Ken Kragen

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, brocome back to the Bob Left Sets Podcast.
My guest today is truly legendary artist manager Ken Craigan.
We have the Smothers Brothers, Lionel Richie the First Edition,
Travis Tritt, Tricia Yearwood, the comedian Gallagher. Is there anybody
who haven't represented Ken? It's amazing. It's sort of that

(00:31):
six degrees of separation. I'm connected to everybody one way
or another. So why did you decide to become an
artist manager? You know, it's funny. I didn't exactly decide that.
I went to Harvard Business School. Let's go back, where'd
you go to undergraduate? I went to undergraduated Berkeley. Okay.
My dad was vice chancer and teaching in the law school,
and uh, and we were living in Berkeley, and I

(00:52):
ended up going there thinking I was gonna be a microbiologist.
Why a microbiologist? I have no idea. Well, six for
we have to be started here. How many kids in
your family? Uh? Just myself and my sister and your
sister older or younger. She's younger by six years and
she's still with us. Oh, what's she up to? She's
got four kids and thirteen grandchildren's boyfriend. Her husband passed

(01:17):
away a few years ago, and you got a wonderful
boyfriend that's and which I love at her age and
they travel all over the world together. It's fabulous. Okay.
So you're growing up in Berkeley. This is the fifties
and fifth well we went. He was he was ahead
of Loeban Lobe here in l A. And that's a
legendary also entertainment. Yeah, he represented eleven studios. He was

(01:38):
a chief lobbyist and Sacramento for them. And he had
the funny thing is this is a good story. He
he had clients. His clients were Deborah Carr, William Holden,
Alan lad Mickey Rooney. And they used to come over
the house and I was like six years old or something,
and I would sit at their feet in the on
the rug in the living room and here the taught

(02:00):
my dad and them tell stories about all these entertainment stories, right,
And I remember, I do remember this perfectly that I
thought to myself, I'll never have any stories like that. Now,
you bring up any subject, I can tell you a story.
Something in my fifty or sixty years in this business. Okay.
So you're living where in l A. At that time,

(02:21):
we were living over near Fairfax in Beverly, where I
ended up much later, basically having an office at CBS. Okay,
you never left, but uh, in terms of were you
aware that your father was that successful? We we Uh,
we moved when my dad was really at Loeban Loeban

(02:42):
doing Grady ended up being the managing partner. Uh. We
lived on Irving in Los Angeles, right off of right
off of third Street. Uh, in that kind of area
where they shot movies a lot, and there were all
these big homes at the time. And I would go
down on the weekend and get to help run the
switchboard at Loeban Lobe. Yeah, that was like a little kid.

(03:06):
Where was their office that their office was Grant Union
and Grant Okick or something like that or Grand I'm sorry,
grand And and Union, I think. Okay, so you met
a lot of powerful, famous people when you were growing up.
Did that have an impact upon you? You know, I
don't think so. But what changed my life in a

(03:29):
funny way was uh that I we moved when I
was fifteen to Berkeley. And when we moved when my
dad took what happened, and it's a big lesson. My
dad was making I don't know, over a hundred thousand
a year, because that was a lot of money back then, ton,
I mean the fifties, fifty two. This was you See,
Berkeley comes to him and they offer him twelve five

(03:52):
to come pel five a year to come teach us
like ten percent of his salary right to come teach
at Berkeley in the law school. And he takes it,
and we leave Los Angeles and we moved to Berkeley.
I've used it in my classes at U c l
A when I've teaching there. I used it as a
great example of do what you love, what you really believe.
He stayed there forty two years. He taught till he

(04:14):
was eighty seven. He chaired committees till he was ninety five.
He died in his sleep at night. I mean he did.
He lived it so he never had any regrets none,
And somehow or other he ended up living, leaving my
kids and and uh and my sister's bunch of kids.
Uh A lot of money. I who knows it from where?

(04:37):
You know? So you moved You were born in l A.
You moved to fifteen What about your mother? My mother
was basically a housekeeper and homekeeper. But she had been
a violinists with the Oakland Symphony. And but after she
met my dad, slowly she wound that. Now she still
played even when we moved down here in groups there.

(04:58):
So music was in our life, but I was a
terrible musician. I played a lousy trombone. Okay, So your
parents born in the US and their parents born in
the Old Country as her family, this is kind of neat.
Our family came, at least one side of it, came
to San Francisco for the gold Rush. The great great

(05:19):
grandfather came across the Isthmus of Panama on a donkey
because there was no canal. Then he rode across. He
got on a steamer. He came up to San Francisco.
But he got there in eighteen fifty two and the
gold Rush was essentially over. And he then formed or
opened the first furniture store on Market Street in San Francisco.

(05:41):
And he had come from where he had come. Well,
we always thought it was Austria, but I think what
we're finding out is it may be part of Austria now,
but it was hungry, I think in that. And what
about Poland, and what about the other side of your family,
the other side of the family also from that kind
of area. My mom trade. This is kind of interesting,
My mom trace back to the fact that in the

(06:02):
seventeen hundreds a Jewish, a regular general in the German army,
married a Jewish woman and was kicked out of the
army in the seventeen hundreds. Right. I don't know how
she found that out, but she did, and so they
moved away from Germany. And so I think both sides
of the family came from that, you know, that Hungary, Austria,

(06:24):
Poland kind of one came in eighteen fifty. When did
the other one come? You know, the other one came
when there was a railroad that I don't know the
year now, I probably should, but the wild part of
it was, and this is the first She was with
the firstborn child, who was like four or five, and
the new and a new baby in her arms, and

(06:45):
she came across on a train and they changed trains
in Chicago, and the four or five year old ran
under a train and was killed. And she had to
arrive in San Francisco with the firstborn boy in the
family in a coffin wild you know, I don't know.
My mother was phenomenal at tracing all that stuff back. Okay,

(07:07):
So let's be like you were born in l Aye
and he didn't move to Berkeley. I was born in Berkeley, Okay,
and moved to l A. I remember. I think I
started Third Street School in Los Angeles and probably the
third grade. So you were here for like six or
eight years before you went back to Berkeley a little more,

(07:28):
and you were in Berkeley you went to regular public school. Yeah, yeah,
I went to Berkeley High. I'm an alumnus of Berkeley High.
So what was that experience? Like? Very interesting? Uh? You know?
For the interesting most interesting thing is Berkeley High had
a theater attached to it, a regular community theater, and

(07:50):
the first show I ever produced was for a group
of the Kingston Trio or no, it was sort of
the lot. It was for the Gateway Singers. I think
I don't even know they well, they predated they were
sort of the West Coast weavers, you know, in that
old folk era, you know, I know it was one
of those, and it probably was the king Centrio and
it was in the Berkeley Community Theater. And the reason

(08:12):
I remember it so well is the group made three
sixty dollars, which was more money than they had ever made.
That that night, I made eighty two dollars until my dad,
who was a tax expert, explained to me that there
were admission taxes and they were eighty dollars. So so
my first show in the Berkeley Community Theater, right where

(08:34):
I went to high school, I ain't two dollars. And
so you're in high school, You're a popular kid. Were
you a nerd? What kind of kid were you know?
I joined a club there, club called the Annoias and
we called what they were called the Unoias EU. And
I have no clue. I don't know. But what I
know is because this was the seeds of my career

(08:56):
is in l A. We had always had these big
dances with Nay. We had Frank Sinatra come and sing
it at a high school dance, you know, I mean,
it was unbelievable. Got to Berkeley and I felt like
they were ten years behind the time. So I started
through my dad, I made some connections and I started
bringing acts from l A to come up to perform

(09:17):
at dances or not concerts. At that point, we're talking
the fifties, uh and and I'll never forget because I
bought this. I bought the stand Kenton band. Except you
didn't get the band. You got a group that he
formed of musicians in San Francisco, and they sent the
drums that said Stan Kenton on it, right, you know,
but at least Stan Kenton was there, right. No, No,

(09:39):
Stan wasn't there either. Stan couldn't be there, and I
had booked his I think his wife was Julie Christie maybe,
and I booked her and she couldn't come either, So
they sent a lady named Terry Southern. These are all
acts no one would know now, you know, but the bad.
But we made money, you know. My mother sent me
a picture one time of me giving six four dollars

(10:00):
to the Red Cross from one of these shows that
I did, you know. Okay, so you're in high school,
are you you know, certainly looking at your career? Are
you that entrepreneurial? From day one? You have a paper
route that kind of I sold Time Life Sports illustrated subscriptions,
and I would go up to the Berkeley campus and

(10:21):
I would hand out discount cards in what was then
the Red Line. Now you wouldn't have stand in line
to register then you had to stand in a long,
long line for hours to go and actually register, and
I would have to. So I would go down the
line and hand everybody a students a student discount card
for Time Life for Sports Illustrated. But it had my address,

(10:44):
my home address on it. I would get. I remember
I made eighteen hundred dollars one week in commissions in
high school. It's like today doing My mother looked at
me like I was. She thought, oh, no thing is
going to come from this. So I did that. I
got over the years. Even after I got into college.

(11:05):
I had I called at the cal Subscription Service, but
because my first initials ken K in my last k,
it was called k L Subscription Service. I ended up
with fifty sales people around California on campuses. I so
I was totally entrepreneurial from the early stages there. Okay,
and how did you get you know, was it a

(11:26):
super discount price? Why did everybody say that it was
like half the normal price? And how did you get
hooked up? Well, somehow or other, I agreed to do it,
and they gave us. I would get like six they wanted.
They wanted the subscription, so that would give me like
sixty or seventy of the cause of the subscription. So

(11:47):
even though the subscription was less than five dollars for
for the year, I would get, you know, three sixty
five or something from every subscription. You know that our
mailbox would be stuffed with these cards and fifty salesman.
How much did you take from them? You know? I
don't remember that. I don't remember, but I might have

(12:08):
split with them or maybe I don't know. I gave
them enough as incentive, and even I let when I
went to Berkeley. I was in Berkeley four years and
then the King cent Trio I was doing their shows
and they wanted me to become their concert promoter on
the road. And the meantime, I got accepted to Harvard
Business School, and my father, I think that's the only

(12:29):
time in my whole life, he said, you've got to
do something. He said, if you don't go to Harvard
Business School now, you will never go Okay, let's go back.
You're in Berkeley studying, what I'm saying. From getting out
of high school, I thought I'd be a microbiologist. Uh.
Then I ended up in engineering and I did terrible
there because I was awful at math. I used to

(12:49):
skip math in high school for basketball practice and and
so I dropped out of that for after a year.
And they had a special deal for basketball players at Berkeley,
although I wasn't a big time player there, and it
was where you could make up. Of course, the schools
all have it now. This they created for the athletes,
and you could take subjects from You had to have

(13:12):
a total of twelve units and you could go up
to three different areas. So I picked anthropology, sociology, and journalism.
Don't ask me, I don't know why, but there were
all things I was interested in. So I did very
well because I now was taking things that were fascinating
to me and interesting to me. And I got all

