Chapter 10
Business as performance art ... Chinese banquet as metaphor ... The clause that refreshes
BRUCE BOTNICK: My first-ever trip from LA to New York was with Jac, overnight on the red-eye—Jac never wanted to miss a business day. But he also wanted his sleep. In those days on a 707 they had a little settee just outside first class, for the stewardesses. Jac commandeered it and slept on it, all six-foot three of him, no matter what the stewardesses said. Jac was a firm believer that he was who he was, and this was the way to live it, and he did.
BILL SIDDONS: He was always clearly the guy in charge. He kind of put his shoulders back and lifted his chin and walked in a way that you went, “Who the fuck is that guy? He thinks he's somebody.” And he was somebody. He was regal. Not many others were.
DAVID BRAUN: He was seen as pompous by some, but I saw him as just acting out the way he felt about himself. He felt good, he was strong, he knew he was a leader.
PAUL WILLIAMS: He was the sort of guy you would think, “If I had to pick one of my friends to be the president of the United States,” well, Jac would come to mind.
PAUL NELSON: I voted for him for president once, a write-in vote. And Norman Mailer for vice-president, to write the story.
DAVE GAHR: Jac had style, mystique. He was mysterious. You couldn't put your finger on it. Most people didn't know where he was going, but he always knew.
BHASKAR MENON: Constantly an explorer. He is a man who will never have the peace of being content with the mediocre. There is no frontier or threshold that he would not wish to cross, and that's what makes him a fascinating fellow, a wonderful influence. He maintains a capability for stimulating vitality, a driving passion for the consequential. He is a man who improves you, because he does not rest.
DIANE GARDINER: With Jac it is all up, up, up, build, build, build. Life to us looks like this, but I sometimes think that life, to Jac—he can shrink it down and move around trees and countries. He does it all the time.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: He was an amazingly rapid assimilator, and in the process he could become a leader rather than a follower. I watched him study what it takes to be an executive, and that's when Elektra got into its big stride. I watched that growth and it was miraculous. Jerry Wexler and John Hammond, for two, were more spontaneous. Jac had a lot of spontaneous invention too, but he covered both sides. He'd go after it methodically, try to become the leading expert in whatever it was that he was chasing down. He was a student of life. In his way he attempted to become the impossible renaissance man, to know more about a subject than anyone else, to be the ultimate authority on dozens, hundreds, of details of complex living in the modern world.
THEODORE BIKEL: I was always intrigued by the fact Jac that got himself one of those novelty store pens that light up, with a bulb on the end that you pressed. I said, “Why?” And he said, “Because I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea, and I'm afraid I'm going to forget it by the time I wake up for good in the morning. So I have this pen.” It's very telling about Jac, that he couldn't afford to let go of an idea, even if it came in the middle of the night or out of a half sleep or half dream. Which indeed is where many good ideas come from. Except how many of us have a lighted pen?
BILL SIDDONS: Twenty different ways during my relationship of working with Jac I always thought he got the big picture, he really knew what he was doing there, he knew what was important in any particular scenario.
MARK ABRAMSON: Completely right in his thinking—thought out before it was said.
TERRY ROTHCHILD: He talked fast. His mind would make a leap; you could see it.
SUZANNE HELMS: One of the four quickest people I know, and one of the others is David Geffen.
SUE ROBERTS: I never saw Jac procrastinate about anything. Very decisive. He wouldn't say, "I'll think about it and get back to you, dear," or "Well, dear . . . " There was always an answer.
JAC: I take upon myself a high level of responsibility for everything, because it heightens my enjoyment when things go well. Being a confessed responsibility junkie has made me something of a perfectionist and demanding of others.
PEARL GOODMAN: From the time I started working for Jac as his secretary, he had an extreme way of looking formidable. Most people were scared of him. I have had many bosses in my life, some very impersonal, but Jac seemed to me to be the most formidable of all. His standards were way up there. That may be one reason people were afraid of him, they couldn't meet his standards. He would give you a hug, but at the same time he could be a frightener.
PAUL WILLIAMS: Visiting Jac at his office, you could feel the intensity of business being done, and when you talk about Jac's presence in a room—even when he wasn't there you could feel his authority. Fear would be too strong a word, perhaps, but everybody was aware of him looking over their shoulder all the time.
