(Backbeat Books)

www.backbeatbooks.com

BY ROBERT MAY

In the Summer of 1978 I was working for a tiny, Nashville-based independent record label.  We produced no memorable hits, but over a period of a couple of years we managed to release and promote more than a dozen albums, and maybe twice that number of singles.  Keep in mind we're talking at least a decade before under-funded, overworked laborers for love were raised to the elevation of "entrepreneurs," but that seat-of-the-pants operation was the quintessential multiple hats environment.  Just about everybody did just about everything that ever figured into the business model of a pre-Internet music company. 

I made my first big business mistake back then.  I convinced myself - and two close friends - that our learn-by-doing, experiential PhDs had equipped us to turn the whole industry into a board game - a sort of "Monopoly of the Record Business."  The Record Game (ultimately bearing the logo and endorsement of Kenny Rogers) was released less than a year before the introduction of Trivial Pursuit - after which, anything that looked like a board game was assumed to contain decks of cards with color-coded questions.  The Record Game passed into near⁽¹⁾ total obscurity, but my lack of trivial foresight was not the error to which I refer . . . see, The Record Game was destined to die soon enough anyway.

[⁽¹⁾ I say "near" total obscurity because David Geffen bought a few hundred copies for promo gifts; and in an even more flattering development, a few music business schools used the game as an in-class educational tool.]

The thing is, in 1978 the record business was an exciting, envied, strobe and psychedelic, members-only world!  It was filled with larger than life personalities and job descriptions, and everybody associated with it seemed graced with a certain stellar countenance.  One thing was evident to me and my pals . . . from radio DJs to roadies, no matter their age, gender or geography, they were all getting laid! 

Sure, I've evolved along with my industry brethren - that is to say, I can download, I know what a ringtone is, and at least a few times I've disgusted myself by trying to listen to Led Zeppelin through a cell phone - but I'm thinking back to an era of multi-floored record stores, sexually-explicit posters (illegible to anyone over 30 - and somehow even more explicit when viewed under Black Lights), rows and stacks of amps rendering stages a look more daunting than the walls of Gaza and the Rio Grande, and of course, festivals that turned pig farms into tourist stops.  That was the world we sought to reveal with our board game.  It's long gone now, and you don't have to be an old die-throwing role player to feel the pangs of nostalgia.

Well, many of those old nostalgic wounds were recently reopened, and in a good way.  I'd say a curtain of time was pulled back offering me the chance to relive years of memory and emotional connection when I picked up the new book by Larry Harris And Party Every Day - The Inside Story of Casablanca Records (published by Backbeat, the book division of music publisher, Hal Leonard).

Larry Harris was a co-founder (along with his infamous cousin, Neil Bogart, and their mutual and former Buddah Records co-worker, Cecil Holmes) of Casablanca Records - the company that came to symbolize, if not embody, the wildest corporate culture and most innovative marketing in the history of the record industry.  Harris would likely be the first to admit that had he not been Neil Bogart's cousin he would never have become a Hollywood star-maker.  But to the great benefit and enjoyment of us readers, not only was he granted nepotistic access and authority, but Harris possessed a good head for creative business, and an outstanding sixth sense for pop culture trends.

Indeed, while any name-in-neon success tends to bring with it a surfeit of authors, the case can be made that Larry Harris' role at Casablanca may have been the single most pivotal regarding the introduction of two separate trends in pop music, each of which delivered multiple imitations and hundreds of hits.  The theatrical special effects and pyrotechnics of acts like KISS and George Clinton (Parliament Funkadelic), and the exuberantly influential prominence of Disco (a la, Donna Summer, The Village People, Giorgio Moroder) both came to power and subculture status on his watch. 

Harris is a great storyteller and memory revealer - which is exactly what we need for this kind of historical account, and perhaps even these times.  But also, the importance of his being there then is unmistakable despite the modest and unassuming tone of his recollections.  A perfect example is Harris's account of what was to be the first artist-label deal in the long and industry-influencing career of uber-rep, Allen Grubman . . . a meeting for which Harris says he was expecting, "guys dressed in leather, a construction worker, a cop, and some cowboys and Indians."

"The two (producers, Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo) had picked up on Casablanca's maverick approach . . . (remember that the Warner execs had initially hated KISS, telling us that the band should lose the makeup to be more palatable to the music-buying public).  . . . They played us a recording of the Village People. 

"Neil immediately loved it, but he decided to let me put it to the ‘Casablanca test' first.  This consisted of playing a song at such a high volume that everyone in the entire two-story building would hear it.  If people came running to find out what it was, we knew we had something."