(13:34):
ready to graduate from Berkeley, and I turned out I
was three units short. So my journalism for me who
was my sort of my mentor too, she gave me, uh,
she let me work on a study with her, and
she gave me three credits so I could graduate. Okay,
did you promote shows in college? Yes, we're at the

(13:54):
college or the idea. The first show I ever did
at the college was the group the Limelighters, and it
was in a sevenfty hall seed Hall. I've got the
poster on my wall at home. I know. The tickets
were seventy cents, okay, and I and it was first come,
first served, no pre sale. And I remember sitting in

(14:17):
the office of the editor of the of the school paper,
the Daily Cow, and saying to him, Oh, God, is
anybody going to show up? And we walked out of
his office, which was right across from the hall, and
there was a line around the building. We sold out.
It was my my first show on the Berkeley campus.
And and by the way, it led to my managing

(14:41):
that group after I got out of Harvard Business School,
because they thought of me as some kind of genius.
They had never done that, They've never made that much money.
They were appearing at the Hungry Eye, a little club
over in the Bay Area, and uh. And I was
like a hero as a kid, you know, from doing it.
And I actually ended up by the way U after
once I got professional, after Harvard, I wrote a book

(15:03):
on promoting college concerts. Okay, so the line lighters hadn't
broken yet if they're playing at the Hungry No, they
hadn't broken back. Okay. Now today it's a track people
become part of the concert committee, etcetera. Were you operating
totally independently or were you part of a club? No,
I was. I was operating pretty much independently, but I

(15:24):
was doing everything. In fact, once I took on the
management of that group after after the business school, I
would do everything from sending the laundry out to booking
the airfares to uh, you know, I'd be a shill
at the concert and have to throw out a line
that got a very funny reaction from the their response

(15:44):
to it, and stuff like that. I mean I was
a run spotlights. I sold souvenir programs, whatever was necessary
at that moment in time that had to be done
that would help the group I did. It was a
great education. They were older and me. They knew what
they were doing. I learned management. Okay, so you're still

(16:05):
in Berkeley. When you book a bandon Berkeley, you know,
today there's a huge guarantee and the promoter can lose money.
What was the deal back then? Well, I just you
reminded me of one grace whore. I booked Ray Charles,
and it's Saturday night in Berkeley and they get there
for rehearsal at four in the afternoon and Joe Adams,

(16:25):
his manager, says to me, you owe him ten thousand dollars,
which is what I had to pay for him then.
And he says, and we want it in cash. Where
do you get Where does a college kid get ten
thousand dollars? And I have no idea where I got it.
I did, and I watched them count every dollar. Okay,

(16:49):
you graduate from college, you go to Harvard Business School
the following fall. Do you take time off? Yeah, here's
the crazy thing. The king Centrio asked me to be
there answer promoter. My dad had ah. I think I
had grant some kind of a grant to go to
Europe and do some lectures there. So we went to

(17:10):
Europe for the summer, and I flew directly from Copenhagen
back to Boston to start Harvard Business School. And I
walked into my dorm room and a guy said to me,
my god, have you heard this song by the Kingston
Trio Hanging out your Head Tom Dooley. It's the number
one song in the country. I was sure, absolutely certain,

(17:31):
I had blown it, and my career was in the
in the entertainment business. I had lost, I had lost
any opportunity there. I was sure of it. I thought,
you know, you should have taken that job. Look at
their the number one and I had predicted a year
before when I first heard him. I walked up to
him after the show at a little club called the U.
The UH was the Blue Onion or something in San Francisco,

(17:53):
and I I said to them, you know, a year
from now, you're going to be the hottest thing in
the US. And almost a year to the day they
had the number one record. Okay, so at that time
you ended up managing the Kingston Trio. No never, No, okay.
So you go to Harvard Business School. When you were
in college, did you live at home or on campus?

(18:14):
And lived at home? Okay, so this is the first
time you're living alone. Yeah, and your Harvard Business School dorm.
Any idea what you're trying to achieve by going survive?
I flew home the first year until my parents. I
had flunked out. I was sure of it, and I
ended up twenty seven in the class, and I I

(18:37):
was absolutely certain I had to fake some of the exams,
you know, I mean it was it was so hard,
it was unbelievable. And they told us that the dean.
I think the reason I got into Harvard School is
the dean of of the school had been the dean
of men at Berkeley when my dad was vice Chances
that they were all friends. Somehow I got in, you know,

(18:57):
those that wouldn't happen nowadays. But and and uh, and
I was sure that I had was flunked out, and
I just couldn't believe it. But the second year was
a little easier than the first, but never it was easy.
And and I, by the way, I started a subscription service.
I called it New England Subscription or something like that
in England. You know I had but I you know,

(19:20):
I got an offer from this group, from the Lime Letders.
They I was home at Christmas between I still had
four or five months ago, and they called me just
as I'm getting ready to leave to go back, and
they said, we need an executive secretary. Would you be
our executive secretary? And I think this is probably the

(19:43):
single guttiest thing I've ever done in my life, because
I said to them, look, I didn't go to Harvard
Business School to be an executive secretary. If you need
a manager, you know, call me. And when I got
back to school. The leader of the Lime Letters was
a very funny guy named Leuke Got Ladies. Rik was funny,
and there was this wonderful letter that I can't find anywhere.

(20:04):
And he said, we want you to be our manager.
So now I accept the management and he want and
they want me to come out of school. And I
said no, no no, no, no, no. Four months from now,
I'm you know, in May or whatever it is, I'm graduating. Uh,
you have to wait. But I started working for them
right away, and I took their album and I walked
into the biggest station in Boston at the time, w

(20:25):
b Z, and who was the program director but Joe
Smith not He was the librarian. Joe Smith for those
of no, Joe Smith had a legendary career in the
record business, working at Warner Brothers Records running Electra. Yeah,
he was co president of Warners with Mo Austin. You know,
the gold Dust Twins, that's what they were called. So

(20:46):
he he was the first guy. He sat me down
and gave me clues to the business. And I took
that record all over Boston and promoted it and everything.
Had some unbelievable experiences. You know, this was the days
of Paola and other stuff like that, and there were
some amazing things happening in those days. I don't know
if we have time for it, but I okay, if

(21:07):
there's Paola, you're a graduate student. How did you get
the money to pay them? I didn't. I didn't pay anybody.
But it led, it led, and I wish I could
remember the guy's name. He was like the hottest DJ
in the country at the time. What if he played
your record, you were made right? And he was at
a competing station, not busy, and I made an appointment

(21:27):
to take one of the members of the group kind
of a hot blooded he's still around and still I think,
occasionally performs with the group as he's constituted. A guy
named Alex Hasslev and he was from a Russian background,
and UM and I took him with me to meet
this DJ with our record, with our single, whatever it was,

(21:47):
and we and UM he kept us waiting over an hour,
which was getting Alex kind of upset anyway. Then he
walked into the studio, walked right by us, went to
his office and we were sat there for another half
hour or more. Finally we go into his office and
he is he's got a stack of In those days,

(22:08):
they were those little forty five with a big hole, right,
and he's taking them and he's throwing them one after
the other into the waste basket. Uh. And every every
so often he puts one down on the desk, but
the rest just get tossed. And we're standing there in
front of me. Doesn't offer any place to sit, and
he doesn't look up, and he says, come back when

(22:30):
you get a hit. That's it, Alex. I have to
restrain Alex from jumping over the desk and strangling him
from the dead. This is my first month in the job, right,
and the bigger thing than happened. I go to Chicago.
The group is in Chicago that went at the Easter break.

(22:51):
So I go to Chicago. They're peering at a at
a club in Chicago, and I go to their hotel room.
And as I walk in their hotel room, and I've
turned down bb D, N O, Procter and Gamble Time magazine,
all these people that are hiring the Harvard grats, the
Harvard Business School grads and and uh. As I walk

(23:14):
in the room, Alan, I hear Alex say, Okay, that's it.
We're breaking up. And what I didn't know was they
break up every day from there on concerant. You know, okay, God,
just finishing Harvard Business School before you got that call
slash letter from the Lime Lighters. Would you have gone
into music management or would you have gone to work

(23:36):
for Procter and Gamble or one of those? I think
I might have gone to work for Time magazine because
of all my history with Time, and the department that
wanted me a time was called New Developments or innovation,
or nowadays it'll be called innovation. When there was a
recession a year later, I guarantee you it was the
first department to go. So I made one good decision.

(23:59):
And what are your parents say about you going to
Harvard Business School? Now you're a manager? You know? The
great thing about my parents is whatever I was doing
they were thrilled with. They were here. So many stories
now of kids whose parents, you know, fight what they
want to do. You read books about it all the
time here, and the kids do it anyway. But you know,
we all want to make our parents proud. I think

(24:21):
even even abusive parents, people still want to They're they're
driven to make them proud and um and in my case,
I felt the same way. But they never pushed me
one way or another, and they were just proud of
everything I did. And I and I got lucky. Listen,
I took this group on. We were I moved him
from Electra Records. I moved with Jack Holtsman, dear Jack Holdsman,

(24:46):
of course the recent scene. I moved him from there
to our c A for a much bigger deal. At
the time, Elector was an independent. Yeah, it was a
smaller independent. They didn't have the money to promote them.
I made a rather revolutionary d at the time. I
made a deal which gave us a fifty thousand dollar
promotion fund would be five thousand maybe now or more.

(25:09):
A fifty thousand dollar promotion fund that that we controlled.
They had to if they objected anything that had to
be coordinated with them, but we could control it. And
um and so I had that fund to work with
to promote the group, and we became the number two
selling artist at our c A. But you know, it

(25:30):
was just kind of amazing. I mean, I learned by
making mistakes through that whole period. But these guys, they
couldn't agree on anything together. So what they would do
is each one would take me aside and try to
get me to agree with their point of view about
which booking agency we should go with, whether she we
should take this tour or not, and so on, you know,

(25:53):
and um, and then what would happen is we'd get
together they each want to do at a different time,
in different place. Then we all get together to meet
and make a decision booking agencies. One I particularly remember
they each wanted a different agency. They finally throw up
their hands and say, well, let's let Ken decide. Like what, Ken,

(26:13):
what do you think? Now? I've heard all the arguments,
ad infinitum. I mean, I've heard them over and over
and over, and I make a decision, you know, and
hopefully I make the right decision. In fact, one of
the wrong decisions I made that was perfectly right for them,
as I pulled them off some booking to put them
on the mort Salt tour all over the country, thirty
four cities and thirty five year we have like sixty two,

(26:36):
sixty probably sixty and sixty one. Yeah, in six you
go to negotiate a record deal. Everything is very sophisticated,
these tapes. Did you have a lawyer. Do you do
it yourself? How did it work? We had lawyers usually
I don't remember who was there. Oh, they did have
a lawyer that I wasn't too crazy about, but they
But the record deals, I still got very much involved.

