Latest / The Bob Lefsetz Podcast / Danny Goldberg

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Danny Goldberg · The Bob Lefsetz Podcast

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome to the Bob Left Sets podcast. My
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: guest this week is Danny Goldberg, who's had a career
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: as a record executive, as a manager, as a writer,
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: as a producer. Good to have you here, Danny, So
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: nice to be here, Bob. Okay, you were the billboard
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: correspondent for Woodstock. How did that come together? I got
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: my first job after dropping out of college. Uh, with
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: Billboard because okay, well let's go that that triggers. Okay,
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: so you grow up where? Grew up in Hastings on Hudson,
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: which is Westchester County, right, and I went to a
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: high school called Fieldston, which is actually in the Riverdale
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: section of the Bronx Private School. Yeah, and your father
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: is doing what for a living? Here? Was a textile
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: executive and my mother was a housewife. She didn't make money,
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: but she was a brilliant you know, she's a poet.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: She published a book of poetry and we always looked
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: her is the smartest one. But but my dad was
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: took the train to the city every day and came
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: back and as did you. If you're going to Fieldston,
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: well to Fieldston from Hastings there was a math teacher,
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  Speaker 1: Mr Jason, who would drive me there and then it
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: was a bus back. There was there was not really
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: a train. How long was the bus ride that? Forty minutes? Right?
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: Relatively long for school? Yeah? And you have any siblings.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: I have a younger brother and a younger sister. Yeah,
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: so you're the oldest. All the hopes and dreams are
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: in you, correct. And so what are your brother and
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: sister up to today? My brother works for a company
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: that sells computer systems to companies. I don't know exactly
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: what he does, but it's in that ballpark. And he's
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: got a son named Ben and and two grand daughters. Uh.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: And my sister is an academic. She is a professor
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: at the Paul University in Indiana of conflict resolution. And
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: she's a PhD. So we do have a doctor in
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: the family. Okay. And are your parents political, because I
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: know you're very political. My parents were political. I got
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: my politics from my parents. They were there. They they're
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: in heaven now, but they're not, you know, I don't
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: get to talk to them in the flesh anymore. But
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: there they were, you know, for the civil rights movement.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: They had worked together before I was born. On the
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: thing was before they were married, but when they were
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: gonna get married. On the Henry Wallace campaign in so
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: so he was he for those who don't know he was,
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: he had been Roosevelt's Vice president and Secretary of Agriculture,
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: and he was kind of against the Cold War and
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: was to the left of Harry Truman and and ultimately
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: ran on an extremely unsuccessful third party ticket in forty
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: eight because he felt Truman had kind of sold out
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: some of the New deals. So that's what I grew
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: up with was they weren't communists, but they they they
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: were They hated John McCarthy, and they were they were lefties, liberals, liberals.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: Let's jump all the way to the future as we
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: sit here right now with what happened in the Bronx
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  Speaker 1: with Crowley being uh beaten in the primary by a
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  Speaker 1: twenty eight year old woman. Do you believe the Democrats
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: should run to the center, run to the left. Well,
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  Speaker 1: I think that the short answer, the one word answer,
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  Speaker 1: would be to the left. But I do think these
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: words left and center are kind of um used differently
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  Speaker 1: by different people. But to me, the key to the
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  Speaker 1: Democrats is to turn out the vote and to get
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  Speaker 1: everybody who voted for the third party candidates uh to
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: vote for Democrats this time. To get the people who
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: didn't vote to vote for Democrats this time, I think
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: that's the low hanging fruit. I think changing the mind
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: of a Trump voter is really really hard. And I
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: think getting somebody who voted for the Libertarian or Jill
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: Steiner who didn't think there was any difference, or those
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: ridiculous arguments, I think getting those people to show up
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  Speaker 1: and vote for the Democrats is is an easier lift
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: of the two. Well, that's what Frank Rich says. Frank
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  Speaker 1: Rich said, you know, although it's interesting to study why
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  Speaker 1: these people voted for Trump, that you're not going to
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  Speaker 1: convince him. It's about getting out the vote. Yeah, I
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  Speaker 1: think that's true. I think historically, when there's a high turnout,
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  Speaker 1: Democrats win, and when there's a low turnout, they lose.
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  Speaker 1: And I think clearly we know the math. I mean,
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  Speaker 1: there's not a majority support for Trump, but but if
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  Speaker 1: if a majority the people who show up to vote
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  Speaker 1: support him, then he controls everything. Do you have any
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: fear that we could have candidates that are too far
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  Speaker 1: to the left and we lose the so called center.
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  Speaker 1: I'm much more scared of people who demoralize women, young
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  Speaker 1: people in racial minorities, because that's what happened last time,
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  Speaker 1: and that's what's happened frequently with the Democrats. I haven't
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  Speaker 1: I guess, if you wanted to say McGovern was too
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  Speaker 1: far to the left, that was so long ago, and
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  Speaker 1: it was such a unique set of circumstances, you know,
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  Speaker 1: and you know, almost forty more than forty more than
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: forty years ago. But certainly in terms of in the
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: last several decades, there's no examples of Democrats who are
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: too far to the left. There's a lot of examples
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  Speaker 1: of Democrats who didn't get the turnout, who didn't motivate
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  Speaker 1: young people. These kids who showed up on the Gun March,
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  Speaker 1: the women who showed up on the William Million Women March,
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  Speaker 1: the the African Americans who showed up for Barack Obama,
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  Speaker 1: the Latinos who need to know that there's a compelling
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  Speaker 1: difference between Democrats and Republicans. Getting them to show up
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  Speaker 1: is to me the big task. I haven't seen examples
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  Speaker 1: of Democrats who lost because they were too far to
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  Speaker 1: the left. We have a lot of examples of Democrats
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  Speaker 1: who couldn't get turned out. Well, it's interesting in the
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: last few days, uh, people are accusing of The New
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  Speaker 1: York Times of trying to bring people to the center,
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  Speaker 1: and then there are people to the left like Matt
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  Speaker 1: Taiebi say no, we really have to run on the issues.
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  Speaker 1: You know, a lot of them publicized by Bernie Sanders,
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  Speaker 1: having to do with school debt and healthcare and other opportunities.
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  Speaker 1: And as I say, this is how we lost, if
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: I want to say I am a Democrat, that is
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: how we lost the last time around. Um, I guess
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: when Hillary Clinton said her favorite book was the Bible,
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: I said, it just blew all credibility. Well, I think
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  Speaker 1: when she said I'm going to ask Henry Kissingerer for advice,
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  Speaker 1: and when she said no, I won't tell you what
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: I said to Goldman Sachs that it was it was
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  Speaker 1: not exciting. You know, Look, I voted for Hillary Clinton.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: I contributed money to Hillary Clinton, and I think she
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  Speaker 1: would have been a terrific president. I was for burning
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: in the primaries because I agreed with him on the issues.
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  Speaker 1: But I think the reality is that there's been too
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  Speaker 1: many Democratic leaders that haven't delivered for a lot of people,
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  Speaker 1: and and some of those people, uh didn't vote last time,
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: and some of them voted for third parties. I think
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: five percent of the vote went to the libertarian or
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: to Jill Stein. I think all those people, I don't
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: think any of those people would have voted for Trump.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: Some of them would have voted for for Hillary. Maybe
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  Speaker 1: some of them you just could never get. There's a
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: certain core of nihilist lefties that will never vote for
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: a Democrat. But it's not five percent, that's for sure,
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: And uh, you know that was you know, and then
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: you look at the young people. The percentage of progressive
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: views of people under thirty or fifteen twenty points higher
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  Speaker 1: than the rest of theation. And uh, every every election
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: is more of those people. And you've got to motivate
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: them and show them there's a real difference and that
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: it's worth it and taking it for granted because you
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: just kind of quote something that you know lb J
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: did fifty years ago is not going to do it.
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  Speaker 1: You've got to. So I on that particular argument, I'm
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: I'm more on the mat Ti e. B side, not
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: only because I happen to believe in those issues, because
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  Speaker 1: I don't believe the other thing works. That what the
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: what you're describing the not let's not go too far
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  Speaker 1: to the left platform is what lost for the Democrats,
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  Speaker 1: not only Hillary Clinton, but but successive mid terms and governorships.
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  Speaker 1: And you know, the Democratic Party is the weakest in
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: terms of elective office that it's been in my lifetime
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  Speaker 1: because they keep taking the advice of these so called
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: experts who claim to know what the center thinks, except
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: they keep losing. If they would win, I would salute,
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: you know, but they lost, so obviously their expertise is
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: not what they claim it was. Okay, you're speaking my
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: language before we go back to the beginning here, is
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: there a place for music in this political sphere? And
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: can music move the needle um? You know, it's so
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: hard to know how music affects people relative to to politics.
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  Speaker 1: The historical role of music has mostly been as a
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  Speaker 1: source of encouragement for people. When when you know, John
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: by Ezra Pete Seeger would go and sing for the
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: civil rights workers, or phil Oaks would sing at peace rallies,
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: or Jackson Brown and Bonnie Rate would would sing, you know,
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  Speaker 1: for anti nuclear rallies and things like that. It's not
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  Speaker 1: been to convert people. It's mostly been to kind of
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  Speaker 1: inspire and motivate the troops and to raise money. Um,
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  Speaker 1: you never know what art can do. You know, I
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  Speaker 1: wouldn't look at music as a separate category. I would
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  Speaker 1: just think creativity in general. I mean, certainly, Uncle Tom's
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  Speaker 1: Cabin is believed to have been a big catalyst in
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  Speaker 1: getting white people who had political power to finally be
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  Speaker 1: against slavery. So that's the famous example of a work
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  Speaker 1: of art actually moving the needle. But I think in
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: terms of the general atmosphere of the culture, to the
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: extent that art is makes certain things cool. Uh, you
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  Speaker 1: know it helps. I don't think it's it's it's it's
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  Speaker 1: that big deal. I think the underlying issues matter more
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  Speaker 1: and and the Again, the main role of artist is
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: to support politicians. As much as I love Harry Bellafante,
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: he supported Martin Luther King, he wasn't Martin Luther King,
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: and he would be the first to say that. Okay,
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: So going back to Fieldstom, you were in high school
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: in a very tumultuous era. Were you involved in politics them?
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: I was, to the extent I could be. Um, you know,
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: bunch of us in in um in seventh grade. One
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: of my my best friend in high school was somebody
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: named Joel Goodman, who was still a friend of mine.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: He lives in Santa Monica, not far from where we
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: were doing this podcast, and he um. His uncle was
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: Paul Goodman, who's a famous radical writer of the fifties,
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: great hero of both the gay rights movement and a
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: lot of left wing movements. So he was way more
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: tuned in to sort of left the ideas than I was.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: But my parents, like I was telling you earlier, supported
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: these things. And he had the idea that we should
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: protest air A drills because they represented preparation for war
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: and kind of enabling a war psychology. And so in
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: seventh grade, six of us held signs up mindset, don't
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: prepare for war prevented and refused to participate in an
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: air A drill and we got suspended for a day.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: But then the next year they stopped having air A drills.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: So now this was a private school, but it gave
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: me an unrealistic sense of what protests could do, which
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: I've never completely lost. Okay, so you get kicked out
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: of school for a day for yours. Oh, they were
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: all for it now my parents supported that. My parents
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: didn't like it when I started smoking dope and taking
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: acid that and and dropped out of college. That freaked
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: them out. But the political activity they were completely supportive of.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: And a bunch of us got a bus in sixty
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: five to go to a march on Washington against the
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: war fields and bus and uh. And one of my
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: classmates in in in Um the last three years of
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: high school was gil Scott heron Um. You know, he
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: he got a scholarship there. He had his family had
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: moved up from somewhere in the South. I think it's Virginia,
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: but it might be Tennessee. I it's But he was
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: immediately the most popular kid in school because he was
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: that cool. He was the lone African American. There were
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: a few other African Americans, not a lot, but I
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: think we had out of a class of a hundred,
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: I think there were seven or eight. But he was
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: just so charismatic. He was the center of the basketball team.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: He was the biggest, he was the main he was
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: the wide end on the football team. He was the
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: most talented musically. He had the best sense of humor,
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: and he was an incredible writer. The first day in
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: English class, we've been given this assignment about what did
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: you do over the summer? And mine was the I
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: went to the beach. I rode my bike and brought
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: a copy of Mad magazine, and I had a ice
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: cream Sunday and I rode back. And we're all having
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: these like a sort of four line see Dick run
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: type descriptions, and the okay, Gil yours and he starts
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: reading the wind Blew through marriage Hair. She hadn't slept
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: all night, but she'd had enough coffee that she was,
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: you know, it was literature. And we all looked around, like,
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: who is this guy? You know? And um, so he
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: was you know, he wasn't um. He didn't come with
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: us to the to the march. His mother was pretty
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: strict and but but but he he was. He was
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: a lefty. He was he was a deaf and it lefty.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: How was he your friend in school? He was my friend.
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: He mostly hung out with the jocks, but he liked me.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: It's it's counterintuitor, isn't it. But but these were fields
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: in shocks. This is a mostly Jewish private school. This
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: this was not providing players for the NFL or NBA.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: You know, Um, but he uh, he was. He was
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: a good guy, and he was he was. Everybody loved Gil.
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: He got along with kind of all the different cliques
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: and and and I considered him a friend and he
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: and I saw him in subsequent years at different times
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: in both of our lives. You know, now, any of
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: your contemporaries from Fieldston become notable on the scene. Oh,
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: I don't know. I would say he was by far
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: the most spectacular public figure from our particular class. Okay,
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: So you graduate from Fieldston and you go to college
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: where I got into the University of California at Berkeley
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: because I was an underachiever, as they used to call us,
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: a d D people in those days, do you consider
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: yourself to have a d D? In retrospect? I know
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: what it was about the story. That's the story I
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: tell myself now for being such a mediocre student. Who knows,
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: but I um, but but but I was a good
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: test taker. And Berkeley was one of the schools that
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: only looked at the S A T. S. So the
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: guidance people said, don't even those are the only colleges
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: you should apply to, because if they look at your grades,
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: they're not gonna want you, you know. And I spent
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: an entire week going to classes and that was it.
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: I just was only into drugs at that time, and
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: so I dropped out literally after one week. This is
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: the fall of no. No, this is this is the
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: fall of sixties seven. I graduated from high school in
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: June sixty seven and go I wind up in Berkeley,
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: and okay, sixty seven, Okay, so that is literally just
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: at the end of the summer of law. Just missed
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: the summer of love. Yeah, so by the time I
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: visited Hay to Ashbury, it was it was already kind
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: of ruined by the inflo of junkies and predators. And
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: I mostly stayed in Berkeley, but I did. But I
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: saw it right after the Summer of love. The real
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: summer of love, I think, having just written a book
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: about this, was really sixty six. That was the real
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: idealistic period. Sixty seven was the media summer of love.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: Although many people think sixty eight was the summer of love.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: Who weren't around that today was the summer of assassination.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: Sixty eight was certainly that was when the mains just
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: started to get clued in. But you're in Berkeley, which
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: is a hot bit of radicalization, and could you still
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: feel that even though Mario Savio was before that, etcetera. Well,
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: there was a schism. It wasn't an official schism, but
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: there was the fact of schism among people that were
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: kind of long haired, people that were generally rebellious baby
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: boomer anti war types, between people that were sort of
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: into the seeing political radicalism in the anti war movement
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: as their number one priority, and people who saw getting
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: high as their number one priority. And I was in
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: the latter group. I was in said head who was
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: against the war and proudly against it. I had no
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: ambiguity about it. But I didn't want to sit in meetings.
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: I was never part of STS. I was really mainly
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: into getting high. Okay, So were you into getting high
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: in high school? I was, okay? So why do you
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: you just doubled down when you get to Berkeley? Correct?
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: Because I didn't have parents to come home to anymore. Okay?
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: So you literally stopped going to classes after one week? Correct?
