Chapter 18
Guns of the White Panthers ... Motherfuckers of the East Village ... A Stooge in diapers, bleeding on Park Avenue ... A loaf of Bread and a promise kept ... And who knows where the time goes?
JAC: While Paxton was forming and fulminating and falling apart, Elektra was turning more and more into a corporation.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: I remember the day in 1967 Jac walked up to me in the hall and said, "Paul, this is the first year we're going to break five million, gross." There were about fourteen or fifteen of us on the payroll. And then all hell broke loose. The company got huge. Jac was running a corporation. The record part of it was tangential for a long time.
JAC: The company began to separate along tactical and artistic lines. Suddenly the tactical, which had always been there but had never had much visibility, acquired more people. Marketing, foreign licensing, music publishing, business affairs, accounting, inventory control, quality control—those departments began to grow. At the size we were approaching, without those systems there would be chaos. When the service aspects become blatantly visible, the creative people resent that they are no longer the princely constituency. But for every issue there was now a business component, requiring a business person to be involved.
GEORGE STEELE: Growing up, I was picking and packing records in a warehouse in LA, and I also had the opportunity of working the front desk. Mel Posner would come to town, and I always looked forward to when he would make a sales presentation, because unlike many of the other sales managers he would come well armed with a very sophisticated approach. His presentation was typically New York and bordered on getting one's attention in a rather loud way, always backed up with very specific hard reasons why certain things had better damn well happen based on certain criteria. Mel was a driving force. When he came into town, people came to attention. He was always incredibly sincere. The integrity of the associations was almost profound in the way that people would admire the man, the person. And when it came down to selling records, man, he was the best. He made the map.
When I finally came to work at Elektra, imagine me being able to sit in the conference room at La Cienega and being introduced to the data processing; how they planned to monitor sales, and be able to tie in the credits and debits and accounts payable and advertising scenarios and inventory control and management. As an independent company that didn't have the resources of a parent company—not an RCA Victor—to employ that data processing was not only cutting edge in terms of its sophistication in approaching a vision, but it was a huge marketing tool. If you made the sales, you made the money. You could do all the creative work you want, but ultimately you gotta sell records, because records generate revenue, which propels the system.
Mel was responsible for sales. And as someone working in sales, I felt I could never do enough homework, I could never be aware enough, I always had to work extra hard to ensure that I was very much up to speed on every one of the projects. I could only have one gear, top speed. And I had better be one hundred percent accurate one hundred percent of the time, because I'm gonna get a phone call from Mel. He's the driver. He's the taskmaster.
Jim and Mel Posner
JAC: Mel could be tough. Whatever he's telling you and selling you, it comes through. His method was to get a little gruff and act disappointed with a staffer not doing his best. Mel conveyed his message with vocal timbre and gestures—he's investing a hundred percent of himself, you were his friend and you were falling short, and ultimately Mel was going to have to explain to me, and you wouldn't want to put Mel in that position.
It was reassuring to have had Mel with me through the growth years, both of us learning on the job. And Irwin Russell, not on staff, but a calm outside intelligence to add wisdom and perspective. I also had my problem children within the company, most notably Bill Harvey among the old guard. Bill had been around since the scuffling days, and we shared history, but Bill was proprietary and assertive, not just about the art department, but about the whole company. His ambition far exceeded his skills. Bill had been able to keep his drinking within reason; now he began to drink at lunch. Alcohol was his enemy but none of us could convince him.
My brother Keith was an essential point person, smartly handling a wide range of administrative detail. He was in charge of less than romantic but sensitive areas like inventory control, which were critical to our ability to function. He knew about computers, had worked with them in the army. I knew we needed data processing, I just didn't know how to go about it. Keith was like a universal joint. He's the guy who's there earliest and stays latest and makes sure everything gets done. He took an appalling amount of abuse from people within the company because we shared the same last name; shit was directed at him that was meant for me. Of course, not to show even a hint of nepotism, I probably treated him less well than I did others. He was my brother, and I could trust him absolutely, and I think one of my greatest failings was not trusting more in his judgments of people.
Elektra gang celebrates Judy's first gold album. Back row (left to right): Bill Harvey, Mark Abramson, Judy Collins, Jac, Larry Harris, Mel Posner, Keith Holzman. Front row (left to right): kneeling, Steve Harris; Paul Rothchild; Nina Holzman
To supervise business affairs, I hired Larry Harris from CBS, a seasoned music attorney who knew the ropes. When Larry told Clive Davis he was coming to Elektra, Clive called me and said, "If you're hiring people of Larry's caliber we all better be prepared for tougher competition."
Larry was needed because the music business was getting tougher. Early on I signed an artist directly. The contract was simple. As the music business starting making the financial pages, the deals got bigger, more byzantine, with higher demands and greater detail—read "nitpicking." Everyone wanted a piece and the piece came from the hide that was seen as the richest, meaning the record company. Some artists' lawyers were working on percentages. Managers took large slices. Producers came "attached" to projects. Suddenly there were demands to provide extras beyond the basics of a recording studio and musicians. We were asked for band equipment, living support before an artist ever made their first album, then tour support. It resembled the military at war. For every soldier in the field you needed five in close support.
This kind of swelling occurs whenever an industry comes of age. There was such an explosion of detail, that if I got too caught up, my perspective would be dulled. I'd much rather save myself for the broad-stroke decisions.
I had become a Swiss army knife. All the tools were there, but not the tools that I would have chosen to do every job on the scale the job now had to be done. I would need dedicated tools for that task. Larry Harris was that tool in the area of business affairs.
SUE ROBERTS: Larry was very steely, very aggressive of eyes, partly out of distrust, partly out of intelligence, partly out of quickness. You knew that he was not someone to fuck with. But just by his aggressiveness, his very nature, he got some really good things done.
LARRY HARRIS: Elektra went through the same kind of changes that any company goes through when it goes from being a small, family-type operation to a medium-size successful corporation. It became more of a job to run the company rather than to make the music. It was no longer a family. It wasn't six people, it was sixty. It became more fragmented, more political.
I was resented a lot when I came, because I had so much authority and freedom. People look back on Elektra and say, "What a wonderful place." But it wasn't Camelot. It was dirty, all that went on. Most of the artists never saw that. They were not the people on the inside who saw what was going on, including Jac, who fostered it. Mel Posner and Bill Harvey were very political. Bill was an artistic genius. Jac's genius was in recognizing that; his shortcoming was allowing that to get out of hand. Mel equally had an area in which he was very good. Jac's failing was the same there. Or in allowing the situation to develop politically. For all Jac's talent as a record executive—creative, business, marketing, et cetera—he could have been better with people.