(26:59):
I didn't know better, you know, I mean and and
and it wasn't anything like it is today. Really talking
to So you're dealing with the record company, then to
what degree are you telling the record company what to do?
I can't. It's not my style. So what is your?
My style is finding a way that together we make

(27:21):
decisions and that that I but I'm willing to go
with them the extra mile to support everything. To that
I'm not. I'm not saying to them, you go promote this,
you go. I mean, even we're talking, if you if
you skip ahead thirty years on, Kenny Rodgers or Tricia
Earwood or I would make four hundred radio calls to

(27:44):
promote a record. Now the record company's still doing the
same thing. But my calls. They don't get calls from
managers on you know, the program directors Like I became
close friends with program directors all over the country, and
I would call, call and call to get my records
on the end. What if you felt the record wasn't

(28:12):
an a level record, would you still call That's an
interesting question. I you know, hopefully most times, you know.
I'm trying to remember one of those incidents. I'm pretty
sure that I was involved enough that whatever came out
with something. Now, when Kenny Rogers first recorded Lucile, he's

(28:35):
into seventeen songs. I thought it was hysterically funny. It
was going to be either a big flop or a
big or a big success. And I tried to get
the record and you put it out, and they wouldn't.
They put out one or two records before it. But boy,
when we got to it, I worked that record like
crazy because I believed in it. I don't know what

(28:55):
I did with the previous two. I probably didn't work
anywheres as hard. Okay, so you're managing the law lights.
Their career gets better when you're the manager, much better,
and you're making any money A lot a lot of
my when when I graduated from Harvard Business School, and
anybody who knows what they get nowadays from that school
when you're grad will just be before it the the

(29:18):
top price that the guys coming out of Harvard Business
School got on the average a lot of them got
it was twelve five a year. Okay, that was considered
a lot of money for them. H I earned by
my second year, I earned thirty five. And at this point,
how many people do you have working for you? If
any maybe no, I probably nobody. Probably, So the Limelighters

(29:46):
are big, big and successful. What's the next step? The
next step is the Limelighters finally reach a point where
they decided to break up. And by that time, by
the way, by that time, for the last year, they
have replaced me with a woman they met in New
York who because they've decided they can save the timber cent,
they're paying me, right, and you charge ten? Then ten

(30:09):
was all? Then yeah, it went up to five. I
never charged more than fifteen. The managers get hey, Colonel
Tom Parker got you know that story, it's the great story,
some news guy says to him. So I understand that
you know that you take you take half of Pressley's earnings.
He said, no, no, no, no, Elvis Presley takes half

(30:29):
of months, right, you know, but anyway, uh, in those days,
I'm trying to think now, I got a little off trail. Okay,
So the point is they were the limelighters, replace you
to save money. Where does that leave They replace me
with a woman. They send her out to give her
two weeks to learn everything I'm doing. She calls him
up in the second week and says, this is crazy.

(30:52):
It's gonna take me a year out here. She stays
like four or five months. She finally goes back. She's
mannaging him for six months, and now she asked them
for tier and he saved anything. In the meantime, they
make me the concert promoter. I'm making two or three
times what I made as their manage. At that time,
there wasn't percentage, right, you paid a flat fee. Uh

(31:14):
you may for for the if you're a promoter to
the act, to the act, you paid them, Yeah, some
kind of percentage usually though even then, Yeah, a lot
of times was flat feet. And earnings in those days,
my god, I mean we were getting ten thousand a night.
Streisan came along and charged twenty five thousand, and we
all talked about how uh you know that she was

(31:34):
going to ruin the business at Okay, so you know
you're being the promoter, but the band breaks up, what
do you do next day. Here's the crazy part of it.
The band breaks up. Well, I'm holding a ten thousand
dollar commercial for Chrysler Cars in my hand that for them,

(31:56):
and they can't do it because they've broken up. And
I approached the Smothers brothers and say I'd like to
manage I knew them, I knew them from San Francisco.
We were friendly and said I wanted to manage him.
And here's a ten thousand dollar deal. I've convinced the
buyer that they that the Smothers are the right group.

(32:17):
At that point, they're on a lot of of the
late night shows jacqu Parr and shows like that, and
I say, I say, I'm gonna always make more money
than I cost you for you and they signed with me.
So the day the Lime Letters break up, I signed
the Smothers brothers and that within a month, they appear

(32:38):
on three major network shows in the same week. That
never happened then, but they prefer a prayer performing on
three shows. Uh, Judy Garland, I can't remember the shows,
but the Sullivan Show was one I can't I don't
remember what the third one was anyway, that never happened
because they all had exclusivity causes clauses. But the smothers

(33:00):
weren't big enough than anybody cared because Striison was on
one of the shows, and so you know the show.
The shows each wanted to put whoever they had on
that week, and the smothers were secondary, but they got
all the and the commercial breaks. So the Christi commercials
are playing on the on the Today Show, and the
Tonight Show, the the they're on a bunch of shows

(33:24):
one week, we get so much exposure. The next forty
nine shows selled out. Okay, just to be clear, was
it your plan to get them on all those shows
in a week or was that I think it was.
I think it sort of happened. I mean, I don't
think I had any idea. I looked back at it.
I teach now something called the magic of threes. How
it takes three impressions in a concentrated period of time

(33:47):
for anybody to take any real action. That if you
just have one, so you try and combine, you try
and bring things together. So they all happened in a
very tight period that I learned that it now shown
as a real law, I mean, a real scientific principle.
But in those I learned it when I started teaching
at u c l A. By looking back and specifically

(34:08):
that week taught me that everybody got excited when they
saw the Smothers in those multiple appearances all happening in
one week. It was all in one week. So anyway, uh,
the Smothers very quickly are red hot and a blast vocal.
Who's running. William Morris at that time talks to CBS

(34:31):
and says, all of your stars on the network are aging.
You've got Ed Sullivan and you've got all these old
you know, all these other stars that are older. Red
Skelton had a show. They're they're all older stars. You
need some youth, and he convinces them to put the
Smothers on the air. So it's just sixty six. That

(34:51):
was about that. What we've started out with was was
a show in which Tommy played in Angel. Oh yes, yes,
that exactly just to be there before we get to
my brother the Angel. Had you kept regular contact up
with theos because I was living in the Bay Area
right right a block two blocks from the Hungry Eye,
and it was the Purple Onion. I said, it was

(35:13):
the blue it's the Purple Onion. And they were appearing,
and then they do a live album from the Purple Onion.
I think they did absolutely one of the first step
maybe the first album. Okay, And didn't they have a manager? No,
they didn't at that point. I don't know if they
had had it or not prior I can't remember. Okay,
So they do that show, I remember, and what network

(35:34):
does it? The first show the My Brother the Angel
was on. I think it was a sho That's what
I was going to say. Okay, so I know it was.
It was a company called screen gim So it was
now I remember because I had a friend who had
the record, and so therefore I tuned in. But from

(35:54):
the perspective of viewer, the show wasn't really successful. But
in those days they bought twenty six shows. Nowadays you
get six maybe, And in those days they bought you
for a season, and they lived with you for a season.
There were only three networks, and and if you got
on the air, you still got a year's worth of exposure.

(36:16):
You know, they didn't they didn't take you off mid year.
They didn't have any other shows to put on. Uh.
So we did get through a year and then we
kind of things were it still gave them weekly exposure,
which was good, so fed the concert business and everything,
and they were touring a lot. And then we then,
of course in six okay, let's go back. Did they

(36:37):
like each other or not? If they were threatened from
the outside, they would respond as brothers, as a pair. Uh.
If they were just arguing among themselves, uh, they would
really argue. And the funny part of it was one
night they had a they had a concert in Aspen,

(37:01):
or or very close to Aspen somewhere. They're in a
club and it was snow on the ground everywhere, and
everybody was lined outside the club waiting to get in.
And Tom and Dick come along and they're arguing and
they start throwing punches and they now are wrestling in
the snow in front of the crowd that's going into

(37:22):
Tommy says, best show we ever did. People believed everything. Okay,
so they see you can drive off the concert business.
The show ends, and then what, uh the I don't
quite understand the SMS Brothers. They do their network show
runs a season half a year, twenty six episodes, and
then they just continue touring and stuff like and doing

(37:45):
some records and stuff. We were on Mercury Record and
then um and then this is when last Vogo convinces
the network that they should put the Smothers brothers on
and they and they put them on nine in a
slot which see me, us has failed over and over
and over there in fact, for eight years, nobody can
knock bananas out and number one. But Sunday nights at

(38:08):
eight o'clock and it's Bonanza and it's America's show, right,
nobody's gonna do anything, and we knock them out of
number one. All Smothers goes on in sixty seven becomes
an instant hit. Not instant, but within a week or
a few weeks. We were not a lot of the show.
A lot of the show was kind of traditional old,

(38:31):
you know, variety show. But certain number five ten minutes
of the show was outrageous and and we had young riders.
We were protesting the Vietnam War, we were protesting racism.
We were but in a satirical way, in a in
a you know, really really funny way. There's a great

(38:52):
there's a great documentary on it called Smothers Smothered, and
it has the highlights of all the show and what
happened because after two and a half three years, the
CBS threw them off the air. UH new president Bob
Wood who came in and Tommy went head to head.
Tommy got rid of after about in nineteen sixty nine,
he got rid of me, and he got rid of

(39:14):
UH my partner at the time, and he had nobody
beat no buffer, and he went one on one of
the network president. Next thing you know, they were off
the air. He you know, he's looked back on that
and said it was the wrong thing to do. Okay,
But just in that era, you're the manager you have,
you know that they're testing the limits on a regular basis,
and how did you manage that with the uh that

(39:36):
work before they had a change. I always loved to
tell this. We would be in the dressing room. There
was a wonderful man from the CBS network who was
sort of the guy that dealt with us day in
and day out, and and we'd be in the dressing
room and Tom and Dick would be swearing, you know,

(39:58):
like like say, I mean sailors um about, you know,
tell CBS to take this show and shove it, you know,
and all that stuff, and swearing left and right, and
then kN Frets, my partner at the time, and I
would walk out of there and we'd go up to
the CBS guy and we say, you know, we have
a small problem here. You know, we would have we

(40:20):
would bring it all down and we would talk with
them and so on and everything. And we were a hit,
which helps. I mean, we're the number one show on
television for a while, and you know, they put up
with a lot when you are By the time the
Smothers got thrown off, a lot of things that happened,
and they were maybe seventeen. Today, they wouldn't consider throwing

(40:42):
the seventeen show up, but in those days that was considered.
You know, we had been number one, We'd set a
pretty high gund bar um. So we would always kind
of modify it and keep it down. And there was
a William Morris agent named Stamp came in and he
kept everything. We all kind of controlled the volatility. And
the other thing about the Smothers is Dick was super conservative.