DAVID ANDERLE: He's somebody you didn't want to have mad at you.
PEARL GOODMAN: He was a good boss in many ways. He was not a good boss in his stinginess with salaries. His raises were very meager.
MEL POSNER: After I was at Elektra for a few years, I said, "Jac, it's great, it's wonderful being here, but how do I make some money?" And Jac said, "Well, we're going to create a bonus system." And he created a really nice situation for me, that in addition to my salary I would have a bonus of a certain percent of the sales over wherever the sales were last year. It wasn't a lot of money, but it was a signal to me that he was willing to allow me to participate in the success and the growth. At the end of every year I would prepare a document which would detail, this is our sales on this thing, this is the returns, this is the net, this is where we were, this is what I earned over here. It went on for a couple of years, and one year the growth was really stronger, and Jac said, “OK, now you have a ceiling.” That was Holzman.
MARK ABRAMSON: Jac had me intimidated. He would have me over the barrel. It's like Lyndon Johnson saying, "You don't know the facts here, you don't know what's going on. If you knew all the facts, you would see that there's no way of not bombing Hanoi," or whatever he was bombing—"There's this and this and this, you don't know that, so this is how it has to be." But I have to say that it was very seldom that Jac had to do that with me, because I kind of would go along with anything. He had the right person in me for that, in that I dealt with everything like, "Oh, thank you." But inside I was seething because I felt disempowered so much of the time.
FRITZ RICHMOND: This was a subject of much debate, why people liked to work for Jac. Well, he's just the kind of guy who seemed to appreciate what you did, noticed what you did. He was a very aware person, and word would get to him when his people had made an extra effort—he could tell in the sound of records, and in other ways. And even if he didn't tell you in money, you knew that he was glad that you had gone the extra yard.
JAC: I gave a lot of thought to finding the exact right present for people. I would begin my Christmas shopping months early, to have time to carefully match the gift to the givee.
IAN RALFINI: He remembers people's names and wives and birthdays. And odd little things that he will throw into a conversation. I thought he must keep lists, there's no way he could remember all this.
CARLY SIMON: He gave me my first pair of boots, from the Chelsea Cobbler. I still have them.
SUE ROBERTS: I remember an incredible enamel cigarette case that he brought back to me from Europe, kind of a take-off on the Naked Maja, but with these two Arabian-looking guys leering at it. It was wonderful, except it was a little too small for cigarettes, and it took me a long time to understand what Jac was giving it to me for—just right for a joint.
BILL SIDDONS: The only weakness that any of us ever saw was that Jac could not take us out to dinner without counting up and double-checking the restaurant tab.
JAC: I still check the tab. Over twenty percent of the time it's wrong, and usually in the restaurant's favor.
Counselor Irwin Russell (left) and Jac, in Aspen 1968
IRWIN RUSSELL: Jac had a combination of business skills and musical taste. I always used to describe him as close as you could be to being an attorney without the formal credential, to an accountant without the formal credential, to an engineer without the formal credential.
SUZANNE HELMS: He took a lot of pride in his engineering. He knows a lot more than most, and he was very interested and supportive of his engineering staff. I've known several other heads of record companies, and Jac had more all-around knowledge. He knows about color transparencies and separations and those kinds of things, that an awful lot of guys who ran record companies didn't know diddly about. He's an all-around person.
NESUHI ERTEGUN: A perfectionist. Uncompromising. These are not common qualities.
JAC: I applied a film producer's sensibility to record making: to creatively bring the best elements together, to keep the process running smoothly and to assure the result.
I would have much preferred to call record producers “recording directors,” and tried to do just that on several releases, only to get them upset and demanding their conventional credit back. As Production Supervisor I was ultimately responsible—overseeing and tying together the many and varied aspects of record making; approving the material, making sure the record was sequenced properly, the artwork appropriate, the label copy correct, the record well mastered, all to achieve a harmony to the finished album with no distracting elements.
Following the music means more than tracking a trend line in the business. Whenever I have been stumped about how to set up or launch a recording, I have always found the answer by listening to the music until it tells me what I need to know.
ANN PURTILL: Jac used to say, “The first song on an LP should make you want to listen to the next song, the last song on side A ought to make you want to turn it over, and the last song on Side B should make you want to hear more from that artist.”