While that particular meeting beget one of the most memorable pop culture icons of the ‘70s and ‘80s - guest appearances on everything from "Love Boat" and "Married With Children," to Jerry Lewis's MDA Telethon - not all of Harris's inspirations came to fruition. As Harris explains:

"The problem with having a glut of disco product was that our rock promotion department, which was second in size only to publicity, had little to work with . . . so I went on a tear to get some rock product into the pipeline. 

"Not long after I started this drive . . . our international department brought me an exciting tape . . . I ran into Neil's office and told him I had found the next great group.  He said, ‘Why sign a band for a hundred thousand when we could sign four or five disco acts for that?'  I was disappointed, but there was nothing I could do, and so Casablanca lost out on signing Dire Straits."

Anyone who loved pop music back in those days, and ever wondered how it actually got done - how did artists become stars?  How did radio decide what to play?  Why did one song become a hit and another never get heard? - will wind up thanking Larry Harris for keeping good mental notes through all those years.  And those of us with some compassion for the "davids" in all those giant-fighting, biblically-rooted business analogies can draw vicarious satisfaction from the accounts of flipping off the Goliaths.  Wall Street bankers could still learn lessons on how useless it may be to purchase a creative enterprise expecting ownership to inspire cultural change.  Harris suggests the very briefest of honeymoons followed Casablanca's purchase by PolyGram (at that time, the largest record company in the world and the music holdings entity of the Dutch actuarial and engineering automatons known as "Royal Philips Electronics"):   

"PolyGram had an issue with us from the beginning . . . we hated the stiff culture of the corporate world . . . We didn't like being managed; we didn't like bureaucracy; we liked acting like a bunch of delinquents with an expense account. It was difficult to talk about music and movies with people who had little understanding of our market or our artists. Neil and I grew to have so much disdain for PolyGram that we would show up at board meetings in New York tripping on Quaaludes."

As it turns out, Harris was front and center - from Woodstock and the discovery of KISS, to the founding of Casablanca, Studio 54 and the origin of Disco.  He relates each story with a refreshing humility, often sharing the recall of his own overwhelmed surprise. 

To put it bluntly, Harris's firsthand accounts go way beyond enjoyable and engaging.  Without belaboring the value of his perspective, Harris leaves us with the sense that he was pretty much like any other non-celebrity twenty-something of the day.  And the result is, for anyone who ever sought to associate with fame, or chanced to experience even a moment's elbow-rubbing in such environs, Harris's chronicle immerses us within the awe and aura of having been there with him.  The reader is granted a backstage kind-of Being-John-Malkovich-like access to the endlessly preposterous scenes and events which, ultimately, became the quoin of Casablanca within American popular culture.

Thousands of circa-2010 chat rooms and discussion boards are dedicated to young independent music artists pursuing "discovery" - along with all the fame and fortune it was always purported to deliver.  While I often engage in those conversations myself, I'm convinced that most of my words do not connect.  Of course, I employ today's jargon ("mp3s," "online branding," "platforms," and so on) but I keep thinking back to the days when there really was a record business . . . when artists could actually create a brand.  Those were the days when I read Billboard every week - keeping track of, and envying, the exploits, overindulgences and promotional shenanigans of Larry Harris, albeit usually in the name of KISS or Donna Summer or the Village People, or Casablanca in general.  Indeed, those were the days when the record business was composed of charts and airplay, wildly breakable do's and don'ts, and crazy codes of unwritten etiquette which, though quite different from normal business and society in general, might be interpreted as rules for a board game. 

I don't miss The Record Game, but I miss a great deal about the business and culture that inspired it.  That may sound like a solely personal lament, but if anyone understands why I might feel and express such wistfulness - that is, anyone who might also recall the combination of wonder, belonging and discovery, occasionally infused with the aromas of incense or patchouli, and reverberating from the walls of record stores like Tower, Wherehouse, Record Bar and Peaches, or rock cathedrals like Aaron Russo's Kinetic Playground in Chicago, and of course, Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditoriums (East and West), and so many other place names of the era - then to you I must enthusiastically recommend And Party Every Day!  And to anyone for whom those references have little meaning - anyone who may be confused, let's say, by the image of the 1979 Maxell "blown away guy" ad where a long-haired, tie-wearing freak is sitting, G-forced deep into the cushions of a plush chair facing end-table sized music speakers - then I advise that you get your hands on this book ASAP, and find out some of what you missed. 

And Party Every Day - The Inside Story of Casablanca Records is not just an insider account of a major portion of American Rock ‘n' Roll history - it's a work of cultural anthropology.  Those dreams, those experiences, those trips and those days, may well be gone forever . . . but thanks to Larry Harris we've been blessed with an unabashed look back into our most fantastic and frivolous past.