(41:03):
Tommy was the liberal one. Tommy was hanging out with
Timothy Leary and doing LSD and and hanging out with
there was I can't remember his first his first name now,
but there was a h Federal Communications remember who was
a rebel and Tommy would hang out with him, and

(41:25):
he would urge Tommy to you know, to be as
controversial as possible. And Tommy would think, wow, this is
the FCC, so telling me this, you know, but but
it was it was pretty crazy and okay, a couple
of things. How did you end up getting the partner?
Ken Fritz hired him as a road manager for the Smothers.

(41:47):
And then, uh, uh, Tommy, you know when when I
found this a lot when an act is on the
road with a guy who's there every night. I mean
the early days, it was me, you know, always with
the act. But once I got more successful, I was
not going as much because I had too many other
responsibilities and also felt staying in l A I could

(42:08):
do a better job for my group. I go out
on all the big things. But if ken Fritz was
traveling as a road manager for a couple of years,
and uh, finally Tommy said, you gotta make him a partner,
and I already had a partner at that a guy
out of Boston. So for a short while we were
three ways was the guy out of Boston? Oh God,
I'm tom Oh well, what was how did he get involved?

(42:33):
I can't remember how he got involved, but I know
I originally he may have been I may have been
involved with him when I was doing concerts or something. Yeah,
but by the way, he did a very key thing
when I moved. I was I first started out working
out of San Francisco. When I decided to move to
Los Angeles, or we decided to put our offices in
l A, Tom Carroll said to me, we're going to

(42:56):
go to l A. We're gonna have We're gonna be
the most honest guys with the best reputation and business
is going to be the path to our door. That
I mean Tom Carol unfortunately died early young, but Tom
I felt he was so right. That's what I did,
And literally I never had to run after an act.

(43:18):
I think in all the years, the only act other
than maybe the Smothers, which really wasn't running after him.
But but other than that, um, you know, Bill Medley
and Righteous Brothers were the one act I ever heard
ran after and we didn't get him. I got I
got Medley years later as a solo artist, but I
never managed him. Okay, So during this period you also

(43:42):
have first edition, the Kenny Riding the first station comes along.
After the Smothers are on the air for a year
and and very hot, and a lawyer keeps calling me
and bugging me to go see this group at a
little club called Leadbetters. Leadbetters was owned by the leader
of the New Christie Mistrels. The group him out of
the New CHRISTI instruls. Kenny Rogers was a member of

(44:03):
the group, and I went down finally and saw them
after six weeks of this lawyer in l A. It's
in l A on Westwood Boulevard, or it was no
longer there, And I went down there and flipped and
I brought Mason Williams and Tommy Smothers the next night
or the next week or whenever, and they flipped for him,
and we put him on the show and started managing

(44:25):
right away. And Kenny Rodgers was part of the group,
but he wasn't. He was singing lead on some of
the songs, but he wasn't the key member in it.
He didn't didn't become Kenny Rogers in the first edition
until a couple of years or a year at least
a year later. So how does just dropped in to
see what condition my condition was in. That was the

(44:47):
initial big hit. How did that come together? You know,
I don't remember how the song got in there. I
do know that was a song that kind of changed
things for us. That and Ruby Don't Take Your Love
to Town and Lucy Well Lucy a for Kenny as
a solors um. But but the thing was that Kenny
became the lead voice on a lot of those and

(45:09):
we had a hit going up the charts. And I
remember meeting with Mo Austin and Joe Smith at Warners
and them saying, we've got to do something because this
record is starting to get play and we've got another
record that's way up the charts. What do we do?
And we sat there and somehow in the group we
made a decision that since Kenny was the lead on

(45:31):
I think it was Ruby Um, that it would be
Kenny Rogers and the first edition for one of them,
in the first edition for the other. It was a
group happy with this. No, okay, during this area, you're
managing the Smothers, you manage the first edition managing anybody else. Yeah,
I had three or four let's see, from the Smothers

(45:53):
Brothers show. I had a fabulous, probably the best banjo
player in America, John Hartford, uh uh, who became kind
of a sidekick on the on the Glenn Campbell Show.
By the way, I I literally found Glenn Campbell for
that show to be the summer replacement for the Smothers
when I was tasked with that job by watching. In

(46:15):
those days, the tapes that you viewed were these heavy, huge,
heavy video tapes. There were two inches wide. They I
don't know how much they weighed, but I could barely
carry one. And I had to watch fifty of those.
I had a hundred hundred acts to watch, hundred artists
to see who would host the show. And when it
got to number fifty, actually number fifty, exactly halfway through,

(46:39):
Glenn Campbell was there. Uh, And I ran upstairs, got
Tommy Smithers, brought him down to the screening room, said
here's our guy. And we never looked at the other fifty. Okay,
so uh, Now it ends with the Smothers brothers. What's
keeping the door open? That the first edition and they're

(47:00):
they're hot in the US, and then we also as
they start to cool here, we get an offer to
tour in New Zealand and believe it or not, We
go to New Zealand were treated like the Beatles. It's
unreal how hot we get in New Zealand. We make
three tours there and I literally spent probably six months
of my life in New Zealand, which is an incredible

(47:22):
country visually, and everything else conservative is all get out.
I mean everything Saturday afternoon until Monday morning, everything closed closed.
In those days. It was, you know, quite a different experience,
but it was the most fabulous country visually. Uh you know.
So anyway, so first edition is driving, But I have
other clients during that period of time. I've been handling

(47:44):
Mason Williams out of the I had Bob Einstein, who
went on ended up being Super Day Super Dave. Yeah.
By the way, I just recently went to the memorial
service for Bob Einstein and he had to his two brothers,
one of whom his head of a big advertising agency, Cliff,
and the other one is Albert Brooks, the comedian. So

(48:07):
Cliffs gets up to and and does a whole thing
on Bob from beginning to end. It's like thirty minutes.
Everybody else is talking five just Seinfeld was there, All
kinds of people Tommy smothers were there. They all talked
five or ten minutes. Cliff does this whole big long thing,
and he's followed by Albert Brooks. If anybody knows wonderful

(48:29):
comedian movie maker move, you know. Albert Brooks gets up there.
He has this sheaf of papers in his hand and
he throws him up in the air and he says, well,
the heck with that. They told me Cliff had died.
That's good, great, And then he says, but now I

(48:49):
hear Cliff speak. Jeez, I went out to move my
car twice while Cliff speak. He brought the house that.
It was the best two lines of the night. It
was hysterical. I just that. I mean, that family was
so funny, and their father was a guy name of
all things, whoever remembers this father was a comedian named
Parker Carcass. That was his name, I mean his stage name,

(49:11):
you know. Anyway, But I had Einstein, I had Mason Williams,
I had John Hartford. Oh, I had Jennifer Warren, uh
you know. And and somewhere in that period of time,
I think maybe it was a little later, Jennifer and
Bill Medley did fabulous songs for the movie. Uh. So

(49:32):
I had a lot going on during that period. Uh.
But then I went to work for Jerry Wander. How
did that come about? I used to collect old cars,
antique cars, and Kenny gave me an old nineteen uh
Ford with a little Ford coupe with a with a

(49:55):
rumble seat, and I had a park somewhere I was.
I drove it around town and a note came on
my window and said, we're doing this thing in Vegas,
the show in Vegas, and we're using antique cars and stuff.
Could we use your car? Actually, first around l A,
it was a group called the Do Dog Gang. I
don't know if you remember it. You're talking about the
people did the parade and they did all kinds of

(50:17):
things that they that they they were They played as
if they were nine. So there was Big Jim and
he was a gangster, and they were all hoodlums and
there were a rival gang and they'd have shootouts in
l A. In fact, he gets married to this lady
that's supposed to be she's a dancer from a chorus

(50:39):
line in Chicago, because he's from Chicago. And they get
married at the Beverly Hills hotel and as they're walking
out of the hotel, the rival gang kidnaps. Her name
was I can't remember what her name was, but Bob
Boop see something or something like that, you know, and
then they go in to shootout around town. So we
opened in Vegas. They talked me into coming up and

(51:01):
helping produce a show in Vegas at the at the
Flamingo and it failed, and um but it failed. The
week that Time magazine did a fabulous review of it.
We just couldn't We couldn't get a second show going.
We were in a side room. Didn't work anyway. I
limped back to l A. And I had loaned the

(51:23):
show what amounted to my life savings to pay the
very last week's salary, thinking we were getting money. But
we didn't. So I lost my money. So I'm now broke.
I've got my house in my car and an antique
piano from the show and that's it. And and somehow
or other, I found Jerry Weintrop and he hired me.

(51:43):
Hired me for nothing. I mean, it wasn't much, but
it was enough to keep me alive at the at
that point in time. And I worked for him for
two years. And I learned an enormous I learned an
enormous amount from it. Uh good and bad. I have
to be a couple of things. What was good what
was bad. The good things were things like you play
uh l A and New York for the career, and

(52:08):
you play the rest of the country for the money. Okay,
I mean for him by the way I handled the carpenters.
I worked with John uh John Davidson, I worked with
with John Denver. We had all we had all the d's.
We had Davis and Denver was unbelievable. We even had
Dylan for a while. I remember walking down the hall

(52:29):
and Bob Dylan's walking towards me. The Colonel used to
come and hang out in my office. Colonel Tom Parker
would hang out in my office anyway. In that, you know,
That's what I learned that what I the problem was
Jerry was driven by power and money. You know, I'm
very driven by those things, and that's just not my style.
It's not what I you know. So those were like

(52:52):
the Kings, and and so I learned things not to do.
But I really learned a lot from him. On a
positive side, he was incredibly sick Cessil and he had
a thing called Concerts West, which is still around now.
Uh that was part of the company and they produced everybody,
and they did all the Sinatra tours. I got to
work with Sinatra and stuff. It was pretty fun. I mean, now,

(53:13):
at the time, you're still managing Kenny Rogers. No, Kenny
had left, the group had broken up. That was the
other thing that had happened before. Right around that time,
the first edition broke up. But I wasn't making much
from them anyway. They were in the very, very downside
of their career. Uh So I at that point in time,
I went, you know, I'm going to work for Jerry.

