Jac Holzman

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to Bob Leftet's podcast. My guest
today is Cruly, a legend in the pian era. Mr
Electra Records, Pano Vision, and so much more. Jack Holsman, Jack,
it's a pleasure to be here. Okay, first question, why
is there no kay On Jack? Because the name was

(00:29):
originally Jacob and my dad, I'm a junior, Jack Holsman.
It's Jacob Holsman, and my dad said that when he
was going to school up in Portland, Jacob was a
Jewish name, so he decided to get rid of that
in terms of talking to other students that he named
himself Jack and I inherited on my birth certificate is

(00:53):
Jacob Easton Holsman the second But you are Jewish and
were raised Jewish? Correct? Yeah? I was Okay, So he
was doing it, Uh, just so he wouldn't experience anti
semitism in Portland. What was he doing in Portland? Well,
the whole family had come across the United States, had
settled in Denver, and at one point I thought that

(01:13):
Portland was new, fresh open territory, and uh, they opened
up second hand stores there. Okay, we'll get back to that.
But h in our conversations previous to this, you said, well,
you didn't know whether you could schedule because you were
doing work for Warner Music. What exactly, how exactly and
what are you doing involved with Warner today? Well, what

(01:36):
happened was that I was with the company for twenty
three years, and I knew I couldn't leave the company
until we had a solid distribution system. And I had
made a promise to myself to quit my at midlife.
I saw a movie once, uh, and it was a

(01:56):
story of about a guy who decide that he wants
to stop at midlife and figure out what he's doing
and then pick up and go from that. And I
thought that was in uh, incredibly smart, And so I
knew that I wanted to stop in my forties and
take how many years to do whatever I wanted. There

(02:17):
were things I longed to do. I was a pilot.
I loved airplanes. I like to fly airplanes. I love
to scuba dive, I wanted to travel. I just wanted
to have time off and see what comes into my
perspective and figure out what I'm going to do later.
I did that for seven years, uh, and then in

(02:41):
the end of that seventh year, I UH called the
chairman of the company and I said to him, I'm
ready to come back. And he said, what do you
want to do? And I said, I want to come back,
not in the music group, but as as a technologist,
your chief technology. As he said, You're hired. And then
we got into cable and a whole bunch of interesting

(03:04):
things and I was there as part of that group,
and when we had problems, I knew how to solve them. Okay,
so you're rehired at Warner is the chief technologist? What
does that ultimately leave you? That ultimately led me into
cable TV. I had a friend who had done a
video which I thought was quite amazing, and Uh, I said,

(03:29):
I think there's something here. One of the things that
happened that was material was that somebody gave me a
film of his performing a song and I thought it
was wonderful, and I got it up on one of
the UH Warner cable channels and there was excitement about that,

(03:50):
and then that turned itself into MTV over time, and
that was just wonderful because suddenly the record companies had
an outlet for making people aware of their records and
promoting their records without having to go through radio stations
and all the nonsense that went on with getting your

(04:11):
thing on the air, and it was a more complete
emotional picture or emotional experience of what the song was.
So MTV was was was the happy outcome of what
I had started. I got it to the right people
at the right time, and it just happened. So from
there you go to Piano Vision. You go through many iterations,

(04:35):
but before we go literally you're still working for the
company today. Yes, that's a longer story, but what happened
was that after we got the MTV up, Warner Communications
became Warner Communications. They immediately acquired a company called Pani
Vision at the recommendation the man who was running the

(04:59):
uh the studios. And the thing about Panavision was that
it made cameras. It was very profitable at least cameras
and lenses to all of the picture companies. The picture
companies had sent their equipment back. And what happened at
Panavision is that it was upgraded. There were new lenses,
everything was guaranteed. They rented it, you had somebody standing

(05:22):
by to fix it if it needed fixing. That was
all wonderful then suddenly they were spending a lot of
money and nobody could find out what the money was
being what the money was being spent on. And since
I knew something about cinematography, Steve Ross, who was the
chairman of the company, asked me to go out and
find out what the hell was going on. So I

(05:44):
went to Panavision and I sat with the man who
was in charge of the company, Bob got Schalk. He
was very tightly woven. I couldn't get any answers. And
then he took me into room where all of the
pan division equipment was showing, and I looked around and

(06:07):
I saw a camera that had a red light flashing,
and it had it had film in it, but I
didn't hear anything. So I said, is that a silent camera?
He said yes. I said, in effect, what you did
was didn't try to muffle the noise. You tried to
eliminate it before it happened. He said, exactly right, And

(06:30):
that was the Panaflex. So suddenly movie making change. Everybody
wanted a Panaflex because it was a smallish camera, it
could be moved around and you didn't hear it. It's
it saved all kinds of time and money. Gotchawk was
running it. He was running it moderately well, but then
he was killed by a living male lover. And I

(06:55):
got a call from Steve Ross saying, we've heard that
Gotcha talk was was killed. Can you find out what's
going on and try to come up with something that
you think we should do. So I was up at Atari,
where I was in a where I was a director
because I had been involved in the evaluation, the technical

(07:16):
evaluation of that company. And I called into the got
Shocks UH secretary and I said, Michael, and he said
it's true. And I said, what's happening? He said, everybody's
going around crazy with rumors. I said, I'd like you
to stay off the phone for five minutes. I need

(07:36):
to think, and he said I'll do that. And I
as he stayed off the phone for five minutes, I
asked myself, do I really want to take over this company?
Do I think I can do that job? Well? I
have some fun, it's so totally different from anything I've
ever done, and yet it's in the business that I
admire so much. And I called him back and I said, well,

(07:59):
tell everybody I'm taking over the company. And I'll be
there at ten o'clock tomorrow morning. And you picked the
executives you think I need to meet with first before
we meet with everybody. He said fine. And then I
called Steve Ross and I said it's true. And he said,
you have any ideas? I said, I've taken over the company,
and he said, what can I do for you? I said,

(08:21):
don't call me cash my checks and he said, agreed,
will do that. I said, I need I'll talk to
you when I think I've got my arms wrapped around it.
But these are people I don't know, and I'm going
to have to earn my way into their confidence, and
that's going to take time. And that's what we did,

(08:45):
and I took over the company. We brought in all
of the people from around the world who were releasing
agents for us, and uh. They all were helpful. And
when I was in the company two or three months,
I could see the defects and what we needed to
do and where we needed to go. And we had

(09:05):
optics that were too old and some optics that weren't honest.
So we got it all fixed. And three years later
Ross decided he didn't want the company anymore, and he
was going to sell it. I had money and was
willing to buy it with a people, with people I
could raise money from. But he never sold any company

(09:25):
to any person who would run it on the grounds
that you knew stuff that he didn't know, and so
you had an advantage. So he turned me down and
that was it. And Uh. Eventually I left Warner Communications
and stayed out while I took a vacation that I

(09:47):
had promised myself. I had seen a movie called Holiday
with Carrie Grant. That was a wonderful movie about a
guy who was from the wrong side of the tracks
when he was on the rights I had of the
tracks and beginning to make some money if he made enough,
he wanted to take a break for a period of time,
figure out where he was going and what his life

(10:09):
was all about. And at nineteen years old, I saw
sat in the back of the theater and I said, God,
that makes so much sense. I don't want to forget that,
and I didn't so that. When my contract was up,
UH and I was asked to renew, I said, look,
you can put a lecture with Asylum. You've got Geffen,

(10:29):
You've got all of these good people. You don't need
me anymore. I need time for myself. And I had
discovered Hawaii and a holiday trip, and I knew that's
where I wanted to be. And I moved to Hawaii
and I lived there for seven plus years and did
everything I wanted to do, so all the people I

(10:49):
wanted to see and meet and have all of the adventures,
and I I loved my life. But I knew it
was time for me to go back to work and
called Steve Ross and that's when we got into the
stage of being the chief technologist. But let's go back
to the beginning. So your parents were they born in

(11:13):
the US? Were they born in the so called Old Country? No,
they were born in the United States. My mother was
born in Cincinnata. My father was born in Portland. Where else? Okay,
So they met in Portland, Um, actually they did. My
mother came there with her mother, a stell Sternberger, who

(11:34):
was a real personality. She had a program, a weekly
political analysis program on CBS network which was broadcast on
Saturday mornings. And that was a big piece of my
actually going into music because when I asked to sit
in the studio with her, they said, oh no, you
can't do that. But you can sit in the control

(11:56):
room and in the control room where all the lads
and earned tables and uh everything. It was used in broadcasting,
and I was intensely curious about it, and I'd ask
a lot of questions and they'd explained it to me.
So that when I was reading Life magazine and saw
an article uh that showed the inventor or the creator

(12:21):
for CBS Labs of the LP record, I knew that
it was going to be a winner, and that small
independent labels could start because we would do stuff that
was not related to the major labels at all. I
thought I would do folk music in baroque music. Baroque
music was too expensive for me. I only had six