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: And but you're living in the dorm. No, at Berkeley,
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: you did not have to live in the dorm. So
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: Joel Goodman, the Fellow I mentioned you before, also went
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: to Berkeley and we shared an apartment. It was actually
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: in a town called Albany, California, that's just past the
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: border of just slightly north of of Berkeley. So we
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: we had an apartment and we're not in a dorm. Well,
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: so what? And he continue to go to school. He
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: stayed in Berkeley for about another year, and then he
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: later became a film editor. You'll see his name on
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: the credits of many TV series and the movies and
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: so on. He's okay, so you're there. You you stopped
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: going to class for uh after week. You know, you
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: know something is coming the bell that's gonna be wrong.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: Your parents are gonna freak out. So what's going through
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: your head? You know? I this was not the time. Welcome, Welcome,
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bob Left Sets podcast. My guest this
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: week is Danny Goldberg, who's had a career as a
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: record executive, as a manager, as a writer, as a producer.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: Good to have you here, Danny, So nice to be here, Bob. Okay,
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: you were the billboard correspondent for Woodstock. How did that
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: come together? I got my first job after dropping out
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: of college, uh with Billboard because okay, well let's go
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: that that triggers. Okay, So you grow up where? Grew
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: up in Hastings on Hudson, which is Westchester County, right,
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: And I went to a high school called Fieldston, which
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: is actually in the Riverdale section of the Bronx Private School. Yeah,
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: and your father is doing what for a living? Here
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: was a textile executive and my mother as a housewife.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: She didn't make money, but she was a brilliant you know,
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: she's a poet. She published a book of poetry and
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: we always looked at her as the smartest one. Uh
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: but but my dad was took the train to the
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: city every day and came back, and as did you.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: If you're going to Fieldston, Well, to Fieldston from Hastings
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: there was a math teacher, Mr Jason, who would drive
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: me there and then it was a bus back there
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: was there was not really a train. How long was
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: the bus ride that? Forty minutes? Right, relatively long for school. Yeah.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: And you have any siblings. I have a younger brother
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: and a younger sister. Yeah. So you're the oldest. All
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: the hopes and dreams are in you, correct, And so
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: what are your brother and sister up to today. My
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: brother works for a company that sells computer systems to companies.
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: I don't know exactly what he does, but it's in
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: that ballpark. And he's got a son named Ben and
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: and two grand daughters. Uh. And my sister is an academic.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: She is a professor at De Paul University in Indiana
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: of conflict resolution and she's a PhD. So we do
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: have a doctor in the family. Okay. And are your
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: parents political, because I know you're very political. My parents
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: were political. I got my politics from my parents. They
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: were there. They they're in heaven now, but they're not
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: you know, I don't get to talk to them in
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: the flesh anymore. But there they were, you know, for
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: the civil rights movement. They had worked together before I
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: was born on the thing was before they were married,
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: but when they were gonna get married. On the Henry
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: Wallace campaign in so so he was he for those
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: who don't know he was. He had been Roosevelt's vice
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: president and Secretary of Agriculture, and he was kind of
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: against the Cold War and was to the left of
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: Harry Truman and and ultimately ran on an extremely unsuccessful
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: third party ticket in forty eight because he felt Truman
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: had kind of sold out some of the new deals.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: So that's what I grew up with was they weren't communists,
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: but they they they were They hated John McCarthy, and
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: they were they were lefties, liberals, liberals. Let's jump all
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: the way to the future as we sit here right
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: now with what happened in the Bronx with Crowley being
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: UH beaten in the primary by a twenty eight year
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: old woman, do you believe the Democrats should run to
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: the center, run to the left. Well, I think that
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: the short answer, the one word answer, would be to
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: the left. But I do think these words left and
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: center are kind of um used differently by different people.
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: But to me, the key to the Democrats is to
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: turn out the vote and to get everybody who voted
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: for the third party candidates UH to vote for Democrats
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: this time. To get the people who didn't vote to
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: vote for Democrats this time. I think that's the low
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: hanging fruit. I think changing the mind of a Trump
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: voter is really really hard, and I think getting somebody
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: who voted for the libertarian or Jill Steiner who didn't
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: think there was any difference, or those ridiculous arguments. I
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: think getting those people to show up and vote for
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: the Democrats is is an easier lift of the two. Well,
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: that's what Frank Rich says. Frank Rich said, you know,
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: although it's interesting to study why these people voted for Trump,
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: that you're not going to convince him it's about getting
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: out the vote. Yeah, I think that's true. I think historically,
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: when there's a high turnout, Democrats win, and when there's
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: a low turnout, they lose. And I think clearly we
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: know the math. I mean, there's not a majority support
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: for Trump, but but if if a majority the people
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: who show up to vote support him, then he controls everything.
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: Do you have any fear that we could have candidates
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: that are too far to the left and we lose
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: the so called center. I'm much more scared of people
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: who demoralize women, young people in racial minorities, because that's
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: what happened last time, and that's what's happened frequently with
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: the Democrats. I haven't I guess if you wanted to
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: say McGovern was too far to the left, that was
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: so long ago, and it was such a unique set
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: of circumstances, you know, and uh, you know, almost forty
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: more than forty more than forty years ago. But certainly
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: in terms of in the last several decades, there's no
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: examples of Democrats who were too far to the left.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of examples of Democrats who didn't get
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: the turnout, who didn't motivate young people. These kids who
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: showed up on the Gun March, the women who showed
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: up on the William Million Women March, the the African
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: Americans who showed up for Barack Obama, the Latinos who
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: need to know that there's a compelling difference between Democrats
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: and Republicans. Getting them to show up is to me
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: the big task. I haven't seen examples of Democrats who
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: lost because they were too far to the left. We
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: have a lot of examples of Democrats who couldn't get
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: turned out. Well. It's interesting in the last few days,
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: UH people are accusing of the New York Times of
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: trying to bring people to the center, and then there
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: are people to the left like Matt Taiebi say no,
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: we really have to run on the issues. You know,
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: a lot of them publicized by Bernie Sanders, having to
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: do with school debt and healthcare and other opportunity. And
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: as I say, this is how we lost. If I
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: want to say I am a Democrat, that is how
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: we lost the last time around. I guess when Hillary
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: Clinton said her favorite book was the Bible, I said,
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: it just blew all credibility. Well, I think when she
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: said I'm going to ask Henry Kissinger for advice, and
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: when she said no, I won't tell you what I
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: said to Goldman Sachs that it was it was not exciting.
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: You know, look, I voted for Hillary Clinton. I contributed
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: money to Hillary Clinton, and I think she would have
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: been a terrific president. I was for Burning in the
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: primaries because I agreed with him on the issues. But
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: I think the reality is that there's been too many
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: Democratic leaders that haven't delivered for a lot of people.
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: And and some of those people, UH didn't vote last time,
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: and some of them voted for third parties. I think
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: five percent of the vote went to the libertarian or
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: to Jill Stein. I think all those people, I don't
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: think any of those people would have voted for Trump.
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: Some of them would have voted for for Hillary. Maybe
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: some of them you just could never get. There's a
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: certain core of nihilist lefties that will never vote for
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: a Democrat. But it's not five percent, and uh, you
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: know that was you know, and then you look at
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: the young people. The percentage of progressive views of people
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: under thirty or fifteen twenty points higher than the rest
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: of the polation, And uh, every every election is more
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: of those people. And you've got to motivate them and
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: show them there's a real difference and that it's worth
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: it and taking it for granted because you just kind
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: of quote something that you know lb J did fifty
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: years ago is not going to do it. You've got
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: to So I on that particular argument, I'm I'm more
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: on the mat Ti e B side, not only because
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: I happen to believe in those issues, because I don't
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: believe the other thing works that what the what you're
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: describing the not let's not go too far to the
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: left platform is what lost for the Democrats, not only
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: Hillary Clinton, but but successive midterms and governorships. And you know,
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: the Democratic Party is the weakest in terms of a
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: of office that it's been in my lifetime because they
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: keep taking the advice of these so called experts who
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: claim to know what the center thinks, except they keep losing.
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: If they would win, I would salute, you know, but
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: they lost, so obviously their expertise is not what they
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: claim it was. Okay, you're speaking my language before we
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: go back to the beginning here. Is there a place
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: for music in this political sphere? And can music move
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: the needle? Um? You know, it's so hard to know
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: how music affects people relative to to politics. The historical
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: role of music has mostly been as a source of
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: encouragement for people. When when you know, John by Ezra
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: Pete Seeger would go and sing for the civil rights workers,
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: or phil Oaks would sing at peace rallies, or Jackson
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: Brown and Bonnie Rate would would sing, you know, for
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: anti nuclear rallies and things like that. It's not been
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: to convert people. It's mostly been to kind of inspire
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: and motivate the troops and to raise money. Um, you
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: never know what art can do. You know, I wouldn't
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: look at music as a separate category. I would just
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: think creativity in general. I mean, certainly, Uncle Tom's cabin
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: is believed to have been a big catalyst in getting
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: white people who had political power to finally be against slavery.
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: So that's the famous example of a work of art
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: actually moving the needle. But I think in terms of
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: the general atmosphere of the culture, to the extent that
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: art is makes certain things cool. Uh, you know it helps.
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: I don't think it's it's it's it's that big deal.
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: I think the underlying issues matter more. And and there again,
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: the main role of artist is to support politicians. As
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: much as I love Harry Bellafante, he supported Martin Luther King,
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: he wasn't Martin Luther King, and he would be the
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: first to say that. Okay, So going back to Field Stem,
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: you were in high school in a very tumultual was era.
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: Were you involved in politics them? I was to the
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: extent I could be. Um. You know, a bunch of
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: us in in um in seventh grade. One of my
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: my best friend in high school was somebody named Joel Goodman,
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: who was still a friend of mine. He lives in
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: Santa Monica, not far from where we're doing this podcast,
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: and he um His uncle was Paul Goodman, who's a
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: famous radical writer of the fifties, great hero of both
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: the gay rights movement and a lot of left wing movements.
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: So he was way more tuned in to sort of
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: left the ideas than I was. But my parents, like
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: I was telling you earlier, supported these things. And he
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: had the idea that we should protest air A drills
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: because they represented preparation for war and kind of enabling
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: a war psychology. And so in seventh grade, six of
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: us held signs up mindset, don't prepare for war, prevented
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: and refused to participate in an air A drill, and
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: we got suspended for a day. But then the next
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: year they stopped having air aid drill. So now this
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: was a private school, but it gave me an unrealistic
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: sense of what protests could do, which I've never completely lost. Okay,
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: so you get kicked out of school for a day
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: for your say, Oh, they were all for it. Now,
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: my parents supported that. My parents didn't like it when
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: I started smoking dope and taking acid that and and
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: dropped out of college. That freaked them out. But the
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: political activity they were completely supportive of. And a bunch
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: of us got a bus in sixty five to go
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: to a march on Washington against the war fields and
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: bus and uh and one of my classmates in in
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: in Um. The last three years of High school was
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: Gil Scott heron Um. You know, he he got a
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: scholarship there. He had his family had moved up from
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: somewhere in the South. I think it's Virginia, but it
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: might be Tennessee. I it's but he was immediately the
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: most popular kid in school because he was that cool.
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: He was the lone African American. There were a few
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: other African Americans, not a lot, but I think we
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: had of a class of a hundred, I think there
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: were seven or eight. But he was just so charismatic.
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: He was the center of the basketball team. He was
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: the biggest, he was the main he was the wide
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: end on the football team. He was the most talented musically.
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: He had the best sense of humor, and he was
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: an incredible writer. The first day in English class, we've
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: been given this assignment about what did you do over
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: the summer? And mine was the I went to the beach.
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: I rode my bike and brought a copy of Mad magazine,
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: and I had a ice cream Sunday and I rode
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: back and we're all having these like a sort of
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: four line see Dick run type descriptions, and the okay,
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: Gil yours and he starts reading the wind blew through
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: Merrit's hair. She hadn't slept all night, but she'd had
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: enough coffee that she was you know, it was literature.
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: And we all looked around, like, who is this guy?
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: You know? And um, so he was, you know, he wasn't. Um,
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: he didn't come with us to the to the march.
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: His mother was pretty strict and but but he was.
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: He was a lefty, he was. He was a definite lefty.
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: Now was he your friend in school? He was my friend.
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: He mostly hung out with the jocks, but he liked me.
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: So it's it's counterintuitor, isn't it. But but these were
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: fields in Shocks. This is a mostly Jewish private school.
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: This this was not providing players for the NFL or NBA.
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: You know. Um, but he uh, he was. He was
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: a good guy and he was he was. Everybody loved Gil.
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: He got along with kind of all the different cliques
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: and and and I considered him a friend and he
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: and I saw him in subsequent years at different times
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: in both of our lives. You know, Now, any of
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: your contemporaries from Fieldston become notable on the scene, Oh,
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: I don't know. I would say he was by far
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: the most spectacular public figure from our particular class. Okay,
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: so you graduate from Fieldson and you go to college
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: where I got it into the University of California at
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: Berkeley because I was an underachiever, as they used to
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: call us, a d D people in those days, do
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: you consider yourself to have a d D? In retrospect?
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: I know what it was? That the story, that's the
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: story I tell myself now for being such a mediocre student.
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: Who knows but I um, but but but I was
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: a good test taker. And Berkeley was one of the
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: schools that only looked at the S A T. S.
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: So the guidance people said, don't even those are the
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: only colleges you should apply to, because if they look
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: at your grades, they're not gonna want you, you know.
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: And I spent an entire week going to classes and
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: that was it. I just was only into drugs at
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: that time, and so I dropped out literally after one week.
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: This is the fall of sixty No, no, this is
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: this is the fall of sixties seven. I graduated from
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: high school in June sixty seven and go I wind
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: up in Berkeley, and okay, sixty seven. Okay, so that
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: is literally just at the end of the summer of law.
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: Just missed the summer of law. Yeah, so by the
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: time I visited Hay to Ashbury, it was it was
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: already kind of ruined by the influx of junkies and predators.
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: And I mostly stayed in Berkeley, but I did. But
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: I saw it right after the Summer of Love. The
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: real summer of love, I think, having just written a
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: book about this, was really sixty six. That was the
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: real idealistic period. Sixty seven was the media summer of love.
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: Although many people think sixty eight was the summer of love.
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: Who weren't around that today was the summer of assassination
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: was certainly that was when the mains just started to
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: get included in. But you're in Berkeley, which is a
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: hot bit of radicalization, and could you still feel that
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: even though Mario Savio was before that, etcetera. Well, there
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: was a schism. It wasn't an official schism, but there
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: was the fact of schism among people that were kind
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: of long haired, people that were generally rebellious baby boomer
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: anti war types, between people that were sort of into
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: the seeing political radicalism in the anti war move as
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: their number one priority, and people who saw getting high
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: as their number one priority. And I was in the
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: latter group. I was an asset head who was against
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: the war and proudly against it. I had no ambiguity
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: about it. But I didn't want to sit in meetings.
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: I was never part of STS. I was really mainly
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: into getting high. Okay, So were you into getting high
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: in high school? I was okay? So why do you
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: You just doubled down when you get to Berkeley? Correct?
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: Because I didn't have parents to come home to anymore. Okay,
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: So you literally stopped going to classes after one week? Correct?
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: And but you're living in the dorm. No, at Berkeley,
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: you did not have to live in the dorm. So
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: Joel Goodman, the fellow I mentioned you before, also went
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: to Berkeley and we shared an apartment. It was actually
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: in a town called Albany, California, that's just passed the
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: border of just slightly north of of Berkeley. So we
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: we had an apartment and we're not in a dorm. Well,
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: so what? And he continue to go to school. He
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: stayed in Berkeley for about another year, and then he
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: later became a film editor. You'll see his name on
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: the credits of many TV series and the movies and
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: so on. He Okay, so you're there. You you stopped
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: going to class for uh after week. You know you
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: know something is coming. There's a bell that's gonna be wrong.
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: Your parents are gonna freak out. So what's going through
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: your head? You know? I this was not the time
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: in my life when I was the most clear thinking.
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: Um what was I was really thinking everything in terms
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: of sort of the next twenty four hours, and I
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: really became a druggie. I'm not particularly proud of it.
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: I think that the psychedelics played a positive role for
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: me at one moment in my life, but thereafter I
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: was just into taking all kinds of drugs, including you know,
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: meth and heroin and everything. And I got arrested in
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: May of sixty eight wandering around asking a cop for
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: directions when I was very, very stoned, and it was
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: obviously subconsciously something I wanted to do. It's scared, you know,
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: I was scared straight, as the expression goes. I spent
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: six days and Alameda County Juvenile All my parents found
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: some laurying got me out. It was before my eighteenth birthday,
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: and the lawyers were not as strict then, and and
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: I I didn't. I don't think I took any drugs
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: or had a glass of wine for a ten or
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: fifteen years after that. Really, you were literally scared. I
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: was like I, I don't understand a lot of things
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: about life, but I never want to put myself in
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: that position again. You know, that was very clear. I
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: got lucky nobody raped me or beat me up. I was,
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: but I never wanted to be in that situation again.
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: How about today? I still don't want to be in jail.
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: But would you imbibe any uh? I don't have a
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: social glass of wine or smoke a joint. You know
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: I'm not. I'm not a twelve step person that many
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: of the people closest to me are. But but in
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: the in the extreme moderation, we'll take a quick break
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: and come back with more of my conversation with Danny Goldberg,
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: recording it at the Tune in studios in Venice, California.