(53:36):
Was kind of salvation for me at that moment in time,
and um, I kind of lost my trend. Thought, I'm sorry, no, okay,
So how do you decide to leave Jerry? Oh yeah,
that's exactly. Let me right back into the Kenny Rogers thing.
So Kenny goes to Nashville, meets up with Larry Butler,

(53:56):
starts to record song since a seventeen song. I sit
in Jerry had his own promotion department. The three guys
from the promotion department and I sit in the little
room we had with the great speakers and stuff, and
we listened to these seventeen songs and we hear Lucy
Elle and a couple of other songs that became big hits,
and we're pretty mesrized with it. And so I want

(54:19):
to and I want to sign Kenny, and Jerry says, oh,
he's washed up and so over. It's not going to happen.
Don't do that now, you know that'd be straight and so.
But over his objection, I signed Kenny, which, by the way,
ultimately made Jerry several millions, and after I had left him,
by the way, um so, anyway, Kenny knows that Jerry

(54:41):
didn't want him as a client. I don't remember. I
doubt if I said that directly, but he knew. Uh.
As Kenny starts to become successful, he says to me,
I'm leaving. You can either go with me or not,
but it's up to you. Well, you know, now Kenny's
my hot client. I've got others. I've got Dottie West

(55:03):
the singer, and I've got I'm working with Harry Chapin
and and who Jerry had signed, and a few others.
So I decided to leave Jerry very contentious decision. It
wasn't pleasant. But so what did Jerry? Sorry, yeah, give
me a few million dollars and you can go. And

(55:24):
he was paying me next to nothing. Um No, but
he did keep a piece of Kenny for a couple
of years, which turned out to be a couple of
big years. Um So in any event, um, and he
became very fair. Used to come over and visit me
at my other once. I became very successful with the
new new acts. I mean, I've been there before during
the mother's days being real hot, but I got very

(55:46):
hot in the eighties, as you know. And uh, and
Jerry would just drop by and his in his sweat clothes,
come over and sit in my office. You know. It's funny. Uh,
sort of like Colonel Tom Parker did. It was interesting.
But but when I left Kenny, I bought a little
house on Shaborne Drive here in Los Angeles that would

(56:09):
have been Casablanca Records and Neil Bogart's place, and but
it was the record company. Uh, and you know, set
up an office there and started managing acts and had
almost huge success from the very beginning because Kenny was
read hot and he was getting out of all the
time and I was really able then I was able

(56:30):
to probably use whatever skills I had as a manager
really came into play in that period. Who's the next
big act? Dr? Kenny? Uh, Lionel Ritchie and how did
you get Lionel Richie been with the Commodores? How did
he come to you? He came to me because Kenny

(56:52):
had been very hot on the country charts and was
now doing extremely well popped. People don't kind of realize,
but the first act to really cross from country to
pop and keep his foot in both was Kenny Rogers,
and he decided there was one other chart at the time.
He decided he wanted to be number one on the

(57:12):
R and B charts, so he Uh. He went to
Jim as It, who was running the record company, and said,
I want to have an R and B head And
Jim said, well, there's only one guy around to write
it for you. It's Lionel Richie. And I think Lionel
was in Vegas. Al the Linel remembers is the opposite.
He remembers that he went to Vegas to visit Kenny.

(57:33):
But the story I've always known was Kenny went to
Vegas to visit Lionel and Lionel played him what he
had of this song and then wrote it for Kenny,
which was Lady, which became one of Kenny's very biggest hits,
and produced it for him and everything. So it was
quite something and and he Uh So, all of a sudden,

(57:54):
I had two huge acts. One of the things I'm
extremely proud of his one through into two. For eighteen months,
I had forty eight percent of the top ten records
in America were my clients over an eighteen minute period
month period for eighteen months. Okay, so who was it?

(58:16):
It was Kenny, it was Lionel, it was Kim Carnes
with Betty Davis eyes and a lot don't fall in
Love with a Dreamer, which she did with Kenny. Uh.
You know, she had a whole series of hits. Uh
had we had the Jay Giles band at that time
with freeze Frame and you know a lot of the
other songs. Um, I hadn't taken on Olivia yet, and

(58:40):
I didn't have big hits with Olivia. Later on. I
had Olivia, John and the Bigs for short periods of time,
and Burt Reynolds for a very short less than a year. Uh.
But I'm trying to think who all the others were
right in that period. But you know, Lionel and Kenny
would have more than one hit in the top ten
at times. Okay, So lionle to manager and he just

(59:00):
called you up and said, I want to go with you. No,
we were doing after we did, lady. We flew down
to Tuskegee for a TV special and for and had
the Commodores as a guest. I have a great picture
with all of them. And they were managed by Benny Ashburne.
I think, boy picking names out of my head that

(59:21):
I don't know how I'm doing it. Uh, And and
they were, and he was he had really done a
lot for the group. But Lionel came to me and
said he and his wife at the time, Brenda, and said,
you know, we want to we want Lina wants to
go solo and he wants to do this. And I said, look,
I'm not gonna. I've never stolen an act from another manager,

(59:45):
you know, so you gotta if you leave Benny, come
to me when you're free, which he did very quickly,
and he always felt very bad about it because Benny
probably in another year or maybe less, Benny died yeah. So,
and Lionel took that hard of it. I mean, you
think these were the tracks were really hot because he
had all night long. Yeah, yeah, he had. He had

(01:00:09):
so many hits in in a period of time. But
remember Kenny was having hits then two Kenny's got like
fifty number one records. Lionel was having one hit after another.
Lena was taking more time. Kenny would get a record.
Kenny could record a record in Nashville, and he could
do it in three days, okay, three days, you know.

(01:00:29):
Lino would take a year and a half, you know,
and the record company would be calling for the last
six months, calling me every day, is it ready yet?
Is it ready yet? They were trying to schedule it
as it ready in line, it will be going I
need one more song, I need one I've got to
tweak this or whatever. So that the style was so different,
you know. Okay. The question, of course is would they

(01:00:50):
have been as successful if they had not been with you. Well,
that's a trick question. I'll tell you why, because if
I didn't believe that was true, wouldn't be any good
at what I do or what I did. I don't
do that much anymore now, but I believed that was
the best manager in the business, not the only good
one and not but I and not doing it the

(01:01:13):
same way others did you know if he went to
Peter Asher who ended up managing Linda Runstad and James
Taylor and others. You know, he was a record producer,
He's been an act He've been part of Peter and Gordon,
isn't yeah, um, you know, but he was a wonderful
record producer and would produce incredible music with him. What

(01:01:34):
he did in the rest of the areas, I'm not
sure because I never followed that part of it, but
he had great success with his act. Um. You know,
Sandy Gallen and and Jim Morey and some of the
other managers in the business that were successful worked different ways.
They were they were tougher, They were probably better negotiators
than me. I always felt my strength was twofold one

(01:01:59):
picking the right artist, some gut feel for who has talent?
Where is that X factor? Where what's totally different about
this person in some way? It doesn't have to be everything.
In fact, a lot of things may not. It may
not be good to be different in every way, but
what's unusual what's special, what's the wow factor, what's why? Why?

(01:02:20):
You know? Where's the I could feel the charisma of
certain artists when they walk in the room. They didn't
have to do anything. Give me a couple of examples. Um,
that's interesting, that's a good, good question. I'd have to
think about it for a minute. Um, you know, I mean,
certainly Lionel had it and Kenny had it. Um, great, great,

(01:02:43):
Kenny illustration Slightly different than that answer. I felt what
Kenny Rogers could do was like what Michael Jordan did
on the basketball court. If the chips were down, if
if he had to hit the shot to win the game,
he would take his game up and hit the shot.

(01:03:03):
I found Kenny every time there was a challenge there,
he dialed it up. Yeah. I know, this is like
sports starters. You can hang with him every day and
he could be better than them. But when competition comes
there just there's one thing, you know, they just and
a part of it is they don't want to fail.
Part of it is they're absolutely determined not to be embarrassed,

(01:03:25):
not to fail. I listened. I gave a fiftieth birthday
party for Kenny Rogers at the Mountain Gate, which the
golf course here in l a And and I live
across the street from it. But I gave a party
there as a surprise for Kenny. And he was out
on the golf of course, playing in a foursome that day.

(01:03:46):
He didn't know there was any party coming. And flew
Dolly Parton in flew his original jazz group, the Bobby
Doyle Tree in trio in. We had all things scheduled,
and Kenny's playing the course and I got the fifty
people are so attending to hide behind trees and rocks
around the ninth hole. And what I had told him

(01:04:08):
was when he find when he hits the final punt,
you jump out, yell surprise, happy birthday or whatever. Well
he's off the green, and somehow or other, the minute
they see him, they all jump out from behind the rocks,
and you know, and they and they yell surprise, and
he's he's, you know, twenty ft off the green. He

(01:04:30):
chips to nine feet and he sinks the putt. I
went to I said, all you need is a little pressure.
All you need, I said, you could go on the
pro tour. You know, I mean, he he was He
was a good golfer, but he wasn't that level or
you're gonna do that with a hundred and fifty people
standing around at yelling surprise. But but that was typical

(01:04:51):
of me, of that Michael Jordan's quality that you see,
or the Kobe Bryant quality, that competitiveness. Uh uh So. Anyway,
what I started to say is I have some kind
of a gut feel for who has that extra dimension
and it's got to excite me. It's got to be
something that I feel like, oh boy, there really is

(01:05:14):
something cool happening here, even if it isn't my genre
music I would listen to normally, If it's quality, if
it's different, if it's unique, then that's that's the biggest
that's the number one. Number two. I think I take
everything I'm working on and try and take it up
to another level, almost like what I'm talking about with

(01:05:35):
the artist. I always try to find the piece of it,
what how can we make this something bigger than it
might otherwise be? So and I feel extremely creative. I
think my strengths are creative vision of stuff. How do
you how do you take stuff? Whatever I'm working on,
I mean, whether it was you know, the great charity

(01:05:57):
projects have done that are very historical. It's always finding
that way to have a wow factor, to have something
that takes it to another level. And those are those
are my areas of strength. I'm not the strongest negotiator
in the world. I negotiate differently than some of the
tougher guys I know in the business. I still get
it good stuff, but I start with acts that can

(01:06:20):
demand that that that are going to get that anyway. Okay,
but didn't you you develop some of these acts like
Travis Tritt and Trishanyrwood from the beginning the same way,
same way, figure out, you know, bottom line, figure out
what's needed at that moment in time for that day,
even what what's the most important thing you can accomplish

(01:06:41):
today and go after that and make it happen, and
um so on each of those acts. I mean Travis Tritt,
when I first saw him, it was because of Warner
Brothers promotion. Guy called me and said, you've got to
come to Atlanta and see this act. And he just
and and I trust did him enough that I really

(01:07:01):
had to go do it. And he blew my mind
in his live performance. And Jim Ed Norman, who was
running the Warner Brothers in Nashville, was there, and he
Travis had a singles deal, and uh. And I turned
to Jim in and I said, Jim had um, he's
not going to record anymore for you unless he has

(01:07:24):
an album deal. You've got to agree to put make
turn this into an album deal, which he did. But
I looked at Travis Tritt and I went, this is
a great live performer, this guy. This is a guy
who's sensational on stage. So the first thing I went
did is I went out and bought an old I
think it was Randy Travis or somebody's tour concession bus,

(01:07:48):
so he had a bus so he could tour. Because
we couldn't afford to fly him from day to day.
We just started taking him everywhere across the country, playing
in clubs and anything else, but creating excitement because in
every city he went into, it wasn't so the important
thing wasn't so much the audience. We didn't need to
get an audience to react, but it was the record

(01:08:09):
people that we brought in, the DJs and the program
directors and song in every city so that we created
excitement out there. Because he could do that in person, phenomenal,
great songs, terrific songwriter, and he might have hit even
if he didn't to her, but touring was his biggest strength.
And what about Tricia Herewood. It's interesting Tricia Herewood. Again,

(01:08:35):
by the way, in those days, I rarely, if ever,
I ran after an act. I mean I didn't, and
I certainly didn't after Tricia. Somebody brought me Tricia, maybe
the record company, and it might have been um the
president record company. I think it was an m C
A um uh and I but I wasn't sure she
was going to take me as a manager. And she

(01:08:55):
flew out here to meet with the people out here,
and we were walking up to the off this and
I turned to her and I said, am I going
in as your friend or your manager? And she said,
you're my manager? Right there? It was that was the question,
you know. And and then that's the funny part of

(01:09:15):
this was that night we went to Spago here you
know when it was used to be yeah, was my
office was the next block. And uh so we we
go to Spago and we're sitting there just she and
me at a table, and a little lady comes up
and with a pad and a pin and a pencil,
and Tricia and I were both thinking, she's coming to

(01:09:36):
get Tricia. Tricia had number one record, She's in love
with a boy. The lady says Mr Craig, and Mr Craig,
and will you sign one thing? So I'm thinking on
my feet fast. And when she leaves, I turned to
Creatricia and I said, Tricia, you realize our job now
is to see that you're big enough that that never happened, okay.