(12:43):
hundred dollars, and so I tried folk music. Glenn Yarborough,
who turned out to be a star later and a
member of the Limelighters, was one of my first early artists.
And at the end of that third year, St. John's
College was an am using school. It it's had a

(13:03):
curriculum that did not use textbooks. It used the original books.
If you were studying geometry, you went all the way back. Well,
let's just let's go back. We'll get back to St. John's.
So you grew up in Portland. No, I didn't grow up.
I grew up in New York. My father came to
New York UH after his after his supremat he came

(13:25):
to medical school at Harvard. And after medical school at Harvard, UH,
he was taken in by Mound Sinai and was at
Mount Sinai for a number of years, and then he
went into private practice. And he called up my mother
our writer or a letter or whatever did and then

(13:45):
they started dating, and eventually I emerged. And how many
kids in the family? True? My brother and I my
brother Keith, who's the oldest. I'm the oldest. I'm And
to what degree be the oldest child? Were you in
the embodiment of their hopes and dreams? My father didn't

(14:06):
think I was very smart, and he said that, look,
I know you're gonna have a trouble finding a way
to make a living. So I'll buy a drug store
for you in this building. We'll put it up and
then you run the drug store, and we split the
profits at the end of the year. And I said,
that's not what I have in mind. He said, what

(14:26):
did you have in mind? I said, I don't know,
but I'm going to think on it. And Uh, I
started a little record shop for folk music and as
the office for a record company I named Electra because
I loved the name. Electra was one of the one
of the outer muses in the Solar system. And but

(14:51):
I wanted Electra with a C. Was. I wanted a heart,
more dramatic K. And so the lecture came with a K.
And I found my first folk singer, Geane Ritchie, and
she we made a wonderful album together. You could record
the artist in their own home. I had my own

(15:12):
tape recorder by that time, six hundred dollar Magna order
and a microphone. And so what we do was we
would set up the rooms, hang hang things on the
walls to keep the echoic nature of a room from
happening into the microphone. And I did that with a
whole bunch of artists, Oscar Brand, Frank Warner, uh And

(15:34):
slowly these were tenanth LPs. They kind of grew and
grew and grew. I still wasn't making money. I was
making debt. In nineteen fifty five, I was sitting in
a at a home with some friends and they were
having everybody brought their guitar and they're singing songs. And

(15:55):
they gave this guitar to this guy who was an actor,
and he just blew me away. It was Theodore Bickel. Uh.
He was doing Yiddish songs, he was doing Israeli songs,
he was doing Russian folk songs. And I knew those
genres had big audiences in the major cities. So I
sat theo down and we talked, and we made a

(16:16):
record deal together, and uh, we started making these albums.
And in the nifty six when twelve inch records happened,
we added more music to the album as they came
out as twelve inch LPs, and suddenly we were selling records. Okay,
let's go back. Uh, you're growing up. What kind of

(16:38):
kid are you? You have a lot of friends. Are
more of an introvert? I was a loner. I had
one friend named Adam Pinsker. Adam was smart and kept
me kind of straightened out. I was kind of loose
and banging at all kinds of edges. But when I
had something I love to do, I did it very well.

(16:59):
And when I went to St. John's College, which was
this great book school which Ahmed Errigan had gone to
eight years earlier than me. When we found out that
we had both gone to this very obscure school where
there are only one hundred students in it for all
all grades, big hugs and kisses because we had that

(17:22):
extremely important education and opportunity in hand. Why did you
go to St John's Because I had my only other
choice with another college. I had a promising date for
that weekend, so I they insisted upon an interview that weekend.
I said, the hell with it. I'll go to St.
John's whatever that is. I had no idea what I

(17:45):
was getting into what it turned out to be a
turning point in my life. And as I was there
and picking up some packages that I had sent to myself,
I noticed one to Adam Pinsker. He had also ended
up in this school. The child wildhood friend whom I
hadn't seen in years was in this school, and he
was enormous help to me. And so at what point

(18:07):
do you decide to start electra? Are you still at
St John's and don't you have a partner. I'm still
at St. John's. I had somebody who had come out
of the Navy who put up three hundred dollars and
they we were partners. Uh. He later didn't want to
be involved with this, and so I think I gave

(18:29):
a thousand dollars. I don't know where the hell I
got the thousand dollars, but I gave a thousand dollars
and he went his way, and I owned a hundred
percent of the company, but we were in about ninety
thousand dollars worth of fifty five debt before Theodore Bikail
the Theater or Pikail records between them sold about a

(18:52):
hundred thousand, but they were very profitable despite the fact
that they were very elaborately produced. Did you had a
Russian album? We had a book of liner notes. It
wasn't liner notes on the back so much as it
was liner notes. Inside the album. We would have the
songs in Russian in a transliteration, which is what if

(19:12):
you want to sing along with us and can read English,
you might be able to sing with with theo uh
and then the English translation. And because they were so
complete and the covers were so good, we did well.
And I had very good suppliers. They were really generous

(19:32):
with me. I owed him ninety thousand dollars, but my
strategy with them was not to put off paying them.
It was the opposite, to pay a small amount every
two weeks. So they saw a check coming every two weeks,
and the checks got bigger and bigger and bigger, and
then one day I wrote checks for ninety thousand dollars,
paid them off and kept them. Okay. Now, I certainly

(19:56):
remember growing up with Theodore Maquel records, and he was
very definitely a star. The reason I bring this up
is when you meet him in this party. Had he
been contacted by anybody else to make records? No, he wasn't.
He was an actor. He was on Broadway. I thought
he could be in a record artist. And I said, Jim,

(20:17):
come on over to the house and we'll record some stuff.
We'll see how it goes. And then I played it
back for myself a lot, and I said, this isn't
this is an artist. I think that will help get
me there. And about five years after he had helped
get me there, I said THEO we're doing well. Now

(20:38):
you deserve a reward as an appreciation, and he said
what I said, Well, I'll sell you five percent of
the company for the low price of twenty dollars and
he bought it, and when the company was sold, he
walked out with five hundred thousand dollars. But that's what
I felt. I owed him. He was there at that time.

(21:01):
You have a record deal. Today, record deals are very complicated,
never mind the streaming era. What kind of deal did
you cut the O back in the fifties. Well, I
cut the deal of no money down and a royalty
of seven on the price on which all records were sold,
because there was a ten percent federal tax at that time,

(21:24):
instituted during the war. So that was it. The contracts
were very simple. We had very successful series. We had
a series we did. Another artist, Oscar Brand, who had
a New York radio show every Sunday, came to me
one day and said, you know, I've been getting lyrics

(21:45):
and stuff with melodies from Air Force people. He said,
you know, we could make an Air Force album. I
said that kind of crazy, but let me listen to
the material. And the material was there, and so I said, okay,
we'll call at the y old Blue Johnder. We made
a record, we put it out, It did well, and
we sent a copy with a note to the unit

(22:08):
that bought all of the stuff for the stores that
they ran in each of the various locations the world,
and uh so we sent it and we didn't hear
from them, and then about three weeks later we got
a letter with an order for ten thousand copies. I
called him and said, do you guys make a mistake
with a zero? And they said, no, no, we think

(22:29):
we can sell ten thousand, and so that worked, and
then we did it for the Marines, we did it
for the Navy. We were doing well. No, nothing explosive,
but I was having fun and we were doing things
that other people didn't do. There was a moment when
I had there was nothing to record. I could not

(22:50):
find an artist I wanted just before Josh White, so
I said, what else can I record? I'm a Ham
radio operator and I have trouble with Morse code. So
I came up with a Morse code record that you
could play at thirty three, forty five, and seventy eight,
depending upon your how good you were in reading Morse code.

(23:10):
And we didn't sell it through record stores. We sold
it through stores that had big mail order departments. Uh
and they were located throughout the country of Concord was
one of them. There were about eight, and he sold
about five a month, So I was selling three thousand
a month of what I couldn't give away in fol

(23:31):
in folk music, and I never forgot that it's not
always about recording music, which came later on and proved
to be the most dynamic restart in a record company
that I know of. Okay, now, one thing we know
in the era of independent distribution as opposed to branch distribution,

(23:52):
that it wasn't always so easy to get paid even
if the records sold. What was that experience like for you?
I didn't have that experience very badly. I picked good
people who actually paid me, but took their time about it,
which was one of the reasons why I didn't have
enough money to pay off the manufacturers and people who

(24:15):
made the records assemble the albums. But I knew that
had to end, and that was one of the sparking
points with which I always lived. I've got to find
an opportunity for independent labels to be able to supervise
and handle the last thing between the record and the
person who buys it, so you ultimately form wea But

(24:38):
staying with the Electra story tell us the story of
Josh White Josh White. I got a phone call one day.
A man said to me, I represent Josh White, and
Josh White can't get a record contract because he's been blacklisted.
Why was he blacklisted? He performed at a Russian a

(25:00):
concert to raise money for Russia and special arms for
Russia during the Second World War, so he was blacklisted.
I said, that's no reason to be blacklisted. They well,
they calling him a communist. I said, well, I call
him Josh White, and I would love to have him.
He said, I'm not going to send him over if
you're going to disappoint him. I said, if he can

(25:21):
sing the way I remember he could sing, then you
have no problem. And he came over and we sat
down and we got along very well. And then he
began to sing, and I realized that all of the
recordings that had been done mono records were done very cheaply,
and he didn't sound like Josh White. I thought I
could make him sound like Josh White. And we talked

(25:42):
about this, and then we did the We did an
album called John Henry, which was two LPs. One was
just the story of John Henry and the other was
other songs from that same period and then we did
Josh at Midnight, which was the winner. We did it
late in the evening, a young lady would drop by.