GEORGE STEELE: I never knew what Larry did, other than help solve problems or create problems. My perception was definitely some of both. It was a phenomenon of the growth of the company. Larry had to put a harness around it, and he put his personality into making sure that the growth was proper, and that became Larry Harris-ism. My perception was that it was cumbersome, the arduous task of dealing with Larry.
DAVID BRAUN: Larry, I think, viewed it almost as a Talmudic duty to make a contract complicated. One I can remember—if Larry or I die, it will never be interpreted.
JAC: Jack Reinstein was another heavy-duty tool. When Jack switched from the outside accounting firm which audited our books to working full-time at Elektra, he was out of his suit and into size 44 jeans, beads and leathers in minutes. He could be charming around the lunch table, but he was ferocious on the job.
GEORGE STEELE: Jack was extremely hard about making us be disciplined on expense accounts, and there was no pulling the wool over his eyes. He would send out little memos about how we were buying too many felt-tip pens, about putting them in water overnight.
ANN PURTILL: A few people spent time on the phone exchanging records, and Reinstein said, "Are you giving away our records?"
JAC: One of Reinstein's many responsibilities was artist and publisher audits. Managers and lawyers would say they hated doing an audit at Elektra. An audit was always a grey area. The artist or publisher's representatives routinely threw in all manner of exaggerated claims to be used as tradeoffs in the final stages of give and take. The record company was where the money was and thus was always on the defensive. Reinstein was a master at dragging it out, making it uncomfortable. More than uncomfortable—with Reinstein an audit was scorched earth and minefields, to the point where the other side was happy to settle. This was no longer record company to artist, this was hardbitten gladiator matched against hardbitten hit man.
SUZANNE HELMS: I knew how many people waited for their royalty statements. Reinstein would say, "It must have been an accounting error." He wasn't stealing the money, he would invest it somewhere and get more return on it, so that the company would look better and he would look better, and some of the poor artists and producers would just tear their hair.
JAC: Jack and Larry did much of the dirty work while I retained my good-guy image. Every company needs a good guy to keep the communication flowing when things get tense. Larry was smart and tough and I didn't want to play Scrooge. I could float concepts in a negotiation through Larry that I would be uncomfortable doing myself, especially with lawyers with whom I had had excellent relationships over a long history. Larry got to loft the trial balloons, and if he was shot down, I was still the good guy, the court of last resort.
The problem was that Larry had eyes to run his own shop.
SUE ROBERTS: He was aware of his territory, very power-driven.
JAC: He tried to take greater control of Elektra, but he was never going to run my company. I knew that, and in time he knew it. Albert Grossman thought Larry was terrific, just the man to launch a new label for Ampex, and in the end that's where Larry went, to found Ampex/Bearsville Records.
I was relieved when Larry left. He had done some excellent work but I never fully trusted him. We needed a less contentious tonality in our business affairs department. I offered his assistant, Sue Roberts, the business chair. Sue didn't have Larry's legal experience, but she was blessed with good common sense and could sweet-talk people into things that Larry couldn't argue them into. Sue managed all business affairs and every contract, and she never dropped a stitch.
For our heavy legal work, we now cast outside lawyers. They could be our tough talkers. I chose counsel the way I would select record producers. And it was smart to have lawyers in the music business who owed you favors. There was always the possibility that they might bring us something good. Those were benefits we did not have with in-house counsel.
JAC: To deal with the whole culture of music in the late Sixties, the established record companies, which had always been run by suits, would, out of bafflement with the new scene, hire designated counter-culture types to be ombudsmen between the company and the artist. They were called "company freaks," the ones who interpreted the artist to the company and the company to the artist. If something new was beginning to surface, the CF's responsibility was to find out first and let me know. They networked voraciously. They listened to comments and criticisms about the label from Elektra and non-Elektra artists and fed that information to me. They were fertile sources of gossip and some gossip was of inestimable value. Our New York company freak was Danny Fields.
STEVE HARRIS: I loved Danny. He was a hippie yenta. In an hour he would fill me in on every bit of gossip. He would stay out late, and if he had copy due by three o'clock, he would stagger in at two, write this magical stuff and then leave. Nobody else had a Danny Fields working for them.
JANN WENNER: Danny was the hippest guy in New York.
ANN PURTILL: A legend in his own time. When Lillian Roxon did the first rock encyclopedia, Danny was one of her best friends, and he got every Elektra artist listed.
Producer Peter Siegel (lower right) looks up at David Peel recording in Washington Square
JAC: Elektra wasn't old-line, especially on the West Coast—in the La Cienega office just about everybody except Suzanne Helms and Ellen Vogt would have qualified as a company freak in a tie-dye T-shirt. New York was different. Put in the simplest of terms, there was a schism between inhalers and non-inhalers, ingesters and noningesters. I wasn't against inhalation, either privately or at the office. There were rooms where I knew the air was hazy behind closed doors, occasionally wafting out into the corridor. But some of the senior people were upset by my benign attitude and looked upon what they considered bizarre manifestations such as Danny with naked hostility.
DANNY FIELDS: They were suit and tie, martini lunch, old school, Madison Avenue, Fifties kind of people, and I was a Sixties kind of person. I had started out as a New York Weavers Jewboy, and now I was Andy Warhol and hard rock and revolution and march on Washington and marijuana galore.
PETER SIEGEL: One of the things Danny came upon in the streets was David Peel with his band, the Lower East Side.
Danny came raving, "You gotta hear this." I heard something completely different from what Danny heard. I heard a field recording of indigenous music of the Lower East Side. I didn't honestly believe it was the exact same thing as folk songs of Eastern Kentucky, but I modeled the production after that type of record. It was a documentary, it would be recorded on the street. I had a lot of nice ideas, like at the end of the record David shouting out the credits to the crowd: "Production Supervisor, Jac Holzman, yay!" We did it in Washington Square with a portable tape recorder. We actually got a permit from the city, but that didn't stop some policeman from unplugging us. That was the climate at the time. Yeah, I had a permit in my pocket, but they were singing about cops being pigs. The light would go out, you'd look up and the cop would be right there with the plug in his hand, you'd show him the permit and plug it back in.
DANNY FIELDS: There had been an anti-Vietnam demonstration at Grand Central Station. Time reported on it, protesters storming in, led by a ragged singer chanting. It was David Peel. He was singing, "I like marijuana," but his teeth were sort of funny, so it came out "Have a marijuana." I saw this in Time, and I said, "There is the title of that album, we'll call it 'Have a Marijuana.'"Bill Harvey growled, "This isn't what Elektra does."