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: I love sitting down with music industry veterans like Danny
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: and traveling back in time and getting their history. I
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: love getting to the heart of a person's story, whether
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: they're perform warmer, a manager, a record label executive, or
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: just someone on the street. Everyone's got a story and
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: I want to hear it. This week, Danny Goldberg tells
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: us all about his roles in the music business. Previously,
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: we talked with artists like Cascade, Moby and Shirley Manson
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: of Garbage. Whether you come from the music conversation or
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: learn more about the business, be the first to hear
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: next week's episode by subscribing to the podcast on tune in,
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: Apple or your podcast host of choice. If you like
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: what you hear, please rate, review, and of course tell
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: your friends they'll dig it to. Okay, let's get back
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: to my conversation with Danny Goldberg. Okay, so when do
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: your parents wake up to the fact you ain't going
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: to school. I think when they got the call from
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: the jail was when they woke up to it. And
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: so how pissed were they? They were devastated. My poor parents.
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: They were such lovely people, and I got very close
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: to them by the time I hit my thirties, but
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: you know, at that time in my life, I just
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: didn't want them in my head. They they were I
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: if I get to be born again and live on
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: a planet like this, and I can pick my parents.
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: I'm fine to have the same parents. They were really interesting,
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: loving people, and I became particularly close to my dad,
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: who outlived my mom and and who was the not
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: the disciplinarian of the two of them, and was the
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: unconditional love guy. But they were just freaked out. I mean,
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: they didn't understand it. They were worried that I'd ruined
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: my life. But you know, within you know, I got
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: a job. I got the job working for Billboard. Remember
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: of that year. Okay, you're in Berkeley, you get out
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: of juvenile hall, you go back to your parents. I
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: have to go back. The condition of my release was
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: that I would not be in California for a year,
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: that i'd get therapy, and and so I'm living in
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: their apartment going to some kind of group therapy that
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: was for people with drug problems. Was that beneficial at all?
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: It was? First of all, I was so surprising to
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: me that other people had problems. I thought I was
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: the only one I had problems. So just that sheer
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: fact of sitting in a group. And what was really
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: amazing to me was that older people had problems, because
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: I thought only people my age had problems. So just
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: in terms of that superficial getting out of my own
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: self centered nous, it was hugely helpful. And there was
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: one therapist there named Ralph Ricky. I think he's passed away,
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: that I still remember that that that that he just
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: helped me feel a little bit better about myself. I
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: only went for Bad five or six months, and then
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: I by the fall, this was June, and by September
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: I got the job at Billboard. How did you get
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: the job at Billboard? And The New York Times really
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: says magazine clerk wanted for magazine. I had no idea
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: what Billboard was. I didn't know there was a music business.
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: I just loved rock and roll as a fan. I
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: didn't know there was a whole business and that it
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: would be a trade magazine about it, or three trade
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: magazines about it. But you know, I figured magazine. I'd
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: written for the high school newspaper. I figured the other
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: job that I could get was key punch operator for
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: Sears Roebuck and writer. You know, magazine just sounded better
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: to me than Sears Roll. Did it say Billboard? Uh?
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: I don't remember, But I didn't know what Billboard was.
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: I didn't really unders thinking of other competition. Other people
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: might want that gig. Well, I don't know, you know,
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: nobody knew what the music business was then later on
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: USA today, the New York Times would print charts and
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: they'd beat you. Developed subsequent generations understood there were things
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: called record companies and managers and agents, and it became
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: part of popular conversation. At that time. Nobody knew anything
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: about this except people that were in the business. So
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: I certainly didn't know what billboard was, and I really
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: didn't understand what it was when I started the first
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: day and I was leafing through it, and they had
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: pictures of like Janis Joplin and people that I liked,
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: in addition to kind of country artists and R and
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: B artists. And the job was in the chart department,
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: where there was no bar codes then. So the way
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: they compiled the charts what they had seven or eight
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: of us called stores three or four three three days
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: a week. We would call the stores and read a
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: checklist of all the singles that were on the list
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: and ask to people who answered the phone or is
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: it selling heavy, medium, light or not at all? And
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: then what's your top ten selling albums, and then I
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: had and then some of us had specialties. Mind was
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: classical music, so I would also have a list of
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: classical stories to call to compile the classical chart. And
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: then we and then then one day we'd spent compiling
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: the now would be called data. And then then then
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: the fifth day we'd answer the phone when people called
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: all day asking where their record was on the charts.
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: So if there are five other people doing this and
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: you're basically a data technician, you're not on the fast
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: road anywhere. Well what happened is they were. I discovered
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: that there was this thing called the music business, and
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: there were people. I discovered two things pretty quickly. Number one,
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: there were people and another side of the office that
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: got to go to concerts for free and got free records,
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: and all they had to do was write their opinions
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: about them. And I had pretty low self esteem, but
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: I knew I could do that. You have plenty of yeah,
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: especially about music, you know, especially about the kind of
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: music that I that I like. So I was immediately,
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: how do I get that job? How do I get
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: that job? But no, no, no, no, there's that you
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: have to be credentialed. And but what what happened is
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: that by nagging enough. It was a small enough office,
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: there were there were certain assignments that none of the
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: staff writers could cover, and so within a few months
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: they would let me as a freelancer do pieces that
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: nobody else none of the states remember. The first one
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: ever was a banned on Atlantic called Mr Flood's Party.
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: I don't even remember that. No, they were a flop.
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: They played at the Steve Poles the Scene and um,
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: I wrote one that I do remember, um about the Rascals.
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: The Rascals played at an outdoor venue in Queens. I
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: think it was called the Pavilion. It was on the
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: side of what had previously been the World's Fair. And um,
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: and I wrote, um, and I love the Rascals. But
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: I knew I'm supposed to be a critic, so I'm
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: supposed to say something critical or I'm not really a critic.
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: So I said, well, feelis cavalerian Eddie Brigotti sound amazing
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: vocalist and the songs are great, And I said and
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: and and Gene Cornish twanged his guitar. Because this was
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: the era of guitar heroes. You have Jimmy Hendrix and
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: Eric Clapton and you know Jeff Beck and you know
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: these amazing guitar players. And he was like, you know
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: the rascals guitar. So on Monday, which was in the magazine,
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: is published The Phone Rings and it's Gene Cornish and
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: he says, um, what do you mean I twanged my guitary?
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: Do you know how long I practiced to learn other players?
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: I have a lot of I said, I didn't mean
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: it as a criticism. I I just, uh, you know,
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: I was so I felt so terrible. I didn't know
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: that these people in bands were human beings that would
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: read or care about anything like this. I was just
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: trying to look like I was a critic, and after
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: that it was very hard for me to criticize musicians,
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: you know. And that's why I ended up being a
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: much better publicist than I was a critic. Okay, So
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: if you're starting to fall of sixty eight, let's go
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: back to the additional question. You end up being the
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: writer for Woodstock, So then then I'm still at Billboard
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: by by August of sixty nine, when when Woodstock happens
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: and none of the writers wanted to cover it because
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: a good assignment for a Billboard writer. These were old
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: guys like thirty five, you know, totally different generation than
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: a nineteen year old, and they they wanted to go
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: to clubs like the Copacabana where you got a free
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: drinks and free dinner. Those were the assignments that were
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: coveted by the staff writers. Nobody wanted to slep up
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: to the country. They didn't care about these artists. They
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: were ten fifteen years older, and so nobody wanted to go.
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: So they somebody said, do you want to go? I
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: said yes, So I went there in a limo with
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: the public The publicist for Woodstock was a woman named
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: Jane Friedman, who is still alive. I think she runs
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: an art gallery in Soho. Now and uh, stop for
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: one second. Are you making enough money at Billboard to
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: live in your own place? You're living with your parents?
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: Oh no, No. The minute I got the job, I
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: got my own apartment. I was sharing it. Initially, I
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: had apartment in Brooklyn. Initially I was sharing with Peter Connoy,
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: who was a fieldstin friend of mine. He was a
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: year older, first guy who's the first guy ever smoked
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: pot with and his father was a great civil liberties
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: and civil rights lawer. He had represented Dr King and
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: Adam Clayton Powell and other other people. But Peter like
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: getting high, you know, and uh and and then after
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: I saved up about a thousand dollars, which was like
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: this huge milestone when of my savings account was four figures,
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: I got an apartment on St. Mark's Place by myself.
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: So I don't remember when Woodstock happened, if I was
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: still in Brooklyn, or if I had moved to sing.
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: So you're going in the limo with Jane Friedman. It
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: was me, Jane Friedman, and there was a writer named Vincelletti.
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: Roll wrote at that time for a magazine called Rat.
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: He later became kind of a village voice writer and
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: particular expertise on R and B and disco. And I'm
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: trying to think if anyone else was in the car.
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: I know it was me, Vinceletti and Jane Free. Okay,
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: So you're going to go in the car to Woodstock,
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: and you're going to stay where in a hotel? They
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: were the publicists for Woodstock. They had a group of
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: rooms for the writers. And so I may get money,
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: did you make it to the hotel, Yeah, definitely. Okay,
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: So do you hit any trap if they if the
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: first day of shows was Friday? Did you go on Friday?
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: Did you go on Thursday? You know? All I remember
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: is that when I finally got to the site of
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: the festival, the band that was playing was Santana. So
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: in my mind it was the first day. But it's
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: a long time ago, and a lot of my memories
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: of Woodstock are commingled with the memories of watching the
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: Woodstock movie. I'm not sure which are my memories in
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: which I'm just remembering seeing in the movie, but I
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: do remember it was Santana and I've never heard of Santana,
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: and I walked up and I asked, these people aren't like,
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: who's that, you know? And it was the town and
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: they're amazing, and it was so that's like one of
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: my They were definitely on because they were so good
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: and they were brand new to me at that time,
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: and so I happen to remember that now. Certainly it's
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: iconic at this point, But in terms of the experience,
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: what did you think, Well, what I felt was, even
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: though I hadn't been taking drugs for more than a
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: year and was really committed to the idea that I'm
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: not that guy anymore. Who's who's going to screw up
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: my life by taking drugs. I still completely identified with
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: the romance of hippie culture. And I was so moved
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: by the audience and the crowd and the and the
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: camaraderie and sweetness of everybody there that that's my main
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: memory more than the music. It was, it was, it was,
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: it was you know, it turned out to be the
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: end of something, not the beginning of something, but it
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: was something in that moment that I was very moved by. So, okay,
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: you pored on that for Billboard and they put on
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: the front page. The only time I ever had a
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: front page story in Billboard. They let me write. Usually
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: I'd have to write like three words. This I think
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: they let me write a couple of thousand words because
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: it was a big turned out to be a big story,
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: and I was the only Billboard guy that was there.
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: And how much long do you stay at Billboard before
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: you become a publicist. Well, I went through a series
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: there was a gap in between Billboard. I went through
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: a series of of of of short term jobs. First
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: of all, I went from Billboard to Record World, which
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: was one of the three because Record World was a
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: competitive Billboard, but a Record World, I didn't have to
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: be in the chart department anymore. I was just hired
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: as a writer. So that was a huge step forward
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: because I was only writing periodically as a freelancer while
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: still having to be in the chart department. A Record World,
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: I had a weekly column called Getting It Together, and
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: and I reviewed shows, and I interviewed people and I
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: wrote story. So that was a full time writing job.
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: And then I got fired from that because I kept
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: coming in eight You know, I hadn't completely mastered this
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: adult thing yet. Uh. It's so funny because now the
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: last thirty or forty years, when I have people who
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: work from you coming late, I really don't like it. Well,
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: what's your definition of late? Uh? You know, if it's
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: more than it depends on the Like our office now,
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: in my little company, we look at ten o'clock as
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: a time. Other companies I had at nine o'clock. But
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: to me, if it's more than twenty minutes, it's late, right,
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: I just meant the time that you would have to
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: arrive so you get can from Record World. So I
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: got caned from Billboard. Then I got Can from Record World.
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: No no, you didn't tell me you got Key No no, no, no, right, right,
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: I went from Billboard to Record right then. Um, there
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: was about a year where I worked for Circus Magazine.
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: I think I had the title of managing editor of that,
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: and that was so sort of a cross between sixteen
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: Magazine and Rolling Stone, right, it was. It was going,
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: That's a good description of it. It was certainly for
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: more for males and girls. You know, it was a
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: little bit older audience than sixteen. And it was a
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: rock magazine. There were no pop, no Bobby Sherman, no
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: David Cassidy. It was it was rock. But the thing
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: that roll that Circus had that Rolling Stone even didn't
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: have at that time was color pictures. Rolling Stone later
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: got colored, but for this brief period, so Circus had
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: shorter articles, but we had some of the Rolling Stone
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: typewriters like Paul Nelson wrote also for Circus, and a
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: lot of the people who wrote for Rolling Stone would
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: also write pieces for Circus. To pick up an extra
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: fifty hundred bucks, you have another outlet or or whatever.
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: And so I did that for about a year and
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: then I got a job working for Albert Grossman's publishing
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: company that I wasn't any good at. But I got
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: to meet Albert Grossman, who was my great hero of mine,
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: who's Bob Dylan's manager, and I've seen him in that
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: movie Don't Look Back. And at least I got to
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: meet him, you know, at that time. And and then
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: finally I was kind of desperate. I wasn't getting writing
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: work anymore because I wasn't really that good a writer.
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: I was just mostly into trying to meet girls and
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: having friends and I wasn't serious about you know, there's
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: this um website called my back Pages, uh that's out
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: of England that compiles rock journalism. So they found a
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: lot of my old articles, including especially the Circus articles,
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: and it's I don't think I ever wrote a second
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: draft of anything. It was all this. So I walked
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: into the room and you know, Alvin Lee was just
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: eating breakfast, and you know, I thought that's what journalism was. UM.
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: So I couldn't I couldn't make it as a writer.
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: And I got a job working for Lee S. Walters,
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: who was the real rand old great show business uh,
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: you know publicist he um one of One of the
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: things that happened that was a big life changing experience
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: for me when I was at Record World was I
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: met a guy named Danny Fields. And Danny Fields I
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: had read about because there had been an article about him.
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: He had worked in Electra in in the in the
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: eight period, where his actual title was company freak, and
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: he then signed the m C five and the Stooges
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: to Electorate. He later was one of the managers of
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: the Ramons. He also, I believe, introduced the Louie to
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: Andy Warhol. I mean, he's a great historical figureing. There's
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: a documentary about him called Danny Says. It came out
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: a few years ago, and he read a piece. The
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: woman named Gloria Stavers, who was the editor of sixteen magazine,
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: UM read everything and took notes, and she read a
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: column that I wrote about the m C five for
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: Record World and sent it to Danny. And Danny called
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: me and said, uh, we should have lunch, you know, great,
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: you know and and and then he took me the
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: next night to Maxis, Kansas City, where I met Gloria.
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: Woman named Lillian Rockson who was the Australian correspondent for
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: the Sydney Morning Herald, who at the Encyclopedia of the
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: Encyclopedia of Rock, and Steve Paul, who was Johnny Winter's
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: manager and runs De Poils, and I met all of
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: them the same night and they became the most important
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: people in my life. For the next several years, I
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: just would go to Max's every night, and it was
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: my social life, was my professional life, and it was
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: my identity and I it just conferred. Being Danny's friend
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: was this instantly legitimacy in a culture that was a
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: million times cooler than anything I'd ever encountered, And overnight
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: I had an identity that I really owe him forever for.
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: But I did find my own way. I mean, after
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: the first night I could go myself. Mickey Ruskin, the
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: guy who ran it, was just kind of if he
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: you know, the big thing with Mickey Ruskin famously is
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: if you came in a limo, he wouldn't let you in.
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: You know, that wasn't what you know, he had like
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: this inverse snobbery. So um so. Gloria became a good
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: friend of mine and she was a mentor. She was
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: such a glamorous person. She passed away. Uh, in her
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: fifties from lung cancer. But she had an extraordinary life.
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: First of all, she she invented a lot of you know,
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: before Rolling Stone sixteen magazine was all there was. And
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: she did some of the earliest interviews with Dylan and
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: the Beatles and Elvis. And she did a thing about
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: Rolling Stone when it first was published that Yan always
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: said helped get them thousands of subscriptions. And and she
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: had been Lenny Bruce's lover for the last several years
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: of his life, which there was just no more awesome
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: credential for me than someone who had known Lenny Bruce
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: not to mention, and slept with him. So I just
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: idolized her and did and and and she and she
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: liked me, you know, so she she she um. When
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: I was desperate for a job, she called Lee Alters
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: and look, you know, if you want somebody to do
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: rock and roll, this would this would this is this
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: is who I would suggest. So Lee interviewed me, because
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: of Glory's recommendation, hired me. And you know, within a
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: few months he asked me if I thought it was
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: a good idea for Salters and Roskin to do pr
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: for led Zeppelin and I said yes, and he said, well,
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: you'll have to deal with them because I'm the guy
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: Lombardo generation. I said, you got it. So then I
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: was Led Zeppelin's publicistem that's which kind of branded me
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: for the rest of my career. Okay, so you were
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: Led Zeppelin's publicist at what point in their seventy three
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: The album was Houses of the Holy and they that
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: album came out, and then they did an American tour
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: and it was the tour where they sold out stadiums.
