And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records (30 page)

Faced with no other alternative, we began to look for ways to make it work. Neil initially thought that we could release a total of two million albums (which was by now standard for KISS, anyway)—half a million units for each guy. It had been over a year since KISS’s previous studio album, an eternity for them, and the opportunity to offer their huge fan base four new albums at once certainly held some appeal. A half million each; sure, we can do that. But Howard Marks balked. Sticking the contract in our faces, he pointed out that in order to abide by its terms, we’d have to press one million copies of each solo album. This would amount to a minimum of four million dollars in recording and advertising costs, to say nothing of manufacturing and promotion costs. At that point, albums still sold for less than ten dollars each, so we needed to ship a large number in order to cover costs and maintain the KISS hype machine. PolyGram was not happy about this. Wow, big surprise. We didn’t like it much either. We had to beg, plead, and cajole them into it.

Considering that all of KISS’s previous albums had gone Gold, Platinum, or better, shipping a million of each album didn’t seem
too
ridiculous, or so we told ourselves. Neil, gambler that he was, eventually embraced the idea. We not only came out with the four solo albums, but we also issued a limited edition of each album as a picture disc for collectors. The picture discs did very well, so, true to the Casablanca “damn the torpedoes” attitude, we quickly printed more of these not-quite-so-limited editions.

On September 18, we shipped over 5.3 million albums. It was the biggest release in industry history to that point. We had to make sure that PolyGram saw that this four-million-dollar investment was going to succeed, so we created an equally enormous marketing campaign. We supplied retailers with half a million white plastic bags printed with the four solo album covers, along with an assortment of point-of-purchase displays and foam-board signs. Hundreds upon hundreds of lavish press kits went out. We spent $1.2 million on ad buys in various forms of media. We bought sixty-second radio spots on over one hundred stations nationwide. We placed expensive thirty-second spots on youth-oriented prime-time TV shows like
Happy Days
and
Laverne and Shirley.
There were bus and subway ads in Manhattan, as well as billboards there and in LA. We did four digital ads—one for each album—on the nineteen-month-old JumboTron in Times Square. We shipped out looped videocassettes of a two-minute presentation on the pressing of the solo albums to over four hundred retailers, as well as promotional calendars for 1979. The campaign seemed endless.

It wasn’t just PolyGram that was pissed at us—it was the entire industry. Neil’s aggressiveness had always been the subject of water-cooler gossip in the various record companies. At first, we’d seemed like ambitious underdogs. Our naïveté was probably endearing: “Oh, look at those Casablanca guys going a million miles an hour.” But then raised eyebrows became contempt because we started to promote to ridiculous extremes—and, worse, we even promoted ourselves, as record company execs. This unquestionably made life difficult for our counterparts at other record companies. Now Warner execs, for instance, had to field calls from artists asking, “Why can’t you promote us like Casablanca promotes their acts?” Our rampant spending was forcing other labels to keep up with the Joneses, whether they wanted to or not. The new KISS albums were the worst example of this, because not only had we spent more on a single campaign than any other record company had ever spent before, but we’d also done it for solo albums, the bane of the record exec’s existence. You could just imagine the top guy at MCA grumbling, “God, if Townshend and Daltrey come in here screaming for three million each for solo albums, we’re fucked.”

Not long after the KISS albums hit the stores, it became apparent that we were royally screwed. The Gene and Paul solos, the ones we thought would do the best, were miserable failures, as was Peter’s effort. The best seller of the lot was Ace’s, which scored with a relatively strong single, “New York Groove,” but that wasn’t enough to save us, nor was having four Platinum albums (only because we’d shipped a million each). Our projected sales figures were frighteningly off, although I’d bragged in an interview that they would be at six to eight million by Christmas. We had another Carson album on our hands—times four. The albums actually sold about half a million units each: Gold status. Had we fought Howard Marks and shipped them Gold to begin with, everyone would’ve survived. But given our cash outlay for recording, pressing, and advertising, we needed to sell the entire run just to approach the breakeven point. To eat two million returns was a crippling blow.

