Jonathan Taplin

Jonathan Taplin started out as the road manager for the Jim Kweskin Jug Band and Judy Collins and then he became the tour manager for the Band. Along the way he worked with Bob Dylan and the Band at the Isle of Wight and helped produce the Concert for Bangladesh. Subsequently, Taplin produced Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets" and brokered the sale of Disney and... Tune in to hear what was really happening in Woodstock with Bob Dylan and the Band and so much more!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, welcome, welcome back, But Bob left that's podcast. My
guest today is music manager, film producer, educator Jonathan Taplin,
who's got a brand new book, The Magic Years. Scenes
from a Rock and Roll Life. Jonathan. Great to have
you here. Good to be here, Bob. Now, I notice

(00:29):
on your website you say John. Are you Johnny? You Jonathan?
John is fine by the way you're going through life.
You know, usually when you're a little kid, you're Johnny,
and then at some point you become Jonathan. So I'm
just interested what people normally call you. My friends call
me John, okay John that I will call you John.

(00:49):
So how does a teenager end up being the road
manager from major musical acts. I was a fan of
Bob Dylan and three sixty four UM. In the summer
of nine, I had graduated from high school and was
headed to Princeton and I got a b in my

(01:12):
bonnet that I would go to the Newport Folk Festival.
And my brother had a friend named Paul Clayton, who
was a a friend of Bob Dylan's, was an important
Ethne musicologist, and he got me a backstage pass at Newport,
and then he introduced me to a band called the
Jim Question Jug Band. Uh had a singer named Jeff Muldar,

(01:36):
and they needed a road manager. And their road manager
their real manager was Albert Grossman, and Albert Grossman happened
to manage Bob Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary Paul, Butterfield
Blues Band, Odetta, pretty much all the important people in
the folkustic business. So they introduced me to Albert. He

(01:59):
hired me, and then on a whim on a Saturday afternoon,
Bob Dylan decided that he would play electric music at
the Newport Folk Festival. And Mulda and I had been
watching the Butterfield bluespan do a a workshop and Alan Lomax,

(02:24):
who was a very famous at the musicologist, tried to
unplug the electricity from the Butterfield Blues Band, and so
Muldar told this story to all the artists in the
Grossman circle in the artists tent afterwards, and Dylan, I think,
just decided on the spur of the moment, well, hell,

(02:46):
I'll play electric two. And so they quickly threw together
a band made up of the Butterfield Route Land Rhythm
Section and Mike Bluefield and brought in Cooper from New
York and rehearsed for a few minutes, and then on

(03:07):
Sunday night came out and played and the reaction was explosive,
to say the least, um the folk fans. Visually, Dylan
came out in black leather jacket, a bright orange shirt,

(03:29):
tight pants, English rock and roll boots, and and it
was not the blue work shirt Bob they had all expected.
And then they launched into Maggie's farm. And when Maggie's
Farm was over, it was just like silent. And then
eventually people started booing and it went downhill from there.

(03:52):
And uh so, you know, I was witnesses something, and
I don't think at the time I really realized how
important it was, what a breakpoint it was in the
history of rock and roll. All I knew was I
like the music. Um, I like Bob's direction. I had

(04:14):
loved like a rolling Stone on the radio. And uh so, eventually,
over the years I got closer to that as being
part of the Grossman family, so to speak. So you're
at this transcendent rock and roll moment, not that you
were aware that it was so important. How do you
end up becoming a road manager Albert Grossman seemed to

(04:37):
like to having college kids be the road managers or
or college educated man. John Cook, who was Janice's road manager,
had graduated from Harvard, you know, a son of Alistair Cook. Uh,
I don't know. He liked people with a certain way
of acting, and so uh. I worked for the Question

(05:00):
Jug band for a year before you get there. Before
you get there, but you were literally just starting college.
Was there anybody else in your position? I was. I
would go on the weekends to do concerts because that's
the way the concert scene was working. Yeah. I guess

(05:20):
what I'm saying is for those of us who were fans,
it seems kind of amazing that someone could walk off
the street less than twenty years old suddenly have this
amazing job. And the other thing is, you know you
in your personality In your book, you were saying you
were somewhat alienated individual. But I certainly know what it

(05:42):
takes to be a movie producer. One has to ask
to what degree you put yourself in the mix and
asked for that job. Well, I I did ask for
the job. I wanted. I want very much to be
part of that world. I didn't know that I could
a living out of it, but I wanted desperately to

(06:04):
be I mean, Dylan was to me the most important
star in the world. Uh he was. He defined what
a great artist was to me, and I wanted to
be close to that. It took me a few years
to get there. I mean, I had to go through
other bands. I worked for Question, and then I worked

(06:26):
for Judy Collins, and then I did a little work
for Jennis Choplin. And then eventually the band which had
been the Hawks became a group, and then I became
their tour manager. And then eventually Bob decided and he
wanted to go out and start playing again, and I
took them to the Isle of Wight, and so, I

(06:46):
mean it was a progression. It wasn't immediate, but I
I made a living all through college to working on
the weekends, and then once I graduated. Literally, you're there
at the Newport Folks Festival, your backstage of the backstage pass.
How do you literally get the job road managing Jim Question?

(07:10):
Do you send a letter? Do you call Albert? Does
he tap you? What happens? I a friend of theirs,
said Paul Clayton. He said, this is John Taplin he's
a the brother one of my best friends, Randy Taplin.
He's a good guy. And and Jeff Muldart said, well,

(07:31):
we need somebody slept this equipment around all weekend, and
I said, I'll do it. And then so then Muldar
took me over to meet Albert and I think I
probably got paid hundred dollars for the weekend. You know,
it wasn't big money, and that was it. And then

(07:53):
once that was over, then I was inside the Grossman sir, yeah,
you've passed the test. So Jonathan Jim Queskin was famously
a member of the Mel Lineman family. Do you have
any experience with that? Only peripherally, I mean, obviously the

(08:13):
mail Lineman kind of cooperative in Roxbury went a little
crazy start using LC and uh so Mel had dropped
out of the band by the time I was starting
to work with them. He was not involved in the

(08:34):
Question Jug band. He had become a a guru. Okay,
so you do the Question Jug band. Your next act
is Judy Collins. Okay, at the time she was a
quite admired lady. What was it like being a young
man working with Judy Collins? Well, she had a huge