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: One of them was Tampa, which was fifty hundred people,
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: which was more people than so the Beatles and Jay Stadium.
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: And I got a wire service story about it, and
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: you know, I got Zeppelin really the first good press
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: they'd ever had. People. They're so legendary and such an
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: influence on the musical culture that it's hard for people
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: who weren't around to realize they never got good reviews.
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: The rock press hated Zeppelin in those years because they
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: you know, they were they were Their audience was younger.
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: The Rolling Stone writers were into The Stones, Dylan Cream
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: and then Zeppelin comes along, and Zeppelin was made famous
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: by radio, not by the press, and so they always
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: got bad reviews. So by House of the Holy was
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: their fifth album, and it was the first time they
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: got good press. And it was just the planets lined up.
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: I was in the right place of the right time,
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: and I could help them do that, and they liked
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: me enough to then hire me before they hired So,
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: you know, Peter Grant is a legendary guy. The BM
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: members are known as being off putting too. How do
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: you ingretiate yourself with that? Well, you know, I was
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: so nervous, Lee and I Lee came to the first meeting.
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: He said, I'll come to the first meeting and after
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: that I'm never going to see them again or meet
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: them again. But I'll go to the first meeting because
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: they were hiring lease authors. And we flew to Paris.
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: They were playing at the Palais to Sports in Paris,
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: and we stayed at some fancy George sand hotel which
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: is where the Zeppelin was saying, I've never been to
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: Europe before, you know, not to mention to Paris, and
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: he says, so tell me about these guys. I said, Look,
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: they got a really bad reputation with writers. I mean
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: there was some writer named Ellen Sander who they supposedly
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: threw things at and you know, they had, like what
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: you're saying, a reputation of not being pleasant to strangers
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: or people that weren't in their inn out, including and
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: a particularly journalists because they viewed journalists as adversaries. I
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: said there, like considered to be like barbarians. So we
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: get to the meeting with Peter Grant. First we meet
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: with Peter Grant, and then after that we meet with you.
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: Who have it? Are you pitching? I don't really know,
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: I mean Lee, they we flew over there. Um, I
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: don't know how they came to him exactly. He was
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: just to go to famous PR guy and they decided
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: to go to him. I don't know really. Uh. In
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: my understanding of it was that we had them, but
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: I'm sure if they hadn't liked the meeting, they would
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: have changed their mind. And um, so we're sitting there
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: with Peter Grant, who is this three hundred plus pound
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: former professional wrestler, wrestler, cockney accent, very intimidating, tough guy.
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: And uh, I'd heard about Peter Grant, you know, and
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: there was vague sense that he maybe new gangsters or
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: could have been a thug or you know, it was
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: a scary guy physically. And lisays, tell tell Peter, you
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: tell me, tell tell him, tell tell him. You told me,
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: tell about the Barbarians thing. So I said to Peter, look,
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: you know, um, like I talked to some of the
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: writers and you know, there's like this feeling like that
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: the that the band is almost like barbarians. And he
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: looked at me with this big smile. You know, Peter
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: was brilliant. He wasn't only tough, he was the smartest
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: manager of his generation and knew how to be charming.
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: He looked at his big smile and he said, yeah,
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: but we're just mild barbarians. So then we met with
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: the band and uh, you know, uh it was fine.
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: You know, they they they you know, they they wanted
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: good press. Robert Plant in particular was sick of He
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: wanted his parents and the people who grew up with
• 57:51
  Speaker 1: to read about him. Also, they already were the biggest
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: band commercially, and he he did most of the interviews.
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: Jimmy Jimmy controlled things, but he was in the big schmoozer.
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: Robert was the big mooser. Okay, so you're moving from
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: writing publicity with essentially no training or track record. How
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: do you pick it up? Well? Two things. One is
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: I had friends who were writers. All my friends wrote
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: about rock and roll. I had spent three or four
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: years in this clique of people that revolved around Max's
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: Kansas City writers and who were on the press list.
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: There was like a party every night. I mean it
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: was the boom period in the music business. You never
• 58:28
  Speaker 1: had to pay for a meal or pay for a ticket.
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: So I knew the New York writers and it was
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: all about favors and hey, it's can you do this
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: for me? So like Lilian Rockson did the first piece
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: for the New York Daily News. By this time, in
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: addition to the Australian paper, she was the rock writer
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: for the New York Daily News, which at that time
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: I had the biggest circulation of any American newspaper. She
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: did a big full page in the Sunday and so
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: she came to the airport and did a piece on them.
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: And so I was into asking my friends for favors.
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: And then Lee explained to me, Les Alters taught me publicity.
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: He is different generation. He didn't care anything about rock
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: and roll. He were suit every day. He was a
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: guy that you know, knew, Walter Winchell. He was like
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: from out of a forties movie. But um, he understood
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: the rock and roll was this new thing that they
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: wanted to have their piece of that pie, and that
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: I was his guy with the long hair to do that.
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: And he explained to me that if you had a
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: good story, you didn't need to ask for a favor.
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: That the idea was to create good stories and that
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: was this huge paradigm shiffers. So he and the other publicists,
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: it's olders. They were all older than me, and and
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: and uh and hard bitten, but they they they took
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: me under their wing and they showed me. They explained
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: to me how to write a press release and you know,
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: how to how to do it, you know, and it
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: was like it was like going to Harvard for publicity.
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: Did you like it? You know? I liked that I
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: had a job. I had had spent three after you know,
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: I had a few months where I didn't have a job.
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: So I was like, I I liked that I had
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: a job. And it occurred to me after are a
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: couple of months that I was good at it. And
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: it was the first time I'd ever felt I was
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: any good at anything. I always felt like a complete
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: fraud as a As a journalist, I knew I wasn't
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: really as good as the really good writers. They were
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: great writers. John Lynde was writing about rock and roll,
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: then Paul Nelson. These were great writers. I knew I
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: couldn't write as well as them. But I was really
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: good at publicity because I was a fan and because um,
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: you know, that fit my temperament better, like I said,
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: being a fan instead of a critic. So within a
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: pretty short amount of time I started to get, for
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: the first time in my life, feeling I was good
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: at something, and so I like that. So how did
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: you end up working? Well? I did publicity for the
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: for the seventy three tour, and then when they started Swansong,
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: they offered me the job to be what Peter called
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: his ambassador and in America, and I said, uh, well,
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: could I have a title? He said, well, what title
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: do you want? I said, I've had vice president of Swansong.
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: He said fine, because there was no staff. Was he
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: was president vice press or something about vice president of
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: led Zeppelin's label. But yeah, they they had a good
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: they liked me, you know, and and and and they
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: needed somebody like in my category for for the new label.
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: So they for me, were you making the money that
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 1: would be aligned in one's brain with that title in
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: that position, Well, I was making more money than I
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: was making. Its salters, I think it's salters. I was
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: making three hundred dollars a week. Um, this is seventy
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: three so whatever inflation would be, you know, that's fifteen
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: thousand a year. That's probably like making seventy five hundred
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: thousand now, uh. And then and then I got a
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: percentage of business I brought in. And the only business
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: I ever brought in was Edgar and Johnny Winter, which
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: was Steve Paul's clients. So maybe I was making three
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: fifty a week. So then I started a Swan song
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: at five hundred a week, so that was like a
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: fift increase dollars a year. And I also um had
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: an expand accounts, so I could take people to uh,
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: you know, the fancy Italian restaurant around the corner, and
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: and and they would pay for it. So that was
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: a step up. And then after the first year they
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: raised me to forty thousand dollars a year because we
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: had a great first year. Bad Company record came out.
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: Of course, it was the first release of Lanson was
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 1: Bad Co number one album, number one single. So so
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: you know, I was then twenty four. I was that
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: was fine, you know. I was ambitious to kind of
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: just be more in the business. But it was certainly
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: for a guy who never had any college education. I
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: suddenly was rebranded from being this failure to being this
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: success in terms of just the way. Like my parents
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: realized at a certain point when I was working for
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: Zeppelin and my mother said, Danny, you ever think about
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: maybe going back to college? And I said, month, did
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: you know who Lie Zeppelin is? Okay, So were you
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: working with the band during the famous era at the Cote, Yes,
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: I was. That's why that's really where I bonded with
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: I think that's why Peter Grant hired me is because
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: that was in ninety three, and the story is that
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: they had cash. It was the end of a tour
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: and there was a lot of cash. Peter liked cash
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: for whatever reason, and there was I think two thousand
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: dollars in a safety deposit box of the Drake Hotel
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: that disappeared, and it was front page of the newspapers,
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: and I and and Peter is like, they're all freaked out.
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: And Peter's freaked out, and and I said, you want
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: me to call um? It was a guy named John Gibson,
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: I think was the publicity guy at Atlantic. I said,
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: you want me to call Bob Gibson. He says, no,
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: I don't want anybody from Atlantic here. I want you
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: to handle this. So and I had no idea that
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: he would prefer me to somebody at the label, but
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: to him, the label was them. And I worked for him,
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: and and and and and that was the first time
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: I even knew he liked me. I mean, he never
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 1: gave me a compliment. You know, there were some and
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: so we had to have a press conference and that
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: that's really I felt that that that he kind of
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: felt I handled that well enough. Yeah, some people believe
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: that they stole the money themselves. Well, nobody knows. Let's
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: put it this way, no one's ever was arrested for
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: this crime. And uh, it's a little fishy. And then
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: the question is who would they be. Would they be
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: the entire band, would it just be Peter, would it
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: be Peter and someone else? No one knows. What we
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: know is no one was ever arrested for it. Well,
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: I guess my father woke me up. Was during the summer.
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: He couldn't believe the sum he read it in the papers,
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: you know, this being led Zeppelin. They're staying at the
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: Drake Hotel. And the famous thing was the band flew
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: home almost immediately, as opposed to staying around and trying
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: to help with the finding of this money. Well, I mean,
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: how would a band there but I was to get
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: on stage a masson Square Garden. You know they saw
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: that three shows at the garden and to play a
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: great concert. They are not detectives or you know, so
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: of course the band flew home. Um there there Peter
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: and the two. A manager of led Zeppe was named
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: Richard Cole, who's to this day a pretty good friend
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: of mine. The beautiful guy he was, he's he's a
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: twelve step guy. He's a guy in those he's out
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: of control. I remember when he used to be at
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: the Rainbow every night. He was out of control, a pirate,
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: scary guy. Peter's right hand guy, kind of the enforce
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: your guy. And uh and the last thirty years he's like, uh,
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: he got sober again. I'm not you know, this is
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 1: he he would be the first to say this, and
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: and he's what a beautiful guy. He lives, he's retired,
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: he lives in in in England, I think London. I
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: just mostly see we mostly communicate through Facebook. But you know,
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 1: I don't think Richard knows and if anybody that IM
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: and Peter's dead and um, I don't know, but it's
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: something a little a little um. The weird thing is
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: that the one was ever arrested for it, you know,
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: and uh, and that only a couple of people had
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: access to the to the safety deposit box, one of
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: whom definitely was Peter. We're listening to my conversation with
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 1: Danny Goldberg, recorded live at the tune In Studios in Venice, California.
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: I hope you're enjoying this episode of the Bob Left
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: Sets podcast. If you want to see videos, photos, and
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: soundbites from Danny and our other guests as they joined
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: me in the studio, visit at tune In on Twitter, Facebook,
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: and Instagram. Now more of my conversation with Danny Goldberg
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: on the Bob Left Sets Podcast. Okay, so you end
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: up working with Led zeppelind until the band ends, right, No, No,
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 1: I did not I work with them. Um. I started
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: at Swansong in January of seventy four and I left
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: in May of seventies six, and the band didn't end
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 1: until seventy seven. Okay, so you left in seventy six
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: to do what I started my own PR firm. You know,
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: I had a falling out with Peter. We later made up.
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: It's it's not that interesting a story. And but I
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: by this time I had a reputation of I'd been
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: Zeppelin's publicistem bad company, and I've been quoted in articles.
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: So I started a PR company with the imaginative name
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: of Danny Goldberg, Inc. And And the first client I
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 1: got was Kiss, you know, who idolized Zeppelin and billow
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 1: Cooin had been at somebody i'd met earlier. And I
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: also very quickly got E l O, which Don Arden
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: managed to Don Arden had been Peter Grant's former bloss
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: and was also a legendary tough English guy. His daughter
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: married Ozzy Osborne. We know here Sharon Osborne, and those
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: days she was Sharon Arden, and very very good to me,
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 1: you know, always made sure I get paid on time. Really,
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: so you were at the advent of the success of
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: those Well, Yolo had already had a hit seventy four
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: in America. Elo, it had hits. They they had. I
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 1: mean I think, um, they already had can't get out
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: of my head. Um. The big record we had was
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: I think it was called uh, God had living thing
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: on it. I think it was called out of the Yeah.
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: I think that was the big yellow record that I
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: that I was Danny Goldberg in just you or did
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: you have people working? Oh? No, I had people working
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: for me. Um. I started. I started out of my apartment.
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: By this time, I'd moved to West seven ninth three
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: and I had a one bedroom and sort of for
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: the first six months, the living room was our office,
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: and actually Howard Bloom shared the office with me, and
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: then he later off did his own PR firm. But
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: originally we were thinking of doing it together. But but
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: we're still friends. Howard and I just did a book
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: event together like last year. But um we we um.
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 1: So I had fives, I had, I had some people
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: and then and then I made enough money that I
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 1: could afford to rent offices somewhere in midtown. Uh and uh,
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: you know, publicity is work intensive. It's it's a you
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: need you need bodies making the phone calls to UH
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 1: service the clients. Do you're making any money? I mean
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: it was cash flow positive, you know. Um for most
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 1: of it. Um, it was a struggle, but I got
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: enough money where I ended up having also an l
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: A office. I had an office in Century City, right
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: down the hall from where E. L Os Jet Records was,
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: And then I had an office in New York, but
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 1: with two or three people in each in each office.
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: And it was a cash business. I wasn't owning anything,
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: and I wasn't building up any great savings, but I
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: was making enough to pay for these rents and to
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: pay salaries to these people. So then the next step
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 1: is twentieth century Fox. No, you're so kind to have
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: researched to all this, and and obviously you know, being
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: around for so many years I have in the middle
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: of I'm trying to remember when I did Fox. I um, Fox,
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: I think was two. Yeah, that's later the big breakthrough
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 1: coming out of So I have this PR company and
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: within a year one of the most the important clients
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: to me becomes Bearsville Records. And this is the second time,
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 1: I encounter Albert gross soon, and this time I'm actually
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 1: communicating with him on a regular basis because the guy
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: that was president of his label was Paul Fishkin, and
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: Paul and I just were best friends, you know, and
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 1: Paul the minute I was doing this, looked for a
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: way to get me the business and they had some
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: budget for PR so I did Bears well. They had
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: Todd run Gren. Their big act in those days was
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: fog Hat That was their Planum act and they Jesse
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: Winchester made a record while I was there, and Um
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 1: and Paul Um at some point in seventy eight, I
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: think it was seventy eight, maybe the beginning of seventy nine.
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: Has a romance with Stevie Nicks, and this is at
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: the peak of Rumors. They're the biggest group in the
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: world and she's the lead singer and songwriter of their
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: biggest hits, Rhiannon on the previous record and Dreams on
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: Rumors and he introduced me to her, and uh, you know,
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: would be quickly became clear to me that she was
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: frustrated in terms of some of the business dynamics of
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: Fleetwood Mac because she and Lindsey Buckingham had joined the
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: group that had already been in existence for eight or
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: nine years or least. So Fleetwood and Mac made all
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: the decisions, including which songs went on the record. And
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: she had written this song called Silver Springs that she
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: loved that they didn't include on Rumors, and she had
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: all these other songs, and I was extremely happy that
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: she was so unhappy, because now I could be somebody
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: who could maybe help, you know, And and Paul was
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: promoting this, and so we got to know each other
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: and had this idea for a Rhiannon movie. We made
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: a development deal with the United Artists. Nothing ever came
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: of it. But I got to be friends with Stevie
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: and she's just another person who just believed in me
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: when there was no particular reason for her to do so,
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 1: based on my background. And and uh, somewhere along the line,
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: Paul and I had this idea that we should start
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: a label with Stevie for her solo work, because Warner
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: Brothers had not signed her as an individual when she
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: joined Fleetwood Mac. Fleetwood Mac had made album after album
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: after album. They just seemed to change guitar players on
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 1: every album, and they weren't that important an act to
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: Warner Brothers for the first seven or eight albums, so
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: there was no big push in business affairs to sign
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 1: the new members of Fleetwood Mac. How hum, and then
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: almost immediately they went from selling a hundred fifty albums
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 1: to four million albums with this with the record called
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: Fleetwood Mac that had Rhiannon on it, and they never
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: signed Stevie, so she was available as a solo artist.