(26:04):
We had to do it all with one microphone, so
I had I put the people where I thought they
belonged in front of the microphone and you know, take
something to the floor so that they wouldn't know we're
a step. We recorded, and that's when we made the
Josh White recording and it just took off. By take off,
I mean it was selling thirty thirty five thousand, which

(26:28):
for me was wonderful, and he got paid, so Josh
was easy to work with me. We made about seven
albums and all overtime. So this begs a question. Since
you were recording in Mono and you had the magnetone
tape recorder, were you also serving as the engineer and
do you have skills in that area. I did everything myself. Yes,

(26:50):
I was the engineer. I had the tape recorder, we
had the one microphone. They were placed strategically where they
should be in terms of distance. Uh. They were wonderfully cooperative.
But I recorded every album with my tape recorders. I
would go places by strapping my tape recorder onto the

(27:10):
spare seat behind me on my motor scooter. I didn't
have a car, but I motor scooted everywhere. I love
that motor scooter. Okay, So for those of us who
are a little bit younger, we remember Elektra being one
of the two kings of folk music, the other being Vanguard.
So as we start to hit the sixties and the
folk music eras begins with even Hood Nanny on DV,

(27:34):
you start putting out these folk records that start getting traction. Okay.
What happened was by nineteen sixty, I thought folk music,
the five to eight hundred songs that were folk songs
had all been recorded. They had been played to death
on radio and people would sit there clapping their hands,
which had nothing to do with folk music. And I said,

(27:55):
it's a different direction. If I find a folk artist
that I are, an artist like a Judy Collins, who
I think has has talent, I'll do that. But I
don't know what the hell to record, and I'm not
going to record crap. So I went back to my
time every of recording the Morse Code, and I said,

(28:17):
I said, what's not out there that needs to be done?
Because I'm not going to make any piece of ship.
I thought, and I thought, and I came home one
day and I was closing the door. I heard a
car crash which was on my wife's TV. And I said,
sound effects. There are no sound effects albums that I

(28:39):
know of that are available to the public. So I
did a lot of research, and I started started by
sitting down watching television and writing down every sound effect
I heard, and every sound effect I could think of.
When I had six hundred of them, I put together
a team of people who had for whom I could least,

(28:59):
the recorders and microphones and stereo, and we started recalling
recording all of these and it took about eight months.
And when I got them all together, I program them
into ten albums and you could buy them as a unit,
or you could buy them individually, but you could. You

(29:20):
ended up with forty some odd sound effects at a
course of about fourteen cents each, and it blew wide open.
I could not believe the numbers of sound effects I
was selling, and they were. They were obviously in record stores.
We made them available through mail order. We produced a
very good record, and we thought about everything to locate

(29:44):
a sound effect when you had twenty of them. On
one side. We had a little ruler which had a
little hole where which you put over the center hole
and then you wrote down which track that arrow was
entered into. So you had twenty arrows and you could
find the sound effect immediately. So you think about all

(30:04):
of that stuff beforehand, and then you do it. And
when you do it with love and intention and you
don't spare the money, you do well. We made a
million and a half dollars that year on sound effects.
That's a lot of money. Uh, sixty years ago, back
in nineteen sixty one, boy, that was a lot of money. Okay.

(30:31):
We also asks the question you're having these huge successes
are other people than imitating you? There's no point in
imitating a set that's got everything. You force them out
of doing it by making it so good and so
complete and so full that nobody wants to buy anything
but yours, because you have those little grace notes like
the thing that slips over the spindle on your turntable,

(30:55):
those kinds of thinking and talking about how we did them,
and then we would sell them in a special package.
You could get the package for fifty dollars and uh,
we would send it off to you. You got the
whole thing. We didn't collect for licensing. If somebody wanted
to use the sound effect, go ahead and use it.

(31:18):
We don't care. We made it for you to use,
and we're very satisfied with the profit we're making per album.
So with all of these benefits, who's going to come
out and try to compete with us, especially when we
did such a good job making them. You have this
big victory. What's your next step? My next step is Okay, folks,

(31:41):
music is going where do we go? And I'm beginning
to hear I heard about the Paul Butterfield blues band,
uh and that sounded really good and my uh but
but before we got to Paul Butterfield, you you recorded
Tom Rush. There are a lot of other people that
you recorded phil Oaks that were folk yaks before you

(32:04):
got into rock. You're you're absolutely right, So let me
start again. Knowing that there were no more folk songs anymore,
there was beginning to come forth. The generation of people
who inspired by Dylan were writing their own songs, and
they they were phil Oaks and Tom Rush, who was
also an interpreter, and any number of people who wrote

(32:27):
distinctively different songs, phil Oaks especially, and we recorded all
of those people. And then as we saw different things happening,
and and Dylan went electric at Newport and I was
standing right below him, and parts of the Butterfield Blues
Band were accompanying him, and I just shivered because I

(32:51):
knew exactly where I was going. I was going to
Los Angeles, and I was out the next day and
we started looking for things in the first group I
found was Love, and then Love turned me onto a
group that they thought was pretty good. That was the
second on their bill, which was The Doors. Now I
went to see The Doors four times before I got them.

(33:13):
If I got the means before, I understood because Jim
loved to sing the blues, and he'd sing the blues
for a whole set. And I don't need Jim to
sing the blues, but I need those musicians. They are
superb guitar, keyboards, drums, each superlative. I can get the
right material to them. And then one day they play

(33:37):
a song that it was so totally off the wall.
Show me the Way to the next whiskey bar. Yes,
that's the song. They just sort of slipped into the
Whiskey Bar song. And when I heard what they could
do with that, and I heard how Jim and everybody
was so locked in with each other, I said, I
have to have that group. And I went back and

(33:59):
introduced myself. They knew we were coming, and we talked
and we talked and we talked, and I made them
an offer, and we went back and forth. They were
taking their time. They had a contract with Columbia, but
Columbia dropped them. Uh. Columbia said, well, we'll keep you
if you'll record a single force and if we like

(34:22):
the single, and they said, the hell with this, we
don't want this. We got an offer from Electra, so
they started nosing around and talking to other artists about Electra,
and we had no problems there and we signed The Doors. Now,
the very first album was both a huge success and legendary.
Can you tell us about the experience of making that. Well,

(34:43):
my problems were that I wasn't the producer. I needed
somebody who was right and who keep them in line
and who was at least as smart as they were,
and I could manage the group. So we decided to
do two weeks of rehearsal and I asked Paul Rothschild
to do it. He said, well, look, I'll go out
there and I'll check it out. But they liked each

(35:06):
other a lot, and so there was a natural coming
together and he helped polish the songs a lot. He
would make suggestions about how to make changes and they
would do it, and the album was recorded in about
a week. Bruce Botnick, who had done the Love Album
with me and I was the producer of that, was terrific.

(35:26):
And so the combination of Rothschild and Bruce Botnick was
just magic and the band and we did it. It
was wonderful in many respects. I knew that Jim was
in love with the U forty seven microphone because he
was a big Frank Sinatra follower, and Frank Sinatra always
sang in front of this microphone. So when he came

(35:48):
into the studio and I said for the vocals, you'll
be in the booth or outside depending and this is
your microphone, he had tears in his eyes. He said,
you gave me Thank Sinatra's microphone. I said, we think
that's best for you. And uh, it went well. I mean,
there were all kinds of wild things that happened during it.

(36:10):
That Jim got mad and threw UH through some stuff
against the glass in the control room. I had to
take care of all of that and keep it quiet
without calling the police. I knew he was going to
be Uh needing constant watch. But we were finished the
album and it was scheduled to come out in November

(36:30):
of nineteen sixty six, and I said to myself, wrong month.
So I got the band together and I said, guys,
I might a mistake of promising you November. It's the
wrong month. They said, why Christmas is coming, people can
give it a Christmas present. I said, you're not gonna
You're not going to get the airplane that you need.

