Siren Song_My Life in Music Read online

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  Siren Song is dedicated to my beautiful daughters, Samantha and Mandy, to my dear friend, Richard Gottehrer, and to the incomparable Syd Nathan.

  Samantha was taken way too soon, on February 8, 2013, after a long and brave battle with brain cancer, leaving behind a most beautiful and brilliant young daughter, Dora Wells, and scores of friends who flooded the chapel at her funeral.

  My younger daughter, Mandy, a film producer / director, is a constant source of inspiration, whose help and support while writing my story was invaluable. She also took on the responsibility of finding and selecting the photos for the book from noted photographers Bob Gruen, Roberta Bayley, and Bobby Grossman, as well as some family photos, most of which were taken by my dear late cousin, Brian Weisberg.

  Richard Gottehrer and I started Sire together and were partners for seven years, which were among the roughest but also some of the best. Richard had already built up quite a name as a songwriter or producer on such hits as “My Boyfriend’s Back” by the Angels, “Hang On Sloopy” by the McCoys, “Giving Up on Love” by Jerry Butler, and his own band with Bobby Feldman and Jerry Goldstein, the Strangeloves, with “I Want Candy.” Richard is probably the closest thing I ever had to a brother, and our friendship has endured for well over half a century. I’m being honest and fair when I say I don’t think I could’ve done it without him. Much love and many thanks to him and his lovely wife, Anita.

  Syd Nathan was far and away my greatest mentor. The founder of King Records in Cincinnati, he was a music man through and through. Syd saw something in me, and it was that belief and the training and knowledge he passed on that saw me through, especially during those earliest and toughest years at Sire Records, and right up until today. I’ve tried, throughout my career, to pass on what I have learned and mentor and help in any small way to ensure that great music men move forward and take on the responsibility as mentors to ensure the continued growth, importance, and success of music around the globe. That, above all, was my main purpose in writing this book.

  PROLOGUE

  I can’t imagine a world without music.

  The best songs of every generation make society stand up and walk into the light. In my own lifetime, I’ve seen how popular music has helped improve human rights, racial equality, sexual equality, and inspired so much love and hope where once there was only ignorance and injustice.

  Songs have influenced the course of modern civilization, as in the case of “La Marseillaise,” written soon after the French Revolution. Unlike “The Star-Spangled Banner,” written nearly forty years after the American Revolution, “La Marseillaise” was a battle cry for French citizens to rise up and defend the first Republic from invading tyrants. Or consider “Over There” by George M. Cohan during World War I. Also, on the British side, “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” by Ivor Novello. Two of America’s biggest national holidays, Fourth of July and Memorial Day, celebrate our freedoms and our fallen soldiers in war. What is life all about except for freedom? There’s no denying: it took wars to win them.

  I remember participating in several civil rights protests and singing “We Shall Overcome.” That song and others helped to change so many people’s minds and lift the civil rights movement into national consciousness. “Eve of Destruction” by Barry McGuire was another. “Like a Rolling Stone” and so many songs by Bob Dylan, “The Sounds of Silence” and “America” by Simon & Garfunkel, “Woman” by John Lennon, “Teach Your Children” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and “I Am Woman” by Helen Reddy, all carried these classics’ important messages. And so did a Sire release, “Scatterlings of Africa” by Johnny Clegg and Juluka, a racially mixed band from South Africa during the last days of apartheid back in 1982.

  The inspiration to write the story of my life in the music business was stirred in large part by concern over the decline in sales and what appears to be a dwindling interest in pop music, culturally. Music has played a central role in life, history, and religion for thousands of years. It’s bigger than any of us, and it belongs to us all.

  I’m the man who signed the Ramones, Talking Heads, Madonna, the Pretenders, the Dead Boys, the Replacements, Ice-T, Brian Wilson, k.d. lang, Lou Reed, Throwing Muses, and many more. I’ve also been the indie community’s number-one transatlantic operator. Across fifty years of high tides and economic troughs, I’ve tracked down and shipped into America a whole bloodline of British bands, from the Climax Blues Band and Barclay James Harvest to Depeche Mode, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Cult, the Smiths, the Undertones, the Rezillos, M, the Cure, Madness, the English Beat, Soft Cell, Yaz, My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Primal Scream, Seal, Aphex Twin, and many others.

  Sire is my label, still afloat, still trading, and just celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. How I’m still alive is the greatest mystery of all. Yes, I’m still hobbling around the deck of the good ship Sire, refusing to give up on the giant beast that almost killed me all those years ago.

  Before I begin my story, I have to warn you that I have no easily definable skills or talents. I’m a hit man, a record business entrepreneur. But what I’m not is a producer like Phil Spector or Quincy Jones. I can’t play any instrument, I can’t operate a studio, and I definitely can’t abracadabra something into a gold disc. My exact job description is A&R—artists and repertoire, the old show business term for talent hunting. But the word I tell myself when I look in the mirror is fanatic. What I really am is an extremist. Every happy accident I provoked in pop music happened as a result of my zeal bumping into originals whose lucky stars only needed to be seen, believed in, and, most of all, supported.