IRWIN RUSSELL: He would predict what he would sell of each upcoming record, saying, “This is the way I think we'll come out at the end of the year,” and he was usually right.
PAUL NELSON: He had this thing, even when Elektra got very big—at Christmas time, other times too, he'd go down to Sam Goody's or Tower Records and work as a clerk for a few days, because he wanted to keep in touch, not to lose the feeling of what the kid buying the record was asking for, and he did it for years and never told anybody.
BRUCE BOTNICK: He would allow himself to be a voyeur of the whole music scene and the whole music business scene, but only to a limit. If he didn't want to participate, if he felt that he was going to be out on his own and lose control, he wouldn't do it. Which I think is a responsible thing to do. He's always been a very responsible person. I've done it with my own companies. What's good for you is good for your company, what's bad for you is very bad for your company—which is in turn very, very bad for you in the long run. Jac always knew that he was on the edge of danger. He could walk that line and kind of put his foot in the water and see if it was safe and see that there were no sharks there. There are always sharks. But Jac never got his foot bitten off. Not that I ever saw.
MARK ABRAMSON: He took a lot of risks, but they were well calculated. So many of them paid off that probably for him they weren't risks. He really saw the possibilities and the consequences of what he did. He knows how to steer his course. He has the ability to think through every situation like a chess master.
BRUCE BOTNICK: Jac always signed acts with his stomach and his heart, acts that he would listen to at home at night with Nina.
JAC: I wanted to take musical and artistic risks that would stretch our opportunities. But I also needed to stay in the game, so I tried to avoid stupid things—
MEL POSNER:—But he took risks all the time that a weaker person might not have taken, I mean risks in the sense that Jac put himself on the artistic line all the time. He said, “I believe in this artist. Whether he sells ten records or not, I believe in this artist.” Jac was willing to stake his reputation all the time. And that's what people respect him for. Yeah.
IRWIN RUSSELL: A business-oriented mind, and an understanding of cultural tastes. An organized mind. In touch with reality. And a driving ambitious guy.
MEL POSNER: The whole premise was that one day we were going to be gigantic. The thought that Jac had instilled was that Elektra was going to go public, make a lot of money in the public offering, and we were going to share. The whole theme of our scrimping and saving and not doing for ourselves was that it was going to affect the multiple, and therefore let's not do that. And we did without for a long time—profit sharing and pension plans and all those other perks—because it was in our interest, based upon the promise that one day there would be a payoff, a big upside for us.
BRUCE BOTNICK: I remember the first time Jac and Elektra came to record on the West Coast, they had brought their own tape because they knew that the studio would add a markup. He saved money that way. It cost less to make the album. When it recouped, the artist got his money sooner, Jac got his money sooner. It was just good business.
JAC: When there was enough money to fly first class I still flew coach, because I knew that if I saved the few hundred dollars difference, I would get it back manyfold in a public offering or merger.
Irwin and I thought that a potential public offering might be more attractive if we diversified the company. We bought a radio station in Hartford, Connecticut and made a sizeable investment in a speaker company, but both became time-consuming distractions and more than I could responsibly handle. So I returned to the core, which was always records.
I needed to produce albums that made my heart sing. Music was where I lived and I was driven to get it right, not only for myself but for all who would listen.
JANN WENNER: The first time I became aware of the Elektra name was before I started Rolling Stone, when I was at Berkeley. The first Butterfield Blues Band album said, “This Record Is Meant to Be Played Loud,” and I just thought that was a neat thing. That one little line always made me aware of Elektra Records. You felt that it meant something special, there would be something intelligent there, and indeed it was the case. Later, with Rolling Stone, Jac cared about it. He was an adamant supporter, placing his advertising, building up the print medium. There was something valuable about his presence. What he did mattered to us. Whoever was signed to Elektra de facto was considered an important artist. They didn't just sign anything that came along and throw it out.
JAC: I always tried to see how few releases we could issue and still get the most out of them.
STEVE HARRIS: I noticed how careful everything was. If it wasn't right, it would go back and be listened to over and over again.
People that knew music, and had full libraries of music, would buy Elektra records unsolicited—they would walk out of the store with it in the shrink wrap.