(08:57):
fan base. You know, she had done Sue's and that
Leonard Cohen song and it had been very popular. Um,
we would play you know, three thousand seats Hall's college concerts,
things like that. She had a very small group. She
had a bass player, Bill Lee, who was Spike Lee's father,

(09:22):
and a piano player named Paul Harris. And you know,
we just take a plane on Thursday night, get to
a college town, play a college concert on Friday, player
another one on Saturday, and come on on Sunday. So
how close did you get to Judy Collins herself? Well,
I mean as close as anybody could get. I mean

(09:45):
she she had a very personal life. She was having
a romance with Steven Stills at the time. Uh. We
traveled all over the country for a year and a half.
I mean we had some good times and we had
some bad times. Okay, how do you manage being a

(10:06):
tour manager while you're going to Princeton at the same time. Well,
I don't know, Bob, I don't know how old you are,
But in in the sixties you could skip a lot
of classes and still get a good grade if you
could write a good paper. Um, So I mean, I

(10:26):
don't I my roommates used to think I didn't take
my college life very seriously. But I did graduate and
get my degree, and so that's that's what matters. And
I ran in some good professors, and so I mean
it was a very loose time. Okay. So if I

(10:47):
talked to the other students at Princeton at the time,
would they say, oh, yeah, that's the enigma, that guy's
really never around doing his own thing. That would be true. Okay.
So what was Albert rousemidlike? He was amazing. I mean,
for a lot of people were kind of intimidated by him.

(11:08):
I somehow got on his good side right off the bat. Uh.
He would He had a very different view from most managers,
which was that you actually shouldn't do a lot of
public appearances. In other words, he turned down almost every

(11:30):
television show appearance that was offered to Bob Dylan. Uh.
He turned down everything for the band until finally Ed
Sullivan offered them to come on and then we took that,
you know. So, I mean Albert's thought was most artists
are out there too much and and you gotta have

(11:51):
a little mystery to you. And the second thing about
Albert was he believed that if if if you had
signed a bad record contract when you were really young
and somehow now you've gotten really good, then he should
be able to go in and completely renegotiate that contract

(12:14):
with the record company. And he did that regularly. Used
to drive Moaston or you know Oskar men and crazy,
but he did it all the time. So what was
his negotiating style. We'll go on strike, we just won't
show up at the studio. You may have him my

(12:37):
artists with a really bad royalty rate, but you're not
gonna have any output. So what good is it doing you?
And was he a raver or he was he quiet
and intense? No, he could. He could scream at people. Uh,

(12:57):
if he got really angry, he would. He could be
very intimidated. I'd see him throw people out of a room,
you know. So you know he's he's unfortunately no longer
with us, and he has a certain reputation. Would you
consider him, based on your experience, to be a great manager. Yes,

(13:19):
I'd consider him to me maybe the greatest manager. And
if you can amplify that a little bit, well, I
think even David Geffen would probably tell you that he
learned an awful lot from Albert Grossman. Uh And you know,
people could argue that maybe David Geffen was the best
manager for a while. Uh So, I mean he was

(13:43):
incredibly protective of his artists, and the artist felt that
protection and in that sense, and he never made you
do stupid stuff, you know, I mean, never me anybody,
uh dress a certain way or anything. I mean you
think of all the stories of Marvin Gay rebelling against

(14:08):
Motown because they wanted him to dress in certain costumes
and stuff like that and he didn't want to do it.
Albert never got into that. Okay. When Albert get involved
in the music, were only the business, only the business.
He felt that the artist's job was make the music

(14:28):
and decide what he wanted to do, and his job
was just to protect the artists and make sure that
he got treated fairly. Now, you were in the belly
of the beast, and then Dylan Jettison, Albert Todd Rundwyn
did too. What's your viewpoint on those situations? Well, Bob

(14:52):
leaving Albert had more to deal with the dispute over publishing.
Albert from the beginning it had owned half of Bob's publishing,
and Bob didn't think that was fair, and he thought
he was paying Albert too much money. And Albert, though

(15:13):
willing to renegotiate any artists contract for the record company,
was not willing to renegotiate his publishing contract with Bob,
and so it came to a split. Uh. But then
almost eight months after that, Jannis Joplin died accidentally, UH,

(15:38):
of an overdose. And Albert had really invested a lot
of emotion, heart love into Janis's career, and that really
killed him. And you know, I just watched him pull back.
He stopped going into Manhattan, UH, stopped going into the

(16:01):
office and and just spent all his time in Woodstock.
Um started building a restaurant called the Bear and of
recording studio, and it was like, I don't have anything
to do with this business. Is is too cruel. And
yet you know, he started spending more time on his

(16:24):
restaurant than he did on the music business. Okay, So
when you would be on the road with his acts,
would you ever get a call from him about this
and that? Or you were pretty much on your own.
I was on my own until a critical moment. For instance,
I mean the story I tell him the book about

(16:45):
the band's debut at winter Land, right, so that would
be a moment where Albert would come out on the
road to be there. And so when Robbie Robertson got
a hundred and re fever and couldn't keep anything in
his stomach the day before we were to have our
debut at winter Land, Albert was there, and Albert was

(17:11):
the one said we're not going to cancel, and Bill
Graham was saying, well, I'll get a hypotensis, and so
they they brought in a hypnotsus and he put Robbie
in a trance and he told him your stomach will
feel as calm as a mountain lake, and your head

(17:34):
will feel like the north wind is blowing on, and
your legs will feel like springs. And he brought him
out of the trance and he said, whenever you hear
the word grow, all those feelings will expand. And so
Robbie looked around and he felt his head and he
didn't feel feverish. And Levan said, let's go play some

(17:58):
rock and roll, and so literally the opening act had
already gone off the stage, and we got in a
car and police escort to Winterland got on, played the
gig and when Robbie came off, he said to Richard Manuel,
the piano player who the hyperness side, put him right
behind the speakers, so he had a sightline to Robbie,

(18:22):
but he was much closer to Richard Manuel. And Robbie
said to Richard, wasn't that weird? Between every song this
guy was yelling grow? And of course Richard said, well,
I never heard a word. So somehow they gotten on
a frequency together. Okay, so eventually you graduate from Princeton,

(18:42):
and granted it's a few decades back, but don't you
say to yourself, well, now it's really my life that
I want to, you know, set the world on fire.
You don't really want to be a road manager at
that point? What's going through your head? No, I was
having too much fun. I was in Woodstock in nine
when I grab do it. It was by this time

(19:03):
I was getting paid a decent amount of money. I
had a crew of five people that I was managing.
I had a bunch of musicians in the band that
I loved and who were making extraordinary music every night.
And we're on the road a lot. In six nine

(19:25):
we went to the Woodstock Festival. We went to the
Isle of Wight with Bob Dylan. I mean, what's not
to like? Meet the Beatles, you know? I mean? Now,
I stayed with it for two or three years, and
then eventually, Uh, most of the artists I cared about

(19:45):
after I produced the contract for Bangladesh, most of them
had stopped working, and so I went out to California
and started making movies and that was different. Okay, let's
go back to the musical era. How do you end
up being involved with the band? So? Uh, I was producing.