(36:51):
And I said to them, if you let me come
out in January January four, I promise you you will
be the only album we released that month. Now, you
could do that when you're only issuing eighteen albums a year,
but nobody out offers anything that crazy and on and
I had everything probe. We knew what we were going

(37:14):
to do. I had the idea I see these billboards
on Sunset Strip, but nothing had to do with music.
So I decided I'm gonna buy a year on that
billboard and we went up and when the record was
out there was this billboard on Sunset strip which was
you couldn't miss. And then we we did our job

(37:34):
and took it across very slowly, and the band was
an enormous success, and the doors were history and joy
and in history and not so much joy sometimes, but
the artist always comes first, and you take care of
the artists and the other The other three lads were
just beautiful to work with, and the ones who were

(37:56):
still alive are still very close friends. So do you
know that Late My Fire is going to be a smash?
And how do you make it a smash? Back in
the days of indie labels competing with majors. I knew
that was the song, but it was very long. That
was the problem. So I sat down with Rathchild and
everybody and said, let's try some edits down and I'll

(38:18):
tell you what I'll do. I'll do two forms of
the song. I'll do a single which you can buy
that has the complete song, the short song on one
side and the complete song on the other side, and
or I will come out with one that has the
short version and then another song from the album on
the other side. Both of these will be out, the

(38:41):
public will buy what it wants, but I need to
get it heard. And what was happening in starting in
San Francisco, Uh there was FM radio for the kinds
of music we were recording. And uh so I knew
that if I could get the FM stations to begin

(39:05):
to back it, their A M counterparts would be forced
to putting it on the air sooner or later. And
that's what happened. Uh. It went on the air in
Los Angeles the same time were they were having the
nineteen sixty seven rock festival Monterey Pop Monterey Pop, and

(39:28):
they were all over the radio. They had not been invited,
Blood had been invited, but it turned it down. But
whenever you turned on the radio and everybody with nuts,
why aren't the doors here? They've got the hottest song
in California. And it moved slowly across the country. It
by the time it was not playing in Los Angeles,

(39:49):
it was number one in New York. And in June
of nineteen sixty seven, one of my people came and
said to me, your number one next week would light
my fire nationwide. I cried, was that your first number one?
That was my first really charted. I never had a
chart single before. It was my watch stopped. My watch stops.

(40:15):
So I later put the watch aside and bought an
expensive watch the next day, and that that that we
had had a number one. Considering what we had started from,
which was the smallest inkling of an idea, and how
it had grown mostly because we were We were straight
with everybody. We had a good reputation. The DJs would

(40:38):
come to the office in Los Angeles, what would they
pick up? They weren't picking up the rock records. They
were picking up the none such records. They had amazing
taste and we were very close to them, and we
didn't ask for favors. If it wasn't right for them,
it wasn't right for them, and they shouldn't play it.
But we started with the doors and then we grew
from that. Okay, Uh, did you get a piece of

(41:00):
the publishing on these acts? Yes, I had of the
publishing they had. When the contract was over and I
wanted to make one more album, the album that was
to become l a Woman. I had a hunch Jim
was going to go off to France. I didn't think

(41:21):
the group was going to stay together after that I
didn't know that he was going to die, but I said,
there is one more album to be had. And one
of the negotiating points from the lawyer, who said he's
not going to give this up, was that I give
up my of the publishing, which I said, we're not publishers.

(41:42):
They can have it, no problem. That's the all the deal.
And we had the opportunity to do the sixth studio album,
which I think is right up there with their first
is the best. But starting with that sixth album, uh,
they'd done Morrison Hotel but for which in retrospect is

(42:02):
legendary with Rhodehouse Blues and so many other songs Piece Frog,
but it wasn't quite as successful financially as what came before.
So they make a record l a Woman, and they
fired Paul Rothchild and they make it themselves. Aren't you afraid? No,
that he was on that record. He was not fired,
he quit, which is a very interesting story. We knew

(42:24):
we were going to make a sixth album, so we're
talking about what to do. The Doors start writing some
material and Rothchild goes, here's here's it and says, I
think it's awful. I don't want any part of it.
I don't want to produce this. I had somebody in
back in my mind to produce it, so I said, okay, sorry,
thank you for everything you've done. Will remain friends, and

(42:48):
we did very close friends. We worked together on projects
later on when he couldn't get work and I had
owned yet another label. But anyway, I didn't hear the
material for l a woman. I said to Bruce Botaniic,
you can produce this, who is traditionally an engineer. Yeah,
he's basically an engineer, but he had produced a great
deal of what became one of the great albums of

(43:11):
all time, the Love Forever Changes Album, which is just
so special. I knew he could do it, and he
did it very, very cleverly, and he got them back
in and I said, I think we need we need
some richer instrumentation. This is not a rock record anymore.
This is a record from a point in time. So

(43:33):
let's do what we think we should do. And there
was a song that I thought could be orchestrated, and
that's what we did. And it opens up the record. Uh,
and you have this grand, welcoming song that just overwhelms you.
And then the rest of the record is what we
intended it to be. We understood what was happening. It

(43:56):
became the record which every time I I cried because
I loved it so much. Uh, getting a record that
you hear sometimes for the first time, and I was
not allowed to hear this record until it was done.
We're talking forever changes, right, yeah, And but when I
heard it, I knew it was there. I knew the

(44:18):
sequencing was wrong. I reserved the sequencing for myself and
I would listen to any good argument, and sometimes I
would make changes if they were minor. But I knew
how to I knew how to sequence albums. I knew
about the keys. I knew about the mood structure, what
you want to do at the end of the first
side to get him to turn to the to the

(44:39):
second side. All of that stuff was inherent in me,
and so I took a crack at it, and they
would say we like it or we don't like it,
and maybe make a change or two. But that worked.
I was the final word. But I was not arrogant.
I was this is what I really believe in. Give
it free, give it careful, listen, and I could pick

(45:02):
out the songs that we're going to happen with the Doors.
L A woman was with a song that was going
to happen. It was destined, and I knew it was
worth giving up the publishing so I could get this album,
which was a statement, now we're not going to be
any more Doors albums. We did do a gym, a

(45:24):
gym album, his poetry album, and that's another story. So
that happened, and all of the songs hold up. The
sound effects that are used on the opening and closed
are found the sound effects library. So they got on
that record the Thunderstorm, it's all very much in the

(45:47):
distance and very polite, and then it's writers on the Storm.
What a wonderful song that Hey, every day it rains
in l A, they play it. Let's just let's go
back to the Butterfield Blues Band. Why did not not
break bigger than it did? Very influential, but not a
huge sales success. They didn't have any singles hits without

(46:11):
a single. It's very very tough. I mean it's possible,
look at but Dylan had singles. They had a strong
loyal group and their records did very well. And the
double records that that came out of the of the
folk festival. Was was just incredibly successful. This is after

(46:34):
the festival and things start falling apart. They had played
with with Dylan on stage. A couple of them had
played with Dylan on stage, but they were What happened
with them is that other artists would say, well, you
really worked and stayed with Butterfield even though they don't
have any hits. We're willing to take a chance with you.

(46:55):
And what about Mike Bloomfield, what can you tell us
about him? Who's in the Butterfield Blues. He he wasn't
the drugs so valuely he didn't know whether it was
going to show up or not. The story the album.
Rothschild made the album and after we had ten thousand
of them ready to go, they were in their sleeves.
He said, I didn't get it. I said, what do

(47:16):
you mean you didn't get it? We were flying up
to see Tom Rush and we're in my airplane and
I just gently lowered the nose of the airplane and
picked up speed, and he saw we were heading for
the ground. I said, what do you mean? He said,
I just didn't get it, And I said, convinced me.
And he talked for a few minutes with such passion.
I straightened the airplane back up and I kept some

(47:40):
of the records and I trashed the rest, kept the covers,
and then we went out and we did it three
times more and he got what he thought was the
record and it it was excellent. What it lacked with
some of the passion that was in the first album.
Years later, I got the first album re released on Rhino.
When when I heard it that this is I got

(48:02):
flu mixed. I shouldn't have done it, but it all
worked out and I got the first record out and
it was wonderful, and even Rothschild said, you know, maybe
I overdid it. And that was that. Okay. What about
Tim Buckley? Tim Buckley is comes in the mail. His

(48:22):
manager sends me an ascertate of He said, this is
someone who sings, and I think you should listen to it,
and it's I take him in the order in which
they come in and it flows to the surface. Three
days later and I hear Tim Buckley and I am
absolutely knocked out. He's doing the wrong material, But the

(48:45):
voice is there, and what can be done with that
voice if we figure out what's going to fit that voice?
And so I signed him, put together proper team. We
did the first album. I didn't think we hit it
with a first album. Then we did the second album,
and that's when we got it. The album was perfect,
happy sad with Buzzing Fly and all those other tracks. Yeah, yeah,

(49:10):
it was what I was looking for. And suddenly he
broke wide open and it was wonderful to see happen.
But there was a point when I knew he was
going to go downhill. He felt that his audiences owned him,

(49:30):
and that put him in a very depressive state, and
so he became more cautious and more cautious, and then
he stopped playing all together, which was a shame because
I don't think his audiences were trying to do that.
He was into drugs a lot. We made a fourth album.