TIMOTHY WHITE: Elektra was part of the new seriousness of rock. It was OK if something failed, because Elektra tried for reach—if the reach exceeded the grasp, at least there was reach.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: Jac was on the perimeter of the American music scene which would become mainstream within three to five years. We had stuff on record and out years before the rest of the world got onto it. So the Elektra image of being very avant garde, very hip, was maintained.
LENNY KAYE: At college I started noticing that a lot of records that I was gravitating towards were Elektra releases, especially after the first Love album. Any record I bought on Elektra would prove interesting. I found their signings to be fascinating. Definitely intellectually challenging. No other label was like that. They were cutting edge.
JAC: David Mamet talks about the culture of Chicago when he was a teenager—a mixture of the populist and the intellectual, the model being the autodidact, the self-taught, what Mamet calls people who so loved the world around them that they were moved to investigate it further, either by creating works of art or by appreciating those works. He and his friends would gravitate to “Midnight Special” on WFMT on Saturday night, a mix of show tunes, satire, folk, blues. His heroes were those with what he called “vast talent and audacity and no respect”—and the interesting thing is that so many of those who stood out for him had an Elektra connection: Shel Silverstein, Lord Buckley, Bob Gibson and Hamilton Camp, Studs Terkel.
TIMOTHY WHITE: Elektra always had an identity for me. Growing up in Montclair, in the New Jersey ‘burbs, smart friends of my parents would have Theodore Bikel records, and that was a sign that this was a hip household, it would be cool to think out loud here and not get your knuckles rapped. I remember Judy Collins records, I think through a girl friend of my older brother. I liked the Butterfield Blues Band; I was aware that what they were playing was between Muddy Waters and rock and roll, between black and white culture. There was a lot of cross-pollination between electric blues and ethnic folk, and Elektra had these hybrid qualities. Elektra would take on things like “The Blues Project.” Paul Rothchild was a name associated with interesting music; if I had been in a good viable band I would have wanted to sign with Elektra, and maybe Paul Rothchild would have produced. Vanguard was dry, in a way not heavily involved in pop culture, like a service organization. Folkways was ethnically funkier, because Moe Asch was obsessive. Elektra could strike a balance. Elektra took a lot of acts out of the coffee houses and gave them an audience they wouldn't have had—take someone out of left field, graft existing things onto one another. I went to college at Bensalem, part of Fordham, in the Bronx. Bensalem was Catholic anarchist, experimental, free-spirited, a hippie bordello. Arthur Lee and Love was a big album there, everybody played the fuck out of it. Love was also part of the refined hipness of the time—black and white hippies in a hip band, and Elektra calling no attention to the black and white. And they had Nonesuch too, a very cool, hip classical label. Elektra was a very canny label. It was always a literate label, contemplative, a world apart. It did a lot of good helping people understand the roots and capillaries of pop music. It was a sweet spot, the place to be.
MO OSTIN: At Warner Records, I always looked at Elektra as some kind of model. I liked their repertoire. The thing you could not escape was the quality of the music—a bunch of wonderful artists—and the quality of the look. And I certainly thought Jac was as smart a record executive as I'd come across.
LARRY HARRIS: Artists loved to be at Elektra, and would sometimes take a lesser deal up front, because it was instilled that we would pay them on the hits, and pay them fairly, and they had a better chance of winning here, and they would buy that, because the alternative is shitting up against a wall.
GEORGE STEELE: The part of the business I had come from exploited artists—at independent record companies, take some black artist and do a blues album and give them a bottle of whiskey.
DAVID ANDERLE: There were companies that would pay artists in heroin.
GEORGE STEELE: The attitude of Elektra toward an artist was something I'd never witnessed before. It was warm, nurturing. The artist was not a property. The label was for the artist, not the artist for the label. That was what was different, and that's what struck me so hard. I think about it now, it almost brings tears to my eyes.
JAC: Over time our recording contracts had taken on weight and complexity and I felt we should try to simplify them. Most contracts were worded like insurance policies and it was the record company that was protected. The language was stiff, intimidating and open to wide interpretation. Just the sheer heft of the documents would alarm any new artist. Irwin Russell, Sue Roberts and I decided to recast the agreements, to write them so that an artist could readily understand them.
SUE ROBERTS: Irwin and I spent a couple of days drafting.
