early eighties hadn’t been hits. Hooked by the video, hundreds of thousands of new listeners were duly introduced to ten other Echo and the Bunnymen underground classics, enabling fans to delve deeper into the actual albums. It sold about three hundred thousand copies in North America—healthy numbers, and it’s why Echo and the Bunnymen are still regarded as a big-haired, mideighties “indie” band, even though they’d really been short-haired art rockers from the late seventies.
Talking of big hair, the Cure took the longest, most meandering route to the top. It pains me to confess, however, that through no fault of their own, they’re among my personal disappointments and for all the wrong reasons. Inside the American record industry, the term indie meant something else entirely. Among those familiar with the corrupt ways of American Top 40 radio, “indies” were shorthand for independent promotion men, basically the payola brokers who controlled the airwaves. As you can imagine, their controversial existence created a lot of fights between band managers and major company executives who were the only ones able to pay the exorbitant fees.
A case in point was the Cure’s manager, Chris Parry, a tough character who believed brute force would get his band these all-important “promotional” funds. His behavior didn’t bother me, but Lenny Waronker was a gentle Californian who just couldn’t stomach the abuse Parry kept heaping on him. It got so embarrassing, I felt obliged to cut the Cure loose, a terrible mistake I soon regretted. Sire had given the Cure their first big push, so Parry didn’t waste any time moving his artists to another label in the Warner group, Elektra, whose even-tougher boss, Bob Krasnow, had no issues with either bad manners or indie promotion. A seasoned pro like Krasnow, who’d actually got his first break working for King’s San Francisco branch, had little trouble breaking the Cure at the ripe moment, causing me further embarrassment.
I still regret that mistake, because as the mideighties progressed toward the nineties, I could see Mo stirring cauldrons in the background. Sire had become so successful, I kept getting the distinct sensation that whenever possible, my signatures were getting moved around the group to ensure WBR remained the jewel in the Warner crown. Sire was never going to outgrow its parent company. Mo’s concern seemed to be more about his son Michael, by then WBR’s main A&R man. Under no circumstances could the chosen heir be made to look like a lightweight beside me or anyone else at Warner.
Michael Ostin definitely wasn’t stupid. His curse was that he didn’t have to work as hard as everyone else. The smartest artists, producers, and managers all befriended Michael, knowing he was the inside lane to special treatment. Madonna wound up on Michael’s desk, as did other big names he never signed himself. In fairness, he had supported Madonna’s cause relatively early on, but you get the picture—he was the boss’s son. The other problem I encountered in the mideighties was that some of these English artists suffered from what I can only describe as a cultural allergy to playing the game by American rules. Especially the North of England groups. I hate to say it, but all those Irish and working-class attitudes that were so strong in places like Liverpool and Manchester may have infused the souls of the musicians with some magic ingredient. Unfortunately, when it came to the dirty work of saying cheese for the camera, some of these northerners just didn’t want to sell themselves.
Ian McCulloch, Morrissey, and Johnny Marr were natural-born stars who I think had always dreamed of fame. Like their bandmates, however, there was something about America they just couldn’t warm to. They were happy to fly into New York or San Francisco and play prestigious venues to hip crowds, but when it came to touring cities that played ice hockey or doing interviews with provincial deejays who’d introduce them as “punk rock” from “Manchester, England,” these proud northerners recoiled in horror. Without even realizing it, they hated the very traits about Middle America that Londoners hate about the North of England—the paro
chialism, the funny accents, the awkward gushing small-town hosts always shower on visitors.
I know that Los Angeles label A&M experienced similar problems with Human League, who were from Sheffield, which is about as far north as you get before England becomes Scotland. After Human League’s single “Don’t You Want Me” blew up on American radio, A&M’s publicists spent weeks hustling for a precious slot on a nationwide TV show. When they got it, the Human League singer, Philip Oakey, turned around and declined. He just couldn’t do American showbiz and all the smiling, dancing, glitzy self-promotion that goes with it. He felt he was whoring himself. It’s what we love about the English, their sincerity, their extreme artistic principles, but my God, if you’re in the business of gambling hundreds of grand to get songs on Top 40 radio in the hope that people will buy records, you just want to slap these artistes in the face with a wet fish.
There were no such hang-ups inside the ranks of Depeche Mode. They came from London’s outer suburbs and accepted from day one that to break America, you had to play the game by local rules. Both the band and their producer, Daniel Miller, cultivated friendly relationships with the marketing staffers in Burbank and made a conscious effort to be liked and trusted as reliable, can-do partners. Funnily enough, Depeche Mode’s cause was helped by me dropping the Cure. As a sort of thank-you gesture for supporting him, Lenny Waronker announced to his staff, “We’re dropping the Cure. Instead of spending money on two Sire groups, we’re gonna give a bigger push to Depeche Mode, who I think are better anyway.”
In August 1985, Depeche Mode scored their first American hit on the Billboard Hot 100, “People Are People,” which peaked at number thirteen. But even that wasn’t enough to launch them nationally. As the old expression goes, success does not have an elevator; you have to take the stairs. They kept writing, kept pushing their sound into new territory, kept adding American cities to every tour, kept playing every show like it was their last. No matter where they played or what they had to do to promote their shows, they worked their leather trousers off until their breakthrough American album in 1987, Music for the Masses. That’s when they began filling arenas in forty cities around North America. But to get there, they needed millions of dollars in marketing, promotion, and tour support, which they never would have been given without first proving how much they wanted it.
Siren Song_My Life in Music Page 24