(49:50):
I didn't think it was very good, but I released
it because I thought it was the right thing to do.
As time went over, I realized it was a much
better album that I thought it was, and I, uh so,
I was happy I did that. I'm always trying to
stay in congruence with the artist, to feel what they feel,

(50:11):
and if we have a problem, we just figure it out,
sit it out, talk it out or bargain it out.
I mean I've I've had some strange things happen with
artists and groups like what well, Arthur Lee in Love.
I had a problem on the second album. He said,
I don't have to record for you under my contract.
I was a minor when I signed the contract that

(50:33):
you would not believe. This guy was under eighteen years old.
And he said, I'm just gonna go find a better deal.
And his lawyer was a very good guy, and he
said I didn't know anything about this, and I said, look,
I absolutely trust you. I need only one thing from you.
I need you to get me in the room with
him when he's in a calm state. So uh, that happened.

(50:58):
And he said, well, I think AUTO have ten percent
for everybody that's in the band, and he said it's
going to be nine people. So I want we sit
down and we talk and he realizes that he's over
he's over pushing it, and so I increased the advances

(51:18):
and I increased the royalties and then Paul Rothschild does
the second album, which is not a good album. It
was experimental, but it wasn't the album I expected. And
then we started working toward a third album. I took
Rothchild off it and said to Botanick, you get along
with him, Why don't you guys try to put the

(51:41):
album together? And they did. Bruce brought in a lot
of other musicians. We brought in an arranger for the
opening song. That album was done, and then I worked
through it with him and we made some changes and
I got the sequencing right, and then we came out
with the album and that became a hit as an album,

(52:03):
but not with any singles. Would you ever tell any
of your acts once the record was delivered that you
were not going to put it out as is, or
that they needed to record a single. Uh No. I
wanted to get the singles from the album in some

(52:24):
form that it would promote the album, because that's where
their income wasn't It was true of me as well.
The singles were the calling cards for the albums. The
singles on Light My Fire did remarkably well for the album.
Suddenly the album was selling over a million and a
half records. But did you ever say the album isn't done,

(52:49):
you need one more song? Oh yeah? And what would
the ox say the well? Judy Collins as an example,
I let Judy and her producer, who was a staff member,
do the do the fifth album on her own. And
then they played the album for me and it was good,

(53:09):
but it didn't stand out. It was lacking a certain feeling.
I didn't feel she was as passionately in the materials
as I could wish her. But I had to show
that passion someplace on the album. So I said, uh,
we can't release what we have. We need to go
out and look for more. And she said, you know

(53:29):
how much trouble I've had. And I said, Judy, I know,
I'm I'm seeming like I don't care about the album,
but I really do. It just don't think it's finished yet,
So see if you can find some more songs. And uh.
Then I didn't hear from her. I figured, well, I'm

(53:51):
on the don't call thing. And then three weeks later
I got a call and she said, you won't believe it.
I met this wonderful poet who speaks French from Canada
and he writes these glorious songs and I have got
such and such and such and such, and she things
them over the phone for me, and you know who

(54:13):
that was. Of course, let her call it dude, what's
the story of both sides? Now that we that we
put it out because we thought it was a single,
there's no story behind it. How did you actually find
and signed Judy Collins? Uh? I found Judy Collins singing
in a club downtown and Columbia was looking at them

(54:36):
as well. I saw enough material that I knew we
had a starter album. I never thought that an artist
has to hit with The first album will build up,
we'll learn, we'll do better, and maybe around the third
album we'll hit it. But we'll do these things right

(54:57):
and with honor. And we all listened to each other,
and that's what happened. That's how we would do these things.
And then somebody, somebody would come up with an idea,
and Leonard Cone was an amazing choice. You put his
two songs in the album, and suddenly the glue flowed

(55:17):
throughout the record. You had him exactly precisely placed as
to where you wanted them to be. When you heard
it that way, then you knew you had an album.
I was loath to release anything that I didn't believe
was going to be good for the artists. If it
was not going to be good for the artist, that
wasn't going to be good for me. And the artists

(55:38):
were really very good in trusting me about this. If
I said no, they'd grumble a lot, but it always
worked out, and then they would always remember that and
they would tell that story to other artists. Though the
artist at a lecture were very were very chummy. Okay,
how do you end up with Bread, which is seemingly
a different kind of music than the rest of electra? Yeah?

(56:00):
How did I? How did I get Bread? That? You're
very astute, because that was everybody said, that was so
different from what you were doing When I had Trouble
with Love on the second album. Their lawyers said to me,
you handled it very well. If anything crosses my desk

(56:20):
that I think might be good for you, I'll give
you the first shot. And I got a call saying
he had this group called Bread, and so and so
and so and so was in it. And I knew
some of the names, David Gates, I knew from his
other recordings, and I said, I'd love to hear something.

(56:42):
Are they available to go to our studio? We by
that time, I had built a studio in California in
the studio was available, and they went over that day
and they recorded four or five songs and the song
was in the album or not the album, but the
disc was delivered to me the next day and I
listened to the songs, and yes they were popular, they

(57:04):
were not what intellectual, but they were beautiful. And how
hard is it to write a simple song? You write
a song like if? When I heard that, I cried.
I cried a lot and when I'm listening to music,
because it just gets inside me so quickly. And I said,

(57:25):
I'm going to make an offer. And I made an
offer and he called me back and he said the
boys accepted it. I said, we're in business. Let's get
started working on an album. And they made the first
album out at our studios and the album was quite wonderful,
but it got put out the at the wrong time.

(57:47):
Crosby Stilton Nash came out and that totally wiped any
attention anybody was going to pay to them. It was
bread just was gone. So I said, we lost the
first album. We're never going to get it back. But
Crosby Till the Nash aren't gonna last forever start writing.

(58:09):
And they started writing and they were in the studio
and I went into the studios and I would listen,
and one day I said to uh them, what's that
fourth track and they said it's Oh, it's called if
and it's I said, let me hear it, because I
think that that's got hit single capability. Now I never

(58:31):
pick hit singles in my life. If they happened, they
happened because they were part of something else. But I
listened to it again and I said, that's the single,
and we came out with it, and that was the single.
And suddenly all those bread records and everyone that came
after went platinum very quickly because they wrote they wrote

(58:54):
simple songs. These were guys who came in with their
briefcases in the morning record from nine to twelve, had lunch,
finished at five, picked up the briefcases and went home.
Now nobody was using the studio between nine and six.
They were all coming in at eight o'clock at night
to use it all night. So these guys were perfect

(59:15):
and we got along very well with him. Except there
was a part of their contract I didn't know about.
Their contracts said that if any band, any member of
the band left the band, the band was dissolved and
the drummer left the band, and I got a call
in from the lawyer about this and I said to him,

(59:38):
give me his phone number. I said, I have an
idea and let me go try it out. So I
went up to see him and he gave me all
the reasons and not giving him enough of the money,
and so and so and so and so, and I said, look,
you can wreck the group or you can make some
real money. He said, how I said, I will pay
you your royalty, whether you're on the album or not,

(01:00:03):
so you will collect on every album they sell, even
if you're not on it. Now, that was about one
and three quarter percent, which which I could easily afford.
It was going to be about seven cents an album,
but it was really big money down the line. So
by doing that I got him to sign off on
it and we kept the band alive. And did he

(01:00:24):
play on the record. Nope. I didn't want to see him.
But he got paid anyway. And was that the was
that the last Bred record? No, no, no, that was
the second Bread record, which was the hit. They did
about five or six of them. Okay, So he did
he get paid on every record thereafter? He got paid
on every record thereafter. So why do these bands after

(01:00:48):
they have success, why did they break up? Internal stuff?
Usually they don't think they want half of their songs
on the album because the writers were really the guitarist
and David. Sooner or later, it's just going to get
to the point where nobody's gonna want to play with
anybody anymore. We had five, I think albums with them. Uh.

(01:01:09):
I thought that if it's going to break up, it's
going to break up. We've got the best of what
they have, and so we'll just move on. But trying
to save trying to save a contract. Uh, it was
something that I was very conscious of. I didn't want
to see bands split up, and I was willing to
pay extra to keep the bands together. Do you remember

(01:01:31):
any other stories but like that. Nope. But there are
always stories of me going and quieting people down and
getting them back on track and getting them to talk
to talk together again. Uh. I mean the artists that
I worked with, we're wonderful. Harry Chapman was terrific. When

(01:01:51):
you go through the list of artists we had. While
we had Bread, we had the Stooges just developing. We
had Carly signed Man who was breaking out. We were
yet to get Queen. We had the Doors who were
continuing to make records. We had Tim Buckley, and we

(01:02:11):
had enough going two to do well. As we were
looking for new artists. New artists would come up just
when we needed them. Harry Chapin would come up a
year and a half after Carly Simon. That was a
hard That was a hard contract to get, a really
hard contract again, But the Carly Simon contract, Oh, Carly

(01:02:35):
Simon was easy. She always wanted to be on an
electric She thought of a lecture in book terms, because
she was the daughter of the of the partner who
ran Simon and Sister publishing. So she said, well, Electra
reminds me of a good publishing company that watches its roster. Uh.