JAC: We divided the agreement into two documents. The first was a straightforward letter to the artists, signed by me, telling them how gratified we were that they had chosen to record with us; and then in plain language we outlined the term of our arrangement, amount of the advance, number of albums to be recorded and the royalty rate. This is what the artist really wants to know. And we got it all on a single page.
Attached to the letter was a pre-printed form which covered the many special conditions necessary in such agreements, with bold headlines for easy reference. In a fit of candor, I called the attachment “The Small Print,” which is what it was, and had those words printed large at the top.
If a lawyer read it carefully there were little drolleries in the text, the most famous of which was our “love and affection” clause. It read: “Label agrees to treat artist with love and affection. Artist in turn agrees to treat executives of label with a modicum of respect.” Lawyers being lawyers, some objected, and inserted their own language to the effect that a breach of this paragraph by either side was not to be construed as a material breach of the entire agreement. Ah, lawyers . . .
SUE ROBERTS: The love and affection clause was meant to be humorous and it was meant to be serious. It certainly took everybody by surprise. People sat up and noticed: “Wait a minute, there's something about this guy.”
DANNY FIELDS: Jac always wanted to do the right thing for the right reason. I never saw hypocrisy or venality or political ambition.
NINA HOLZMAN: In a business where you have epidemics of lawsuits, Jac almost never got sued. And I can't think of a suit that prevailed on the merits. Jac would always say, “I'm not in the suing business, I'm in the music business.”
BILL GRAHAM: I'd trust him with the combination of the safe. When I first got into this business, I talked to agents and managers, and I didn't care for many of them. If you're a businessman, fine, but don't try to convince me that you care for the artists. Jac was the first one in the industry that I met who not only had the power to effect positive things, he ran his label in a much more humane fashion.
TONY GLOVER: He was the first rich guy I met that wasn't an asshole.
JANN WENNER: There came a time when Rolling Stone had gotten into very perilous financial straits, like at the edge of bankruptcy, for several reasons, most of them having to do with immaturity and hubris. Jac was one of the people I went to borrow money from. He said, “Sure,” in a second.
DAVID BRAUN: And he was not just a friend in business to get a better deal, he was a friend in need for people who worked for the company.
ANN PURTILL: It went beyond that. My first job at Elektra was to review tapes that came in, give them a fair listen and comment on them, more than a “Thank you, we're not interested,” a wonderful all-purpose rejection letter that says nothing. What Jac said was, “They're sending us their life, their song, because they like and trust Elektra. We have to respond to them in kind.”
ARTHUR GORSON: Jac was not predictable.
PETER SIEGEL: He would change from time to time, sometimes warm, sometimes cold and steely. At times the company would be like a total freakout, at other times Wall Street.
ARTHUR GORSON: You couldn't read him. He had mood swings. Sometimes he was a nice guy, sometimes he was very cold. That's not unusual in business. But Jac would surprise you with a curt answer when he's supposed to be your friend—and then come back and feel badly about it, and try to make amends.
JAC: I did have mood swings, but if I was not always even-tempered it was usually due to pressure, trying to do too much and do it well when you had really bitten off more than you could chew. Yet, at the still center of things, there was a conviction that even though I had my problems you could still trust my word, and if things got really tight people would be taken care of. This emotional shorthand was expressed in a heartfelt hug, a smile and the understanding that we were all in it together.
IRWIN RUSSELL: Basically, Jac wanted to do the right thing. He probably treated people better than they treated him.
DANNY FIELDS: He was nicer than the people who worked for him.
SUZANNE HELMS: Give him a show of trust and admiration, and Jac's more vulnerable than many people. I think he's not sophisticated in those relationships.
PEARL GOODMAN: He had a certain kind of naiveté—not about business, but about people. I don't think he knew the darker side of people. For example, I don't think he sensed that Paul Rothchild was a bit of an operator. He took to people or he didn't take to people, but I never felt he had a sharp eye for people as people, rather a sharp eye for people as useful to him in the work.
JAC: We were looking for people who could handle a variety of tasks, and we sometimes hired more by instinct than anything else. I mean, this whole thing was done by instinct.
SUZANNE HELMS: Jac's consistent in the things that he loves in people. We're all difficult or unique or something.
MARK ABRAMSON: Jac was a Virgo, and it wasn't just Jac. So many people at Elektra were Virgos—I think every recording engineer.
