Bumping into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Danny Goldberg has been in the music business since the 1960s as a journalist, PR person, personal manager whose clients included Nirvana and Bonnie Raitt, and as president of three major record companies: Atlantic Records, Warner Bros Records and Mercury Records. He currently runs Gold Village Entertainment and he is the author of the book How the Left Lost Teen Spirit.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Introduction

Secrets of the Rockand Roll Business

“There aren’t any secrets,” Atlantic Recordspresident Jerry Wexler growledat me, as if I were the stupidest personhe had ever met. I was nineteen and it was thewinter of 1969, more than thirty - five years beforeWexler would be immortalized by Richard Schiff'sportrayal of him in the movie Ray. I was writinga column for the weekly trade magazine RecordWorld when Wexler had asked one of his executives,Danny Fields, to gather a group of youngjournalists who wrote about rock and roll. Thereal Wexler was far more imposing than the cinematicversion. He was broad - shouldered, with asalt - and - pepper beard and sunken eyes that gavehim the look of an Old Testament prophet. He hada thick Bronx accent, an intimidating intellect, andthe ultimate rock and roll and R&B pedigrees.

Some months earlier, at the storied GreenwichVillage nightclub the Village Gate, I had seen atalented R&B singer named Judy Clay dedicateher hit, “Storybook Children,” to Wexler, whostood up and waved with an understated noblesseoblige.

I had no idea what a record company president did, but Iwas stunned that such a soulful singer would publicly acknowledgea mere businessman. I soon discovered that Wexler hadalso worked with Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, and Sam andDave, and had been the person at Atlantic who actually signedLed Zeppelin.

My awe at Wexler’s résumé was reinforced by seeing hishouse in Great Neck, Long Island, which had an entire roomfilled with gold records and a living room with original Légers.Amid thick marijuana smoke, Wexler played records on hisstate - of - the - art stereo, alternating an acetate of a forthcomingDelaney and Bonnie album with the Beatles’ Abbey Road. Itwas a relief to know that even an insider like Wexler was a Beatlesfan. “Those guys sure know what they’re doing,” he sighed,listening to the end of “Carry That Weight.” During a momentbetween songs, in a lame attempt to enter the conversation, Iasked Wexler if he was going to an upcoming conference onthe music business. “I never go to those things,” he snarled.“The premise is that you can go there and learn secrets. First ofall, there aren’t any secrets.” He paused dramatically and then,with a wolfish grin, concluded, “And second of all, if there wereany secrets, we wouldn’t tell them.”

Over the next several decades I would come to understandwhat he meant. Although I never came close to equaling Wexler’shistorical contribution to the music business, I was luckyenough to find myself in many situations that would make rockhistory. I had a press pass to the Woodstock Festival. I workedfor Led Zeppelin from 1973 to 1976, first as their publicist andlater as vice president of their record company. I managed Nirvanawhen Nevermind came out and Bonnie Raitt when she wonfour Grammys. I did PR for Kiss and Electric Light Orchestra. Iworked closely with Bruce Springsteen on the No Nukes movie.At the peak of Fleetwood Mac’s popularity I helped launchStevie Nicks’s solo career. And twenty - four years after meetingWexler I was given his old job as president of Atlantic Records.What few secrets there were could not be of any help to anyoneelse. But there were stories.

I can’t be objective about the music business. I know it hurta lot of people; artists were often lied to, royalties weren’t alwayspaid, bad people sometimes got promoted while goodones were fired. Drugs, misogyny, and death stalked rock androll. A lot of shlock was produced. A lot of pretense maskedshallow, materialistic quests for fame and money. It’s not like Idon’t know these things and it’s not that I mind writing aboutthem. It’s just that the part of the music business I know best,the rock and roll business, also produced and popularized a lotof music that I love. And it gave me and a lot of my friends aplace in the world.

One nonsecret of the rock business is the intertwined natureof art and money. No one became a rock star by accidentor against their will. Bob Dylan’s memoir, Chronicles, beginsnot with a reference to Woody Guthrie or Allen Ginsberg, butwith a meeting Dylan had as a young man with music publisherLou Levy. Levy showed him the studio on the west sideof Manhattan where Bill Haley and His Comets had recorded“Rock Around the Clock,” which is widely considered the songthat made rock and roll music a part of mainstream Americanculture.

Dylan did inject a folk music aesthetic into the commercialrock culture that existed. Steve Earle, who grew up in Texasin the 1960s, saw folk music as the vehicle that “brought artinto rock and roll.” The great beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg sawDylan’s song “A Hard Rain’s A - Gonna Fall” as “the passing ofthe torch of Bohemian illumination and self - empowerment.” Theideals and aesthetics that informed folk music of the early andmid - 1960s would continue to be present in varying degrees inthe minds of many successful rock artists for decades to come.

But one of the main points of Dylan going electric was notmerely that he was adapting a more complex musical backdropfor his songs but that he was consciously entering a world anda business defined, at the time, by the Beatles. One of the salientpoints about Dylan’s rock single “Like a Rolling Stone”was that it went to number one on the pop charts. If it hadn’tbeen a hit, it wouldn’t have mattered anywhere near as much.Members of Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, the Lovin’Spoonful, and the Byrds all started as folkies. Far from sellingout, they were buying into a rock and roll culture and businessthat, from the very beginning, had been as much or more aboutmoney and success as about the nuances of the art. The trade -off was that rock and roll, corrupted as it had to be to win inthe marketplace, was a vehicle that could impact millions morepeople and, yes, make artists lots of money The contradictionsbetween art and commerce were not something that took folkartists by surprise, but were implicit in their decision to enterthe world of rock and roll in the first place.

As the rock and roll business developed, most rock starsamassed unprecedented power in relation to the corporationsthat profited from their work. In addition to exploiting rebelliouscreative talent, the business itself was repeatedly transformedby that talent.

I was one of millions of rock fans who went to high schoolin the 1960s and one of a thousand or so who figured out a wayinto the business of rock and roll in the years that followed. Ihad all of the contradictions of rock and roll. Like most of mycolleagues, I soon got caught up in the sometimes grim realityof what did and what did not make money. And like most ofthem I never stopped being a fan.

In 2007, at a memorial service for Ahmet Ertegun, the founderof Atlantic Records and Wexler’s former partner and my formerboss, David Geffen repeated one of Ahmet’s aphorisms aboutthe rock business. The way to get rich was to keep walkingaround until you bumped into a genius, and when you did —hold on and don’t let go. In the early nineties, when I finallygot an executive job at Atlantic, the story had been repeatedso many times that it had become an axiom. Of course, no genius was likely to let you hold on very long if you didn’t haveanything to offer them. One had to know something valuableabout aspects of the way the business worked. Some successfulrock businessmen started as record producers. Some beganas tour managers or concert promoters. Many offered financialexpertise. I began in the subculture of rock criticism...