(01:02:57):
And she was very easy to work with, ah, and
she would listen to two ideas that I had. At
first I wasn't sure she was a writer, but then
but then she became a writer. And when I told
her we needed a single from the first album to
move that forward, and I always thought, I always heard

(01:03:19):
that's the way it should be. Was the single. It's
a tongue twister of a title for a DJ, but
it opens light. No other single view have heard simple
piano notes and then it goes into this song which
women will understand. Men won't get it, but I knew

(01:03:39):
the women would understand. And my wife, my former wife,
told me that she heard this on the radio and
she saw cars pulling over to the side of the road.
There were other ladies wanting to hear that song, and
it broke her out big. Because we're willing to be daring,
and because I was dead sure that was the song. Okay,

(01:04:00):
So why was it so hard to get Harry Chapin?
Because I was running into Columbia again. Columbia would go
against me on an act sometime, I think simply because
Clive liked to be in uh jousting with me. We
were we were friendly, We were definitely friendly. I had

(01:04:21):
been recommended to seek uh Harry Chapin. I went down
to see him playing at the village gate. I thought
there was a band there that his inclusion of a
cello player I thought was brilliant because that permitted us
to get a different kind of song into his repertoire. Um.

(01:04:42):
So I made an offer. And then when Clive heard
that I made an offer, he made an offer that
was much bigger than ours, and sat down and showed
them what their sales would be. His sales would be
someplace less than deal bit more than so and so uh,

(01:05:03):
And he decided to sign with A Clive and I
had to go to California, and he said. He came
out to see me at the airport. He said, I
have to tell you this. I'm gonna go with with Columbia.
And I said, Clive is good, We're better, but I

(01:05:24):
wish you well. And it ate away at me the
entire flight out to California, and it ate away at
me all week. And then I found out that the
numbers Clive had showed were numbers that they showed artists
on an inflated basis, or at least that's what I
was told. So I was revitalized. I never said it.

(01:05:47):
I never told him that part of the story, but
I gave him a ring and said, I'm coming in
on Sunday and I'll be at your door at six
seven in the morning, and I'm not going away until
you and I have a deal. You belong with Electra.
I understand what you're doing. I love the way you've

(01:06:07):
arranged the material. I love how you can write a
song quickly. I like the way the band unites in
their instrumentation. So I'll be there and I'm going to
bang on the door. And I was there, and I
banged on the door, and we made a tough deal,
made a deal and money far more than I expected
of that. I think a dollar advance. Um. But uh.

(01:06:34):
I then said, you know, I haven't produced a record
in a long time. I'd love to produce this record.
So I'll produce the record with you, will work it out,
we'll finish the record. I'll do my sequencing for which
I am famed for, and then we'll talk about and
if we don't have something right, we're gonna go fix it.
That record is not going out with me as producer

(01:06:57):
unless I know it is perfect. So he said, I
can't beat your offer, but we've got to take our
family with us. I said, I'll get a company yet,
because we were part of of of what was then
UH Warner Warner Communications, and so I got them to

(01:07:20):
give me the plane and the dogs and everybody got
on and everything happened, and we were in the studio
for three weeks and we did the album, and then
we did the mix, and then I lived with it,
and then when I thought we had it, Harry agreed
to everything that I had done, and we came out
with it, and I made him the same promise, I
won't issue any album the same month yours comes out,

(01:07:44):
because Clive can't do that. He's got fifty records. He's
got to get out that month. And I'm taking advantage
of what he can do, which I do on purpose,
but I wear them down and Harry, he sort of
pulls himself together and Uh, calls Clive and says, I've

(01:08:05):
got to go with the lecture. And he went with
the lecture, and Clive said, Jack will do right by you.
So all was peaced. We fought it out and the
rest worked exactly as we thought it was going to work.
But going back to that first album, the track, of
course is Taxi, but it's the better part of seven
minutes long. Yeah. Uh, we didn't care. We didn't. I

(01:08:28):
don't recall that we made a version of that, but
FM radio would play that like crazy, and AM would
pick it up. It happened, and the album happened because
we were within them eight weeks, we were a quarter
of a million albums sold. Yeah, and then I would

(01:08:48):
work with them on. What I like to do was
had people come over to a house I had in
the country, just from the weekends, and we would record everything,
very simple, and I would just sit and listen to
the songs and study of the songs and get myself
into the songs. And if I thought we had it,
we'd go into the studio. If I thought we didn't

(01:09:09):
have it, we might go into the studio anyway, because
when everybody was eating lunch, Harry was sitting in the
corner writing more songs. He was wonderful to work with.
How how does Richard Perry end up getting hooked up
with Carly Simon? Because that was my idea. After we
had a very good selling record from Carly, we needed

(01:09:32):
a hit single and I heard one, and I knew
it needed an experienced producer. So I called his lawyer,
who didn't particularly like me. He had been the doors
lawyer who said to the doors, Jack will never do this.
And then Jack did it, and he was embarrassed by it,
but he said, that's a good that's a good choice.

(01:09:54):
She's right for this, and so that that happened. It
was very easy. It was an off the wall choice.
From but I thought about it very carefully. I would
go through whatever publication I could go through. If a
producer was listed, I wanted to know who that was,
and I had a list of them together with knowing
the songs that they had recorded, like go check on,

(01:10:15):
and I had those records on file. So I just
thought he was right. She needed somebody tough and authoritative
because she didn't like making decisions much herself. But she
was very very good to work with, and they both
were good to work where there were some there were
some fights and stuff going on, but it all got settled. Now,

(01:10:37):
she famously has stage fright and doesn't go on the road.
To what degree did that affect you in terms of
thinking of signing her and how to break records? Well,
we didn't know that that was part of her her
disease that she did that she couldn't perform, and I
found out after the contract was signed. So I said,

(01:11:01):
we're just going to have to get her perform to perform,
because I need to see what the problem is. We
arranged to have her perform in West Hollywood at a
club everybody went to and told her she had to
do it. Well, she said, I'll only do it if
I can get ahold of these these band leaders whom

(01:11:24):
she knew were committed to be playing with somebody else.
It turns out that somebody else was not, uh, was
not going to do the recording at that time. So
we said they're all available. She said, then I'm going
to have to do it. We had someone who just
actually was with her all of the time, and when
she came in she was nervous on the stage, but

(01:11:47):
after thirty seconds she was in command of the room,
and you saw the nervousness, but she saw the love
of it, the appreciation she got. She could suck it
out of those people there and was a triumph. But
then she proceeded not to go on the road. Yes, uh,
she wouldn't. She did not go on the road very much.

(01:12:09):
But she did go on the road for big festivals,
but did not go on the road playing clubs. It's
a big difference because they have a big festival. You're
in command of that festival a lot of people. And
she learned that she would get over whatever negative feelings
she had in the first thirty seconds of performance. And

(01:12:30):
she was always a pleasure to work with. She never
argued with me about anything, and she had very good management.
It was a non sexual love affair. It was we
really cared deeply for each other, and I watched out
for her and she watched out for me. It was
an excellent relationship. So tell us the story of signing

(01:12:50):
Queen Ah. It's an interesting story. I had a call
from Trident Studios saying that they had been recording a
lot of artists and they thought they wanted their own
record label. Uh. And they were sending some tapes of
these artists. They were ten and all over with a

(01:13:13):
with the person who was going to be the manager
of this enterprise. The representative tried and came and he
put ten albums on my desk. By albums, I mean
ten tape boxes of ten different groups. And he said,
this is how we want to start. We want you
to do for us what you did for a lecture,

(01:13:35):
to go from nothing and take us someplace and we
have all this wonderful music. Uh. Now I knew I
wasn't going to do that. And I knew it because
I knew how those deals work. You put up all
the money, meaning elector puts up all the money. You
take your time away from your artists because your people
are doing stuff on this new label and you put

(01:14:00):
up all the money and you get half the profits.
Now that's dumb to begin with, but I figured I'll
listen to some of the stuff. So I listened to
a couple of tracks of about three or four different albums,
and then I see this thing with Queen, and I
listened to a whole side and there was something there.
I heard one or two singles. I don't remember what

(01:14:22):
they were. Keep Yourself Alive. Yeah, well that's for sure.
I just had a feeling that there was more to
this band. So when he came back the next day,
I said, look, I can't do that. I can't do
for my artists what I want to do for my
artists if I'm handling a label for somebody else. He said, yeah,