(01:09:58):
And I just had a leisure with one of my
tricks in those days I learned from Jerry wein trump Um.
It was a guy named Joe Layton who was the
most brilliant stage or. He'd come from Broadway and won
the Tony a few times, and he was staging people
like Bet Midler and Share and people like that, and
he was brilliant at staging. And I had gotten him

(01:10:20):
to stage line Ritchie and then Kenny and Dolly went
they went on to her and others. And he always
did amazing things. He did Diana Russ's tours, did everything,
and he was incredibly good at surprising the audience. He
would create amazing stuff the way he did it. And
and so I brought him in to do Tricia Herwood,

(01:10:42):
and she had been very stiff on stage and hard
to move around and everything, and she just blossomed. She
had an inner they all did, really but that wasn't
her thing. And he gave her confidence on stage and
gave her a show that she could do really well
and it and it helped to move things along in

(01:11:04):
a wonderful way. And then you have to know, when
I was managing triciaan Travis's is the end of the
eighties beginning of the nineties, I was so established, you know.
I could pick up I remember Regis and Cathy. They
had that Gelman as their producer and they used to
refer to them all. I can't remember his first name now, anyway,

(01:11:25):
I could pick up the phone, call him and say
I've just signed this act Travis Tritt, and he'd say,
send him back, We'll put him on. Because they knew
the quality of the artists I represented, and they wanted
they needed me when they wanted Kenny Rodgers or Line
or my other superstars. So I had leverage and I

(01:11:48):
had credibility, you know, and those things worked. So how
about Gallagher tell me the story of God? You love
this so I go to a TV show I don't
remember which one, but with Bill Medley. Bill's performing and
this comedian is on the show and he blows again.

(01:12:09):
I'm just seeing star power. There's something so unique, so special.
So you know, he's prior to any of these prop comics,
and he's got props and he's smashing watermelons and he's
doing all kind of crazy though, And so I give
him my card. He didn't even want to take my car.
Now I don't need a manager, so I start inviting

(01:12:30):
him to things we're doing. Like I would stage a
big baseball game, softball game up in Vegas with Kenny
Rodgers and doing it playing the local media with a
team he and his band and stuff. And Kenny was
a really first class softball pitcher, so he could really
pitch underhand, fast and good. And we would do that

(01:12:51):
all the time. So if id gallery to fly up
with us and be part of all of a sudden,
he's running after me for management and so and I
put him on. So I I put him on tour
with Kenny. Actually I think I signed him first. And
and I went to a luncheon, my wife and I
went and we sat at lunch with Gallagher, and he
trashed everything in the business, trashed everybody, He trashed everything.

(01:13:14):
He he was on stage or sitting. This was sitting
at lunch prior prior to putting him on tour with
I think too great Gallagher stories. So he's he's sitting there,
we're sitting at lunch and he's telling us what's wrong
with everything, and we get up and we leave, and
my wife on the in the parking lot, I remember
distinctly as we're walking out, and says, you're not gonna

(01:13:37):
sign him. I mean, there's no way you're going to
sign that guy. I mean, that was so negative. I
can't believe it, I said, Cathy, I can't promise you that.
I said, I'm like a moth to the flame. When
I see that level of star quality, when I see
that level of unique talent, it is just so hard
for me to stay away from it, even though I
know it's going to be a lot of a a hassle,

(01:14:01):
you know, and it was a lot of work in
a hassle. But he was brilliant. But this is the
too really funny Gallagher story. One kind of tragic and
not exactly but we um I booked him with Kenny
Rogers first show. And it's in Aptis, California, little town
up near below Sant Jose and everything. And uh, it's

(01:14:26):
a concert in a concert hall and he's up on
stage and he used to break a watermelon and it
would splatter out, and there's a guy sitting in the
center of the front row in a white soup. Now understand,
nobody has seen Later on with Gallagher audiences, people would
come with plastic and umbrellas and everything. You try to

(01:14:47):
trick them, but they become prepared to get squirted and
covered with stuff. This guy, nobody's seen him, right, he
smashes the watermelon and it goes right onto the guy
in the white suit. And I mean, and Kenny's this,
it's my act, Kenny headlining, right, I'm We're all panicked.

(01:15:09):
We run out there, we go up to the guy.
We're saying, listen, sorry, we'll get it cleaned, or we
probably can't clean it, we'll buy you. Ah No, that
was the funniest act I ever saw. You don't have
to do it. Wow, I couldn't believe it. We didn't
have to do anything. We didn't even take his name. Um,
but the other one was kind of crazy. I got.

(01:15:32):
I got a lot of good things for Gallery. I
sold a series of specials to Showtime I think it was,
and stuff that were great shows that he did. Anyway,
I get Gallagher a deal to do it. Well, I
want to get Gallagher a TV show, and so I
get Bud Grant, who's the president of CBS at the

(01:15:53):
time and the head of one of the studios to
fly up to Las Vegas where Caliger's opening for one
of my acts. It may have been apartment, may have
been Kenny, but it also may have been Olivia. Any event,
I am checking in staying overnight, but the Kenny's playing
which we used, is flying them back that night after

(01:16:16):
the show, So it must have been Kenny. Uh, because
Olivia didn't go in private jet um and and they
go in the bar, and who do they come upon
but Gallagher, and he does just what he did to
me my wife at that luncheon. He now trashes the
whole industry. And then he leaves and I come back

(01:16:38):
down and the guys are sitting there and they say,
we're going back to l A And I said, why
is it? We just had this encounter with Gallagher we
don't see any point in doing anything here. He hates
everything in the business, you know. And and but they
didn't leave. I convinced him to stay. They stay, They
see the show, they stand up after the show, they

(01:16:58):
give me a thumbs ups, and we make a deal
to do a series. And we get a guy named Maddie.
I can't remember his name, but he was National Lampoon
right ahead of it. Maddie. It's an s. Maddie Simmons,
Mattie Simmons. So Maddie comes up with they come up
with this great idea, and it's it's called our Man

(01:17:21):
in the House, and it's it's a little a little
county in Idaho. The congressman dies and the governor of
the state has to appoint a new congressman. And there
are only eight possibilities in this part of the state. Uh,
And there are reasons for eliminating seven of the eight.
And the one that's left is Gallagher. And Gallagher used

(01:17:44):
to go around on roller skates all over the place
on his stage show and everything. So the idea was
you you go to the parking area at the Capitol
building and you'd see car after car with license later
and then all of a sudden, you have a parking
spade and they'll be two roller skates in it. And
so Gallagher says, look, I want to go back and

(01:18:05):
research this. CBS loves the idea. That's great, you know,
called our man in the house, and he goes back
and I introduced him to friends of mine in Washington.
Patrick Lay's a friend of mine. He hangs out in
these congressional offices and meantime we set up a meeting
out here with the network. When he gets back, he
comes right back from there. He comes over to CBS.

(01:18:27):
I'm sitting with the head of the Bud Grant Head
and Matty Simmons in the office when Gallagher walks in.
He walks into the office, he says, I just spent
two weeks in Washington. I would need two years before
I'd be steeped enough and what's going on there to
be able to do this show any justice? And he

(01:18:48):
turns around and walks out. It's the end of the series.
We had a serious deal. Okay. Now it's something I remember.
You would turn on you talk about those cable special
It seemed like whenever you went on the dial, Gallagher
was on. He was on more than anybody. Oh God,
they were so good. I mean, that's what this guy
had and still has. I saw him maybe two years

(01:19:11):
ago now, but he was funny as I'll get my
wife and I still quote all kinds of lines from Gallagher.
It's just brilliant. Just okay. So why did it end
with you and Gallagher? You know, I don't really recall
the ending of that usually I can, but it certainly
wasn't bitter or anything like that. It wasn't I In
most cases I stayed friendly with I mean, I went

(01:19:33):
to with the people, you know, you know part of it.
You asked me, are you you know? Were they successful
because of you? My attitude, which served me so well
during that period, was they need me more than I
need them. If they leave me, I have more free time.
I don't have whatever hassles I was having with them. Uh, somebody,

(01:19:54):
something better is going to come along. No matter what
it was, even when Lionel Richie I part, I would
have so much self confidence and hopefully it wasn't arrogance
or or you know or whatever, but so much feeling
that that was that it was a good thing. I
think it's part of I have a general philosophy that
everything in life happens for a good reason, and that uh,

(01:20:18):
everything that happens, even the negatives, can be turned into
very positive, even some of the most serious I look
at I teach this sort of I look at mothers
against drunk driving. They their kids were killed by drunk drivers,
formed an organization save millions of live That's one of
the worst things you can possibly happen. Not that it
was there wasn't. There was good in it because they

(01:20:41):
found that they wouldn't let their kids die in vain.
You know, I can give you fifteen different examples like that.
Um So, I think that when an artist leaves me,
I just figure and now I don't have to worry
about that. I don't manage anymore. But I always feel
like there's a good reason for everything the way it happens,
and when you look for that, most of the time

(01:21:04):
that's what you find. You know, it changes your approach too,
not feeling defeated, but feeling like, oh, this is just
part of life and something better is coming along. Okay,
Just staying in that philosophy, you have a very active
entrepreneurial personality. If someone didn't have that, maybe nothing would

(01:21:25):
come along. Well, that's true. I do get out when
I get excited about something, I work on it. Okay,
So how did inn You know a number of these
artists that work with you, they and something like Gallagher
Travis Tritt, subsequent to work with you, their careers are
nowhere near and successful. Yeah, that's I was kind of
proud of that for a while. I was. I would
always say, gee, you know, nobody's ever left me and