(20:10):
I was working for Judy Collins, and Harold Levinthal, who
was another important manager at that time, decided to stage
a memorial concert for Woody Guthrie, who had finally died
after many years of of being in hunting, having hunting

(20:33):
in his career. And so Harold got Bob and leave
On and the Hawks as they were known to be
part of that concert. And Judy was part of the concert.
And so I was the stage manager for that. And
so the mysterious Bob Dylan and the Hawks, who had

(20:57):
been out of sight of everybody since Bob had had
an accident in the nine six, show up in suits
with beards and hats and play three amazing what he
got three songs in this concert. And when it was
all over, Robbie said to me, because Albert had introduced

(21:25):
me to Robbie when backstage and told me that I
had worked for Question and everything, and Robbie said, we're
thinking of recording our own album and going on the road.
Would you like to be our tour manager? And I said,

(21:47):
of course. And so they went off and did music
from Big Pink. But then Rick Danko drove his car
off the road into a ditch and broke his neck,
and so they didn't go out on the road um
after Big Pink, and that kind of increased their aura.

(22:13):
They were like, mysterious, who are these people? Nobody's ever
seen them on stage? And then I took them out
to California to do the second album at Sammy Davis
Junior's house, and then after that we did Winner Land
and then then we were on the road for two years. Okay,

(22:38):
when they were doing the basement tapes, when they were
doing the first album, were you around? Are you on
the road with other people? I was on the road
with Judy Collins at that time. Okay, sent you that
personal experience with these people and the people alive, tending
not to talk, and everybody's dead. Hey, how serious was
Bob Dylan's motorcycle accident? It was serious. I don't think

(23:01):
it was. I don't think he he almost killed himself,
but he hurt himself badly. And you know, honestly, the
sixties six tour it was pretty crazy in terms of
that same kind of angry booing and all that nonsense

(23:26):
that was going on. Uh, and Bob was probably taking
a fair amount of and fetlemen and uh, I mean
he told Robert Shelton, the New York Times reporter after
the accident, that he'd been up for three days when
he had the accident. So that tells you something. Um,

(23:49):
So I think he needed to stop. And if that
was the Almighty telling him watch yourself, maybe that was it.
But he certainly did slow down, and and then he
had three kids and four years and started painting and

(24:10):
then started slowly getting back to making music with the
band and in Big Pink in the Basement tapes. Okay,
he's famous for obfiscating tall tales, even the movie about
the Rolling Thunder review even at Sharon Stone in it.
So one on one, what was what has been your
experience with him he was great. I mean I was

(24:33):
not around on the sixty six tour, which was evidently
very stressful, so my experiences with him were great. He
would come out with the band in the summer of
sixty nine just as a secret special guest artists a
lot of the time, and so he was very low

(24:57):
key at that point. Um when we went to the
Isle of Wight, he was all business. He wanted to
he wanted to make a great impression. I mean, I
think the last time he had been in England, uh,
he had been at Albert Hall and there had been
a lot of booing, and so he wanted the show

(25:18):
to be great. And of course, as I say in
the book, you know, we rented a house on the
Isle of Wight and set up a rehearsal studio, and
the night before the gig, the Beatles showed up in
a helicopter. No, no Paul, but but John, George and

(25:39):
Ringo and their wives and but instead of you know, jamming,
Bob want to rehearse and the Beatles hung in there
and then then eventually everybody started playing you know, rockabilly,
which was the kind of common genre that leave On

(25:59):
and John Lennon both knew were you pinching yourself or
who you ja did at that? I was pinching myself.
My other one of my other roadies said, oh my god,
if if we'd had a recorder going, that would have
been historic. Course, it would have changed it too, if
we'd had a recorder going, of course. So I mean

(26:22):
the people I know who work with Bob Dylan today,
there's a lot of levels of interference in between them
and Bob. And Bob is uh, let's say, not nonverbal,
but uh doesn't utter a lot of words. So was
that your experience with him or was it more of
a friend experience? No? He he was fairly quiet. He

(26:44):
doesn't talk a lot. Um. I mean I had a
few kind of just fun evenings in Woodstock of playing music.
There was always interesting, um you know what's sucking before
the Woodstock Festival was very kind of low key. Nobody

(27:05):
really knew about it and and would so there were
but A. Grossman had a lot of his musicians living there.
The jug band was living there, The Butterfield Blues Band
was living there. Janice was spending a lot of time there.
The band was there, Bob was there, Peter Yarrow was there.
I mean it was. It was like a music town,

(27:27):
but it was a very low key music town. So
there was a kind of nice late night play, some
acoustic music stuff that went on, and Bob was very
good at that. He knew a lot of old songs. Okay,
now you're working with the band to what did we

(27:48):
are you if at all involved in the creative level?
I was not. I was involved in the creative level
in the sense of when an album was on, I
helped Robbie do the album covers. I'm a big photography
collector and so I spent a lot of time on

(28:10):
trying to find new photographers and so that was part
of my job. But really my job was to make
sure that the tours were booked and that that the
the tours went off. Well, you know, Rick Danko had
a written on the back of one of his road cases,

(28:32):
don't bring the entertainer down, and and that's the key.
You know, the road crew has to make it as
easy for the musicians to do what they do as possible. Okay,
we look at the band's career, Uh, first album amazing,
I believe the second album is even better. Third album