  And because I wasn’t a musician with any formal notion of technique or virtuosity, I was often able to spot the genius black sheep—the rejects and mavericks who couldn’t sing or play by conventional standards but who possessed something unique the world was waiting for. If my life and legacy means anything, I hope it’s something about so-called losers playing to their strengths and winning big. I’ve been wrong far more times than I’ve been right, but I’m still here.

  I still don’t know if the ability to spot talent in others actually counts as a talent in itself. The one weird gift I do seem to have is a photographic memory, which, strange at it seems, is how I developed an ear. Since I was a boy, I’ve kept devouring names and adding to a personal collection of old tunes the world has long since forgotten. My head is a giant jukebox. It’s also a ghost train of long-departed showbiz characters who I’ve never let die. They’re all in here, screaming down telephones and cracking jokes. I can impersonate every Ahmet, Syd, and Jerry down to their accents and mannerisms. You see, I always saw the music business as something between comic folklore and an adopted family. And the more I learned from the old school, the more clearly I could see the new one walking past me on the street.
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  So, here I am, one of the last-standing lifers, aged seventy-five and still looking. The thing about getting old is that the truth doesn’t even hurt anymore. I know I was born damaged in some way, not that my condition was immediately evident or was ever diagnosed. I don’t even know if sixty years in the madhouse of rock and roll made my condition better or worse. Excess definitely made me crazier, but success brought me relief. In songs and adventures, I found both solace and purpose, and just as importantly, I met people like myself.

  It’s amazing how things look when you reach my age. The cruel test of life is that we’re set free into a world that doesn’t really need us. We’re lost souls stuffed into these suits of skin we can’t take off. From our first lung-opening scream, the pressure is on to get a grip, invent a persona, join some gang, and come up with a plan. For the rest of our lives, our daily ritual is to repeat this birth sequence. We wake, we ache, we look in the mirror and ache some more. Then we start to medicate. On goes the radio while the coffee is percolating. With songs to lift our spirits and caffeine coursing through our veins, we slowly turn our minds to the lowly chores of hunting and gathering.

  No matter what way we choose to explain the mysteries of life, the only way to get through it all is to keep our spirits high. Music is one way to do it, and there are many others, but that emptiness follows us every step of the way. You know you’re lucky to be alive, you know you should be making the most out of it, but the sinking feeling that you’re not seizing your precious time is the great human killer. Every one of us suffers from it, wealthy tycoons and pop stars included. In fact, the best among us get there because of it.

  As you’ll see, due to design faults beyond my control, I was a crash landing that had no choice but to run and keep running. In doing so, however, I learned how to harness my mad, hungry dissatisfaction into rocket fuel. Okay, so my ass was on fire without a Stop button, but at least I wasn’t sitting around stewing in my own burning frustrations. My curse became my crusade. My unemployable craziness became my entrepreneurial strength, my solitary nature became my indie spirit.

  My hope is that between the lines of this book, you will better understand how hits are landed, how stars are born, and how you make money out of what is basically thin air. For a fanatic, you’ll see that I’m very practical when it comes to running a tight ship. My prayer is also that you will invest in your local music community and pass on all these old-school secrets to children coming up behind you. Talent is constantly out there, but it’ll always need to be found and helped in practical ways. Boiled down to its basic ingredients, the music world runs on discovering exceptional people and great songs—the two key substances that create musical explosions.

  Whether you’re going to gigs, buying stuff, or actually making a living out of music, we are all participating in the ancient ritual of helping talent rise. On a collective level—gigs, charts, playing records at parties—it’s a modern variation of a pagan ceremony, but in personal ways, it’s more like a street corner. You seek, you score, and you get high on your own. In our modern world of screens, most listeners now get their daily hits by pressing buttons. I’m a believer in the collective high and rarely signed a band unless they could play live. But has anything really changed? Does it matter if your daily hit is acquired digitally or if it’s needled up from a vinyl platter? Different people have their own traditions and rituals; all we really want is the spirit the songs evoke.

  With the growth of streaming services, it seems we’re now moving from the old system of bottled medicine to the brave new world of hits on tap. All ways can coexist and will keep evolving, because underneath it all, it’s still the same old trade of medicating millions of people who, like you and me, are just trying to get out of bed and cope with the mixed emotions of living. That’s why I can’t stand the endless debates about technology. I know I’m an old guy, but believe me, it’ll always come back to songs. Stick to the substance and people will line up.

  The job of the label is to source the dynamite, to know what’ll take people’s heartache away, and, every once in a while, land the legendary whale. In a dense marketplace where timing is key, our imprints provide the guarantees that the dealers and connoisseurs can easily recognize and run with. Labels will always be needed, because only maniacs like me are insane enough to roam the globe, trawling through miles and miles of shit to just every now and then pick out a tiny diamond. It’s a needles-in-haystacks treasure hunt driven by sheer obsession. As for the supposedly endangered species of copyright, don’t panic. While there are lawyers stalking the jungle floor, music rights will be defended with a never-ending hail of well-aimed writs and judges’ hammers.