"Have a Marijuana" EKS-74032
JAC: But we did. The album cover featured a massive marijuana plant, with "Have a Marijuana" in outsized letters. That cover and the photos of David singing to and with the crowd made it into newspapers, magazines and onto murals throughout the world as an example of what was happening in rebellious America.
DANNY FIELDS: We had another group called MC5, and they smoked a great deal. They would come into my office and close the door and puff away. The business people down the hall were raising hell. Bill Harvey and Larry Harris wanted to know what was going on. Harris called me into his office and said, "There'll be no more smoking marijuana in these offices." I agreed. I didn't think it should be smoked in the office. I allowed it to happen because they were artists, but I would never have done it myself. Or drink in the office, except at a Christmas party—I mean, I think that's not suitable. Unless you're Lou Grant and colorful and you keep a bottle in a bottom drawer. But I agreed that the halls should not be full with clouds of smoke. Anyway, Harris had me in his office, and he said, "There'll be no marijuana, there'll be no LSD." I said, "You mean I can't smoke any more LSD in this office, Larry?" He said, "No LSD in this office. You heard me, smoke it at home." I said, "Larry, if I can't smoke my LSD every morning with my coffee, I'm no good during the day."
JAC: Danny was responsible for bringing us MC5, a revolutionary (in the sense of "overthrow") counter-culture band. I found myself dealing with John Sinclair, chief factotum of the White Panthers.
DANNY FIELDS: John Sinclair was a friend of friends of mine, and they put me on their mailing list for all their marvelous graphic propaganda. Sinclair was a press release genius: "Last night three thousand people rioted and tore down the walls and screamed for more. The stirring and starting of a new world. This is it, the future." My friends persuaded me to go out to Detroit and have a look at MC5. I had started to assume A&R duties, as part of being publicity, because you would come across so many interesting people that the record company could sign cheap, like Nico. So out I went.
I stayed in Sinclair's house, in the commune. I loved the whole situation, the Minister of Defense with the rifle in the dining room, the men pounding on the table for food like cavemen, and all the women running in and out of the kitchen with long Mother Earth skirts on and no bras. In the middle of Ann Arbor, this totally middle-class college town. The men did everything but drag them by the hair. Who ever saw anything like it in New York?
I'd never met anyone like Sinclair. He would sit on the can, taking a shit with the door open, barking out orders, like a Lyndon Johnson smoking dope. I became great friends with him right off. I thought he was a fantastic man. He was funny, he liked good food, he liked to hang out, he liked to have plans, and he liked to talk. And he was a businessman. He was a promoter. He spoke the same language as everybody in the music business. I virtually signed him myself, gave him a handshake and assured him that getting Jac's approval was a mere formality.
JAC: Danny had immaculate taste for the arcane and he knew I'd go for it, so his commitment to Sinclair was in the bag before I knew what he had been up to. That probably did as much to piss off Larry Harris and Bill Harvey as the signing itself, but I was intrigued by how the MC5 maneuvered their music to drive their politics, like a loudspeaker assault on the established order: Who is on the inside, who is on the ramparts?—a rock and roll equivalent of storming the battlements.
Sinclair was no surprise to me, having cut my teeth with Phil Ochs. He was a hairier, heavier, wilier Phil; wild, woolly, intelligent, and easy to get on with. Sinclair wanted the band to be successful, and Elektra was a hip label. The signing was easy and immediate. Revolutions are things of the moment and I wanted to record them in the heat of the moment, which meant right away.
BRUCE BOTNICK: The first trip, just for listening, I took along a cassette machine, a little mono portable, with the speaker built in. They played in a ballroom, I sat in the middle, and I was amazed I could still hear afterwards, because it was the loudest thing I had ever heard in my life. I couldn't tell whether they were playing good music, bad music, or no music. But they were these poetical people up on the stage, waving and screaming and going through crazy gyrations, and it was incredible energy. I was blown away.
Jac felt that the only way to capture the MC5 was to record them live. I brought Wally Heider to Detroit from LA, the big macher of remote recording. He flew the equipment in and we rented a truck, into which we loaded a portable console and dual eight-track recorders. The day of the concert I went inside, I was hooking up my microphones, and I walked out and I see Wally and Jac standing there. They're both staring at the ground. And laying on its back is one of the eight-tracks. They had put it up on the truck and the truck was at a slight angle, and it rolled off and fell six feet to the concrete. We went, "Oh, my God, are we going to be able to record?" We picked it up, turned it on, and it was fine.
We recorded for two days, the concert the first night, then the next day we recorded all their songs again, without a pause, just without anybody being there. This was another one of Jac's tricks, because a lot of times when bands are performing it's show time, they're not playing their instruments well. Jac was always thinking how to protect himself.
BILL HARVEY: We had a picture taken in their house. There must have been a hundred people in one room and the room wasn't very big. They were standing on each other's heads, practically. Jac and I, we weren't conservative, but we had jackets on, and we stood out like sore thumbs.
BRUCE BOTNICK: And I'm this twenty-three-year-old kid, married only weeks before, wearing a blue Sixties long suede jacket, black leather pants—I was a very mod dresser in those days. And, I mean, these guys are very funky. They're looking at us suspiciously, they've got guns and a printing press down in the basement printing revolutionary literature, and here's this kid looking very rich. I was scared shitless. I remember calling my wife and I was so nervous I started to cry over the phone. We finished and I said to Jac, "Let's go home." He was feeling it too. He got on the phone, he arranged for the flight. And we bundled up the tapes and grabbed a cab. There were three tunes where the performance was so much better the second day that we took the first note and the last note from the live performance and spliced it onto the so-called studio recording, and nobody was the wiser. You couldn't hear the audience anyway, the band played so damn loud.
The MC5
JAC: The album was called "Kick Out the Jams," and the hook in their signature song was: "Kick out the jams, motherfuckers."
BRUCE BOTNICK: Inside the gatefold jacket it had the band standing there with "Kick Out the Jams, Motherfuckers" buttons, almost like in their skin, and a whole manifesto written by John Sinclair and his propaganda minister. We all thought it was kind of cool, because it's kind of fun to be in a position to taunt a little bit, but still keep one foot in the establishment, never put yourself out there so you get hurt.
JAC: We actually had 'Kick Out the Jams' in two versions, one with "motherfucker," the other with "brothers and sisters." The single had "brothers and sisters." And with the album, stores could choose which version they preferred. Somehow, Hudson's, the retailing gorilla of the heartland, got the wrong version and reacted with the fury of a Midwestern twister. They instantly cleansed their shelves of the record, which mightily pissed off the MC5 who took out an ad in the local underground paper, saying "FUCK HUDSONS," signed MC5, with a very visible Elektra logo, and sent me the bill! In retaliation, Hudson's purged not only MC5 but every other Elektra album: Judy Collins, Paul Butterfield, Tom Rush, the Doors. And they didn't stop there. Nonesuch recordings of Bach, Mozart, and Handel were piling back into our warehouse. I said to the MC5, "Hey, guys, you can't do that." They said, "Jac, we thought you were part of the revolution." I said, "I'm only interested in your music."