(28:54):
really good. And then it starts to go downhill, and
then the band ultimately dissolved. Why do you think that
they couldn't sustain the mojo? Unfortunately drugs, I mean, uh,
Richard was a big drinker, and it got worse. He

(29:17):
became a day drinker. Rick was. There was no white
powder that you could put in front of him that
he wouldn't consume as much as he could. And leave On,
you know, took a lot of valium and eventually started
playing with arolin. And it was sad, you know it

(29:42):
just but this is a story of a lot of bands,
you know. Okay, So there are only two members alive today,
Robbie and Garth, and leave On ends up beating cancer.
He writes a book He has conscience at a barn
in Woodstock, such that the public tends to be in

(30:04):
one camp or another, and a lot of people are
anti Robbie Robertson for no other reason. He didn't give
credit to the others for the songs. What's your take
on this? Well, I watched Robbie get up at h
into his studio by nine o'clock every morning. He had

(30:28):
a piano and a guitar, and he wrote, you know,
For the first album, he wrote all but four songs.
The second album he wrote all but three songs. By
the third album he was writing them all. And quite honestly,

(30:49):
by the third album, uh, it was hard to get
leave on out of bed before you know, two in
the afternoon. N Uh. The idea that Robbie didn't bring
these songs into the studio fully baked all the lyrics,

(31:11):
all the melody. Oh yes, maybe Levin would add a
little bit of different drum feel to it, but that's
not enough to get a song credit. I mean, I, Bob,
I don't know about you, but I don't think if
you had said in nineteen nine the only people who

(31:34):
will make money in the music industry and the year
two thousand two will be songwriters, that would not a
bet you would have made. The musicians were getting larger
royalty than the songwriters. But what happened was that as

(31:54):
Napster and the other digital destructive forces came in, as
CAP and b m I kept collecting money for songwriters.
You know, whether it was at the gap store or
the local bar. They made sure the songwriter kept getting
his money. Whereas if you were going to replace your

(32:18):
whole record collection as you did in the late eighties
with c d s. By two thousand, well you didn't
need to do that. You just go on Napster or
some other place and get it for free. And so
the record royalties for a group like the band just
came to a crashing halt. I mean they had been

(32:39):
even if they had stopped recording in seventy seven. They
made good money in the eighties, and they made good
money in the early nineties too, because everyone kept getting
rid of their LPs and getting c ds. But that
came to an end. And then so leave On was

(33:02):
piste off. And I don't blame him. He was out
of money. He he didn't have enough money to pay
for his cancer treatments, and and Robbie was still making
money as a songwriter. But this was not something that
Levan would say in ninety nine, Hey give me part
of that song credit. I mean, when he did do

(33:25):
something extraordinary like life is a Carnival, Robbie gave him
a songwriting credit. But this is hindsight. So when you're
working with the band, how much are they getting a night? Um,
thirty thousand maybe right. That's what people don't realize, and

(33:50):
that the value of ticket tells, even with inflation, have
gone way up. Now. Your book is really unique rock
book in that most books are just a recitation of
the history. You put a lot of philosophy, You quote

(34:12):
famous thinkers evidencing your Princeton education. Was that conscious? Did
you set? I was saying, this is the book I
want to write. Yeah, I mean, I didn't want to
be a rock memoir. This is a book about this
period of time that I was lucky enough to be
part of. And what is the meaning of it? What?

(34:35):
What you know? There's a quote in there from Peter Townsend,
what did rock music start? That it didn't finish? You know? Uh?
And to me, the role of the artists in society
is very important. I I think if I think about

(34:59):
the earl the sixties, the music that Dylan was making
and others were making was very hopeful and aspirational. The
times they are a change in we shall overcome, and
that sense of hope and of lifting people up is

(35:22):
something that, at least for the last few years, I
think has been missing. I find a lot of the
popular culture today being very neholistic and dystopian. If I
if I turn on the TV. Ever since nine eleven.
What have I seen, you know, the Wires, Sopranos, succession breaking,

(35:48):
bad mad men. They are all these horrible people. I mean,
the heroes are all bad people who screw up, and
that's who you're rooting for, and I think that has
an effect on society, and so I I felt I

(36:08):
wanted to write about that in the same way that
the last book I wrote about was how maybe all
this wonderfulness of the Internet isn't everything that's cracked up
to be okay? Which came first, though those TV shows
are their reflection of what was going on. I think
that's one of the hardest questions to ask. I mean, obviously,

(36:32):
the Wire started being broadcasts, you know, nine months after
nine eleven, so one could say that political geopolitical things
put a moody air. Filmar movies of the early fifties

(36:53):
came a few years after we dropped an atomic bomb
on Hiroshima. I mean, you know, Norman Mailer made the
point that that that had a lot to do with
what happened to the culture. So, I mean, it's hard
to tell. But now, after all, we're twenty years, thirty

(37:14):
years past that we ought to be able to get
out of that whole that we put ourselves in emotionally. Okay,
now you grew up an era, and then your book
is about the sixties when music literally drove the culture.
If you wanted to know what was going on, you
listen to a record. You just spoke of television. Everyone

(37:36):
agrees we're in the heyday of television. Certainly, now there
are many outlets to exhibit your work, but even before
that twenty years ago, Why what's your view on music?
And I certainly don't believe it drives the culture. Do
you believe it does? And why doesn't it or why
does it? According to your uh feelings? I don't think

(37:59):
it drives the culture anymore. I mean, think about what
was happening this summer, last summer with Black Lives Matter,
and then into the fall into try to get people
to vote. Who were the culture heroes that were driving
that dialogue. It was Lebron James, it was basketball players.