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: So we created this label called Modern Records together Paul
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: and I. Stevie had a piece of it, and and
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 1: that the first record was Bella Donna, which Jimmy Ivan
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: produced and which was number one. I think it's sold
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 1: ten million by an now or something. So that was
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: that was a big thing. And then after a few
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: years I thow there were there any other records on
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: Modern Records. Nothing successful. We put out a couple of
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: other records. It was a friend of Paul's named Joey
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: Wilson from Philly that we put out that flopped. And
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 1: there was a reggae act called Jamala that I was
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: enthusiastic about that also flopped. Those with the other artists
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: on Modern Um it went through Atlantic. We made our
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 1: deal with Doug Morris who was just started running at Go,
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 1: which was a division of Atlantic, and it was a
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: big deal for him and big deal for us. Uh.
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: And there's a photo I have somewhere of me, Doug Stevie,
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 1: Jimmy Ivan and Paul right after Belladonna became number one,
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: and it was a moment for all of us, you know. Um.
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: So then later on, after I sold my half of that,
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 1: I started some other label UH with A and M
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 1: that that was not particularly successful, called Gold Mountain, which
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: I then later used as the name of management company.
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: And during that period of A and M, I got
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: this offer to be a soundtrack slim for twenty century Fox.
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: So I spent the year it was right after Flash
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: Dance and all the movie studios to oh, we need
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: somebody who understands MTV and stuff to do soundtracks, you know,
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 1: because that's a part of marketing films. So I had
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: that sort of as a part time thing. I had
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: an office at Fox and an office UH at A
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: and M for um Gold Mountain, just just for a year.
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: But my name is on some you know, there's there's
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: some movies my name is on. And then for about
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: a year after that, I did a few other movies.
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: The most famous credit I have as music supervisor of
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: Dirty Dancing. But you know it was, well, you know
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: Jimmy Ivan takes Jimmy Iron or takes all the credit
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: on that. Does he deserve it? He definitely deserves some
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 1: of the credit. Um and and he and I have
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: not don't have a different narrative about this. We've you know,
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 1: this is come up? I was, can is this? Can
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 1: one use four her words on this course? So the
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 1: director of Dirty Dancing was named Emil Ordealino. He's passed
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: away one of the loveliest people I've ever met and
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: and couldn't have been easier to work with, and had
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: almost no interest in the music. So in terms of
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 1: picking all the oldies that are in the movie and
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: Be My Baby and whatever is I I did that
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: and it was the easiest thing in the world to do.
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: You just pick all your favorite old songs that there
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: hadn't been a zillion of these other movies. It was
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 1: like low hanging fruit and it was not hard to
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: license them. And then I and then they needed some
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: original material, and I suggested and I brought in Michael Lloyd,
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 1: who was a friend of mine. I don't know how
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: we got to know each other. It's from a different
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: kind of music. He produced like Debbie Boone, You Like
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 1: My Life a pop guy, but I just liked them
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 1: and I knew that needed a pop guy. But there
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 1: was one of the producers of the film, and she
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: may still be alive. I don't want to embarrass anybody,
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: but she very um. They was so frustrated that we
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: didn't have a record deal yet, because you have to remember,
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: nobody knew Dirty Dance Thing was going to be a hit.
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 1: It was an unknown director with an unknown cast, with
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: a tiny little studio called Vesturan that was known as
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 1: a home video company that had made some money selling
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 1: Jane Fonda videos. So they decided to make a movie.
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: It was the least likely film based on the people
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: involved in UM, I forget who was The guy who
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: brought me on was named Steve Ruther. I don't know
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 1: what became of him. So one of the producers was
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: very combative and pushy, and she called my assistant at
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: the time, Lorie Levy, a count and uh so I
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 1: just uh said, I can't deal with this. I had
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 1: already gotten so I made a deal. It was the
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: worst business decision in my life. I had gotten fifty fee,
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: which was a lot of money to be a music supervisor,
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: and I had a couple of points on a record,
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 1: but there was no record deal. So I just made
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: a deal with Steve Ruther. I said, look, I want
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: to keep the credit. I think there was an extra
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 1: ten or fifteen thousand. You know, the fee was paid
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 1: in installments, compaying me the rest of my fee. I
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 1: don't need a royalty. I just need never to talk
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: to this woman again, who who? Because you know, insulted
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: my assistant. And and then they brought in Jimmy Einer,
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: who did oversee the recording of the Hits. There's no
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: question about it. Michael Lloyd produced the Hits. I was
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: so the producer I've writ but Jimmy Einer in terms
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: of the songwriting and A and R in it, He
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 1: and R had they hit singles that made that that
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 1: record what it was as a phenomenon. So he but
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 1: but in terms of the music that you hear when
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: you're watching the movie, that's why they kept my credit
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: because so so we played different roles in it, and
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: he made a lot more money from it than I didn't.
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: He deserve to because he he oversaw the production of
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 1: the hit center of the hit songs, and then you
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: decided to become a manager. I always wanted to be
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 1: a manager from the time I worked for Peter Grant.
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: I just thought that was the job for me. It
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: was he was so powerful the record company did what
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 1: he said. He was the close this person to the band.
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: He made a percentage, so he was making what seemed
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: to me like so much more money than than than
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 1: anything that was accessible to me. So I had wanted
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: to be a manager ever since leaving Zeppelin, but it
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: was hard for me to convince people to let me
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 1: be a manager. I had this one band called the
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: Mink Deville that I was very proud to work with,
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 1: a great band, but Willie became a junkie. You were
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: the manager for their first record, first two records, which
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: were the best record, Yeah, which is the first two records.
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 1: H Van Edmonds was a former rock writer who's a
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: and R guide Capital would signed them and he suggested
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 1: I do it, and and it was it was an
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: interesting you know, they were great, I mean they were
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: incredible live act. Willie Deville is one of the most
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: compelling live performers but you know, a little self destructive,
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: so we couldn't really break them, even though again those
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: records hold up. And there's a song on the first
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 1: Mink Deville record called Mixed Up Shook Up Girl that
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: someday someone's gonna have a hit with. It's such a
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: great song. And uh, Willie wrote that song. He didn't
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: write Cadillac Walk. Moon Martin wrote Cadillac Walk, which was
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: the A O. R track, but Willie wrote Mixed Up
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 1: Shook Up Girl. But you know, that flopped, and I
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 1: couldn't get anyone to the WOMY as a manager, so
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 1: I started, you know, I tried different things, and then
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: finally after the Stevie Nicks success in the association with that,
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 1: I somehow had enough whatever it is, to convince people
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: to let me be a manager. And the first client
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: I had after Gold Mountain Label didn't work, I turned
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 1: it into Gold Mountain Management. And the first client of
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: Gold Mountain Management was Belinda Carlisle, right after she left
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: the Go Goes. I think her lawyer suggested it might
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: have been Michael Lloyd um or maybe that's how I
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: met Michael Lloyd. Yeah, because that was before I don't
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 1: know John Mason was her lawyer. Um, she wasn't you know.
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: It wasn't like a huge competition at that time to
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: get Bull into Carlisle. But I was excited to get
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: Bull into Carlisle. And because you know I I was
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 1: a Go Goes fan and she was the singer and
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: and uh, and I heard this song Man about You,
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 1: which just I wasn't sure it was a hit. I'm
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 1: not one of those guys that can always predict to him.
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: But it sounded to me like a lot like a
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 1: great Go Go song, you know it's like So she
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 1: was the first client in Bonnie Rate was the second client.
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: Bonny I had met um some years in the late seventies. Um,
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 1: when I had the PR company, one of my clients
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 1: was a band called Orleans. And then Orleans broke up
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 1: and John Hole, who was the lead guitar player, Um
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 1: it was a social friend of mine and he made
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: a solo deal with Electra and so he hired me
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: to be the publicist on his solo records. So his
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: solo record flopped. But in the middle of this was
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: seventy eight. He said, look, I want you to help
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 1: me publicize this other thing I'm doing and he ex
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 1: Ai'm to me why he was against the nuclear power
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: plants because of the environmental hazard. The radiation could cause
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 1: cancer and there could be a meltdown. And this was
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: the same period of time Karen Silkwood had had the
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: subject of a huge Rolling Stone article. She had uncovered
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: some problems in the nuclear power plant, and then she
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: mysteriously died. And so we did a press conference whereas
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: artists United against Nuclear Energy or something, and the press
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 1: conference with James Taylor, Carly Simon, Bonnie Rate and John Hall.
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 1: And then not long thereafter, there was an accident at
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 1: the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania,
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 1: and it became front page news. This Jimmy Carter was president.
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 1: This was before the hostages were taken in Iran, which
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: wiped everything off the front pages. During this window of time,
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: nuclear power was like a big issue. And and so
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 1: John Hall then calls me and he says, look, we're
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 1: gonna now it's this big issue. We're going to these concerts.
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: And they did concerts at Madison Square Garden and Jackson
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: Brown joined the Fray and this is where I met
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: Jackson And then for the last two nights of those
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: concerts Springsteen headlines. So there were five nights at the
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: Garden and out of it. Uh And I had this
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: notion that we should make a movie UH that was
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: released by Warner Brothers called No Nukes that I end
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: myself and a friend of mine ended up directing and producing. UH.
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: So through that experience, I got to know Bonnie and
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 1: I loved Bonnie Rate. And then it occurred, and then
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: by this time, I just she was kind of going
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: through a down period in her career. Warner Brothers was
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 1: about to drop her, and she had been around, you know,
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 1: she was close to forty, and it was considered somebody
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: that just had her shot and didn't make it, whereas
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: Linda Ronstad doing some of the same kind of thing,
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 1: had become the big star. And I just couldn't believe
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 1: that Bonnie Rate couldn't do. I didn't know she was
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 1: going to be as successful as she became, but I
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 1: knew she was great, and so UM I I called her,
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: and she had had the same manager for her whole career,
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 1: and I felt it was time. She was at a
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: was Dick Waterman and and and it was at a
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 1: dead end, and she came with me and I I
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: think I called her. I think I said, yeah, I
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: think I called her and pitched her. You know, but
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: we had We've gotten to know each other pretty well
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: through the Nonwkes experience, and I and I knew she
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 1: was struggling, you know, and I said, I can help,
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: you know, and and and I brought in a guy
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 1: named Ron Stone, who became part of Gold Mountain and
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 1: so appropriately on all of those records, it says management
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 1: Danny Goldberg and Ron Stone, and we um, you know,
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 1: she got sober just at that time, and she wrote
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: that song Nick of Time, and I remember the cassette
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 1: of it in my car, the demo of it, and uh,
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 1: you know, talking about watching her parents age, and I
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 1: just tear it up, and you know, knew it was
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 1: great again. We got very lucky with the planets lined up.
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 1: V H one was just starting and suddenly there was
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: an exposure vehicle for somebody like Bonnie Raid and capital
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 1: was cold, so they paid more attention to her than
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 1: they otherwise would have, and uh, fourteen labels turned her down.
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 1: I went to everybody, Jerry Moss, Doug Morris, all the
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: people I knew in the business that she's too old.
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 1: And then Joe Smith, who had a sentimental attachment to
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 1: her from having worked with her Warner brothers and having
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 1: nothing else at Capital, gave us what was a low
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: ball deal, but it was fine out of that cam
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 1: nick of time and that one the Grammy, and then
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: I was suddenly a successful manager. And then who were
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 1: the acts to follow? Uh? Well, the biggest one was Nirvana? Right?
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: But before Nirvana? Who else did we have? Oh? Goodness?
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: I mean I I had a gold Mountain, became a
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 1: certainly a bigger company than the one I have now.
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 1: I think we had like thirty five people there. We
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 1: had a number of different artists. We had Bela Fleck,
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 1: we had Sheena Easton, I had I brought in a
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: lot of co managers, So I was com aage with
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: a lot of different people to create kind of a
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: home for for different managers. We had some rock bands
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: that didn't make it that they got played on pirate radio,
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 1: you know, a bang tango. And the whole thing was
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 1: if you could get the record deal and a publishing deal,
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 1: you get a commission on the record advance, you get
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: a commission on the publishing advance, and then you've made
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 1: your forty or fifty grand as a manager and then
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: you hope it's successful. So I had a lot of
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 1: several of those that didn't make it. Had Andy Taylor
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 1: from Duran Duran solo deal, Steve Jones from the Sex
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: Pistols solo deal, my old friend Michael Dabar, you know,
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: I worked with on various records, still still one of
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 1: my best friends. Um. But in terms of successful artists
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 1: other than Bonnie and Belinda Uh, the Almond brothers were
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 1: client for several years. Then I was able to help
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 1: them get back together again, and that was really one
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 1: of the great things of my career was to be
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: able to work with them for a few years. And
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 1: then I had this realization that there was this younger
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 1: thing happening with punk rock, and then I didn't really
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 1: understand it. So I hired m John Silva, who was
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: you know, so I don't remember how I met Silva,
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 1: but he Um, I just knew I needed someone in
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: that category. And he had a House of Freaks and
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 1: Red Cross and House the Freaks had acoustic acoustic guitars,
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 1: and I always liked folk music and I was so
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 1: not connected to the eighties punk world. But I figure
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: I could kind of get what this was, and he
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 1: had this great work ethic and he came, you know,
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 1: and we decided we got to go and try to
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: sign some people and the big Within about six months
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 1: we signed Sonic Youth, which was a big deal in
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 1: the punk subculture for good reason. They're great band and
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 1: great tastemakers. And then through Sonic Youth met Nirvana, and
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 1: did you know Tirvana was going to blow up to
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 1: the degree it did? No, No, nobody knew. I knew
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 1: that I trusted Thurston More and Kim Gordon of Sonic
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: you that that they were they they they had the
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 1: jeweler's eye for talent and that idiom so many of
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 1: the artists that were developing reputations had started as opening
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 1: access on a Youth based on them just hearing some
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 1: seven inch So I signed them totally based on the
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 1: fact that Sonic Youth like them, and uh, you know,
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: we signed them to Geffen, the imprint of Geffen called
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: d g C that had Sonic Youth already. Gary Gersh
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 1: was the and R a guy for both. And then
• 1:27:29
  Speaker 1: I didn't really know until I saw the band live
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 1: that that they were going to be important to me.
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 1: They had already. We've been managing them for months and
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: I've never seen them, which was a common thing for
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 1: me in those days. You know, it was a bigger company.
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: And I saw them at the palace they opened for
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 1: Dinosaur Jr. And I was blown away. You know, bye
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 1: bye what this before never Mind came out, But they
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 1: already were working on never Mind, and Uh, seeing this
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: way he connected with an audience is when I realized,
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 1: oh my god, this is like a much bigger deal
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 1: than I thought it was. And I went from being
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: kind of a tertiary priority for me within the company
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 1: to like one of the main things I was thinking about.
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: You know. So by the time the record came out,
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 1: I was like totally focused on it. But when we
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 1: first signed them, they were just one of a zillion
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: things that we were working on. We'll pause here for
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: a weeve moment and get right back to my conversation
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 1: with Danny Goldberg. For those not in the know, I'm
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 1: primarily a writer. You can go to left sets dot
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 1: com and sign up for the newsletter or read the
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 1: archive for past history. In addition to following my commentary
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 1: on music business in the world at large, will be
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 1: the first to find out, we published a new episode
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 1: of the podcast. Go to left sets dot com and
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: sign up for the newsletter. I know you'll like it. Now,
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 1: let's return to my conversation with Danny Goldberg, recorded at
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 1: the tune In Studios in Venice, California. Looking back at
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 1: this point in time, Kurt Cobain ultimately commits suicide. Is
• 1:29:05
  Speaker 1: there anything that you were the team could have done
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 1: differently that might have prevented that? Well, Um, obviously the
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 1: only honest answer is I don't know. Um. It's I've
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 1: just finishing a book about him that's going to come
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 1: out in the spring, and I've been thinking about this
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 1: a lot, and uh, I just don't know what to
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 1: say about that. I mean, um, we did a couple
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 1: of it. I was part of personally, part of a
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 1: couple of interventions to get him off of heroin. You know,
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: I certainly feel, um, it's better for people not to
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 1: be junkies, and that that's a if there's one lesson
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 1: that I already felt it was bad to be a junkie,
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 1: and I still do. Um. I uh, you know, um,
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: thousands and thousands of people kill themselves every year, and
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: as far as I've been able to find out there's
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 1: no therapists or priests or yogis who the philosophers who
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: know how to prevent it. Um. You know, you do
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 1: everything you can and pray, and some people just kill themselves.