For MC5's first appearance in New York, we rented the Fillmore East on one of its dark nights. Bill Graham asked me to cancel but I didn't want to back down on a commitment made to the band. Bill was concerned about the potential for violence, especially from a bunch of East Villagers calling themselves the Motherfuckers—
DANNY FIELDS:—A "community group," meaning they didn't wash their feet.
JAC: Their credo was that music should be free to the people, meaning them. They demanded a free night at the Fillmore each week. Bill Graham was not amused.
DANNY FIELDS: My tragic, stupid error was bringing the band to the gig in a limousine—in New York, always if you have more than three people, you call a limousine, that was my Andy Warhol training.
JAC: Actually a limo was most efficient for the purpose, but we should have anticipated the reaction and hired a U-Haul, or better still a garbage truck..
DANNY FIELDS: The Motherfuckers are saying, "We want a free night," and this revolutionary band pulls up in a stretch Cadillac. The crowd went wild and broke down the doors and damaged the theater.
JAC: Here you have MC5, roaring out of a Detroit commune, guns stashed in their basement and obscenities on their album, billing themselves as dedicated to the overthrow of just about everything—and in the East Village they are trashed for being merely misdemeanor motherfuckers. Very late Sixties.
BRUCE BOTNICK: By the time we were going to record a second album, the band had gotten really gross. They were defecating on stage, as a cultural protest. Two of the guys bared their asses and took a dump and held it up. I mean, they had lost all sensibility. We recorded 'Call Me Animal' and a couple of other things, then—
ADAM HOLZMAN:—Someone turns their back in the studio for five minutes, and the next thing they know, MC5 has disappeared and all the equipment that Elektra had rented for the band has disappeared with them.
JAC: I sent a telegram granting them their release and suggested they find another label. Sinclair was very cool; he thought I handled it in a righteous manner. They went across the street to Atlantic and straight away got a $50,000 advance.
JAC: Though I wasn't part of the MC5 revolution, I was deeply concerned about the political direction of America. I had a strong liberal democratic upbringing. My maternal grandmother, Estelle Sternberger, wrote speeches for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and my maternal grandfather was a rabbi who would marry Jews and non-Jews. Even—and this was truly radical for his time—marry Jews and blacks, for which he was forever banished to an obscure synagogue in Hoboken, New Jersey.
In my early Village days, I watched the McCarthy hearings with revulsion. The protest tradition in folk music appealed to me. In the Sixties, many of my singer-songwriters were protesters. I was bitterly opposed to the Vietnam war. At the time of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, when the infamous police brutality flashed from every TV set, I bought radio time to say in my own voice how disastrous I thought it all was: a corrupting war, an inquisition into what we read and smoked and saw and did with our lives. I did the same in 1969, supporting the anti-war Moratorium. In 1970, when four young people were shot and killed by the National Guard during anti-war demonstrations on the campus of Kent State in Ohio, Elektra took out full-page ads in the music trades and spots on radio decrying death by government violence. I thought Nixon was an abomination and financially backed George McGovern in the presidential election campaign of 1972.
THEODORE BIKEL: Jac was a middle of the road liberal, not extreme. He opposed blacklisting. But he would not demonstrate. For example, when the folk artists were opposing the cops in Washington Square who were prohibiting them from singing around the fountain, Jac was not there.
JAC: I was out of town for that one, but I did march on several occasions. Once in London, in a demonstration for nuclear disarmament, though my real motive was to get a closer look at Vanessa Redgrave. Another time I flew Judy Collins to Washington, DC, for a major demonstration. The police gave you a choice: be arrested or not be arrested. Judy chose to be locked up on a misdemeanor charge, as a badge of honorable commitment. I chose to return to New York.
DAVID BRAUN: Jac was a recorder, a chronicler. At the time of the American Revolution he would be making silver mugs for the soldiers to drink from when they came home from battle.
JOHN HAENY: We were recording Judy Collins at the War Memorial Auditorium in San Francisco, the day of the great peace march. I woke up that morning and stepped out on the balcony of my hotel and saw a quarter of a million people streaming down the street screaming "Peace!" and "Fuck Nixon!" It was an intense day. And that night the concert. Jac used to get real high seeing his children at work, you know. It's a beautiful hall and a beautiful night, full moon. Judy gives a wonderful concert, and Jac comes out to the van, it's a big gorgeous recording van and the sound is glorious, and you see it all in Jac's eyes, and he walks away two feet off the ground.
JAC: Though I wasn't on the picket lines, I did have an FBI file. Years later, under the Freedom of Information act, I read through my meager file and even I was bored. The most accurate description of me politically would be: founder and president of Elektra Records.
DANNY FIELDS: The weekend I first met the MC5 they said to me, "If you like us, we have this other group, they're like this little brother group, friends of ours. You should see them." It was the Psychedelic Stooges. They were playing at the student union on a Sunday night. I never saw anything like it. I mean, not to be misunderstood, Iggy was the most incredible performer I had ever seen. He must have been about nineteen or so. The most wonderful dancer and inventive person I'd ever seen on a stage—but still I liked the music more than I liked Iggy's images, which I thought were magnificent. So I went up to him after the show and I said, "Hey, you're great," and he said, "Who are you?" and I said, "I'm from a record company," and he said, "Oh yeah, uh-huh." I found his manager, who was a sort of semi-partner of John Sinclair's, and I told him that I wanted to sign Iggy too. What a weekend. Two groups. And the Stooges only wanted $5,000.
JAC: Danny talked me into the signing despite my puzzlement as to what I was going to do with them. He had been right about David Peel and "Have a Marijuana," so I went ahead.
Basic Iggy
Iggy was this demonic spirit who kept falling all over himself. He looked like a spaniel with the saddest blue eyes; smaller than life but larger than life. Shocking and sweet. The Stooges were certainly unlike anything I had seen, but they were mainly visual, as in: Iggy is playing the Electric Circus, a major club on St. Mark's Place. Covered with peanut butter and glitter, he swan dives into the crowd. And they won't catch him. Iggy crashes ten feet to the floor. New York, New York, it's all heart.
But the Stooges could barely play their instruments. How were we going to get this on record? At least when we took them into the studio it wasn't going to be complicated, meaning expensive. Then Iggy and band arrived totally unprepared, with five songs, and I had to tell them to come back when they had better than an album's worth.