PolyGram, unbeknownst to us or to KISS, sold the lion’s share of the returns to discount retailers and flea markets, contravening the terms of our contract with KISS. If your albums landed in the cutout bin, it usually meant that you were finished. This certainly didn’t help KISS’s career, which by 1979 would begin to decline in the US. Years later, KISS would sue PolyGram for this infraction and win. For Casablanca, there would be no such salvation.

 

 

If you’re Jewish, one of the highest honors you can receive is having a dinner thrown for you by the United Jewish Appeal (UJA). In the fall of 1978, Neil was chosen. This was the major honor of his life to that point, and he was beaming when the announcement was made.

It is understood that UJA honorees will use the event to raise funds for the appeal. All my life, I’d heard plenty about the monetary and political sides of religion, so this was no surprise to me. The UJA dinner would highlight Neil’s entire career in the business, and so he wanted it to be the organization’s most successful fund drive ever. He had Ellen Wolf, Walter Wanger, and Chris Whorf plan a multimedia presentation based on his childhood and his career, and he assigned Casablanca’s press department the task of laying out an industry campaign to make everyone aware of the event. He also instructed Dick Sherman and his sales staff to sell an ad in the
UJA Journal
to everyone we dealt with—every manufacturer, every printer, every major chain store. These ads were the primary vehicle for raising money for the organization. Casablanca’s art department, its finance department, and everyone who spent a nickel of the company’s money were ordered to get an ad from all of their vendors, no matter how small. Millennium, Chocolate City, and the rest of our subsidiary labels took ads, even though we actually put up the money for many of them. Finally, we made sure that every one of our artists took ads.

As the dinner drew near, Neil followed up on stragglers who had committed to a donation but hadn’t yet paid up. He was tireless in his drive to ensure that everyone he knew contributed to the effort. At least half of our employees would be attending the dinner, and the per-plate ticket prices weren’t cheap. Many of the companies we dealt with were expected to buy an entire table plus take out an ad in praise of Neil in the
UJA Journal,
which included an extended professional bio of Neil Bogart.

In New York on the big night, Candy and I were seated on the dais next to Walter Yetnikoff, president of CBS Records. Warner executive Joe Smith was the emcee. Joe had been master of ceremonies at so many of these events that it was practically his second career. Launching into his introduction, he spoke with great gusto about Neil. He went on and on, and finally Yetnikoff leaned over to Candy and me and said, “He’s making such a fuss—Neil this, Neil that—I thought he was talking about Neil Diamond.” Candy and I giggled quietly. The evening was wonderful. It was announced that seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars had been raised—a record amount. It crossed my mind that the next guy the UJA honored was not going to have an easy time following in Neil’s footsteps.

A week or so after we’d returned home, our chief financial officer, David Shein, along with a few accounting people, came into my office and showed me the bills for limos from the night of the UJA dinner. It seemed that each person who had attended the event, including those who lived in New York, had taken a limo (over thirty in all), and many had kept them until the wee hours of the morning. Limo, hotel, air fare, and other expenses associated with the dinner totaled in excess of seventy-five thousand dollars. It would have made more sense for us to have stayed home and donated the money to the UJA. Seeing those expense reports, I lost it. I couldn’t keep up the who-cares-it’s-only-money pretense any longer. I just could not stomach any more of this whistling past the graveyard, this willful ignorance. We were hemorrhaging money. “David! What the fuck is this?! I don’t care if people used the limos to go to and from the event, but to have them standing by overnight outside their hotel?” I was livid. “Look at this shit!” I pointed to several of the invoices. “At least half of these limos only had one or two people in them. We were all staying at the same hotel, for God’s sake! How much common sense does it take to coordinate trips to an event?”