(38:23):
It was not Jay z. He was too busy negotiating
a contract to sell his champagne company. So I mean,
I think the culture, the artists, especially the musical artists,
ought to try and take it back. And you know,
I'm not saying that there aren't a lot. I mean,

(38:45):
I think Kendrick Lamar is doing incredible stuff. I think
Lizzo is a real talent of you know, Rhiannion Kittens.
When I go down to the I'm on the board
of the America on a music association. When I go
down to americani Fests in Nashville in September, there's always

(39:06):
wonderful new work that just thrills me, Brandy Carlile, all
sorts of people. So it's not like there isn't good music,
but it's not essential to the culture the way it
was in n Now. I attribute this to income inequality.
You certainly lived through the era where there was a

(39:26):
dominant middle class. Starting in the eighties, uh, certainly, with
Reagan lowering taxes, etcetera, we start to get income inequality
such that if you went to Princeton today and you
told your parents, oh, I'm gonna graduate from Princeton and
be a music road manager, they'd flip out. People who
go to Ivy League colleges, people who are educated have

(39:47):
a better sense of what's going on than a lot
of the prognosticators. They realize life is hard. They want
to get on the train to their destination right away.
They don't want to left but be left behind. So
where is In the sixties you had middle class people
making music the example I always use Jefferson Airplane up
against the wall, motherfucker. Today it's traditionally lower classes who

(40:12):
will do what anybody tells them to do. We talk
about commerciality, etcetera. You have a take on that, Yeah,
I do. I think that the ability of somebody to
go get a college education and then leave it and

(40:35):
take a chance on being a musician or being a
screenwriter or being a film director or something is still important.
If if universities are just a big funnel to push
you into Mackenzie or Golden and Sacks or Procter and Gamble. Uh, Look,

(41:01):
there's plenty of people to fill those jobs. But I'm
still hoping that young people who have dreams can take
a chance and say, I don't know if my Princeton
education is going to do anything to help me write
a screenplay, but I'm going to take a chance at

(41:22):
doing that, even though I may completely fall on my
butt and have to go get a law degree or
something like my father wants me to do. Well, I
find the problem is you'll get I'll get email for
people said, I'm gonna take two years off to try
to be a rock star. Otherwise I'm gonna go to
graduate school. Whereas in the old days, first of all,
you could live on minimum wage. Not well, but you

(41:44):
could live. People were in for the long haul. But
switching gears, Uh, you got a gig teaching at usc
and you became a expert on digital disruption. How did
you get the gig? What did you teach? How did
that all come together? I had started in a company

(42:06):
called Entertainer, which was the first streaming video on demand service,
and we got financing from Microsoft and Sony and Intel
and a bunch of Silicon Valley companies, and we built
a pretty good product, and we we went out and
we had licensed because I had been in the movie

(42:28):
business for twenty years. We went out licensed content from
Warner Brothers and Sony and Universal and Paramount, and so
we had a lot of movies on the service. And
then in two thousand and two, the major's studios decided

(42:51):
to form their own cartel UH called movie Link, which
would do exactly what we were doing. And of course
this was all put forth by Sony which was a
shareholder of our company and had been uh exposed at
the board level to everything that we were doing. And

(43:13):
the next thing I knew, all the major studios stop
licensing US content. So we had to shut down Entertainer
and I sued all the major studios in federal anti
trust court. So need let's say I was not going
to go back to being a movie producer, and the

(43:35):
dean of the Annenberg School at uh USC said, well, look,
I don't care if you're suing all the major studios.
Why don't you come and teach. You have all this
knowledge about what the real entertainment economy is about, and
what the convergence of entertainment and the digital world is about.
Why don't you come and teach. So I said great,

(43:57):
because I couldn't be a movie producer. Then three years
later we won the anti trust suit. Well, I mean
they settled out of court just before we went to court,
so then I could afford to be a movie I
mean a professor. And then I just kept teaching and
then eventually started the Annaburg Innovation Lab at at Annaburg,

(44:23):
and ironically, some of the very companies that I had
sued became sponsors of the Innovation Lab, So that was
an interesting twist. What do you think about digital disruption today? Well,
let's take off Facebook and social media. That's all a
separate topic. But in terms of traditional entertainment movies, music, etcetera. Today,

(44:48):
what's your take, Well, let's separate the music business from
the movie business, because I think they're two totally separate things.
So the music business to me, and I know you
differ because I read your column religiously, I think that
YouTube is still a real problem because I think the

(45:10):
whole key is if the music business is really going
to become as successful as it could be, more people
have to be subscribers to premium streaming services. Uh so
the premium Spotify and Apple Music like that, because those

(45:32):
pay a decent per stream payment to artists. But whenever
YouTube puts and YouTube of course claims he doesn't put
it on, it says it's users put it on. Puts
a brand new song on YouTube for free, it's it's

(45:54):
eliminates the need for somebody to go and pay for
it through a premiums for service. So I think it
undercuts the whole streaming economy. And because YouTube has this
safe harbor. So you can never sue YouTube. You can
file a takedown notice and they'll take down the song,

(46:16):
and long behold, it goes up the next day from
some other user. So it's like a game of whack
the mole. So you can never win against YouTube. And
it's let's put aside that it's also an extraordinarily destructive
force in the terms of all the anti vaccine propaganda

(46:37):
that's on YouTube, all the other nonsense that's on YouTube. Um,
so that's the music business problem. Well, let's stay with
the music business for a second. One we do know
is that YouTube does pay. So there are a few
people who still want their stuff taken down, but they
do pay. The argument seems to be how much they

(46:59):
should pay. Let's also look at Spotify. Spotify has a
free tier, and as you mentioned earlier reference it pays less.
If you could snap your fingers, what would be the solution. Well,
I would like to see the free tiers go away.

(47:20):
And and by the way, YouTube pays in the sense
that it pays some advertising revenue, and it's it's essentially
a gun to the head of every music business executive.
You know, if you don't want your tune on here.
It's gonna get on here anyway, so why don't you
take some advertising revenue? And the payments of YouTube purse

(47:45):
stream are way below even the payments of Spotify is
free tier. So I mean, look, I would like The
second thing I would like to do is see new
work go on the premium serve us is for a
certain period of time and then go onto the free tier,
and that might induce more people to subscribe to the

(48:08):
premium services. Okay, a couple of things. So if we
look at your perfect world, unless you pay, you don't
have access. So the world where everybody can has access
to everything, now you have to pay. Developing acts might
say that makes it different, more difficult for us to
be get known. Philiping and acts could always put their

(48:31):
stuff up on SoundCloud if they want to. I mean,
it's not like there isn't ways to get your music
out for free to people if you want to. But
if you don't want to, you shouldn't have to. And
but today, I mean it's it's like I don't really
have a choice because it's gonna go up on YouTube
whether I want to or not. And so you know,

(48:56):
it's it's like an old mafia routine. Okay, the only
thing I'll say about, uh, you know, behind the paywall
for a first couple of weeks. Uh, we tried that
and that drove piracy. But let's just leave that at that.
Now you're going to move on to the movie business.
So I think the streaming economy right now is at