STEVE HARRIS: I saw something very interesting about Iggy. I was out in the field, working in the trenches, but it was just very, very difficult to make the people at the office to see the commerciality in all this.
JAC: He was beyond Jim Morrison. You had to be ready for something beyond stock outrageous.
LENNY KAYE: Driven, always unpredictable, touched by genius, star-crossed. Iggy was a psychodrama. He'd break the drumsticks off and jab them into his chest, and he wasn't fooling.
STEVE HARRIS: I saw him take "it" out in a club on West 70th and put it against a speaker. He took it out in front of the audience and they just watched the show, nobody went ooh and aah.
Another time he was working at Max's Kansas City, and at the end of the gig, it must have been about three in the morning, he says, "Where are you going?" I said, "Home." I lived on East 82nd. He says, "Well, I'm going to see this girl I know on Park Avenue in the 70s." I said, "Well, I'll drop you off."
Glam Iggy
Iggy was appearing on stage in a diaper, and he had cut himself up unmercifully, he was bleeding like crazy, and you'd think that he would change to go to Park Avenue and 72nd. But no. My attitude was, this is rock and roll—if Iggy Stooge wants to see some chick on Park Avenue in a diaper, bleeding from the waist up, that's his prerogative, he's the artist. He got out of the cab and said, "Come on up with me, have a drink." So there's this really lovely Park Avenue apartment building. The doorman's in full regalia. Iggy asks for this girl. The doorman is looking at him like he is absolutely out of his mind. "Who shall I say is calling?" Iggy says, "Tell her Iggy's here." And she says, "Send him up." All the way up, the elevator operator's looking at Iggy in his diaper, bleeding. We get there and it's this magnificent apartment, just like you see in the movies, and a girl answers in a negligee, slinky, a tall Lauren Bacall-looking woman. We had a couple of drinks, then I left, and Iggy stayed. The next day he called me at the office: "I can't work tonight, I had thirty-two stitches this morning."
DANNY FIELDS: Commercially, the music never went anywhere. Yet historically, those first Stooges records were way ahead of their time. They're avant garde still. The music was amazing. It was so beautiful to me. I thought that was the perfect group. The MC5 I loved for their vitality and their power, and their hold over large audiences, and that carnival kind of thing whenever they played. But I really loved the Stooges for the purity in the music and their songs and lyrics.
And the influence they've had on other musicians and around the world has been incalculable. Everything goes back to them. They were really the proto punk band of the world. There would have been no punk rock without them, no Sex Pistols, no Ramones or anything that was really important in the Seventies. It's like if there had been no Stooges, and no Velvet Underground, there would be nothing that is interesting now. The Stooges will be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame sooner or later.
JAC: It was fascinating, like an odd piece of art that someone strongarms you into buying, and years later it turns out to be of lasting importance.
I never knew what to say to Iggy. Danny Fields was a terrific filter, maintaining relationships between the company and the Stooges, but they offended Bill Harvey grievously. Bill could not fathom how I allowed them on the label. Mel Posner had not the slightest idea how he was going to sell these albums. I was relying on the large fan base of MC5 in Detroit, which has always been a great record area, plus the general political notoriety of MC5 to carry the Stooges forward. We did two albums with Iggy & the Stooges, couldn't get the public interested, and despite the honor bestowed by a teenage girls' club in Paterson, New Jersey, voting Iggy the World's Sexiest Man, I chose not to do a third.
JAC: Bread was at the opposite end of the performance and music spectrum. The story begins with a promise remembered.
When Arthur Lee of Love was renouncing his contract because he was a minor, his attorney, Al Schlesinger, an honorable man and as close to a rabbi as one could find in the record business, appreciated the way I had handled the situation. Al told me he would remember that I had been a mensch, and if anything ever came through his office that he thought would be good for Elektra, he'd be in touch.
One day I'm at my desk, 9am New York time, 6am LA time, and Al calls my private line, the red phone. He says he has a group for me. I only recognized one name, David Gates, from Captain Beefheart, but I quickly offered to have David Anderle cut a demo.
DAVID ANDERLE: They came and sat in my office and played, with acoustic guitars, and I said, "This is really good." I called Bruce Botnick, and we set up to cut a demo that night. I'm nervous about what Jac will think, because it's so pop, and Elektra is anything but pop.
JAC: The demo was couriered to me, and I thought it was great—utterly fresh and likable, harmonizing vocals that wove in, out and around each other; a softer, more considerate sound than the hard rock that was now everywhere.
DAVID GATES: Elektra did not have an act on its roster like us. Crosby, Stills and Nash had just gone with Atlantic, so we felt if we were on Elektra we might be unique in our style of music to them, and at the same time they would be unique to us.
JAC: Other labels were showing interest, especially Columbia, but Bread chose us.
DAVID GATES: Elektra was top of our list. The label and Jac had an excellent reputation of being music-oriented and worked good with artists. A nice home to be.
JAC: The way Bread went about recording was so civilized it attracted attention. Most groups would shuffle into the studio, if you were lucky, in the late afternoon, and nothing would happen until seven, and then you'd work until two in the morning. Bread would arrive in the morning at nine sharp, David with his attaché case, as if he was off to a downtown bank or Pacific Bell. They would record till lunch, break for an hour, work all afternoon, and David would go home to his family at five.
MARTY RICHMOND: Not all musicians are capable of that kind of discipline, and I'm not sure all of them want to be. And I'm not sure that his music wouldn't be better if he were a little more loose. But who can say?
JAC: The album was filled with winsome romantic songs; rich, layered voicings, enchantingly direct lyrics and fine acoustic playing.
ROBB ROYER: The day our album was released was the day we had our first performance, and it was the day the astronauts landed on the moon.
JAC: Two weeks after we released Bread, the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album appeared and essentially wiped Bread out. Bread still sold forty or fifty thousand copies, strictly on merit. I was mighty upset because I thought the group deserved better. I immediately picked up their option and began to prepare for their second album.
Bread's "Best of" went multi-platinum EKS-75056
DAVID GATES: 'Make It With You' was about the fourth or fifth song that we were in the process of recording. Jac came in, and he absolutely flipped: "I must have this record out right away." Then the discussion began. "But the album's not done, and if you put this out and it does well, there'll be no album on the street." Jac says, "I don't care, that's a high-class problem." After the single was out just a couple, three weeks, someone in marketing called me and said, "David, we've got a smash." The record is being played on one station in Washington, DC, and people are coming into racked stores and asking for it, to drug stores and markets, and nobody could get it, because it was just barely out. And that does not happen unless you have huge runaway demand. It happened with 'Snowbird' by Anne Murray, and it happened with 'Make It With You.' And it was Jac who heard that thing, and it was his decision to put it out at once.