(01:14:42):
I can understand. I thought you'd come up with that.
I said, however, there is one group there, Queen, that
I think is very promising. I heard two songs that
I was happy with, and I said, it only takes
one or two songs to get a start in America.
I said, the album is not what i'd like it
to be for a first album, but I know it's

(01:15:04):
coming out in England, and there's nothing I can do
about that. But I would like to distribute and handle
Queen in America, but handled them as a label. We
we would be their label, not Trident, and we would
work together and you would be the manager. He said, well,
you know the Columbia is interested, And I said, I

(01:15:26):
know that Columbia is interested. And I'll tell you what
I'm gonna do. I'm going to come on over and
see the band and talk to them for a while.
When I saw them perform on stage, just as sort
of an audition stage, they didn't move, talk about dance.
They were frozen, stiff, and I remember writing a three

(01:15:46):
page letter to them, which I wish I still had,
about things that I thought they could do to improve
their performance. Little that I know that we were going
to have this explosion of Freddie Mercury. Uh. But then
I decided to make you comfortable. I'm going to send
over every week one of our other key people, so uh,

(01:16:08):
person who who did radio, who did normal publicity, anybody
that was material and they're moving forward. Went over and
spent three or four days with them, and I had
him pretty electra oriented, and I I said to the manager. Well,

(01:16:30):
I'm willing to make an offer. He said, well, we
haven't heard from Clive Davis yet. I said, how long
does it take for Clive Davis to make an offer?
He said, we don't know what's happening. And I sat
in with a meeting with them and somebody said something stupid.
So I have a little bit more orientation towards you now.
So I said, you have you seen the contract from

(01:16:53):
Columbia And he said no. I said, you better get
out to magnifying glass because it's going to be thirty
pages and someplace on page seventeen, it's going to tell
you what you get. I said, our contracts are different.
They're much simpler. And our contracts indeed were Our contract
was a letter. It started as a letter. It said

(01:17:15):
how much we wanted them on the label, why we
wanted them, the advances they would get, the royalty, they
would get, the territories we had. At the beginning, it
was just North America. It ended up that we had
the rest of the world outside of Europe. But then
it was accompanied by something called the small print, and

(01:17:36):
it had all of the things that the big companies
have in their contracts, and not all but many of them,
except they were written so simply and with with humor
that people liked reading them. And I never had any
lawyer called me and asked for any change from that
contract except the modification of one clause. The clause was

(01:18:00):
record company agrees to treat artists with love and affection
artists in terms agreed to treat record label people with
a modicum of respect. And that was it. But I
didn't send the contract off yet. I said, I want
to put myself in their shoes. What is Columbia not

(01:18:21):
going to do that I can do. And since the
contract was only a page and a half letter which
had all the money stuff in it, and four pages
folding of of small print, and we called it the
small print, I said, I'm going to write a check
for twenty dollars and sign it. Anybody's going to tell

(01:18:43):
me not to do this, but I'm going to do it.
So I didn't tell anybody, and I sent it and
they haven't heard from Clive, and here's twenty five dollars
sitting in front of them. When they're desperate, they deposit
the check. We have the artist. And then the first album,
Very Good. I bought it when it came out, but

(01:19:05):
you don't really have any success till the second album,
and then the third album goes wild. The third album
goes wild. But I believed in them now. I left
after the second album. But and there were some clean
complaints from David Geffen about the group, And I said,
have you ever had any experience where the first album

(01:19:25):
is promising, the second doesn't make it because they're not
sure of where they are. But by the third album
they maybe wait for the third album and uh, the
third album, was it? Okay? Just going to one more act?
Tell us the story of the Stooges. The Stooges. Ah, yes,
the Stooges. Now you've picked all the right groups in this.

(01:19:47):
I commend you on getting everything that I prepared for.
I had somebody working for me called Danny Fields. Danny's
job was to go to the clubs at night, sit around,
take the temperature of what was happening, all that stuff
that was essential, and come back to me with the
information because I was going to get my good night's sleep.
But if he wanted to start his day at eleven

(01:20:07):
o'clock at night, it was okay with me. He could
come in late in the afternoon, which is exactly what happened.
And he tells me about this group he had seen
because I had let him go to Detroit to check
out the m C five, and he said there was
this other band performing with them, and the m C
five say that if we're going to sign them, we

(01:20:28):
got to sign these guys. I said, well, get a
can set, get something on what they do and who
they are. And I heard nothing. I mean, it just
was a disaster. But I said, I trust you. If
you think they're that going to be that good, then

(01:20:48):
let's take a chance. I'll sign the contract, which called
for like fifteen thousand. Now it was much much less
than that. It was five thousand dollar advance. And you know,
the worst that can happen is they get the five
thousand dollars and I walk away. But they came into
New York and they came and loaded, and they had nothing.
I couldn't hear a thing, and so I said, to them,

(01:21:11):
as far as I'm concerned, you're still elector artist. Go
get clean and come back. And they came back a
month later and they had nothing to play for me.
I said, where are you going to get the material?
I said, oh, we're going to write it tonight. So
I said okay, and they did. So I had a

(01:21:33):
produced album and when they played it back for me,
the this, this, the tension and the strength weren't quite there.
It was on the corner of it, but not not inside.
So I said, give me the master tapes and the
master mixes, and they were eight track, and so I went.

(01:21:56):
And this is in New York, where we didn't have
a studio, but we had very good listen rooms. I
went into the main listening room eight track, turn them
all up as loud as I could go. I pinned
every every microphone, and my god, there it was. So
we came out with the album not knowing what to expect.

(01:22:18):
I was told that if I released this album, I
was ruining my record company. I said, I don't think so,
but you never know how these things are gonna work out.
And you know that Danny has going to knock himself
out trying to promote them, and so yeah, let's go
for it. And we did, and it started and it

(01:22:39):
got picked up lightly, but it was on the second
album where it really took hold. And after that I
was no longer at the company, and so they didn't
have me there, and they went and signed elsewhere. Yeah,
they went with raw power with Columbia. Tell us the
story of none such St. John's College. Again. I know

(01:23:01):
you've asked every question that I hoped you'd ask. The
stuff that was important to me, Not the stuff that's
gonna look glorious to anybody else, but the stuff I
lived through. My friend Adam Pinsker and I used to
buy records together. Twelve inh LPs were five dollars and uh,
in order to buy two, we each had to buy

(01:23:23):
a half. And you know, why do they have to
be this expensive? I love baroque music? Why can't I
get it to anyway? I forget, totally forget about it. Meanwhile. St.
John's College is giving me an education in baroque and
folk music, and I'm sitting in a delicate testin before

(01:23:46):
we had our own distribution, waiting for my New York distributor,
and noticed that there's a baroque concert happening in the
small theater next to Carnegie Hall. So I say to myself,
I get there's no tablecloth, it's just Butcher's paper. So
I start figuring out can I have a record? It

(01:24:08):
sells for the same price as the quality paperback that
is profitable. And do I know whether I have the material?
I knew I had the material, and by that I
meant I had been been collecting magazines over the years
UH from English, French and German German publishers, which would

(01:24:28):
list all of their serious music, and this music that
I love so much. If they had four stars, I
would make a circle. And I had a whole stack
of this information. So I knew these companies were in
the Europe but not able to get released in the
United States. And what if I make a release engine

(01:24:50):
for this? What am I going to call it? I had?
I thought of publishing company that went out of business
decades ago in England called none Such and said, there's
no possibility that this is gonna work, but I'm going
to give it a shot. We're gonna call it None Such.
And so I figure out that you can actually make

(01:25:15):
a record, and if you sold it, you would sell
it UH at about the two dollar and fifty cent
record would go out of US at about a dollar
fifty and the rest was the distributor which wasn't US UH,
and the dealer, so it would cost US ninety and

(01:25:39):
we could make sixty cents an album, and but I
knew we had to come out ten at a time.
So I had the first ten albums ready ready to go,
including a two two records set. UH. That was critical,
and my sales manager went to the key stores in

(01:26:03):
major markets and talked to them and said, we want
to do this. We want to sell it at to fifty.
They say it's a bastard price. It's got to be
to and I said, to strikes, it hits at the
quality of this, it's just another multiple. No, we're going
to do it at the price of a quality paperback

(01:26:25):
and that's how we're going to advertise it, which is
what we did. And we had ten records ready to go,
which I had gotten for many people overseas. We started
the project in November, and on February the following year,
nine sixty four, we released the first ten LPs. Now

(01:26:46):
I had ten LPs and ten LPs and ten LPs
already picked out and in the works going beyond that.
I committed about sixty to seventy thousand dollars of company
money to test this project out. UH. Fortunately I had
a young man from the Even Dozen jug band who
played kazoo, who knew this music cold, and was very

(01:27:09):
helpful in writing and writing record notes. And we came
out with the first ten records, and three weeks later
we hadn't sold any and little nervousness begins to set in,
and then suddenly they're disappearing. They're all selling off the shelves.
We have to make more. Nobody are advertisements didn't take