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 1: You know. It's It's one of the mysteries of of life,
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: I think. I mean, it's just I think fifty Americans
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 1: a year killed themselves. So, uh, you don't think that
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 1: maybe he should have been pulled off the road earlier.
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 1: He was not on the road much. Nirvana did very
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 1: little touring, um the last the last year. Um. You know,
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 1: he certainly didn't kill himself on the road. Um. And
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 1: and he had complete control over every decision. I mean
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 1: he you know, he didn't spend a lot of money,
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 1: so Kurt was financially independent right away. Um. And they
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 1: didn't do much touring. They did I think shows, you know,
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: the the you know, the last the last year. And
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 1: was Courtney loved an influence in his decision? Do you think?
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 1: You know, Cortney is a friend of mine and someone
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 1: that I also worked with and who I really admire,
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 1: complicated person like anybody else. When you know, again, I
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 1: think some of these hard drugs are just really bad
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: for human beings, and they had a bad effect on
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 1: each of them when they did them, and on almost
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 1: most people who do them. But um, you know, I
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 1: think the main thing is, uh, some people are prone
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 1: to depression. Some people can deal with it, some can't.
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 1: Some some people go into twelve step programs and you know,
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: have some don't take to it, you know. Uh. John Coltrane,
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: I think just stopped doing heroin through willpower, you know,
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: and became a I've never quite understood. He was certainly
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 1: into various Eastern religions, you know. Um, But you know,
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 1: I just don't think anybody knows why people kill themselves.
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: You know, I think that we know what some of
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: the things increased the likelihood. But there were people who
• 1:32:04
  Speaker 1: were junkies don't kill themselves, or people who were depressive,
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 1: they don't kill themselves. There are people who have relatives
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: in their family who who committed suicide who don't kill themselves.
• 1:32:14
  Speaker 1: But you know, all those things increased the likelihood of it.
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 1: So how did you find out? Uh? Rosemary Carroll, who
• 1:32:20
  Speaker 1: was my my wife at the time and mother of
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 1: my children, you know, was was also the lawyer for um.
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 1: She's a music business lawyer. And she was the lawyer
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 1: for by that time, both Kurt and Courtney. And she
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 1: called me. I was Atlantic Records by this time. You know,
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 1: I left the management company to go work for Atlantic. Um.
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 1: You know, within a year after never Mind came out.
• 1:32:51
  Speaker 1: You know, I had a sense of foreboding and I
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 1: was I wanted a regular job. I just didn't want it,
• 1:32:57
  Speaker 1: and that once I had kids, I just didn't want
• 1:32:59
  Speaker 1: to run a small business anymore. I like the idea
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 1: of getting a salary. So I was still involved with Nirvana,
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: and particularly involved with Kurt as somebody that he liked
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 1: to talk to. But but you know, I had this
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 1: other job, as you know, you know Atlantic, and and
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 1: so I was in New York at that time. You know,
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 1: Atlantic was in New York. We were still living in
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 1: l A. She was he had just given birth to
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 1: our second kid, Max. You know, Max was I think, uh,
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 1: four or five months old when Kurt killed himself. And Um,
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 1: she called me and told me. So she was on
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 1: her way to see Corny to tell Corney. This is
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 1: a bad segue, but we have to move on on
• 1:33:39
  Speaker 1: the less Um. So you take the job in Atlantic,
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 1: and simultaneous or shortly thereafter, there's a huge power struggle
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 1: at Warner Music. And what did that look like from
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 1: the inside, Well, it unfolded over a period of I
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 1: think the total amount of time I was there was
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 1: three years, so it you know, in retrospect, it was
• 1:34:02
  Speaker 1: a short period of time. But in those days, I'm
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 1: just living my life and I had no idea that
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 1: around the corner was going to come this, this power struggle.
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 1: I did feel. Doug Mars hired me originally to be
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: kind of the West coast head of A and R
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 1: for Atlantic. I had the Nirvana's manager. That kind of
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 1: music was clearly overnight change. What was commercial rock and roll,
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 1: The so called hair bands were passe A. There was
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 1: a need for someone who could find these new these
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 1: new acts and uh. In that context, I was one
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: of the people at Science Stone Temple Pilots, which was
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 1: almost an immediate huge success and and and kind of
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 1: made me a success in Atlantic right away. Uh, and
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 1: that or so Reaginally I was on the West coast,
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 1: but I Doug, I knew, had aspirations to move up
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 1: in the hierarchy, and I thought that if I did
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 1: a good job, I'd had a chance of them becoming
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: presid of Atlantic, and that is what happened. He became
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 1: head of Warner Music for America UH and made me
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 1: president of Atlantic UH and then um, by this about
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 1: two years into my Atlantic period, there was this huge
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 1: convulsion there. Um. They were a corporate guy named Bob
• 1:35:14
  Speaker 1: murgato um who oversaw all the music companies, and um,
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 1: the CEO of Time Warner the entire corporation was named
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 1: Steve Ross, legendary brilliant business guy who had assembled this
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 1: jewel of a media company included Warner Brothers, films, Time Magazine,
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 1: with Time Warner Cable. I think they had Nintendo and
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 1: one or books, and you know, it was like one
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 1: of the big big media companies. He was like on
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 1: that list with like the way you would talk today
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 1: about a Ruper Murdoch or one of those guys. And
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 1: he died in his sixties. Like I don't think people
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 1: knew he was going to die. He had cancer and
• 1:35:54
  Speaker 1: he went from being running the company to being dead
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 1: very quickly. And the vacuum created his death changed the
• 1:36:01
  Speaker 1: power dynamic in the music group because Steve Ross, for example,
• 1:36:07
  Speaker 1: had always said that Mouston reported to him directly, not
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 1: to the head of overall Music and the new guy
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 1: who replaced the Ross was Jerry Levin. Didn't want that
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 1: kind of weird structure, so Margato hated my Austin and
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 1: he liked Doug, and Mom ended up getting fired. I
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 1: ended up for eight or nine months becoming chairman of
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 1: Warner Brothers, and then Doug got fired. It was a
• 1:36:33
  Speaker 1: convulsive time. Uh. You know, the Warner Music group, it was.
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 1: It was a weird thing to be part of. It
• 1:36:39
  Speaker 1: was an amazing experience. I'm gratefully I got paid well
• 1:36:42
  Speaker 1: for it, and I learned a lot from it. But
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 1: I was totally ill equipped to deal with it. I
• 1:36:46
  Speaker 1: had moved so quickly in the corporate world. I I
• 1:36:49
  Speaker 1: didn't I wasn't a corporate guy. I had been an
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 1: independent manager publicist guy for twenty some years and I
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 1: was only in the corporate world for like a couple
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: of years and something. I have the biggest corporate record
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: job at a time when my boss is embattled, and uh,
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: I was not equipped to really deal with the pressures
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 1: in a very intelligent way. But I did the best
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 1: I could, and you know, I'm glad I got to
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: do it. And so when you let get let go.
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 1: Do you see that coming? Well, um, there was a
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 1: series of things that happened that that seemed incredibly important
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 1: to the time. And now all these names are kind
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 1: of not that interesting, but you know, um, first Mouston
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 1: has let first. Bob kraz now has let go. He
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 1: had been running Electric for ten or fifteen years. One
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 1: of the giants of the business didn't get along with
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 1: Bob Mugato. I guess he wasn't. The company was less profitable.
• 1:37:49
  Speaker 1: Doug puts um Sylvia Rohne in his head of Electra.
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 1: Then Lenny Warnicker was supposed to take Then Moe is
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 1: given all right, when his contract is up, he's going
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 1: to be out, which is a gigantic dock to the
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 1: West Coast music community. Was the premier record executive, certainly
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 1: in California, and many people thought in the country and
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: beloved by a wide range of people in the entertainment
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: business here, and they all sent letters to Jerry Levin,
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 1: you know, all these Quincy Jones, Barbara streisand everybody, and
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 1: Jerry Levin, CEO of Tom Waterer, didn't particularly like being
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 1: pressured that way. That was not an effective tactic. And
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 1: Magato hated Mouston because of some ego thing between the
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 1: two of them that I was not really privy too,
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 1: but was clearly palpable. And um. So then I then
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 1: then uh, Margato gets fired and is replaced by Michael Fuchs,
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 1: who had been running HBO. And then six months later
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: and then then Doug gets fired. Then I get fired
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 1: because I was very close to Doug. The people the
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 1: two people closest to Doug corporately were Melo Winter and myself.
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 1: We both got fired immediately right within weeks after Doug
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 1: got fired. Sylvia hung in for a while. Um, they
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 1: got rid of interscope, you know, within a year, UM,
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 1: and Doug by then Universal brings inter scope there and UM.
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 1: And then Michael Fuchs gets fired because he once Jerry
• 1:39:12
  Speaker 1: Levin used him for the purpose of doing all of this,
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 1: he he also turned out and wanted to also get
• 1:39:16
  Speaker 1: rid of Michael Fuchs. So there was an enormous number
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 1: of people fired. So certainly, once Doug got fired, I
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 1: knew my days were numbered. I mean that was I
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 1: was just a matter of how and what day of
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 1: the week it was going to be. I couldn't imagine
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 1: I was so closely identified with him there and and
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 1: you know it was so personal. My whole role and
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 1: there was so based on him, you know. Uh, So
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 1: once he got fired, I figured it was it was
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 1: going to happen. I I stayed for a couple of
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 1: more months and to see if there was any way
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 1: of achieving equilibrium and and to be responsible. I had
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 1: a job until they fired me to do it. But
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 1: my days were clearly numbered then. So once he was fired,
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 1: I was not surprised that I was later fired. And
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 1: you're fired, then you go to Mercury and then not
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 1: long thereafter, Yeah, A Loon Levy hired me to be
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 1: president of Mercury Records. It was a good soft landing
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 1: and what you learned there, well, you know that was
• 1:40:14
  Speaker 1: the That was a job that I had that wasn't
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 1: based on Doug. That was a job I got kind
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 1: of where it was me because Doug was was a mentor.
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 1: He taught me a lot, but he also was always
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 1: the boss, and a Loon Levy was really hands off.
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 1: He was globally. He was running a global company, not
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 1: just the US, and a global company whose main business
• 1:40:33
  Speaker 1: was not in the United States. PolyGram was the biggest
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 1: company everywhere, but the U S and they were a
• 1:40:38
  Speaker 1: major in the US, but they were super major in Europe,
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 1: Latin American Asia. Um So, first of all, it was
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 1: the first time I kind of did it on my own,
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 1: and uh it was that. It was certainly my most
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 1: successful time as an executive. But it was shortened because
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 1: PolyGram ended up being sold to Universal and they eliminated
• 1:40:57
  Speaker 1: the idea of Mercury, you know. But but I had
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: three years there. We had the last year I was
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 1: there when Billboard Sounds getting they did their annual who
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 1: which major company had the biggest market share? It was
• 1:41:11
  Speaker 1: the Mercury Group. We beat Columbia, you know, and everybody else. So,
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 1: I mean, I I felt really good about what we accomplished,
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 1: and uh I got to uh, I got to do
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 1: things that were really exciting there, you know. And uh
• 1:41:25
  Speaker 1: what was exciting there? Well, um I I, UM, we
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 1: had some hits. Are always exciting, right, so, you know,
• 1:41:38
  Speaker 1: I Luke Lewis was running Mercury Nashville. He reported to
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: me and Chanai Twain's biggest record, which is one of
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 1: the biggest records of all time. It comes out of that.
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 1: We we created what we called the Mercury Group. Where
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 1: we had the pop department also working with the country department.
• 1:41:52
  Speaker 1: It's very hard in those days to to to do
• 1:41:55
  Speaker 1: pop and country at the same time. We pulled it off.
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 1: I had the classical labels for acording to me and
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 1: we we had Andrea Bicelli, you know, who's this unknown
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 1: blind tenor and Pevrotti was in the middle of retiring
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 1: and just kind of room for one of those and
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 1: we were able to throw pbs and other things established
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 1: him and he said twenty year run. Uh. Phil Walden
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 1: had had another iteration of Capricorn that nobody wanted and
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 1: it was one of the first deals I made and
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 1: within a few months we had Platinum Records with three
• 1:42:25
  Speaker 1: eleven and Cake and I got to work with Phil Walden,
• 1:42:28
  Speaker 1: who was you know, had been noticed writings manager in
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 1: the Alman Brothers manager, one of the great again. He
• 1:42:34
  Speaker 1: died young, you know, but in the sixties of cancer,
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 1: but you know, really to me, a giant in his
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 1: own right, you know. You know, Um, we had a
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 1: big We had the first of the boy bands of
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 1: that era was Hansen, you know, before the Backstreet boyson
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 1: in Sync, the first when Total Request Live started on MTV,
• 1:42:53
  Speaker 1: which became kind of the nexus of the boy band era.
• 1:42:56
  Speaker 1: For the first twelve weeks of TRL and Hansen was
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 1: was number one. So that was kind of fun to
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 1: be part of. And the A and our guy that
• 1:43:04
  Speaker 1: I had hired from named Steve Greenberg developed them, still
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 1: a good friend of mine and and and to be
• 1:43:10
  Speaker 1: part of really launching at least one big pop act.
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 1: I mean, Hansen turned out not to want to play
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 1: the game and have future big records, but that first
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 1: record sold ten million records, was number one all over
• 1:43:20
  Speaker 1: the world. And then because we were doing a lot
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 1: of business, I was able to do some of the arts,
• 1:43:25
  Speaker 1: craftsy personal things that I had always dreamed of as
• 1:43:29
  Speaker 1: a record company president. Maybe I could do which so
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 1: we put out I put out Allen Ginsberg's last record,
• 1:43:34
  Speaker 1: to put it to Jim Carroll's last record. Um, you know,
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 1: brought a record, brought in a label called Tri Loca
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 1: that put out the first several Christian Das records. You know,
• 1:43:44
  Speaker 1: it's just things that culturally I was really proud to
• 1:43:47
  Speaker 1: to to to be able to give a place you know,
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 1: in the in the in the in the business. So
• 1:43:51
  Speaker 1: that was really fun. I love that period. But you know,
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 1: corporate events utterly beyond my control. It was some big
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 1: fight in Holland between Phillips and along Levy about you know,
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 1: the film company or something that had nothing to do
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 1: with me. Caused them to sell the company. And once
• 1:44:06
  Speaker 1: it was part of Universal, it was a different vision
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 1: and they created what they called the Island def Jam
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 1: took over most of what Mercury did, and and they
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 1: were probably right. I mean, you know, hip hop was exploding,
• 1:44:16
  Speaker 1: and Lee or was certainly had his handle on it.
• 1:44:21
  Speaker 1: I mean, I I got paid very well for that,
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 1: you know. Uh, that was the best parachute I got.
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 1: But those three that so Mercury at least I felt
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 1: I kind of had had the e ticket ride and
• 1:44:35
  Speaker 1: and uh. But after two corporate convulsions, I was a
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 1: little um dubious about my ability to function intelligently in
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 1: a corporate area. I didn't respond to the pressure very well.
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 1: I I panicked and had ego issues, and you know,
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 1: I I didn't have the kind of centered discipline that
• 1:44:59
  Speaker 1: the great long term corporate players have. You know, I
• 1:45:02
  Speaker 1: was I was more of a rock and roll guy.
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 1: And the next step is Artemus. So then yeah, I
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 1: had Artemus I found a guy named Michael Chambers approached
• 1:45:10
  Speaker 1: me right away. He had his father's a very successful
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 1: leverage buyout genius and they had and Michael loved Nirvana
• 1:45:17
  Speaker 1: and wanted to start a label and started Artemus, not
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 1: you know, thinking that I could do what like Interscope
• 1:45:25
  Speaker 1: had done. That was my model, but of course it
• 1:45:27
  Speaker 1: was first of all, I'm not Jimmy Ivan. Secondly, it
• 1:45:29
  Speaker 1: was the wrong time to do it. We started Artemus
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 1: just as the record business was spiraling downward financially and
• 1:45:35
  Speaker 1: the you know, the the the MP three, dot Com
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 1: and Napster and you know, the digital world was was
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 1: was eroding the value of masters. So I couldn't fight
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 1: that that wave. I was totally not equipped for it.
• 1:45:49
  Speaker 1: I was fighting the last war. But we had some
• 1:45:51
  Speaker 1: records I'm really proud of it. Made the last three
• 1:45:53
  Speaker 1: Warrant Yvon records, the third of which one in Grahamy's
• 1:45:56
  Speaker 1: and his gold record That's where I met Steve are
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 1: all made for Steve row records. Uh two of them
• 1:46:02
  Speaker 1: at won Grammys. Uh made a Jimmy for One record
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 1: that won a Grammy, made Hubert Someone's last record, did
• 1:46:08
  Speaker 1: a Pretender's record, Um. And we had to let the
• 1:46:13
  Speaker 1: dogs out. So you know, it was it was not nothing,
• 1:46:16
  Speaker 1: but but it was. It was doomed because I just
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 1: didn't I didn't have the clarity. You know, Daniel Glasses,
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 1: I was chairman, he was president. You know, I'm I'm
• 1:46:26
  Speaker 1: proud of what we did at Artemus, but it was
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 1: it was the wrong business model. It was a business
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 1: model that would have been great for ten years earlier,
• 1:46:35
  Speaker 1: and I, you know, I didn't So but you know,
• 1:46:37
  Speaker 1: again there's the records that we put out that I'm
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 1: very proud of. So now you're a manager again. Correct?