(49:20):
a point of somewhat crisis. So what I mean if
you think about chord cutting, which is something you've written
about and I used to talk a lot about, the
idea was I'm paying Spectrum two hundred bucks a month
for TV, internet, phone, everything. It's too much. So I'm

(49:42):
going to cut the chord and I'm going to figure
out another way to get as much content as I
used to get. So now I've got my sixty dollar
a month broadband bill, and then I started adding on Netflix, HBO, Max,
Disney plus, Discovery plus Paramount plus Free Thing. Next thing

(50:09):
I know, I'm right back up to my hundred and
fifty dollars, and then I probably have to get YouTube
TV because I still want to get you know, sports
and all that. And I'm right back where I started from.
So I don't think that the ecosystem can sustain twelve
fifteen different streaming services, and I think what we'll see

(50:33):
in the next two or three years is going to
be a consolidation where you know, you notice that Sony
basically gave up and said, we're not going to go
into that game. We're gonna just license to Netflix. And
I think you're gonna see the big three, which I
would say would be Netflix, Disney, and HBO probably begin

(50:55):
to take over the the other laggards, because I doubt
that Paramount plus will survive another two years. You know,
Viacom is like a case study of how not to
run a company, and uh, this is probably one of

(51:16):
the parts of the case study. Okay, just to go
a little bit deeper, Why is Viacom that case study
how not to run a company? Okay? So, Viacom in
the heyday of MTV had more data and more understanding

(51:39):
of a young audience than any company in America. They
had so much data and so much understanding that companies
used to come to them, like they build a little
consulting firm just to tell you the MTV generation how

(52:00):
to explain it to Procter and Gamble. So the world
of streaming comes along, and the world of digital comes along,
and Viacom basically says, sue those bastards. So those you know,
stop it. I heard a very famous story of John Doulton,

(52:20):
who was the president of Paramount, got a a demonstration
of ti Vo from the two top executives of TiVo.
They come to Paramount and Dulgon as this famous big
conference from on the second floor on the Paramount lot

(52:41):
where he could smoke the only place you could smoke indoor.
So they go and they show him this wonderful thing
where you can record TV shows and everything, and they
say this is gonna change TV. Can believely. So Tolgon
goes over to the box after the demonstration, starts unplugging

(53:03):
it and they're kind of like. He says, I'll tell
you what you can do with this, and he throws
the tebow out the window down to the pavement of
the second floor. That was Paramount Viacom's attitude towards the
digital age. You know, we're and so they lost all
their power of understanding young people. They just buried it

(53:27):
everything that they build up with MTV, and they blew
it and and and and so I don't know, I mean, look,
all you have to do is think about if yours
uh a shareholder and Viacom for the last twenty years
it was a trail of tears. Okay, we both grew

(53:50):
up in an era where if you lived in l A,
you knew who ran the major studios. Now, unless you
have that job, it seems no one seems to know. Now,
we know that Netflix was a disruptor, but Netflix is
a valuable company independent Apple. What we do is has
unlimited money. Now we have HBO and attendant stuff sold

(54:15):
to a T and T. As you project outward, who
is really going to have the power? Well right now next,
Flix has the power as far as I can see. Um,
it seems to be able to make both daring choices

(54:36):
in terms of programming, and it's certainly got the largest
number of subscribers, and so in that sense, from a
pure cash flow machine point of view, if you get
to three million subscribers everybody all around the world paying
ten bucks a month, that's a fairly serious money machine.

(55:00):
And eventually you're gonna start to build up a library
of content. I mean, part of what they had to
do and why they were spending so much money on
content was they had no library, which is of course
what Disney and HBO do have. Um, but I think

(55:20):
Netflix is very savvy at sensing the taste of its
public and going there. Um. Disney will continue to pursue
it's niche, which is a lot younger, and it won't
make you know, it won't make the Chicago seven Trial

(55:44):
or you know, it's not gonna make those kind of movies. Uh,
And HBO Max will be okay as long as A
T and T figures out a way to slowly pay
down instet and not just become I'm mean, obviously a
lot of people have left Warner Brothers in the last
few months. All they seem to hear about is we

(56:09):
have to pay down the debt. We have to pay
down the debt. We have you know, A T and
T levered itself up to the neck to get to
where it is. I don't know, and they have a
very large dividend they have to keep paying. So I mean,
we'll see. Okay, let's go back. How do you decide
to break from Woodstock and go into the movie business

(56:30):
and what are your experiences there? I had done the
concert for Bangladesh and I had come to the conclusion
at the end of that that um, there probably wasn't
a band that was wanting to tour that could support

(56:52):
the kind of operation that I had built in terms
of sound systems, trucks, all that stuff. And George Harrison
didn't want a tour, Eric Clapton was sick, Bob didn't
want a tour. The band was not touring very much. Uh.
I did, as you know from reading the book, I

(57:13):
did a try out with the Rolling Stones and then
decided I didn't want to do that, and so I
just thought, well, look, maybe i'll see if I could
do something in Hollywood. It can't be that hard. I mean,
this is how naive I was. I thought, well, in

(57:35):
in the concert business, if something screws up, from a
technical point of view, you've got twenty people in a
stadium clapping for the concert to start, you're you're in
big trouble. But in the movie business, if something screws up,
you could come back tomorrow. And so somehow I thought
it would be not that hard. The other thing I

(57:57):
didn't really understand was you weren't supposed to use your
own money. You know, the term O P M other
people's money. Nobody told me that term. So I came
out to Hollywood. Uh, A friend named Jake has said,
when you go out there, look up my friend Marty Scorsese.
He he edited Woodstock and he loves rock and roll,

(58:20):
and you'll you'll like him. So I met Marty and
he had this script he'd been trying to make for
three years called Season of the Witch, which we've renamed
Mean Streets. And I just didn't know enough not to
put my own money. And I had a friend who
had some money too, and so we put up each

(58:42):
put up two fifty dollars and we made Mean Streets.
And fortunately for us, Marty made a great movie and
we were able to sell it to Warner Brothers. And
you know, I still make money off it fifty years later. Okay,
did you realize who Score says he was going to become?