(01:21:47):
been hot or after they left me. Now I will say,
and I'm friendly with him still. I just saw him recently, Uh,
Lionel Ritchie. It's pretty hot again. He's got a lot
going for him. And we've seen him three times in
the last couple of years, most recently just a few
weeks ago in UH concert in Santa Barbara and I
love it because we were the only ones backstage because

(01:22:08):
he was late getting there, which wasn't unusual, and he
had to really rush on stage, so they positioned us
right where he got out of the elevator and went
through the stage store to go on stage. And he
comes on. He hugs my wife, he said, I gotta
hug the women. First meets our cousins who were there,
and and then he looks at me, and there's a
whole group of people around, the musicians and everybody, and

(01:22:30):
he goes, that's the man who made me famous? Is
that boy that made me high? Like puffed up? I
felt so good, that was so wonderful. But he's a one.
He's a charming, wonderful, wonderful. So why maybe he's hotter
now he's got great management. Now he's got a guy
named Bruce Escovitz who's just fabulous and Escowitz and uh

(01:22:51):
um okay, But why did he leave? Why did Travis
Trent leave? It's always different reasons. There is one underlying
reason that quite often happens. I've said, you work your
way out out of management job or you know, one
of two ways. One you're terrible at what you do,
or you you fail somehow and they leave you because

(01:23:12):
you didn't do the job that you hope to do.
You might have might have tried hard. I haven't had
that happen hardly ever, but it has happened. The other one,
which has more often been my case, is they get
very successful and they look at what they're paying you.
And I mean I had an artist come to me

(01:23:32):
one time it had made five million dollars that year,
and she had netted one point five and she paid
mecent commission. So I made seven fifty dollars, but that
was my gross. Her gross was five million she netted,

(01:23:56):
or or of what she what she made. I went
back when she said, she said to me, you're making
more almost as much money as I am. Uh you know,
And I said, wait a second. Years is after everything,
including taxes, what you needed. Let me tell you what
I needed. And I went back and I looked at it,
and it was seventy five dollars. Ten percent of what

(01:24:18):
I got didn't fly because she looked at the seven
fifty and went, I don't have to. I mean I
could save all that, you know, and did for a while.
I think she had other advantages in ways she could
get advice. But but I have said that you can,

(01:24:40):
at least in my case, I have more often found myself.
I mean I managed this mother's brothers three separate times,
three different times, and each time when we got really
successful and things were really going good, Tommy fired me.
So you know, it's the you kind of you reach

(01:25:00):
a point that they think you know artists ego. It
becomes very hard to think that somebody else is responsible
for even part of your success, if not a good
part of it. I always felt Kenny Rogers and I
were fifty fifty, that he brought the talent, which was
half the equation, and I brought the creative and you know,

(01:25:24):
business expertise and career management and career promotion and all
that expertise that was the other half of the equation.
I didn't get paid, but I always looked at it
as a partnership. We did. We did share a partnership
on some of the Gambler movies which I developed for him,
UM and some other of his movies of the week.

(01:25:45):
But but I always felt that my my arrangement with
an artist was that I was we were partners. We
were doing this as partners. Looked at it that way.
We didn't get paid that way, but that was more
because of the traditions. Kay, did you have written contracts
or not? Once? But what about if an act left you?

(01:26:06):
They left me? They left me. Now, I think there
have been times when having a written contract might have
been some value, but there are also ways for artists
to get out of written contracts. There is, unfortunately, um Ah,
there's been a lot of there have been artists who
have fought when I'm at because when you're a manager,

(01:26:28):
you almost always have to do something uh to uh
to book the artist, which in California gets you in trouble.
And you can know the famous Jefferson airplane case whatever,
And it's still going on. There's still the talent agency. Uh.
The talent act has been fought a lot by managers,
but not successfully. Okay, so but let's just say you

(01:26:51):
had an act who left and they had a very
hot record. You know, in a written contract you have
sunset classes in this particular case, how much would you
you know, try to commission what was coming in the
future are supposed to walking away that day. I would
never worry too much. I was never money driven, um
you know, I would never not only because I was

(01:27:13):
making good money, but more importantly, it wasn't what motivated
me and and so as a result, I didn't care
that much. I wanted to get on with my life
um and and the things I was doing. I did
care about fairness, but the accident in general that I
managed uh were such that they lived up to whatever

(01:27:37):
would be fair in the situation. If we currently had
something that was payment, but I didn't get I didn't
get long term residuals on stuff that's still selling to
this day. You know, I mean I could have easily
gone after that, but I never wanted to be about
the money and I and uh, you know, I mean, listen,

(01:27:59):
I any Rogers thirty three years without a contract. You know,
there's something about a contract that or but not having
a contract that says, look, if you go, you go,
it's your problem. Now that thirty three years he had
fired you once in the end, No, Lionel did not Kenny,
and then Kenny Kenny fired me in the end. That

(01:28:23):
primarily happened because of a three way partnership. We got
into a three way deal which never really really happens properly,
and and I always felt I was a bit betrayed
by the other partner. Okay, So who have you worked
with who has had this charisma? Who didn't hit? I

(01:28:45):
worked with a teen group group called Three of Hearts,
who were gorgeous, but they were in the wrong music field.
They were they would have been a pop hit, and
they had records that should have been released. Bob, and
we've begged the record company to do it. Uh but
and the other problem was they were seventeen years old.

(01:29:07):
Listen I went. I went on a bus tour with
three seventeen year olds and a and a mom as
a chaperone, sleeping in bunks on a bus all summer,
introducing them to radio and doing shows all over the country.
And they were terrific. They were wonderful singers, they were gorgeous,
they were charming, they were totally different each one, and

(01:29:31):
and we everything in that first year that you could
make happen happened. Everything imaginable, but we had we were
in the right we weren't in the right genre. And
as much as we tried the record company to release
some pop, they didn't do it. And the part of
the reason was it was our c A and they
had a pop similar pop group breaking at the same time,

(01:29:54):
and they didn't want two of them, and we just didn't.
And that was the biggest season. But the group broke
up after after a whole year of great stuff happening.
The group went three separate ways, and none of them,
as far as I know, are still in music as
you know, or doing much in it. Okay, how do
acts feel when you're this white hot. How do they

(01:30:15):
feel that you're spending time with the other acts? Well, first,
I tried to limit my personal clients to three because
when you get above three, I found you can't proportion
your time properly. Three you can kind of balance. I've
had moments when they didn't balance, but generally you can't.
I mean, I once went to Uh, Tricia was going

(01:30:37):
to do a big commercial for Revlon in New York,
and I felt I needed to be there when they
filmed it. Travis Tritt was doing a video in uh
in Georgia. Uh yeah, I think, I think probably near
his home there in Marietta. And it was the same day,

(01:30:58):
and I got on a plane in for New York
and landed in New York and got two calls, one
from Georgia where Travis had walked off the set because uh,
they had um the director had called him in at
six thirty in the morning and it was four thirty
in the afternoon. They hadn't used him yet, but I

(01:31:19):
hadn't gone there because he'd worked with that director a
lot in the past. But he just got fed up
with sitting around the whole day and he left. So
they were now calling me panicked, And I get a
call from Tricia and I'm on my way to the
stage where she was doing stuff, and that he wants
her to do something that's real sexy and she doesn't

(01:31:39):
want to do it. As the director, she had big
time director that she hadn't worked with before, so I
went to that. But I'm I'm like torn. It's one
of the few times I can remember where I should
have been in one place and it should have been
in the other at the same moment in time. Usually
when I kept it to three, I could. I could

(01:32:03):
cover for three. They weren't all getting hot at the
same moment or time or whatever. It might compromise three,
even three might compromise my personal life some you know,
I found conflicts when I couldn't do things because I
remember on Valentine's Day when my wife always went to
a restaurant that was a terrific restaurant in l A. Chasen's,

(01:32:23):
if you may. Of course, we used to have a table,
permanent table for Valentine had to be in New York
because Tricia was appearing in Central Park, you know. But okay,
so with the it was called Craigetting Company, at its peak,
how many acts? How many people working there at its
absolute peak, which was a mistake, by the way, fifty

(01:32:45):
people working twelve acts. Three managers I had, Kenny Lionel
and one other whoever it was at that moment. It
changed over time. Um. And it's really interesting because another

(01:33:05):
manager called me when I started to get big, and
he said, Ken, I'm gonna give you a piece of advice.
You're not going to take it, but you're going to
get big and you're gonna regret it. He said, because
society kind of makes you want to grow and be
bigger and everything. But in our business, smaller is better.

(01:33:26):
And once you add people, it's so hard to get
rid of them. Everybody is dependent on an assistant. Everybody's
been And you know, he was so right. And what
happened and what drove me finally to cut it down
was another manager in my company, Gary Boorman, who went
on to be very successful with a lot of big acts. Uh.

(01:33:48):
And another one of my employees decided to leave even
though I just spent a year negotiating a phenomenal deal
for them. Unbelievable. They could never I was covering the
overhead and they were going to get any five percent
of what they brought in and U. But they decided
to leave and form any any formed. Ultimately, his own
company is very successful these days. Um. But when I

(01:34:12):
added up they took it was five employees. They took
three other people with them major employees, so it was
five of them. I added up. I was two hundred thousand,
and they took five acts. Five employees and five acts
I added up. I was two hundred thousand better off
after they left than I was before. And I went,

(01:34:34):
wait a second, and I started cutting my company down
like crazy. And I eventually, I mean, nowadays, I don't
manage anymore. I do mostly consulting and nonprofit work and
all kinds of very big but I get paid for those.
But I do that, uh and UM, but I looked
at it, and I eventually worked out of my home, okay,

(01:34:56):
with one assistant. Um. Did you learn anything in Harvard
Business School that helped you in your career? More in
my life, because it gave me interest in anything every area.
A couple of things. I mean, I learned something about banking,
at least at the time. It's changed now. But I
learned that the time banking was subjective, not totally objective.

(01:35:20):
It's more so now because corporations have gotten on the
banks and stuff big ones. But in those early days,
in the sixties, seventies, eighties, my relationship direct relationship with
a banker. Man, I could pick up the phone and say, listen,
I've got this artist. They need fifty dollars to buy

(01:35:40):
a bus and go on the road. I mean, I
did that this exact thing for Travis, and they'd say,
all right, here, come in, we'll sign up the papers,
you know, and do it. And I made I learned
that banking relationships. I don't know how I learned that
at Harbor, but I did. Um that banking relationships were

(01:36:02):
there were people that made decisions that affected you and
if you could be if you could get the trust
and the friendship of those people, it could really be
a value. Much harder to do these days, it's a
whole different ballgame. Um. I learned. I learned to be
interested in what anything, every business, and the interesting the

(01:36:24):
most valuable thing about that is the more you learn,
you find angles that support some other part of what
you're doing. You know, um uh, oh, gosh, what's his name?
Jacqueline Hyde and Frank Wildhorn. Frank Wildhorn came to teach
him my class at u C l A, and the
first thing he said to the students was, don't ever

(01:36:47):
quit learning. Don't ever quit being a student. The most
important thing you can do that will support everything you
do in life is is learning constantly. And I read
everything I can every time. I love anything new that
I haven't learned about. Um, you know, I just I'm fascinating.