He did it again on the next album. We had finished recording, and we had a playing session, all the Elektra people in the studio, twenty or thirty of us. I had sequenced 'If' as the fourth cut on side one. The whole album goes through, and Jac comes over to me and says, "Can I hear that fourth cut on the first side again?" Just like that he picked out 'If,' which has become the classic Bread song. He always honed in on the key track immediately.
Jac is a good music man. He would work with us to sequence our albums. We'd give him the twelve songs and he'd shuffle them around. I've never known anybody at his level that would get into that kind of minutiae. They're busy running the business. They're lucky to even hear the album their artists record, let alone help them organize the songs in the right order. But Jac was into that stuff.
Also, he's someone you could talk to if you had any problem within the band or the recording process. Really good. And to this day he's exciting, he's vibrant, one of the most—vibrant is the right word, one of the most exhilarating guys to be around.
He could also be brutally frank—not unpleasant, he just speaks his mind right there. But he does it because he's so positive in his thinking, and he's right nine times out of ten.
And Jac was certainly what an artist would want to have. You always felt he was really there for you, rooting and cheering and helping, and if he found out that something wasn't being done for you, boy, he'd get on the phone and take your case, call the radio station or the marketing guy or whatever. If he didn't think you were getting a fair shake, he'd go to bat for you.
MARTY RICHMOND: I asked David once, how he would know that he was a success? When he had a Number 1 hit song? He said, "No." He says, "The first time I walk into an elevator and hear one of my songs come out of the Muzak. Then I'll know." That was his goal, and he got there.
JAC: Judy Collins was ready for the studio again. "Wildflowers" had widened her audience considerably with songs like 'Both Sides Now' and her own exquisite evocation of love, 'Since You Asked.' Now she was looking for change. I recognized the signs.
MARK ABRAMSON: Judy began to feel that maybe Josh Rifkin wasn't the best arranger for her any more. That she wanted something simpler. Josh's arrangements are musically complex. When they work, I think—I still think—they are incomparable. And I think they work most of the time. But there were also problems of over-elaborateness, which I think Judy thought more than me, because I felt we could just deal with it in terms of how we would mix the records. But, you know, it was too competitive.
Judy and I would discuss it. I remember I called George Martin in London, and asked him if he would do some arrangements for Judy. He was very nice, said he was flattered, but no, he didn't arrange, he just produced. We thought of Randy Newman, a wonderful arranger, but he was doing his own stuff. It was really hard.
Judy and David Anderle ponder a playback
DAVID ANDERLE: Judy came out to LA to honor an old contract with Doug Weston at the Troubadour, four nights. I, as a good head of the West Coast office, went every night and watched her. People would totally fall in love with the Judy Collins show, especially that intimate at the Troubadour. And I saw this incredible warmth that she had, but that I never heard on any of her records. Live, she wasn't perfect, but she was real. So I started talking to her about, "You should make a record with a band, try to capture the spirit of a live performance."
She went back to New York and put a band together, came back out here, and went into the studio for two or three days with Mark Abramson and did these demos. Well, the band was rock and roll in structure, but all the players were classically trained, and instead of a drummer she had a percussionist. I just hated it. I said, "You would be best served to forget everything. This is awful. This is not rock and roll. This is, like, stupid." And she got very angry.
We got into it a bit and along the way we became extremely close, and she said to me, "I want you to produce my record." Well, I had co-produced two records with Russ Miller, and that was the extent of my producing. She said, "I know you know what I should do, and I think you have the feel, and I want you." She calls Jac, and Jac basically says, "You're at the pinnacle of your career, and you want to what?" She says, "I'm not going to make the record unless David produces." And so Jac says, "OK."
I called one of my dearest friends, Stephen Stills, who was like a little brother, and I said, "Help, I'm going to produce a record and I know what I want but I don't know how to get it." I called Van Dyke Parks, another good friend, and said, "Would you come in and do some stuff?" And that was the beginning of my career as a producer.
I'm not a musician. I don't play, never have. I can't talk chords. I talk feelings, emotions, colors, shapes—maybe because I'm a painter. But I do have something about me that people like to rally around, or that they like to please. I don't know what it is, but I knew that from before, when I was in the theater and I used to direct; people like to use me as a focus. And I've always loved to be surrounded, no matter what I do, by the best people possible, because I'm not fearful. That's what I brought to the party. Plus Judy's trust.
So we had the best musicians I could get, and we picked the best songs we could find.
Judy taught me something which I haven't forgotten to this day. If you don't write a song, pick a song that either sounds like you wrote it or it was written for you. Period. At that time she was only just starting to write herself, and she was absolutely impeccable in choosing young songwriters. She talked to me about this young Canadian named Joni Mitchell, and she introduced me to Leonard Cohen.
Leonard came by, Leonard the poet, disheveled, but linguistically elegant. I didn't know who he was. He didn't want to play any songs. We had to, like, loosen up the thing. We went to lunch at Casa Cugat, about half a block down from Elektra on La Cienega, showy little Mexican restaurant, bright colors, wood, tile floor, and booths filled with straight people. We got blitzed on margaritas. When Leonard had to pee, he would leave the table from the sitting position, the same height as if he was on his knees, and he would go the bathroom like Toulouse-Lautrec. By late afternoon you could tell that they wanted us to leave. We were walking back to the studio to start listening to Leonard's songs, to pick a few. And as we were walking up the block, this very elegant woman was walking down, exactly the kind of woman you would see on La Cienega shopping for antiques, and she had a poodle with her. Suddenly Leonard broke away from us, dropped down in front of her, wrapped his arms around her legs and said urgently: "Madam! Madam! You must bring the dogs down from the throne!" I was in awe. I'll never forget that. I don't think she's ever forgotten it, either. So from there we crawled back to the studio, and the two songs we got out of that experience were 'The Story of Isaac' and 'Bird on a Wire.' Not a bad afternoon's drinking.
Anyway, the band was Stephen Stills, and Van Dyke Parks on keyboard, and Michael Saul on piano, Chris Ethridge on bass. And James Burton, who was Elvis Presley's guitar player, a great guitar player. James brought a pedal steel player named Buddy Emmons out from Nashville. I always loved the sound of the pedal steel, and we were going to do Ian and Sylvia's 'Some Day Soon' with a country feel, and there was a Dylan song we also wanted to record with a country feel. And Jim Gordon was playing drums. Jim became one of the greatest drummers in rock and roll and went to prison for beating his mother to death with a hammer.