(59:05):
And then you have one movie under your belt? How
did that change your perspective? And what did you want
to do? Um? I thought he was incredibly talented. The
only thing I had to judge on were his student films.
So I saw these these shorts, The Big Shave, It's

(59:25):
Not Just You Murray, and a longer student feature called
Who's that Knocking at My Door? And I just thought
it was incredibly talented, especially the short code Who's It's
Not just you Murray? And so that was the only
basis I made the uh judgment off of UM. Once

(59:49):
I had made in Mean Streets it, I wanted to
keep making movies. I had ups and downs like anybody
making movies. It's hard to get movies made. UM. You know,
some were good, some were not so good. Uh. I
think The Last Waltz is a great movie. I think

(01:00:11):
under Fire it's a great movie. I think, Uh, Until
the End of the World is a great movie. I
think Shine is a great movie. I think To Die
For is a great movie. And then I made some
things that I don't think you're so good? So was
it fulfilling being the movie producer? I mean it's as

(01:00:31):
you said, it's a heavy lift. You know, you have
to go to a million lunches, etcetera, and nothing happens.
I found it very fulfilling. I found the notion of
organizing artists and trying to keep the train moving forward
is not dissimilar from being a tour manager. Uh. You know,

(01:00:55):
you just got to keep the show on the road,
and people will have throw fits, and you know, artists
will be artists, and you know, oftentimes you would encounter
the same problems you counted in the movie business. Gary
Busey was a big coke head on Karney, so was

(01:01:16):
Nick Nolty on under Fire. You know. I mean it
wasn't like these were angels. These are people who had
their own same demons like anybody else. So you had
to try and manage through that. Uh but uh I
found it fulfilling. Yeah I did. Okay, now you say

(01:01:40):
that you were the link between the Bass Brothers and
Disney's okay and disneyse and Turmoil. It's about to be
taken over. Tell us how you become that lake. So
I had bought from Robert Altman, a studio called lions
Gate not to be confused with the lions Gate Films,
that some big action movie producer. But it's a it's

(01:02:03):
a small studio over on Bundy that had a fantastic
sound mixing stage and the best mixer in Hollywood named
Mike Binkler. Just one another oscar less the other night,
um and so I bought it from Almond and I thought, okay,

(01:02:25):
maybe I can use this as the core to build
a small independent production business. So t bone Burnett. Uh
was from Fort Worth, Texas, and he introduced me to
a guy named Richard Rainwater who was the Bass Brothers

(01:02:45):
investment guru. And I went down to see Richard with
this idea of like could we make something out of
Lion Skate films? And he spent a lot of time
with me. He was very generous with his time, and
then he said, John, you know, it takes just as
much energy to do a two million dollar deal as

(01:03:07):
a two hundred million dollar deal, but the returns are
a lot better on the two hundred million dollar deal,
So why don't you come back to me when you
have a two hundred million dollar deal? So I went
home and went back to work, and then about a
year and a half later, I found myself producing a
film for Walt Disney UM and I used to go

(01:03:31):
up to the executive dining room in the animation building
where all the executives worked every day, and as I
had come out, Ron Miller, who was president of Walt
Disney in was playing poker with three friends every day
for two hours in front of all the employees. It

(01:03:54):
was like and Disney at that point was going in
the toilet from as a movie studio. So I was
kind of piste off and I took the ten k
the financial statement down to Richard and I showed it
to him and I said, look, I think this is
maybe the most undervalued company in America. Uh. The whole

(01:04:17):
film library was carried on the balance sheet at like
thirty million dollars, all those classics. So Richard looked at it,
and we spent a lot of time together, and he said,
this is a really interesting deal. The problem is we
own nine point nine percent of Texico, and Texico wants
to buy Getty Oil and we don't want him to

(01:04:39):
buy a Gettar Old, so we may have to go
to So that's another two billion dollars. So we can't
afford to do know another deal. So I went home.
And then about three months later, a guy named Saul Steinberg,
with the help of Mike Milkin, started a corporate raid
on Disney, and the Disney management to flipped out and

(01:05:02):
in the middle of it said bass and Richard called
me and said, John, we just sold all our Texico
sock when we're ready to save the mouse. So I
went down and talked to Ray Watson, who was the chairman,
and we managed to get him on a plane to

(01:05:23):
Fort Worth, and we made a deal to sell the
Basses real estate holdings in Orlando to Disney for stock,
and it put enough stock in friendly hands to block
Saul Seinberg. And the Basses paid me as their investment advisor.
So I made more money in two weeks and I

(01:05:44):
had made in six years, you know, So it was
it was a kind of eye opener. And then they
asked me to go to work for their real investment banker,
which was Merrill Lynch, and I did and what was
that experience like? Interesting? At first, it was kind of fun.
I mean, I've never had that kind of money before,

(01:06:05):
and you know, being in the deal business was kind
of exciting. We did right off the bat, we did Viacom,
you know, we helped some the Redstone by Viacom. Uh.
And then slowly it got less interesting, and I began
to miss the creative life of musicians and directors and writers.

(01:06:32):
And by the end, by the late eighties, you know,
you were you were seeing people like Ivan Bowski and
it's really people. You you have a meeting and you
have to take a shower afterwards, and and so I
I didn't feel good about it. And so a German

(01:06:53):
director named Vin Venders said he wanted to make a
science fiction film called on to All the End of
the World, and what I produced it and it was
just like, Okay, I need, I need to get out
of here. So it's like a perfect skate hatch. And
I went off and and joined VIM for two years. Okay,

(01:07:19):
you get yourself into the Albert organization. You know all
these musicians, if one reads his book, you seem to
know every creative person in Hollywood. What's your secret? How
does this happen? Well? I don't know if I know
every creative verson in Hollywood, but I I knew a

(01:07:40):
lot of good people, and I had a fairly decent instincts.
And you know, you just have to stay open to change.
I mean, I don't know how many careers you've had,
but I've had a lot of them. And and the
trick is, if you see a door open and it

(01:08:00):
looks like an interesting opportunity, you should probably walk through
the door and and check it out at least and
not be afraid that what you're leaving behind is much better. So, uh,
in that sense, it was. It was interesting for me.
I mean, I I you know, I didn't make blockbusters.