FRITZ RICHMOND: Jac was always personable. He came around and said hello to everybody. He wasn't one of those guys that comes in the side door to his own office and you never see him. You saw Jac.
BRUCE BOTNICK: There wasn't anything that Jac didn't know about. Which is the way it should be—when you've got a company that's manageable, you want to keep a pulse on everything. Down to who's dating who, what ménage à trois is happening in what department. Jac was up on it. He knew it all. He loved that intimacy with the employees. And he could smooth things out. He could be a friend to everybody, in their own way, because everybody's truly different. I know he did with me.
ARTHUR GORSON: Jac was a real guy, he had emotions, he had feelings. You could go through things with him. He seemed very tall, but you never felt he was looking down. And he was vulnerable himself.
MEL POSNER: People liked the idea of taking care of Jac, I think. He's not a person who projects that kind of thing, but they do want to take care of him.
JAC: Especially women. I've been blessed with a number of women in my life who have been caring and protective. Certainly Nina, and most of the ladies with whom I worked, made a real effort to make sure that I didn't get hurt.
What I'm about to say now comes from another time. The Sixties attitude towards women feels at a longer distance than almost anything else from my Elektra days—certainly further than the music. What follows comes from that era.
The people who could most upset an office were the women. If they were unhappy or working their way through problems, everyone could feel it even if they did not hear the words—there was a kind of off-kilter, high-frequency hum in the air, a vibration in the floorboards. I knew that women did the hard, routine work without which nothing happens, so I made an effort to keep them involved and happy. Women who were content, who found emotional satisfaction in their jobs, tended to settle in and it took a lot of outside influence to steal them away.
I would go round to each of the offices in the morning and speak with the girls and give them a hug. I just loved the warmth.
You could send women out on specific assignments, and when they were on business, they were on business. When the men traveled they were looking for chances to score. We even tried a woman in radio promotion but the world wasn't that enlightened; sexual favors were solicited, and I just felt it was unfair to put anyone in that position.
I noticed that women tended to work co-operatively, with less destructive ego. Men were very sensitive to turf and pecking order. This was not an issue with the women, or at least not so much of an issue. They were pleased to be recognized for what they contributed and they knew how to get the job done.
I am comfortable with women and have never been edgy about them, so promoting a woman to an executive position wasn't a big deal. We had more women in positions of real responsibility than any other record company—and most other businesses.
So there were large areas of the company I no longer had to be concerned about because I knew the ladies were taking care of it. They genuinely liked each other, and I knew they were fiercely loyal to the company and to me.
PEARL GOODMAN: I was proud to be Jac's secretary. I would go to record industry meetings where he'd speak—he was a marvelous speaker—and I'd say to myself, “That's my boss.”
SUE ROBERTS: Such a sense of pride. I guess it's got to be geared directly to Jac for having such an ability to sense real talent, real genius, real success. You'd go to an Elektra artist's concert, or you'd come into the office and the new album would be out and you'd listen to it, and you really awaited that. All that was part of a sense of, “We're all doing this together, and we're all part of why this is a success, a feeling of family.” And that was all Jac-driven.
ANN PURTILL: We would have a hit, get something on the charts, and George Steele—he looked about twelve—would march up and down the hall blowing a bugle. It was lovely.
JANN WENNER: Those were great days, about the time I met Jac. Everyone was involved. Elektra wasn't a business, it was an ongoing drama of a kind, very meaty artistically.
DAVID ANDERLE: And all of us were brought together by Jac. We loved working with each other, we hung out with each other even when we weren't working.
JAC: Good Chinese food was a staple of the Elektra diet. All I ever had to do was yell, “Anyone for Chinese food when we get done?” and all hands would eagerly sign on.
I was musing one evening about the size of the perfect company, that fit my way of doing things, and concluded that it would contain fourteen people, no more than could comfortably be seated around a large, family-sized Chinese banquet table.
DAVID ANDERLE: Now, was Jac a father figure? No, he was too young. But he was somebody who you wanted to please, you were very aware of wanting to please Jac, so therefore he becomes like a father figure in a way.
SUZANNE HELMS: I don't think I'd call him a daddy. He was a lovable tyrant. Tyrant may be a bit strong, but maybe not.