  All that’s changed is distribution and how we listen to music, which has done nothing but change since I was a boy, anyway. The new dons of Silicon Valley have largely taken over the dirty business of selling the stuff to people, and most of my old friends who ran warehouses or drove around with boxes in the trunk have been undercut, bypassed, outmaneuvered, and—in the end—proverbially whacked. It’s been a turf war, but the joke is, the new dons still need the old labels. Through mutual dependency, peace is slowly breaking out.

  A hundred years from now, no matter how future generations listen to music, it will still boil down to song writing. A&R is basically a big, French-sounding way of saying people and writing. Hits need to hit. Only great music can raise the stakes by truly expressing what we all feel but cannot explain ourselves. The greatest artists are often the greatest writers, and even though you’ve never met them, they’ve always been your best friends. When we need a shoulder to cry on, our dearest, most treasured songs are like penny candles. They bring us to tears in a good way and put us back in tune with our true selves. They make us better.

  I may not have any great talent as a musician, but I’ve seen and heard enough to know what it is. A lifetime of seeking out and then serving great artists has taught me that this precious madness we all suffer from is both a burden and a blessing. Depending on our character, it’s an energy that can consume us or be put to good use. Talent is simply the gritty business of channeling all this inner spirit into the real world we all have to survive in.

  The magic of recorded music is that we can all reach the highs that great artists reach. And even better, as witnesses of other people’s true genius, we all get to elect the best minds of our generation. I take no bows. I never made any of these stars famous; we all did. In our own different ways, we felt something, we put our money on the table, and we lifted these kids up with a million arms. Long may this tradition last!

  So, my travel companion, it’s been a long, wild voyage. Yours now begins where mine must surely end.

  1. SHELLAC IN HIS VEINS

  On April 18, 1942, I was born Seymour Steinbigle, the only son of Dora and David. Considering my life’s obsession would be to get there first, it’s funny how late I arrived. Mother Nature’s stork dropped me down the chimney just as the biological clock was closing in on midnight. My forty-one-year-old father was the last Steinbigle, who’d almost given up praying for a son to carry the ancestral name. My only sibling, Ann, was already six years old and might have already resigned herself to being an only child.

  My birth was greeted with sighs of “At last!” The question was, would I last? I was born with a cardiac defect, a hole between the left and right heart chambers. In those days, they called it a murmur. As we now know, that little heart kept beating like a drum all the way to the pages of this autobiography, but who’d have bet on it? It was my destiny to begin life as the fragile boy, the defective model, exempted from sport and spoiled rotten by a mother who always heard a time bomb ticking in my chest and did what any mother would have done in such a situation. She held my hand tight, hoped for the best, and tried to savor every precious moment.

  It had been the gloomiest winter in living memory. Since Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor the previous December, America was in a state of shock watching the whole world slidin
g irreversibly into war. The very day I was born, however, marked the turning point when finally, Uncle Sam stood up and hit back. Literally hour for hour, while my mother went into labor in a Brooklyn hospital, sixteen B-25s took off from USS Hornet, an aircraft carrier in the West Pacific. To avoid radar detection, they had to fly fifty feet above sea level for a nail-biting eight hundred miles. Off the Japanese coast, they split into squadrons and bombed ten military and industrial targets in Tokyo, Yokohama, Yokosuka, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe.

  Throughout life, my mother always joked that the tremors from those bombs were what made me turn out crazy, but what always struck me as insane was that after they’d dropped their bombs, all eighty airmen couldn’t turn back and had to keep flying west. By the time they reached the coast of Free China, it was dark and turning stormy. Some planes managed to crash-land on airstrips, but most of the raiders had to bail out into the paddy fields and let their unmanned planes crash. Three died, and eight were captured, four of whom were executed. One plane with a leaky fuel tank was forced to take an early right turn to Russia. About sixty airmen, however, managed to get home with the help of villagers, guerrillas, and missionaries.

  The chief pilot behind this ramshackle adventure sported the unlikely name of Jimmy Doolittle. He got home to discover that every last target had been missed, and he was expecting to be court-martialed. But it’s a measure of how depressing our situation was in the first months of the war; the sheer daredevil heroism of this “Doolittle Raid” was a direct hit with newsmen and succeeded in lifting American morale off rock bottom. In the end, the powers that were awarded Jimmy Doolittle the Medal of Honor.

  It was the stuff of comic books in an otherwise terrifying reality. Unfortunately, smiling Doolittle and the American public had no idea what kind of wasps’ nest he’d just rattled. Gripped by national panic, Japan’s imperial forces traced the wrecked and abandoned bombers scattered around coastal China to a trail of parachutes, cigarette packets, coins, and aviation gloves that the American raiders had given locals for their help. With hitherto unimagined levels of extreme violence, the Japs began torturing, slaughtering, and raping the entire region. They burned down every home, destroyed every farm, and even flew in biologists to poison wells with the bacteria of plague, anthrax, cholera, and typhoid. Within weeks, the Pacific front was plunged into a steaming hellhole of terror, starvation, and disease.