And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records (34 page)

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.

 

 

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.

Although they finally realized what a liability Casablanca was and made the necessary cutbacks to fix it, PolyGram again didn’t do their homework very well. The McDonald’s concept had the potential to help Casablanca regain its footing in a spectacular way, but I don’t think Bruce bought into the idea, and the albums made no impact. I wish now that I’d discussed the project with Bruce; I might have been able to sell him on the idea.

PolyGram’s lack of due diligence was far worse with regard to KISS and Donna Summer, who had top-man clauses in their contracts stipulating that they could terminate their agreements if Neil left the company. Now that Neil was gone, both acts gave PolyGram their sixty days’ notice. Angel was a never-was, Parliament was more or less over, the Village People were in decline, and now the label’s two biggest acts were walking. I’m sure PolyGram tried to prevent it, but Donna was moving to David Geffen’s upstart label, and there was nothing they could do to change that. So they set their sights on keeping their only remaining viable commodity: KISS. KISS’s co-business manager Howard Marks was of course aware of the leverage the situation gave him. He put together a six-album deal with PolyGram in late April 1980. This included a jaw-dropping two-million-dollar advance per album. Weeks after the signing, the band announced the departure of drummer Peter Criss; Peter’s long-deteriorating relationship with his band mates was finally over.