• 1:46:42
  Speaker 1: So what you know you could have just said I'm done? Yeah?
• 1:46:46
  Speaker 1: Why why get back in? Um? You know, I I
• 1:46:50
  Speaker 1: like to work. Um, I I feel better about myself
• 1:46:54
  Speaker 1: when I'm working. I don't really, you know, I I
• 1:46:57
  Speaker 1: my self esteem requires the idea of doing something. Uh
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 1: so far, I do meditate and I defined myself when
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 1: I'm in my highest moments as being not just the
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 1: some of my external work and accomplishments, but most of
• 1:47:13
  Speaker 1: the time I'm the same schmuck that wants to be
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: somebody and do something. And the only thing I really
• 1:47:19
  Speaker 1: have expertise in is is is whatever corner of the
• 1:47:23
  Speaker 1: music business I have at any given moment in time.
• 1:47:27
  Speaker 1: So I spent a year or leaving I experimented. I'd
• 1:47:29
  Speaker 1: always had this real interest as a political activist. Ever
• 1:47:32
  Speaker 1: since No Nukes, I've been very involved with a lot
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 1: of political things. I've been the chairman of the a
• 1:47:36
  Speaker 1: c o U of Southern California for seven years when
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 1: I lived out here, and uh, you know, wrote a
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 1: book about politics and culture. Uh. And so I did
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 1: take a non music business job, which was the to
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 1: be the chairman of Air America Radio coming out of Artemus,
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 1: which turned out to be doomed. I noticed you had
• 1:47:54
  Speaker 1: Rob Glazers recent podcast guest, and he was he was
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 1: my least favorite boss. Because I don't want to go
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 1: into it. I'm just trying to say I'm not gonna
• 1:48:04
  Speaker 1: make it. Was he hands on? Well, I mean I
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 1: would say this. Um. When I first got the job. Um,
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 1: he was coming out to l A to try to
• 1:48:15
  Speaker 1: raise some money from the Hollywood liberal community, and I said, you,
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 1: I know, I said, I know, I'm not starting for
• 1:48:20
  Speaker 1: a week or two you but do you want me
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 1: to come with you? I know a lot of these people,
• 1:48:23
  Speaker 1: you know, because when I was here, I was really
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 1: part of that community and meant a lot to me
• 1:48:27
  Speaker 1: and I and I had some credibility with a lot
• 1:48:30
  Speaker 1: of normally are and those kind of people. And he
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 1: said no, no no, no, he says, I don't want you
• 1:48:34
  Speaker 1: to worry about money. I want you to run the company.
• 1:48:35
  Speaker 1: I said great. So then three weeks later, I'm now
• 1:48:39
  Speaker 1: running the company. They've announced it, and the in house
• 1:48:42
  Speaker 1: controller they didn't have a normal CFO comes to me
• 1:48:44
  Speaker 1: and says, Um, by the way, we don't have the
• 1:48:47
  Speaker 1: money for the payroll, and and and you know, as
• 1:48:52
  Speaker 1: I called him, and I said, Rob, we don't have
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: the money to the payroll. What do I do? He says,
• 1:48:55
  Speaker 1: you're the CEO. You figure it out. So I knew
• 1:48:58
  Speaker 1: I was fun. You know, there was underfunded. He he
• 1:49:01
  Speaker 1: did lose money on it. I mean he put millions
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 1: of dollars into it, but it required much more money
• 1:49:06
  Speaker 1: than that, and there wasn't a plan to raise the
• 1:49:08
  Speaker 1: rest of the money. There was this if you build it,
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 1: they will come notion, which is that's a movie. People
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 1: would say that. I said, no, that's a movie. That's
• 1:49:15
  Speaker 1: not real. That was like, you know, so you know, um,
• 1:49:23
  Speaker 1: when that, uh, when that flopped. Um it went bankrupt
• 1:49:28
  Speaker 1: not long after. I spent about a year there. Again.
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 1: It a very interesting experience, and to be able to
• 1:49:32
  Speaker 1: work with Al Franklin was an incredible honor. I'm a
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 1: great fan of his. I wish he was still in
• 1:49:36
  Speaker 1: the Senate. Rachel Mattow was our you know. I put
• 1:49:39
  Speaker 1: her into Morning Drive and she's had the celestrious career.
• 1:49:41
  Speaker 1: There were a couple of things came out of it
• 1:49:42
  Speaker 1: that are notable, but it was a failed business. And
• 1:49:47
  Speaker 1: Steve Earle had been on Artemus and he called me,
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 1: and I knew he was looking for a new manager
• 1:49:52
  Speaker 1: because he'd had a falling out with the guy who
• 1:49:53
  Speaker 1: had been managing him for years. And he called me,
• 1:49:56
  Speaker 1: says and I said, look, man, I don't know if
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 1: you'd be interested it, but this thing is going under.
• 1:50:02
  Speaker 1: And I was thinking about being a manager again. And
• 1:50:07
  Speaker 1: so he called me back an hour later and he says,
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 1: if you're in, I'm in. So I just figured there
• 1:50:12
  Speaker 1: it is, you know, I you know, I had a
• 1:50:14
  Speaker 1: client and uh, I still work with Steve Earl. I mean,
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 1: so it turns out to be the longest relationship I've
• 1:50:20
  Speaker 1: ever had with an artist. It's not seventeen years we've
• 1:50:22
  Speaker 1: we've worked together, and um, I just didn't want to quit.
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 1: I just didn't know what I would do if I quit.
• 1:50:28
  Speaker 1: You know, Now, because I've been writing more regularly, at
• 1:50:32
  Speaker 1: least I have some confidence that there's something else I
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 1: could do. You know, I published that book last year
• 1:50:37
  Speaker 1: about the sixties nine seven. I have this one coming
• 1:50:39
  Speaker 1: about Kurt. I've been writing regularly for the nation. I
• 1:50:43
  Speaker 1: finally kind of have a discipline as a writer that
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 1: I didn't have in my early twenties. But um, you know,
• 1:50:49
  Speaker 1: I I I like, uh, it's the only thing in
• 1:50:52
  Speaker 1: the world where I've had a role is the is
• 1:50:55
  Speaker 1: the rock and roll world. I don't, you know, It's
• 1:50:57
  Speaker 1: not like I could get another job doing anything thing else.
• 1:51:01
  Speaker 1: And I like working, and I like, I don't like
• 1:51:04
  Speaker 1: every minute of it, but you know, I I'm really
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 1: very grateful to have a little piece of it. And
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 1: I've had a very interesting ride at highs and low
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 1: is big and small, but you know, I still think
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 1: it's a honorable profession. And I don't know what else
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 1: to do. Okay, let's just drill down a little bit.
• 1:51:22
  Speaker 1: Steve Earle Steve Earle, you know, comes out in the
• 1:51:26
  Speaker 1: eighties as the new White Hope, makes these incredible records,
• 1:51:30
  Speaker 1: Guitar Town, etcetera. In a different area. If you're Steve
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 1: Earle today and you're approaching sixty, what does the business
• 1:51:37
  Speaker 1: look like for somebody like that? Uh, yeah, he's over sixty.
• 1:51:41
  Speaker 1: He's over sixty. He's five years younger than me. Um. Well,
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 1: the number one characteristic for an artist in a category
• 1:51:52
  Speaker 1: that includes him is that the primary business is is
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 1: selling concert tickets. You know that the records are are
• 1:52:00
  Speaker 1: are your legacy and their marketing tool for your concert business.
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 1: They're not your main source of income. Um The second
• 1:52:09
  Speaker 1: thing about the business is that it's about it's increasingly
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: about trying to monetize the super fan. It's not it's
• 1:52:19
  Speaker 1: it's hard to grow new fans. Every once in a while,
• 1:52:22
  Speaker 1: something happened. Somebody has a song in a movie or
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 1: a commercial, or or a magic song of some kind
• 1:52:27
  Speaker 1: that expands their audience when they're older. Um. You know,
• 1:52:31
  Speaker 1: Zevon expands this audience when he was dying, you know.
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 1: But more common for artists, whether it's Springsteen or Jackson
• 1:52:40
  Speaker 1: Brown or Steve Earl or you know fifty other names
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 1: that we could we could mention it. It's it's it's
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 1: about figuring out to maintain those fans and and some
• 1:52:52
  Speaker 1: of them will pay for uh you know, uh Golden
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 1: Circle tickets or uh a luxe editions signed things, uh
• 1:53:03
  Speaker 1: being able to come to the sound check. Um, you know,
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 1: it's about it's about servicing your super fans. It's it's
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 1: kind of a hybrid between the old music business and
• 1:53:12
  Speaker 1: kind of the business of being like a painter, where
• 1:53:15
  Speaker 1: you've got you know, it's kind of it's it's not
• 1:53:18
  Speaker 1: like someone spending a million dollars for a painting, but
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 1: it's also not like somebody just streaming something hundreds and
• 1:53:23
  Speaker 1: hundreds or millions of times. You know. It's it's it's
• 1:53:26
  Speaker 1: it's it's about it. It's about an intense group of
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 1: super fans, many of whom will pay more money. So
• 1:53:31
  Speaker 1: you've got venues like the City Winery that pay very
• 1:53:34
  Speaker 1: very well because they make so much money on the
• 1:53:35
  Speaker 1: wine and the food. You've got these performing arts centers, uh,
• 1:53:39
  Speaker 1: and then of course for the bigger artists. You know,
• 1:53:40
  Speaker 1: you've got two hundred and fifty dollar tickets that are
• 1:53:43
  Speaker 1: that are that are part of the ecosystem that was
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 1: unheard of. So so that's the world you know, it's
• 1:53:49
  Speaker 1: about it's about finding your fans uh and uh and
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 1: monetizing them um with and and and you you of
• 1:53:56
  Speaker 1: course everybody always wants new fans, but but if you're
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 1: trying to make sure you can pay your bills for
• 1:54:01
  Speaker 1: the year, it's about servicing the fans that you have.
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 1: So if you're someone like Steve Rrol, how many super
• 1:54:06
  Speaker 1: fans would you think he has? Well? Um, I mean
• 1:54:11
  Speaker 1: on Spotify it says eight hundred thousand people a month
• 1:54:14
  Speaker 1: visit his page, so that's a number I like. Um,
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 1: he's got um uh. He's a global artist. You know,
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 1: he tours. He's in Europe right now as we speak.
• 1:54:27
  Speaker 1: You know, he's he's you know, you can sell a
• 1:54:29
  Speaker 1: couple of thousand tickets and uh in London and Dublin
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 1: and Stockholm, Australia. You know, Canada has always been as
• 1:54:37
  Speaker 1: big as a market. So if he's going, he's selling
• 1:54:38
  Speaker 1: couple hundred tickets, couple of thousand, couple of thousand, ye
• 1:54:42
  Speaker 1: no big, Yeah, there's a couple of no no no
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 1: no no no no no, A couple of thousands. Yeah, yeah,
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 1: no so, um, a couple of thousand tickets. Sure, you
• 1:54:50
  Speaker 1: know he's got a band. Um. Sometimes he plays solo.
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 1: Obviously the margin is bigger when he plays solo. But
• 1:54:57
  Speaker 1: on the other hand, the key with the audiences is
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 1: to keep doing something different each time. Right now. In
• 1:55:02
  Speaker 1: the last American tour was him, Lucinda Williams, Dwight Yoakum
• 1:55:06
  Speaker 1: and Steve. They called the L S D Tour. Uh
• 1:55:09
  Speaker 1: you know. Uh. Then he did a cycle with him
• 1:55:12
  Speaker 1: and Sewan Colvin. They did a record together and they
• 1:55:14
  Speaker 1: toured together. Um. You know his next record is going
• 1:55:18
  Speaker 1: to be a record of Guy Clark songs. Uh. You know,
• 1:55:20
  Speaker 1: one of his mentor is one of the great Americana icons. Um.
• 1:55:25
  Speaker 1: He won a Grammy a few years ago for an
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 1: album he did of towns, fans and songs. You know,
• 1:55:29
  Speaker 1: Steve is very smart about trying to create a narrative
• 1:55:32
  Speaker 1: for each cycle because the main exposure vehicle is is
• 1:55:35
  Speaker 1: the old school media. You know, there's only there's some
• 1:55:38
  Speaker 1: radio stations that will play him. I mean here in
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 1: Los Angeles KCS and always play Steve, and there are
• 1:55:43
  Speaker 1: a w FUV and there's a noncommon you know, he
• 1:55:46
  Speaker 1: has a weekly show on serious radio and things like that.
• 1:55:49
  Speaker 1: But but kind of having the narrative that can cross
• 1:55:52
  Speaker 1: the old and new media is kind of a way
• 1:55:55
  Speaker 1: of letting fans know. So, like this year was thirtieth
• 1:55:58
  Speaker 1: anniversary of Copperhead Roads, so he did a Copperhead Road
• 1:56:00
  Speaker 1: tour and you know, that did about more ticket sales
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 1: than his last tour because he played the whole album.
• 1:56:09
  Speaker 1: It was easy. It was a one liner the elevator
• 1:56:12
  Speaker 1: pitcheets all of Copperhead Road and some and some other songs.
• 1:56:15
  Speaker 1: So it's it's it's the marketing part of it is
• 1:56:18
  Speaker 1: about a narrative. The economics is about what the ticket
• 1:56:21
  Speaker 1: price is, multiplied by how many people will buy the tickets,
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 1: adding to which the amount of merch you sell, and
• 1:56:27
  Speaker 1: making sure that you spend enough less than that between
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 1: the tour bus and the crew and what you pay
• 1:56:31
  Speaker 1: the musicians, so that there's a profit at the end
• 1:56:33
  Speaker 1: of it. You know, And if you can have a
• 1:56:36
  Speaker 1: thousand or two thousand fans and seventy rading markets around
• 1:56:40
  Speaker 1: the world, you can make a good living. You're not
• 1:56:42
  Speaker 1: going to become a billionaire or you know. Lifestyle is
• 1:56:45
  Speaker 1: the rich and familists, but it's it's it's it's a
• 1:56:47
  Speaker 1: definitely a good, good living. So the same would be
• 1:56:50
  Speaker 1: true of Bonnie Ray, Jackson Brown, you know, a whole
• 1:56:52
  Speaker 1: category of artists and and there's an artistry to a too.
• 1:56:56
  Speaker 1: I think as a fan of the last five years
• 1:56:59
  Speaker 1: of Leonard Owen's career, you know, to me or among
• 1:57:02
  Speaker 1: the most inspiring, profound artistic moments as a fan that
• 1:57:07
  Speaker 1: I ever had, those last several albums he made, those
• 1:57:09
  Speaker 1: last few tours he did. So you know, it's not
• 1:57:13
  Speaker 1: only about being as big as Drake. You know, you can't.
• 1:57:16
  Speaker 1: You can't compete with people fifty years younger than you were,
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 1: forty years younger than you. You know, youth has a
• 1:57:21
  Speaker 1: certain thing to it. But the exciting thing to me
• 1:57:24
  Speaker 1: about our generation is that there are is that emerge
• 1:57:27
  Speaker 1: that some of them have found a way to stay
• 1:57:29
  Speaker 1: relevant as artists, and some of them are just doing
• 1:57:31
  Speaker 1: all these shows obviously, but Leonard Cohen, to me, is
• 1:57:35
  Speaker 1: one of the great examples of someone in the latter
• 1:57:37
  Speaker 1: part of their career and not also doing some of
• 1:57:39
  Speaker 1: his best work. And I think Steve is doing great work.
• 1:57:42
  Speaker 1: I think Steve's last few records are are as good
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 1: as anything he ever did. I think Lucid the Williams
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 1: last few records are as good as anything she ever did.