Judy had never played with a band like that before. We cut it all live and very funky. There were things that were less than perfect vocally, but feeling-wise I thought it was great stuff. That album, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes," pretty much got rid of the folkie label attached to Judy.
In those days you had no outboard equipment to do any kind of acoustic effect. Everything had to be done by hand; you would hang pieces of tape all over the studio, labeled for editing.
JAC: That was delicate work. The tape-editing process was agonizing to Judy who would hover. She said those lengths of tape were like strips of her skin.
DAVID ANDERLE: And she was very concerned over the end result of the album. I think she got back to New York and a lot of her friends were giving her a bad time about the imperfection of some of the recording and some of her vocal performances, and I think it made her a little insecure, which Judy was wont to be in those days. Jac and Harold Leventhal were concerned too, because she was singing strange songs in a strange manner, and sometimes singing a little bit out of pitch, and the album had cost thirty thousand dollars.
JAC: Probably more.
DAVID ANDERLE: The album went gold, and quickly, so I must have been doing something right. But Judy didn't talk to me for a long time because she hated the record. Then she called and said, "I'm putting together my first 'Best of' record, and I've been going through all the stuff, and the music from that album is remarkable." And I said, "Well, that really makes me feel good, but it's a little late." I was probably at that time not sophisticated enough as a record producer to know how to deal with that like I do now, so I took it very personally that I didn't have the response from her that I would have wanted.
But I got the producing bug. My first ever solo-produced album went gold, and I said, "Hey, this is easy, no problem." And only twenty albums later I got my second gold record . . .
JAC: Bread, Judy Collins—and then in that same year, 1969, Delaney & Bonnie.
DAVID ANDERLE: I saw them in Westwood. A white soul band. I'd never seen anything quite like it. I fell in love with them immediately and wanted to sign them. They finished their gig, I went down and opened up the studio, called John Haeny, brought them in for the weekend, and cut a demo.
JAC: Bonnie was one hell of a singer, the best white blues chick singer I'd ever heard. Blonde and fair-skinned but sounding so black. At seventeen she sang with Ike and Tina Turner in St. Louis, an Ikette for three days in a black wig and Man Tan skin darkener.
DAVID ANDERLE: White R&B was another kind of music for Elektra. A different discipline. And the first time that Elektra had been really exposed to that Southern white attitude. Elektra from the beginning had been this kind of intelligent, New York, folky label—bright boys from back East. Then after a while on the West Coast this insanity had started to happen, these scruffy urchins running the La Cienega office, trying to change things. And now here come Delaney & Bonnie. All of a sudden this weird Southern presence is around, like a band of gypsies.
GEORGE STEELE: Motorcycle boots and blue jeans and key chains hanging off.
Delaney & Bonnie "Accept No Substitute" EKS-74039
JAC: I was wary of them as people. Something about Delaney made me itch. But I was attracted to their music. Several labels wanted to sign them, and I knew we weren't going to get them if we didn't deal. This was the first time I ever granted an artist any kind of say over the album cover. Bill Harvey took it personally and was appalled. And that wasn't all.
KEITH HOLZMAN: I remember being upset with Jac when I got a copy of the contract. He had given the artists control of the record. I said, "How could you do this? You just sold away your birthright. You will live to rue this deal. If this is what is going to happen, we're going to lose the music." I saw the handwriting on the wall.
JAC: My people bristled because of the way this signing was structured, but I knew that the entire record-making procedure and locus of control was about to shift. Artists' managers and lawyers needed to justify their percentage, which meant, inevitably, more interference in creative matters. Down the road I wasn't going to be able to hold the line. Why not offer this group, which sounded exceptional, some leeway?
KEITH HOLZMAN: It turns out I was absolutely right. That was symptomatic of the era of the artist becoming all-powerful.
JAC: David had John Haeny engineering the sessions. John wanted to record organically: basic band on two tracks, live, and sweeten on the remaining open tracks. Our Studio B was particularly well suited. It had a live quality that could be controlled. As for putting John with Delaney & Bonnie, I thought that it might lead to fireworks, but David was so laid-back he could probably keep them going.
GEORGE STEELE: The side band was just unbelievable. When you have Leon Russell playing keyboards for you—
DAVID ANDERLE:—And Dr. John, Mac Rebennack, came in on a Saturday afternoon. We brought him in because Leon said he had this great song we had to record, 'Who'll Wear The Crown?' Dr. John was kicking a major heroin problem at the time. We explained that we didn't need him for the session, just to lay the song down on tape for us so we could do it. He'd sit at the piano, looking like death. We'd say, "OK, we're ready, Mac," and he'd play for a while and then he'd go out; he had this guy with him that would walk him into the bathroom to throw up or whatever.
DAN ROTHCHILD: My father had another story, of Dr. John bringing his wife with him, who would crochet right next to him in a chair. Dr. John was not connecting at all because he was so strung out, and then he went and shot up and came back and played the most incredible solo you've ever heard, and did this great gliss at the end, and with one great motion of his finger leaned over and threw up right on the floor, and his wife kept crocheting.
DAVID ANDERLE: We could control the amount of potential danger in the studio. But it was always Delaney & Bonnie "and Friends," the whole entourage, and it would spill out into Sue Helms' and Ellen's area. Or I'd open up my office, which was right across the hall. Or at the end of the hall was where the secretaries hung out, and everyone would just party in that back room over the weekend, beer and wine and Jack Daniel's and lots of smoke, pizzas all over the place, and then on Monday morning the girls would come in and there's trash cans overflowing, six-packs and wine bottles and little ends of joints, and all the papers on their desks would be covered with grease from barbecued spare ribs.
Later on, when I was recording Bonnie, it came down between her and John Haeny. The most painful studio time in my life. They got me so nuts I hadn't eaten for weeks, my stomach had turned into such a knot. John actually had me down twenty-five pounds. Finally I got to a point where I just laid it out to them. I got real clear and was feeling good enough that I could eat. So I order some ribs, and I'm beginning to eat, and Bonnie and John start going at each other again. It's like she could get him to be bitchy and crazy, and she knew that, and she would start grinding him, and the more she would grind him, the more effetely intellectual he would get, because he was so much smarter. They were going back and forth: "You bitch." "You whore." So I had to say, like a father to his kids, "Knock it off." And they wouldn't. So finally I say, "Get the fuck out of here." And they say, "We're sorry, we're sorry, OK? We won't do it again"—but they do. So I say to Bonnie, "Why don't you go out and practice?" She starts to go, and she stops at the door, clear across the room in the back studio. Everything is quiet, I'm eating my rib, and she says one thing to John, he immediately snaps back at her, and I went so out of my mind with anger that I took the rib from my mouth and I threw a bone at her so hard it just missed her head and stuck in the wall. She just stood there in awe, and John started crying. I said, "Bonnie, you're fuckin' out of here. And John, God love you, I cannot put up with your shit any more, you're fired."