(01:08:22):
I made art films. And there are all of them.
I I mean almost all of them. I I think
we'll hold up in the long run of things. Uh
but you know, you you can't make a living, but
you can make a fortune in Hollywood. So it's one
of those feast or famine things. Okay, you say that

(01:08:45):
you're great at hurting cats, but in terms of producing
the film, you also have to sell. So what's your
magic there? Well, you know, if if you have a
decent story and and you can put it together with
a good director, that seems to be the secret to me.

(01:09:07):
It's it's it's the script and the director. Then after that,
if you get that part done, then you can probably
attract the talent the actors to do it. I mean,
you know, my daughter who produced you know, a lot
of films more than I have, somehow manages to do it.

(01:09:30):
And uh So, I I think it's there's no secret
to being in Hollywood. It's just good material and good
artistic directors who have a real point of view. Okay.
Another element of your book is your love life in marriages.
So what do you learn and what are the lessons

(01:09:51):
for the listeners. Uh, well, my first two marriages, we're uh,
both ended in divorce. So I guess, um I feel
I mean, this is a very awkward question for me.

(01:10:13):
Somehow I could write about it, but I don't know
if I want to talk about it. But I would
say that I thought I was kind of a white Knight.
Rescuing is slightly artistic hippy girls, and that's never a
good stance to take. Now, I've been married for twenty

(01:10:35):
two years, the Maggie Smith, the photographer, and we have
one of the great marriages. My friends all think we
have the best marriage. So I must have learned my
lessons somehow. Look, another thing in the book is you.
And I mentioned this a little bit earlier. Up until
you go to Princeton and you start working in the
rock and roll business, you talk about your alienations. You're

(01:10:59):
difficult with your father, not fitting in in prep school.
Yet somehow you give the appearance now of being plugged
in in a member of the group. So what's the
evolution there. I was an awkward teenager. I was small,
I didn't grow till I was sixteen seventeen. I got

(01:11:22):
picked on. I was a kid from the Midwest sent
to a boarding school in in Massachusetts. I didn't understand
the mores of kind of heavy sarcasm the way people
you know, it's kind of lord of the flies, and

(01:11:44):
I didn't really know how to deal with it. So
it wasn't until I found something to stand on, which
was the Civil rights movement, that I began to feel
like I could stand up for myself. And then I
began to grow and I wasn't picked on quite so much.
I mean, boarding school is a horrible experience. It's much

(01:12:06):
better now because they're co ed, But in the old days,
you know, you had older students policing younger students and
a level of cruelty that was unbelievable. Did you send
your kids to prep school? No? Okay, So now you've

(01:12:29):
written this book, what what else do you have a
hand in these days? Well, I'm doing some business steals,
but I can't really talk about them right now. With
some very well known musicians, you know, I'm I'm put
it this way, I'm interested in the publishing music publishing business.

(01:12:51):
Well that's that's a conversation unto itself. Yeah, well maybe
we can have that in about four months. Okay, So, uh,
you your book is all about this tumultuous era, and
we are in a tumultuous era. Now. You talk about
the optimism of back then the nihilism of today. Is

(01:13:13):
there any hope? Yeah? I think there is. I mean,
you know, as I said to you, I go every
year to this thing called Americana Fest, which is Americana
is kind of like the non hat part of the
country music business accepted. It includes the staple singers and

(01:13:36):
sacks bold and so there's this kind of weird concnotation
of Rhann and Giddons and Brandy Carlyle and all these
different people. And I as pure music, it's extraordinary. It's
really good. These people are making great songs, are singing

(01:13:57):
great and and they're trying. You do also think about
the traditions that they came up with, whether it's Rhan
and thinking about the traditions of the banjo and how
that played a world in in black music in in
the eighteen fifties. You know, I mean this, these are

(01:14:21):
interesting questions. So I have hoped that musicians will continue
to be exploring and not just you know, look for
the Benjamin's. I have hoped that filmmakers will continue to
make interesting movies. I mean, I thought both Nomad Land

(01:14:42):
and Uh Judas and The Black Messiah were extraordinarily good movies.
So I mean it's not like there aren't artists making
really strong stuff. There are, but there's also a lot
of junk out there, and part of that I put
on Mark Zuckerberg's shoulders. You know, I think there's there's

(01:15:06):
too much nonsense and disinformation out there, and I think
people are confused, and you know, there's the information theorists
that m I T used to use the word entropy,
which was if you get too much information, everything just
gets chaotic. And that's probably the world that we experience

(01:15:29):
last year, and unfortunately it's still going on because there's
a reason people are having a hard time getting people
to go and get a vaccination, just because there's so
much damn disinformation out on Facebook that people think that
Bill Gates is trying to implant a microchip in their

(01:15:52):
arm when you get a shot. I mean, that's how
nonsensital get and so we might not get the herd
immunity just because there's so much stupidity out there. Well,
staying on the political element, certainly, since artists were very
political in the sixties. Uh, you talk about Facebook, you
talk about vaccinations. Where's the optimism there? Well, there isn't

(01:16:15):
in that sense. I mean, I I think we have
to deal with the fact that we have a basic
disinformation anarchy in and it's affecting a lot of things.
But that doesn't mean that in small places, important artists

(01:16:37):
can't be beginning to make good work and get it seen.
I think it can. And so look, there's balance. We've
lived through four kind of tough years, and I feel
more optimistic now than I felt in a long time.
I think the economy is going to come back. I

(01:17:00):
think the you know, the sense of pent up demand
is is a real deal. I mean, I don't know
about you, but you haven't been to a music club
probably in a year, right, you haven't heard live music
in a long time, and and you're probably gonna want
to do that again as soon as it feels safe
to do that. And my guess is by the fall,

(01:17:22):
you'll feel safe to do that, and so that will
make the music kind of begin to come back. It
will build confidence, It will make make us all feel like, okay,
we can do this again. Okay. That brings us right
up today you've been listening to Jonathan Taplan who has
a new book called The Magic Year, Scenes from a

(01:17:44):
Rock and Roll Life. As I said, I did read
the book. It is unique and if you're interested in
the perspective of the sixties in music as opposed to
just a recitation of facts, I highly recommend it. And
it's definitely very readable. And I'm not blowing smoke up
your rand because that's not my style. But I picked
it up and I couldn't put it down, and I'm

(01:18:05):
certainly interested in that era. So Jonathan, thanks so much
for taking the time. Thank you so much, Bob for
all you do. Until next time, This is Bob left
Sex