BILL HARVEY: Slowly but surely we all came around to Jac's way. It was Jac's life, but it wasn't my life. It was my vocation, but that was about it. But the company started to grow. Things got more complicated. There were more responsibilities for a guy like Mel or me. Anybody who worked for Elektra Records, they ate, slept, breathed Elektra.
JAC: Most everyone considered me a control freak and I was. The careers of artists are an awesome responsibility, and the traces came together in one set of hands, ultimately.
At the same time, over the years I learned to trust my closest associates, most especially Mark, Paul, Tracey, Suzanne Helms, David Anderle, Clive Selwood, Keith, Russ Miller and a few others. They were happily allowed all the room they needed, but each of them knew when I should be consulted.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: When I first came to Elektra, my arrival time at the office would get later and later and later, until I was arriving at about quarter to five. Jac called me into his office and said, “Paul, I love your work, but you've got to get here earlier, we have a business to run, you have telephone calls to answer, there are conversations I have to have with you.” I was a night owl, I did my best work at night. I would vanish at six o'clock and actually do my production work. I would leave at four or five in the morning go home, crash, get up, come back and do the same thing. Jac said, “I want you to be here when we open, every day.” I said, “Jac, if that's what you want, fine. I will do my best to deliver. I can put out a lot of product, but my work is going to suffer. But I'm going to try to prove myself wrong.” After about two weeks he called me in and asked for a progress report on a project I was working on. I told him I had made virtually no progress: “I'm on the phone all day long. The phone rings and I get involved with managers and agents and the artists and their day to day problems, and I'm exhausted, and I leave at about seven o'clock and I've accomplished about ten percent per day of what I used to.” And Jac said, “Paul, you come to work whenever you feel like it. I like it your way better.” And that's something I saw throughout his entire career—understanding what it is that a specific creative person in his milieu needed, and he gave it to them. Go for it, just deliver—that's all that Jac ever asked of people, to deliver, because he expected it of himself, and what he expected of himself he expected from the people around him.
JAC: Paul was the exemplar of the multi-talented person able to do more than one thing well, which is something I looked for in all our people. I wanted to retain Elektra's compactness and agility, so one person able to wear many hats well was a real plus. It kept the overhead down, it minimized the number of necessary personal interactions, which is always a problem in any company. It gave us all a bit more freedom and we could fill in for each other. And it made a more exciting game for everyone.
If there was one thing I think I was good at, although I didn't realize it at the time, it was setting up a good game. You were never bored when you came to work. You might forget to go home, but you knew your day had been interestingly spent.
MEL POSNER: I start thinking about all of those wonderful memories of Jac and my growing up, and I realize that all of those experiences were learning experiences. He was very good at that, he had the patience and the ability to see beyond what your talents were today and look at the future. He was an excellent teacher.
ARLYNE ROTHBERG: Jac took us by the hand and walked us out to the end of the pier and showed us the ocean.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: I had a particularly fascinating relationship with Jac. He was only my senior by four or five years, something like that, but he and my father could have been brothers. My father was an Englishman, an English Jew, stern, cold, demanding. Closed, brilliant, logical mind. Taught me the whole logic side of life. I never really knew Jac's father, I only met him once, but I would suspect a very similar thing. I think Jac has to be father to mankind because he had to be his own father. He had to deny the fathering he had, create another person in himself, give himself the rules of the world.
JAC: Paul, as usual, is on target. Though my dad tried, he wasn't able to break through his own emotional shell, and I unconsciously mimicked some of his less endearing qualities. I hated that part of me and began to re-create myself as a kinder, more caring person. At first it felt like an act but after a while it came naturally.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: Here's something that I don't know if Jac ever picked up on. I was working in the control room, it was way after hours, around eight o'clock, and we had a conversation, and my mind was on the project, and I said, “Well, listen, Dad . . . ”
It was one of those great Freudian slips. It embarrassed me, and I covered it. I don't know if Jac heard it, if it registered.
JAC: Oh, I heard it, and took it for the kind of endearment that had to slip out because Paul wouldn't have been comfortable speaking those words more directly.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: Jac became my surrogate father. I did things for him I never did for my father. I mean, I gave to Jac the things that my father would so dearly have wished for. There have only been three men in my entire life who taught me how to live a full, productive, meaningful life, that I have admired to the extent that I would literally do anything for them. All three I met in Greenwich Village in the Fifties, and Jac is one.