(01:37:08):
I'd like to live a lot longer than I'm going
to live, just because I want to know everything I
want to know, and particularly I want to know a
lot of stuff about space that hasn't been discovered. I
have quite an interest in astronomy. I built my own observatory,
you know. But I'm fascinated by, uh, by learning. Okay,

(01:37:31):
what are you most proud of in your career? In
my career, probably the United Nations Peace Medal. Tell us
the story of that, well, it's just basically from we
Are the World. We haven't talked about we are as
I say so, tell the story of we are the World.
We are the World started with a well, it started
with Bob Geldof seeing pictures on the BBC in London,

(01:37:53):
of children dying in Africa and deciding you had to
do something about it, and twisting the arms of all.
I mean, he wasn't a big deal at the time,
but he he bugged everybody to the point where they
all agreed to perform, and he put a record together
and it ultimately brought in ten million dollars. Led to
live Aid much later. But while that was going on

(01:38:17):
and making the news, Tom brokaw here insisted that those
same pictures from Africa be shown on NBC here, and
all of a sudden, everybody over here was seeing it,
and Harry Belafoni picked up the phone. Well what Belifani
did first as he went to he thought they should
do a concert here. So he went to a concert

(01:38:39):
promoter named Ron Delsner in New York, and Ron Delsner
said to him, look, Ken Craigan manages some of the
biggest art and Belifani wanted to do it with strictly
with African American artists who had some ties to Africa,
which is a good idea, but not not the one
we ended up with. And I'm glad we didn't just

(01:38:59):
do African American art. But anyway, Delzner said, look, Ken
Craigan's got managing some of the hottest artists in the world. Um,
and he cares about this because he was Harry Chapin's manager,
and he said he he Um, these issues, these hunger

(01:39:20):
and homeless issues and poverty issues are something that he's
been working on with for years with Harry and then
with Kenny Rogers. So I get a call from Belofani
on two days before Christmas or two days before Christmas.
Uh and uh, he says, uh, we should do a concert.
Have you seen these photos? I said, yeah, I've seen

(01:39:42):
him on television. And I said, but why do a concert?
I said, Geldof has just shown us the way. I said,
We've got bigger artists who sell more records here than
what he had there. And not that he didn't have
some very big artists, but we we've got a better
stable in terms of what we can rape. Um, let
me see what I can do. So I hung up

(01:40:04):
with him. I drove to Lionel's house. I was picking
him up for he was going to host the American
Music Awards and I was taking him to a meeting
with Dick Clark to go over some of the details.
It wasn't for another month until the twenty eight January.
On the way on my way to Lionel's house, I

(01:40:25):
called Kenny Rodgers and Kim Carnes and they both said,
you know, they do whatever we wanted. And then I
got to Lionels and he and his wife Brenda had
seen there. They wanted to do something bad, and I
suggested the right with Stevie Wonder, but he couldn't. He
couldn't reach Stevie tried all night. In the meantime, I
took Lionel to meet with Dick Clark, and on the

(01:40:45):
way over to Dick Clark, I got this idea, why
don't we do it the night of the American Music
Awards because the artists would be already be in town.
I'm not gonna have to struggle to get him. Um.
I told Dick that he loved that because it would
help him get artists to come to down. So I'm
I did. Then the next morning, Lionel was still trying

(01:41:07):
to reach Stevie and his wife Brenda at the time.
His wife then then went into a jewelry store to
buy it was the day before Christmas, to buy last
second gifts. Who walks in but Stevie wonder. I probably
had somebody with him who said, that's Brenda Richie, because
Stevie couldn't go around on his own. But I don't

(01:41:30):
know that part of the story. I do know that
he said, would you help me pick out some jewelry gifts?
And she said not until you call my husband back.
And they got Lionel in a dentist chair and Stevie
agreed to write. In the meantime, I'm on the phone
with Quincy Jones. He's on a getting He's in the

(01:41:53):
airport getting on a Warner Brothers plane to fly to
a wife for vacation, for Christmas vacation. And I say,
will you produce this? He says absolutely, And he I said,
can you get Michael to be one of the singers.
He calls me back thirty minutes later. He says, Michael
will do it, but only if he writes a song

(01:42:14):
with Lionel and Stevie, which is all good. I mean.
Bellafoni calls me back after the day after Christmas, says,
if you thought about this at all, what do you
think we ought to do? I said, well, I've got
a song being written by Lama Richie Stevie Wonder, I
thought and didn't work out that way. And Michael Jackson,

(01:42:34):
I've got Quincy Jones producing. I've got Kenny Rogers and
Kim Karnes and Lindsey Bucking and the rest of my
clients willing to perform. He says, uh, oh, okay, Well,
I'm off to Europe. He was going to Europe for
a month. I'll be back. He got back three days
before the recording session. Um. Any event, I very little

(01:42:57):
could get done from there till New Year till after
New Year's But I just sat down starting January two,
every day, get two artists. Go start at the top
of the billboard charts. Get two artists that are up there.
I had already number one and number three, which were Lionel,
and number one was Michael, Number two was Prince, Number

(01:43:18):
three was Lionel. But I just worked my way down
the charts and would get in touch with and call
an artist every uh at least. And I wouldn't go
to bed at night until I had two artists. And
then on the fifteenth of January, UM Bruce Springsteen's manager
John Landau. I had convinced John that he should ask

(01:43:39):
Bruce to come out and do it. He talked Bruce
into it. It didn't take much from what he said,
and uh and uh. I from the moment that Bruce said, yes,
I never made another outgoing call. I just had to
turn people down or okam, you know I already had
quite a bit at that point, but Bruce was that

(01:44:02):
magnet that brings people you know to it. So okay,
so now you have how hard was it to absolutely
actually finalize it, have it done that night at A
and m etcetera. Well, it almost didn't happen. There's a
great Thornton Wilder quote, every great thing balances at all
times on the razor edge of disaster. And I've always

(01:44:24):
found the bigger they are, the more often that's going
to happen. And the night before the actual recording session,
one of the artists managers who quite involved with the artist,
came to me and said, the rockers don't like the song.
They don't want to stand on the stage next to

(01:44:46):
the non rockers because they think it will diminish him somehow.
And so we're leaving. And I said, you know, listen,
if you're gonna leave, you're gonna leave. I can't do
anything about that we're recording tomorrow. Well, they went to
Springsteen and Springsteen said, I came here to feed people

(01:45:07):
and save lives. I'm not going anywhere. And they knew
that if they left and the boss stayed, they're gonna
look pretty sat nobody left, but you know, hey, listen,
it was it was difficult in every way, you know,
to pull it off. But I had a staff of
fifty in those days. I mean, my my head of

(01:45:30):
a of you know, personnel at the company was parking cars.
My assistant was sitting at the get door with a
sign saying check your egos at the door, checking people
in and directing their whoever had come with them to
the There was a sound stage there where they could

(01:45:51):
watch on a big TV screen what was going on
in the studio. But think we couldn't have all the
people that were came with, you know, with everybody was
allowed to bring five people and forty five artists. You know,
you've got I don't know a hundred some people there
fifty people. So so um uh, it was quite in.

(01:46:11):
Geldof came. We flew Geldof over and he came and
he uh uh, he almost spoiled the whole thing because
he he went out, I had put a microphone and
a little stand up if any of the artists wanted
to talk to the crowd that was there. And I
see where you're going, Bob, keeping Bob. So Bob goes

(01:46:32):
up there and we have everything's been donated. Every single
thing for that night has been donated. Couches, pool tables, food, everything.
He gets up on that podium and he says, listen,
there are people dying in Africa, and you people are
sitting here and eating all this food. You should be

(01:46:52):
ashamed of yourselves. And he starts lecturing them on everything,
and I get I'm in the studio and somebody runs
in and gets me. You've got to get out here
and get Bob off this stage. Sure enough, about half
the people left. I mean it was much like you know,
was two in the morning or something like that. We
finished at eight am. But when he spoke, had you
done any recording? We have been recording and people have

(01:47:14):
been seeing it. Oh yeah, so the whole project. Did
it turned out the way you expected? Much bigger, much bigger?
And he twists and turn serendipity that you didn't anticipate. Well, no,
but the greatest thing was I was able to convince everybody,
record distributors, everybody, but we paid. We paid for nothing

(01:47:38):
but the vinyl. So when you bought a record, I
don't know, it was either eight those days for a
you know, thirty three and album, a big album. When
you bought that record, we got all but a dollar
of you know. I talked to There's a big distributor
called Handelman. I talked to them. They said, we lost

(01:48:00):
four hundred thousand dollars distributing that album, but we didn't
care for a good cause. Um, you know. So yeah,
there were all kinds. I mean, look, every every we
had lawyers negotiating deals with record companies so that you know,
the artists. But the good news was we had the
biggest artists in the country all agreeing to be part

(01:48:21):
of this. So nobody put up. Nobody drove us crazy, really,
and Josh, from the first day it came out, it
just went through the roof. I mean, it was just
one of the you know, I would go to Tower
Records here on you know, on Sunset, we're near the
block from my office, and I'd see people walking out

(01:48:42):
with ten and fifteen albums under their arm. It was
one of those things I'm doing in the project and
big project I'm doing now. You you give people something
that they want and yet at the same time they're
doing good so they know that the money they're buying
this records with is going to a good cause. And

(01:49:04):
and but they're getting We put a record album out
with unreleased tracks, you know, we had we had ten
or eleven under his release tracks. Um, and and we
are the world on this album. And so you've got that,
You've got a double album that it wasn't two records,
but you got a double album that you could a

(01:49:25):
gatefold gatefold. Yeah, that's the right, and uh, with all
kinds of photos and everything, and and uh, you know
it was I still have it right behind my desk
in my office. I love it. And so we found
ways to really make it exciting for people. I you know,
it was a pretty heavy time. Things really went amazing

(01:49:48):
for and a lot of people jumped him. MTV vh one,
well yeah, I think h one had started by the yes,
it wasn't. Yeah, Um, they both jumped on HBO. I
sold HBO a special on it, which MTV was also
doing like a three or four days on it. I
had to then convince a MTV that the HBO special

(01:50:12):
would be a promotion for the Michael Michael Fuchs was
the president of HBO. Uh and he wasn't you know,
or one way or maybe it was the other way around.
I think it was Michael Michael had paid two million dollars. Yeah,
he paid two million dollars for the special and MTV

(01:50:34):
had three days of it and he and I said, no,
it's a build up to your special. Okay, this has
been wonderful, Ken. We got your biography, We only touched
on certain parts of your management career. We could go
on for six or eight hours, but we're gonna end
it here today. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
Thank you, it's been my pleasure. Okay, until next time.

(01:50:57):
This is Bob left Sex

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