• 1:57:49
  Speaker 1: And then there are other people whose best work is
• 1:57:51
  Speaker 1: twenty years or thirty years ago. You know, it's just
• 1:57:53
  Speaker 1: it's it's like any other kind of creative person, whether
• 1:57:55
  Speaker 1: it's a novelist. Not every novelist can do what Philip
• 1:57:58
  Speaker 1: Roth did, but Philip Browth did it right. And not
• 1:58:01
  Speaker 1: every filmmaker can stay relevant the way Scorsese does, but
• 1:58:04
  Speaker 1: there is a Scorsese. And it's just one of those
• 1:58:06
  Speaker 1: things about about aging. Some artists lose their inspiration as
• 1:58:11
  Speaker 1: they get older, and some keep it. So really, you've
• 1:58:15
  Speaker 1: been there from the beginning because you were awake when
• 1:58:17
  Speaker 1: the Beatles arrived. You're involved starting in six the Woodstock,
• 1:58:21
  Speaker 1: and you here today with all that perspective, What do
• 1:58:25
  Speaker 1: you think of music and the music business today? You know,
• 1:58:31
  Speaker 1: I tend to see things just through my own prism.
• 1:58:35
  Speaker 1: You you would be much better able to have an
• 1:58:38
  Speaker 1: overview than I do. My My professional life revolves around
• 1:58:42
  Speaker 1: a handful of artists who I work with, and then
• 1:58:45
  Speaker 1: if I get a new client, then I see it
• 1:58:47
  Speaker 1: through their prism and and uh, you know, I see
• 1:58:50
  Speaker 1: it through the prism of some of my friends who
• 1:58:52
  Speaker 1: manage other acts or who work with other artists. But
• 1:58:55
  Speaker 1: I'm not at Billboard anymore. I'm not at MTV. I'm
• 1:58:58
  Speaker 1: not you. I don't have to have it. It's not
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 1: my job description to have an overview, you know. Obviously, um,
• 1:59:06
  Speaker 1: streaming is how people are consuming music. I'm no different.
• 1:59:10
  Speaker 1: I I liked it better when we sold these physical
• 1:59:12
  Speaker 1: products because I understood the economics very well, and it
• 1:59:15
  Speaker 1: was it was a system that worked for a lot
• 1:59:18
  Speaker 1: of people. But I listened to of the music I
• 1:59:21
  Speaker 1: listened to on Spotify because it's so convenient, and there's
• 1:59:25
  Speaker 1: a few things they don't have that I have to
• 1:59:27
  Speaker 1: listen to in another way, But anything that's on Spotify,
• 1:59:30
  Speaker 1: that's how I'm going to listen to it. I mean,
• 1:59:32
  Speaker 1: obviously there's a subculture of audiophiles who like vinyl. It's
• 1:59:36
  Speaker 1: not that economically important, but those are the people who
• 1:59:38
  Speaker 1: buy the expensive concert tickets also, so those are super fans.
• 1:59:43
  Speaker 1: The concert business is probably as healthy as it's ever
• 1:59:46
  Speaker 1: been in my lifetime. The the the number of festivals
• 1:59:49
  Speaker 1: around the world, the amount of money people will pay
• 1:59:51
  Speaker 1: for tickets to things that they like, the continued role
• 1:59:55
  Speaker 1: that music has for wealthy, older audiences. So the kind
• 1:59:58
  Speaker 1: of the kind of uh, you know, Bruce Springsteen, the
• 2:00:04
  Speaker 1: face price on the best tickets to that show are
• 2:00:06
  Speaker 1: eight hundred and fifty dollars. You know. Um, that's not
• 2:00:09
  Speaker 1: a scalpers price, you know. Yeah, well you know that's
• 2:00:14
  Speaker 1: a good way of doing it. Um. And obviously stub
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 1: hub and other things like that too. But so I
• 2:00:21
  Speaker 1: think the live businesses as a business very vital. I
• 2:00:25
  Speaker 1: think the record business is being reinvented, and there are
• 2:00:28
  Speaker 1: fifty people a lot smarter than me who could talk
• 2:00:31
  Speaker 1: about what it's going to be. But obviously the aggregant
• 2:00:34
  Speaker 1: amount of money that's dreaming is generating is probably a
• 2:00:37
  Speaker 1: few years away from getting up to what it used
• 2:00:39
  Speaker 1: to be with with the physical product, how it's divided. Um,
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 1: I don't think that conversation is over. I think it's
• 2:00:46
  Speaker 1: a little weird, you know. Um, I pay my ten
• 2:00:50
  Speaker 1: dollars a month for Spotify, and so it is my
• 2:00:53
  Speaker 1: son and he probably listens to ten times as much
• 2:00:57
  Speaker 1: on Spotify as I do. So I might listen to
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 1: my Bob Dylan, you know, once a week and somebody
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 1: else is listening to Drake you know, a hundred or
• 2:01:06
  Speaker 1: two hundred times a week, but it's the same ten dollars.
• 2:01:09
  Speaker 1: So in that sense, Bob Dylan is kind of getting
• 2:01:11
  Speaker 1: screwed because they're paying based on the quantity of streams,
• 2:01:16
  Speaker 1: not based Well, there was a study once, the studies
• 2:01:18
  Speaker 1: about five years old at this point, where they allocated
• 2:01:22
  Speaker 1: it the way you're talking about it, and actually the
• 2:01:24
  Speaker 1: revenue went down for those martial artists. Now that has
• 2:01:27
  Speaker 1: not been redone since streaming is really gained traction. So
• 2:01:31
  Speaker 1: it's really about the math. Look, it's it's it's there
• 2:01:35
  Speaker 1: has to be a formula. Obviously. It's also a transition
• 2:01:39
  Speaker 1: in terms of the record deals. When see these first
• 2:01:42
  Speaker 1: came out, written into all the contracts was a packaging
• 2:01:47
  Speaker 1: deduction of twenty five or thirty because of the cost
• 2:01:50
  Speaker 1: of manufacturing see these. By the time those contracts were
• 2:01:53
  Speaker 1: over see these went down from costing three dollars and
• 2:01:56
  Speaker 1: fifty cents to manufacture to a quarter. So during these transitions,
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 1: the record companies make make a big margin, and then
• 2:02:04
  Speaker 1: as people renegotiate deals, these percentages you know obviously obviously changed.
• 2:02:10
  Speaker 1: So part of it is that. Part of it is
• 2:02:11
  Speaker 1: that the algorithm I think does favor um people with
• 2:02:16
  Speaker 1: an appeal to younger audiences than people with an appeal
• 2:02:19
  Speaker 1: to older audiences, because younger people are going to listen
• 2:02:21
  Speaker 1: a lot more. But it's still only ten dollars a
• 2:02:24
  Speaker 1: month if you listen to a five thousand streams a
• 2:02:27
  Speaker 1: month or five streams a month. But I don't know.
• 2:02:30
  Speaker 1: I'm not a math genius to know what to do
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 1: about it. But there are people thinking about this, and
• 2:02:34
  Speaker 1: I think we're gonna see some other models in the
• 2:02:36
  Speaker 1: last in the next few years. But obviously it's going
• 2:02:39
  Speaker 1: to become it's it's a big business. It's still gonna
• 2:02:42
  Speaker 1: be a big business. I'm not sure i'll be the
• 2:02:44
  Speaker 1: right person to have a leadership role in it, but
• 2:02:46
  Speaker 1: I still think I can represent artists of the generation
• 2:02:49
  Speaker 1: that I understand, and uh, I see things through the
• 2:02:54
  Speaker 1: prison of my clients, So it depends on on who
• 2:02:57
  Speaker 1: they are. But it certainly didn't die. You know, there
• 2:02:59
  Speaker 1: were a lot of people thought the record business was
• 2:03:01
  Speaker 1: going to die. I didn't. It's definitely bigger than it
• 2:03:04
  Speaker 1: was a couple of years ago because of the growth
• 2:03:05
  Speaker 1: of streaming, and it's there. Streaming is nowhere near mature yet.
• 2:03:10
  Speaker 1: You know, I think this whole idea of free has
• 2:03:13
  Speaker 1: to go by the way side, you know. And this
• 2:03:15
  Speaker 1: is a uh you know, when I got when I
• 2:03:18
  Speaker 1: was in Atlantic, I mentioned earlier Stone Temple Pilots. Was
• 2:03:23
  Speaker 1: this very important signing to me? And so they sold
• 2:03:27
  Speaker 1: I think four million on a record and then there
• 2:03:29
  Speaker 1: was a million four sold through the record clubs and
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 1: the margin on the front line sales was like four
• 2:03:36
  Speaker 1: dollars a unit or something. Once you were over a
• 2:03:38
  Speaker 1: million units is very profitable because your marketing course weren't
• 2:03:41
  Speaker 1: going up anymore. And on the record clubs the profit
• 2:03:44
  Speaker 1: was like fifty cents. And I used to say, why
• 2:03:47
  Speaker 1: are we doing this? Why are we doing this? And
• 2:03:48
  Speaker 1: no one would ever answer the question, and there was
• 2:03:50
  Speaker 1: nothing I could do about it was corporate decision. So
• 2:03:52
  Speaker 1: then I get the PolyGram and now I'm reporting to
• 2:03:55
  Speaker 1: Alan Levy, who's the worldwide head, not just not just
• 2:03:58
  Speaker 1: a regional head. And I asked him the same question.
• 2:04:01
  Speaker 1: I can't do a French accent, but he gave me
• 2:04:03
  Speaker 1: one of these young men, let me explain to you
• 2:04:04
  Speaker 1: how the world works. And you say, look, I get
• 2:04:07
  Speaker 1: fifty million dollar advanced at the beginning of the year
• 2:04:09
  Speaker 1: from the Columbia Records Club. I mean that might not
• 2:04:12
  Speaker 1: be at that exact number, but something like they said,
• 2:04:14
  Speaker 1: so I can plan my whole year. I know that
• 2:04:16
  Speaker 1: for sure we're profitable. And he said, the lower the
• 2:04:20
  Speaker 1: royalty the better because we have to split the royalty
• 2:04:23
  Speaker 1: fifty fifty with the artists. But the unrecouped amount we keep.
• 2:04:26
  Speaker 1: And I got another advance next year. That's how all
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 1: these initial deals were done with Apple and Spotify and everything.
• 2:04:33
  Speaker 1: I I know for sure, and and so that's um.
• 2:04:37
  Speaker 1: That's a short term high for the labels, even though
• 2:04:42
  Speaker 1: it undermines their long term model, because the long term
• 2:04:45
  Speaker 1: model has to be people paying for it free. The
• 2:04:47
  Speaker 1: advertising revenue generated is not remotely comparable to what it
• 2:04:52
  Speaker 1: is to sell products. But if you're getting ten dollars
• 2:04:54
  Speaker 1: a month, it's it's real. You know, you're multiplied by
• 2:04:57
  Speaker 1: a billion people or whatever. Mark Tiger said, you can
• 2:05:00
  Speaker 1: eventually do you know? That's a that's a that's a
• 2:05:03
  Speaker 1: bigger business than the old c D business. So I
• 2:05:05
  Speaker 1: think it's gonna be a big business. I don't know
• 2:05:07
  Speaker 1: what role I'll play in it. But it ain't going away,
• 2:05:09
  Speaker 1: and the live business has never gone away, and it's
• 2:05:12
  Speaker 1: probably healthier than ever. The digital world makes it easier
• 2:05:15
  Speaker 1: to superserve fans of individual artists, to identify them and
• 2:05:19
  Speaker 1: find them cheaper to market to them, and we found
• 2:05:22
  Speaker 1: that older people will pay a lot of money for
• 2:05:26
  Speaker 1: that live experience, even though there's all these things you
• 2:05:28
  Speaker 1: can do in a home theater and the quality gets
• 2:05:31
  Speaker 1: better and better. There's something about being in a room
• 2:05:34
  Speaker 1: full of people in real time, whether it's a sports
• 2:05:36
  Speaker 1: event or a or a musical event, that is different
• 2:05:41
  Speaker 1: from seeing it on a screen, and that has not
• 2:05:43
  Speaker 1: going away. And so, you know, I think it's that
• 2:05:46
  Speaker 1: people ask me, is there a music business young people
• 2:05:49
  Speaker 1: come to you can? So yeah, I don't know. You know,
• 2:05:51
  Speaker 1: you gotta get lucky, you gotta have hits. But it's
• 2:05:53
  Speaker 1: it's not going away, okay, And you personally relevant music
• 2:05:57
  Speaker 1: business maybe contained with the time you have on the planet,
• 2:06:01
  Speaker 1: anything you want to do, any dreams, unfulfilled bucket list
• 2:06:05
  Speaker 1: or certain desires. You know, I'm I'm really a bee
• 2:06:11
  Speaker 1: here now, guy, you know, I mean that's that's my
• 2:06:14
  Speaker 1: hippie roots are growing bigger and bigger as I get older.
• 2:06:18
  Speaker 1: You know, it's not about taking LSD but some of
• 2:06:20
  Speaker 1: the ideas that came with that about really you know,
• 2:06:25
  Speaker 1: one of my heroes and the people you know, wrote
• 2:06:29
  Speaker 1: a dedicated my last book too, is rondas you know,
• 2:06:32
  Speaker 1: Richard Albert, originally the lsd UH spokesperson who then became
• 2:06:38
  Speaker 1: a mystic and a teacher. And you know, to me,
• 2:06:40
  Speaker 1: it's really about just trying to in the moment be
• 2:06:42
  Speaker 1: a good person and do as good as I can
• 2:06:45
  Speaker 1: and appreciate the moment. And uh, I'm really enjoying writing.
• 2:06:50
  Speaker 1: I love working with you know, some of the artists
• 2:06:53
  Speaker 1: I work with, I get paid very well. For some
• 2:06:55
  Speaker 1: of them, I don't get paid anything for But as
• 2:06:58
  Speaker 1: long as as long as I can feel I'm doing
• 2:07:01
  Speaker 1: something useful in the moment, that's that's. That's that's I'm
• 2:07:04
  Speaker 1: trying to think that way more and more and less
• 2:07:06
  Speaker 1: and less about having a bucket list. I'm gonna I'm
• 2:07:10
  Speaker 1: in a non bucket list mode. I'm I'm gonna be
• 2:07:14
  Speaker 1: here now mode. Okay. Any regret that you didn't go
• 2:07:17
  Speaker 1: to college? Oh goodness, yeah, I mean I'm so grateful
• 2:07:21
  Speaker 1: for my life in general, and but boy, not having
• 2:07:26
  Speaker 1: a college education. I mean, I'm pretty well read by
• 2:07:29
  Speaker 1: just being you know, a didact, but not having that
• 2:07:33
  Speaker 1: credential and not you know, foreclosed a lot of things
• 2:07:37
  Speaker 1: that would have been probably interesting to do. But you
• 2:07:39
  Speaker 1: can't do everything in life. And I definitely grateful for
• 2:07:43
  Speaker 1: the life I've had so far, and so far so good.
• 2:07:45
  Speaker 1: So it worked out for me. I'm very glad my
• 2:07:47
  Speaker 1: kids both graduated from college and I told them that,
• 2:07:51
  Speaker 1: I said, don't the path I walked on doesn't exist anymore,
• 2:07:53
  Speaker 1: so I don't even think about that. The kids you
• 2:07:55
  Speaker 1: today are very smart. They know there's the haves and
• 2:07:58
  Speaker 1: the have nots, and they don't want to end up
• 2:08:00
  Speaker 1: one of the half. Yeah, so I um, but yeah,
• 2:08:04
  Speaker 1: you know, I'm just I like doing this podcast. I
• 2:08:07
  Speaker 1: I like writing. I like working with Betty Lovette on
• 2:08:11
  Speaker 1: her record of Dylan songs, and with Steve and Ben
• 2:08:15
  Speaker 1: Lee and you know the people I get to work with,
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 1: and I'm just trying to trying to do it one
• 2:08:19
  Speaker 1: day at a time as much as I as much
• 2:08:21
  Speaker 1: as I can. I I'm grateful for the rock and
• 2:08:23
  Speaker 1: roll business though it gave me a place in the world,
• 2:08:25
  Speaker 1: and as long as I can be of use to artists.
• 2:08:29
  Speaker 1: I'm quite happy with that vocation, you know. So we'll we'll,
• 2:08:33
  Speaker 1: we'll see what happens next. Well, we've heard your entire journey. Obviously,
• 2:08:37
  Speaker 1: there's much more depth underneath all these peaks that would
• 2:08:41
  Speaker 1: be interesting, but we only have a limited period of time. Danny,
• 2:08:44
  Speaker 1: thanks so much for coming and being on the podcast.
• 2:08:46
  Speaker 1: So so pleased to do it with you. Until next time,
• 2:08:50
  Speaker 1: it's Bob left Sets here tune in doing the Bob
• 2:08:53
  Speaker 1: Left Sets podcast once again. That was then Goldberg on
• 2:09:00
  Speaker 1: this week's episode of the Bob Left Sets Podcast, recorded
• 2:09:04
  Speaker 1: live at the tune In Studios in Venice, California. Thanks
• 2:09:08
  Speaker 1: so much for listening. Don't hesitate to email me feedback
• 2:09:11
  Speaker 1: at Bob at left sets dot com. Until next time,
• 2:09:15
  Speaker 1: It's Bob left Sets