(01:27:32):
a page. They took a page and a third and
it said what we were doing. We were very good,
very competently made records at the price as an equivalent paperback,
and then we could come out with material. We came
out with ten records a month. We had nine records

(01:27:53):
out there doing phenomenally well before anybody else who had
all of the classical catalogs, like like Vanguard. Uh. They
they thought I was going to fall flat on my face.
They knew about it beforehand because I told them about it,
figuring that they might support it and come out with

(01:28:13):
their own stuff. So we were because I wanted to
create this price level, but they weren't for it. They said,
now we got to get five. I said, you have to,
but I don't have to because the music has already recorded,
it's paid for. I just have to pay these guys
at ten percent royalty, and that's going to be a
lot more money. And they got nice advances and the

(01:28:34):
result was exactly what I hoped it would be. And
then I started playing with the idea, what else can
we do with none such it just can't be baroque music?
What else am I interested in? I was interested in
the very nascent beginnings of electronic music, and I ran
into some gentlemen who did a basically an instruction manual

(01:28:56):
with information is how you can do this yourself. So
I had electronic music. But then I wondered, you know,
there's a there's got to be somebody out there recording
world music that we don't know about. And he walked
in the door about a month later. He had gone
to Sam Goodies and the interesting records to him were

(01:29:19):
our folk music record which were wide ranging. Uh, And
so he came in to see us and he had
all of this material, like music from the Morning of
the World, which was Gamalan music. And we signed him
up to do nothing but go out and record this
kind of music. We paid him to go out and record.
We improved his equipment and he went out and for

(01:29:41):
the next eight years recorded music all over the world.
This was what we would call world music. Yes, right,
so it music from all kinds of odd places where
you never thought you'd heard anything from. And then you
would meet people later in life and who said your
music change in my life. I was listening to music

(01:30:02):
morning of the world. I just fell into it, realized
I wasn't happy here and went to live in Europe
or I went to live in Asia. The music affected
people's lives and ways I never expect and the covers
were superb because graphics were big on my list, and
I had the best art director extant and we were

(01:30:24):
off and none such today is still alive and doing
business and has this great history. I released only in
the music I life, and I know I was arrogant
in that, but I did release the Stooges. But I
had to love it, or had to see a reason
in it. And I was very, very lucky in the

(01:30:47):
opportunities that came to me, and in the opportunities I
see by either creating them or getting somebody to go
with me who was already out there and needed help.
So how did you decide to sell the Warner Communications.
That's an interesting story. This distribution was always a problem.

(01:31:08):
You had every label going through independent distributors unless they
were Columbia Decca or r c A who had their
own controlled distribution. And you saw how much better that
was because they spoke with your voice. So I started
at about nineteen sixty six, I started bugging Ahmed, and

(01:31:30):
I started bugging Mo Washton, with whom I was very friendly,
and Ahmed and I had gone to both the St. John's,
so at least he would sit into what he thought
would be an intelligent idea, is that we have to
start our own distribution system. You have no idea how
much money is out there, and we do not have
control over the miss message in the product. I thought,
I don't know when to use the word product, but

(01:31:53):
there's a there's a message we need to get out,
and you only are going to get a message coherent
with what you want if their distribution is yours. You're
the ones who write the paychecks. And everybody said it
was a good idea, but they didn't have enough critical mass.
I said, you guys have got eight of it, and

(01:32:16):
my company is fifteen of it. My output doesn't it
doesn't compete with your your output. My output is my interest.
So it broadens the sense of what this new distribution
can offer. And we finally decided to do it, and
within about four months it was done, and it was

(01:32:38):
a miracle. Suddenly we were the number one sellers. The
Warner Music Group was just doing phenomenally well. We topped
the hundred million dollars our first year, which is what
I thought was the number we wanted to reach, and
then it went to a hundred and fifty or two.
We were and our money was critical to the parent company,
so they loved the idea. Steve Ross could look at

(01:33:02):
a wall of numbers and pick out the wrong one.
I've seen him do it, but he recognized something that
compared to the film company was so important to him.
His films required a lot of cash upfront. Our records didn't,
but our payroll, which was our own distribution generating all

(01:33:25):
that cash which we weren't taking back, he took and
used it to finance pictures. So he had an automatic
functioning we get it here, we place it there, we
grow and it was a brilliant Uh. I didn't know
he felt this way until it happened but I thought
it was extremely smart of him and it was great

(01:33:46):
for us. And once I had that done, I knew
my key to freedom was eventual because I could once
it was up and running, Geffen merged his label with Electra.
Great artists came with him. Everything was working, and that
happened in nine seventy, which was the thirtieth anniversary of Electra,

(01:34:13):
and I served my my three years there. I ran
the company's got to new the other guys. We got
to new each other. And when I had an option
that needed to be picked up and it wasn't, someone
forgot about it or it got lost in the shuffle,
and I waited politely, and then I sent him a
note since Steve rossa notes saying my option has not

(01:34:35):
been picked up, for which I am most grateful. You've
been wonderful. But I think it's time that I go
out on my own and do something that I dreamed
about for years. This movie, The Holiday with Carrie Grant
was just a fabulous movie, and it had left something
that I had promised I would do deep inside myself.

(01:34:56):
And I got to do it. And when was done,
and I had done all the explanation, I went back
to the people who had been good to me and
said I can do this job for you, and now
let me do it. Okay, come, okay, just to cover
though ultimately Warner Steve Ross bought all those three labels
though you know the Warner Music, the Atlanta Electra, so

(01:35:20):
that you actually sold Electra prior to the formation of
Warner of WIA the distribution company. How did you decide
to sell to Steve Ross? How did I decide to
sell it? It was an opportunity for me to get
out and to have and to have distribution we owned.
They both were equal uh of equal importance to me.

(01:35:42):
Knowing that I would have control and have an instrument
to work with, and that our records would be handled
the way we needed them to be handled was powerful
and the and the potential exit. I expected them to
pick up my contract and I've been five years instead
of three. But I was willing to do that. And
we made a tremendous amount of money on the way.

(01:36:04):
So all I was doing was making my company more
productive better we could we could. We had an argument
that we could give distribution that was equal to or
better than Columbius. Did you in retrospect do you feel
the number, Steve Paige, you was fair. I mean the
ten million dollars that they gave me the sale of
the company. I had to work them up to get

(01:36:25):
him there. But it gave me freedom because the money
of that money was taxable, and capital gains tax were
between twenty five and thirty at that time. Uh and
I had shareholders. Thearadore Bickel had five percent, which was
now worth a half a million dollars, and my mother
had five percent. There goes a million, and there was

(01:36:45):
about a million dollars I was giving to the staff.
I walked out with about four and a half million,
which was not a lot, but it was a lot
back then. But I was free. I was able to
build a life for myself, and I had no idea
about how I was going to do it, but I
knew the company was in good hands and that the

(01:37:06):
artists were in good hands. Okay, I know you're a
student of the game. So what do you think of
the business and music today? Well, it's totally different, and
today it's different from six months ago. The music has
always been broadened by the technology. CDs were imperative to
our growth and sales, and in the year two thousand,

(01:37:28):
our sales as record companies combined was about twenty four billion.
Today it's about twenty and it may be less because
we're not all back on our home basis. Record making
has changed, Contracts have changed, the opportunities for people to

(01:37:49):
bypass record companies have changed. They can go up online themselves.
They can hire people who were specialists in doing that,
who can sell eight of a download that record company
labels don't have. I think the artists have far more control.
I think that's okay because I think the artists who

(01:38:11):
are very concerned about the money, are very concerned that
we pay them fairly. We paid them exactly what they're
entitled to, and we have extraordinarily deep royalty statements which
they can go online and visualize. So I think there
are so many different ways that music gets across, and
I think all of these different ways are essential to mute,

(01:38:33):
for music to grow. Actually, when you think about uh, Spotify,
I remember conversation those of us who ran record companies
would have in the sixties, and the conversation went, boy,
what we really need is a jukebox in the sky.
But the problem was we had this great idea, but

(01:38:54):
We didn't know how to get it down to the people.
The technology wasn't there yet, digital technology where punch cards
you stuck them in a machine. But we had the
idea that you had to get directly to the customer
and we would talk about a lot, but nothing could
happen because the technology simply wasn't in place. But it
is in place now. I think having a many different

(01:39:18):
opportunities for artists to do it themselves, to make it up,
to create distribution of their own, to be their own commander.
I think that's there and I think that's good. Okay,
this has been wonderful, Jack, Thanks so much for taking
time out of your day to talk to me. It's
a story I wanted to tell, but it's the story
I wanted to have stimulated by good questions. Well, thank

(01:39:41):
you so much. We got most of the story, Like
I could still dig deeper. We didn't cover rhinoceros and Aprica, Brandy.
We didn't cover the original version of m C five
with that had to be edited after but we'll save
that for another time until next time. This is Bob
left Sets. Thank you, Jack. B

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