I finally took a breath. “David, I don’t get it. We treat our people well—better than any company in the business. Even if they don’t outwardly appreciate that, these assholes don’t get to abuse the privilege!” Everything we did for our employees was first class. Remember, even the mailroom guys got birthday parties with, literally, crates of expensive champagne. When some idiot hit-and-run driver severely damaged several employee cars in the company parking lot, Neil had rentals delivered for each affected employee within the hour. We never pitted one executive against another when it came to expenses. Everyone who had to travel went first class and enjoyed the trip. After all, if you happened to run into industry colleagues en route, your first-class accommodation would reinforce their perception that Casablanca was doing well, and that perception was very important to us.

Of course, that policy led to some iffy decisions. For instance, for the sheer spectacle of it, Neil and I were among the first to have cell phones. These were the early models—enormous, clumsy, non-user-friendly contraptions that we had to cart around in briefcases. We’d call each other from our cars, just because we could. Did we need them? No, of course we didn’t. No one else had them. Hardly anyone was aware that we had them, so only a select few knew that we could be reached in the car. It was prestige. It was boys and their toys. But that was Casablanca.

Yes, we permitted our people to spend more money than any other company did, but they would never leave us because we treated them like royalty. On occasion, we would jump in to help with an employee’s family or health emergency, covering deductibles or fronting money for medical treatment; this generosity and family feeling extended down through the ranks from the executive level to the mailroom. Neil was even known to call in a favor at Cedars-Sinai Hospital to get specialist treatment for an employee’s family member. He would sometimes pay medical bills for someone’s kid out of his own pocket. He was very compassionate, and such actions go a long way toward explaining why he remains so revered by so many people.

Not long after the UJA event, I attempted to walk into my office one morning. I wasn’t entirely successful. I was impeded because every teenage actress in Hollywood seemed to have taken up residence in the hallway. Our FilmWorks division was producing our next theatrical project for our new film distributor, United Artists—a coming-of-age drama called Foxes. The movie, which was about the mistreatment of 1970s youth, would have four female leads, so an army of pert, flirtatious minions had come to hang out at 8255 for days on end, vying with each other for a lead role. Former Runaways lead singer Cherie Currie landed one of the parts, and she did such an incredible job portraying a zoinked-out teenager that I’m convinced the only reason she didn’t go on to have a major film career was that no one thought she was acting. Academy Award-winner Jodie Foster, whose dad, coincidently, had sold Neil our Sunset Boulevard headquarters in 1975, scored another lead role. Also included in the cast were Randy Quaid (fresh from
Midnight Express
) and Scott Baio (who was then starring in the ABC Television hit
Happy Days
). Laura Dern would make her screen debut in
Foxes
, as would a tween-aged girl named Jill Bogart, who was surprisingly convincing in her role as an annoying younger sister. (One of the actresses—or, more accurately, future actresses—running up and down the Casablanca halls during this time was a precocious six-year-old named Christina. She was a charming little kid whom everyone immediately liked. We had hired her father, Bobby Applegate, to work in our promotions department, and from the day he arrived he would tell anyone who would listen how his little girl was going to grow up to be a star. He was right.)

Also included in
Foxes
were the members of Angel, finally making it to the big screen in a small but key performance role. Angel’s next release was imminent, and, being as frustrated as we were that we hadn’t broken them yet, they decided to call the LP
Bad Publicity.
The title was a self-deprecating shot at their failure to generate or sustain any sort of visibility. It’s possible that Neil missed the point and took it as an attack on Casablanca for failing to break the band, but, for whatever reason, he balked at the cover art, which depicted the band partying it up at the Riot House (the Continental Hyatt House in LA). Despite the fact that the pressing plant in New Jersey had already printed ten thousand copies of the jacket, Neil called one of the reps and gave the order to destroy the album covers. Retitled
Sinful
, the LP was released in January 1979. Angel was effectively a lost cause in our minds, and any enthusiasm we’d had to promote them was long gone. We scaled back our Angel advertising, which had previously included full-page ads in the trades, and we shelved a promotional film (shot during the Riot House photo session) for the LP’s first single “Don’t Take You Love,” which we didn’t bother to work or even send to the trades. Angel probably suffered from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I would bet the house that had they first come onto the scene in 1985 instead of 1975, they would’ve been as big as latter-day peers like Poison or Bon Jovi. I took that gamble in the mid-1980s, when I became comanager of Giuffria, Gregg’s post-Angel band, which had been signed by MCA Records.