JAC: And this was David Anderle, the sweetest and coolest soul in creation.
DAVID ANDERLE: Delaney & Bonnie were like a whole different people in Elektra's life. But they made this incredible record. And in a way it helped Elektra's international presence, because the English loved it. Bonnie singing her ass off, and Delaney being a great guitar player and coming from Mississippi, he really understood Robert Johnson, so he meant a lot to those English rockers.
It got out among them through Alan Pariser, who was on the Delaney & Bonnie management team, and he had major connections with the English rock scene. All of a sudden that record became a sensation. It was Mick Jagger's favorite, Keith Richard's favorite, Eric Clapton's favorite.
Then George Harrison fell in love with the album. He wanted Delaney & Bonnie for Apple Records, and they were just going to walk. He tried to take the record away from Elektra. In fact I have a copy of that record at home with the Apple label already on it. But they were still under contract to us. We said to them, "Excuse me, guys, this isn't Mississippi. You can't sign a contract with us and then, just because you fall in love with a Beatle, go off with Apple."
JAC: David and I flew to England to meet with Derek Taylor, the Beatles' publicist and close crony, and to talk with Apple management. Delaney & Bonnie had gigs back home and I didn't need them mucking around in very sensitive negotiations with people whose music I admired and who some years before had granted me swift and special permission to do the Baroque Beatles Book.
DAVID ANDERLE: The first night we went over to visit with Glyn Johns, who was mixing down "Let It Be" for the Beatles, and the next day we went to Apple Records—
JAC:—Which was falling apart. Chaos in the office. People in odd costumes running everywhere, preening because they were at Apple, but no work getting done. A lot of attitude without foundation. No clear chain of responsibility. Money spent recklessly. The Beatles themselves pursuing different paths. I had hoped for better. But we got Delaney & Bonnie back, as of course we should have.
DAVID ANDERLE: On the way out to the airport afterwards we stopped off at a Stones session. And then the Stones came over and finished "Let It Bleed" at Elektra.
All this is to say that Elektra in LA now became an international hip place, and it came through the Delaney & Bonnie record. And I got a huge reputation in England because of my work on that record. I started hanging out with the Stones whenever they came to town. You would go to Alan Pariser's house, and there would be Clapton. Harrison was always there, Keith, whoever was coming to town.
PAT FARALLA: The Stones were going to pay us a visit one day, or maybe Mick was going to come by, and there was lots of wheeoo-wheeoo over that.
JAC: To have Elektra so appreciated was heady stuff, but with Delaney & Bonnie we had crossed into the twilight zone. They charged through Elektra leaving a large and upsetting wake.
PAT FARALLA: Seems like Delaney was always drunk and Bonnie was most of the time mad.
JAC: Delaney was combative and surly. He was the only artist with whom I ever had major personal problems. I ran the company so I could make good records with people I respected. Elektra had much bigger stars who never acted with such callous disregard for the people who had gone out of their way to support them.
GEORGE STEELE: Their management group were very demanding.
JAC: In the guise of documenting the recording and release process, Barry Feinstein, their manager, would shove a microphone in my face and ask to what lengths I would go to promote the record. Would I pay off DJs? I mean—
DAVID ANDERLE: It would have been absolutely smashing if Delaney had been able to deal with his ego and just let the music be heard. But Delaney was about being Mister Big Guy of the whole world.
GEORGE STEELE: He was very arrogant, extremely demanding. "Get me this, get me that, this room sucks, the lighting sucks, the staging sucks, this is rubbish, fuck them, I'm not going to go on." He was demanding on his own musicians. He was demanding of Bonnie. She was really the big strength of that band, a focal point, but Delaney was jealous of the enthusiastic reaction of audiences to her singing.
JAC: Before they had a record deal they were Bonnie & Delaney, and then the moment Delaney thought he could see the big time coming, he insisted on putting his name before his wife's.
DAVID ANDERLE: Delaney used to beat the shit out of her. It was just awful. They were a white Ike and Tina Turner. Same story.
JAC: Bonnie would turn up in sun glasses on an overcast day looking embarrassed for having been the victim. Puffy and beat up and one of the saddest looking people I have ever seen.
DAVID ANDERLE: But the music—Clapton left Blind Faith to go with Delaney & Bonnie, and Clapton was on his way to becoming God. That's how good it was. I have a handwritten note from Joe Cocker, saying it was the best album since "Big Pink," it out-Atlantics Atlantic for THE sound, Joe saying he will do everything he can to make sure everyone hears it, don't let Elektra lose it.
After all that, the record didn't do that well. I'd have to say we didn't necessarily know how to market them. White soul music was new for Jac, it was new for Elektra. I'm not sure anyone ever figured it out. Everybody said it should have sold a lot more, but it didn't.
JAC: Delaney was hostile about his relatively weak sales, up around fifty thousand, nasty about everything. I was in England, staying at Claridge's, and he called. He was down in Aardvark, Texas, or wherever his father lived, and there were no Delaney & Bonnie albums in the local store. He was smoldering: "If there aren't records in that store by tomorrow, I'm coming to England to kill you." I said, "You can put the records there yourself. Then you can go terrorize some other label because I'm releasing you as of now. It's as much a privilege to record for Elektra as it is for us to record an artist, and I won't be threatened."
I called David Anderle and broke the news. David was heavily invested in the band, but he had had his troubles with Delaney. There was about fifteen seconds of silence and then he quietly said, "Well, Jac, go look in the mirror and be proud of yourself." They had gotten to him too.
So Delaney & Bonnie went to Atlantic, new home of the MC5—
DAVID ANDERLE:—And drove Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler crazy.
JAC: After a couple of albums, Atlantic let them go. Then Clive Davis at Columbia made a very rich deal with them, six albums for a reported million-dollar advance.
Clive and I were flying to an industry event and I said, "That seems like a lot of money, Clive. You've paid $166,000 apiece for six albums, and these are people who, with the exception of the album Eric Clapton participated on, never sold more than about sixty or seventy thousand records." Clive gamely marshaled all his arguments as to why it was reasonable. D & B grabbed the advance, and about a month later they broke up. Under the contract, Clive was now entitled to six albums by Bonnie and six by Delaney. I sent him a telegram: "Now I understand the deal. You get twelve albums instead of six. You've cut your cost per album in half."
After that, Delaney made albums that didn't sell, and I heard that Bonnie became a born-again Christian.