As 1978 drew to a close, our press department continued to grow, and we assigned most of the new people to work on Neil’s endeavors or on Donna Summer. We also concentrated our energies to establish other artists, movies, and projects. After Susan Munao left to become Donna’s comanager, Neil called Bobbi Cowan, another Gibson and Stromberg alum, and offered her the job of vice president of publicity. Not realizing what she was getting into, she accepted. Bobbi thought she would be working for Neil, and she wasn’t happy to find herself more under my direction than his. I did not demand very much from her, as I immediately saw that she was in way over her head. She was a good publicist, but at that stage in her career she was not equipped to handle a sixty-person department that had about one hundred artists depending on it. The demands of the job overwhelmed her, and she soon left the company. She rebounded quickly and ended up being the inspiration for Bobbi Flekman, the nasal-voiced publicist portrayed so famously by Fran Drescher in
This Is Spinal Tap.

For Casablanca and PolyGram, 1978 was a banner year, the embarrassing KISS solo album debacle notwithstanding. Casablanca logged $102 million in sales, while PolyGram posted $470 million domestically and over a billion worldwide. We had ten Platinum and thirteen Gold albums that year, second only to Columbia. However, 1979 would be the worst year in the history of the music business.

We didn’t know it at the time (our only indication might have been slower-than-forecasted sales during the 1978 holiday shopping season), but a number of factors had combined to pull the rug out from under the entire industry. Due to flagging confidence in the economy and the escalating Cold War with the Soviet Union, consumer goods prices rose dramatically, while economic growth slowed at an equally alarming rate. This left consumers with considerably less disposable income. Music, of course, isn’t bread, it’s a luxury, and the entire industry suffered as the record-buying public went into hiding.

Due, to some degree, to the KISS solo LPs disaster, we were ahead of the pack when it came to cutting back on spending. We only released four albums (about one a month) to fill out 1978, and by the new year, we’d already made considerable cutbacks in our trade advertising. Albums that would have received a full-page ad six months earlier now got to be part of a two-page collage featuring six to ten releases. But all of this wasn’t happening because we at Casablanca had suddenly decided to be sensible; it was in response to a decree that was handed down to Neil, Dick, and me during PolyGram’s national sales meeting in New Orleans just a few days into 1979. Overshipping was another sore spot with the PolyGram brass, which meant that our days of shipping out a million plus units of every major release were over. And although these messages were probably intended for all the subsidiary labels, the speaker looked directly at Neil from the podium as he addressed the issue of unnecessary expenditures. Neil sat there displaying his best poker face. He didn’t bat an eye. The era of true independence was over for us: we now had to answer to Mom and Dad.

Neil’s ambition remained undimmed, however. I’m still not sure whether I found that inspiring or alarming, but, in any case, his sense of opportunism ran strong. The publicity department at Casablanca was the biggest in the company. Neil required an entire contingent just to work on his own publicity. We were sitting in his office one day discussing his growing public presence, and he came right out and told me, “If I’m seen with famous people, I will be famous.” This declaration perfectly captured what he was becoming, and it made me cringe. Neil had fully succumbed to the Hollywood mentality. It struck me hard that we were fucked. If he was signing artists simply because they were famous, then the company was in more trouble than I realized. The line became a running joke around the office. Maybe all of this had begun in the fall of 1977, when Susan Munao had secured Neil a cover story in
New West
magazine (a
People
-like West Coast publication). Or maybe it had come out of Neil’s
Merv Griffin Show
appearances, which had been set up for him by Steve Keator, a relative of Merv’s who worked for us ostensibly in the publicity department, but who was really there because of his connection to Merv.