Chapter 20
Cross-continental corporate commotions of 1969 ... Uriah Heep and a dead mackerel ... From Woodstock to Altamont ... And a moment with Charles Manson
JAC: From the fall of 1968 onward, there were seismic rumblings at Elektra on both coasts, East and West. A commotion began in January 1969 at the New York office, which could not contain both Danny Fields and Bill Harvey.
DANNY FIELDS: Harvey was very strong, very mean, and he was cagey, crafty and cunning. He hated me and he wanted any excuse to have me out of there. There was a certain rumor going round the office that concerned him. Somehow it got back to Harvey. I didn't start it, and it was true anyway, but he came back from lunch, drunk as usual, called me into his office, and started hitting me in the head. I ran out into the hall and he kept following me and punching me in the head. I remember the date: January 20, 1969. Richard Nixon was inaugurated that very morning, my parents were hijacked to Cuba, and I was fired, all in the same day.
JAC: Later in the year on the West Coast, I decided that it was time to let David Anderle go. It was painful, and very complicated emotionally. David had done fine and subtle work and had helped greatly to burnish Elektra's glow, but he so identified now with the artists that his company perspective was lost. What an artist believes is good for them is not necessarily gospel, nor even always in their own best interests. David had trouble sorting this out and keeping me informed. He withdrew into himself, which was not going to get the job I needed done.
PAT FARALLA: I never really knew what transpired between Jac and David, and why David left. David made a funny remark once about himself being so tall and having so far to fall, should he fall. I often wondered what he meant. Was it a power struggle?
MICHAEL JAMES JACKSON: There was some jealousy on Jac's part, and some anger and egotism on David's part.
The way I saw Elektra on the West Coast, there was no way to separate a single individual out. David, Paul Rothchild, Bruce Botnick, John Haeny—they were a combination of loners and orphans, all of immense gifts, all uniquely fucked up, bound by mutual dysfunction, empowered by mutual love to achieve a common goal. There was individual fragility but communal strength and wonderful intention. Their gifts fit their gaps.
Jac wanted to be the creative source. His greatest creation was Elektra. He wore the cloak of the pioneer. Elektra's footprint was his footprint. He could say he was Elektra.
He also wanted to create a family experience. He created the environment for that to take place. He created the club, founded it, paid for it. But then in some subtle sense he wasn't invited to the party.
There was a kind of love between Jac and David. In a way Jac lived vicariously through David. You wanted Jac to be like David, you wanted the house to be complete. Jac wanted to be loved. But it was David who could sit and talk with artists, and artists on the label trusted that they were understood by David. The Stones come by and David and Jagger sit and talk for a couple of hours, where Jagger and Jac would never have talked like that.
BRUCE BOTNICK: Jac was into having open meetings with his LA staff. We'd go and have dinner down the street at the Lobster Barrel. He'd take about ten of us and we'd all sit around the table and Jac would say, "Tell me, what are you doing? How's it going? Been having any problems here?" It got to be a little too formal and stiff at times. It wasn't the Elektra gang going out and having a beer, because it started to become very divided, East Coast-West Coast. The company had its own personality on the West Coast. The West Coast was where it was all happening—we had the Doors, we had Judy Collins, and on and on. I felt there were energies within the West Coast to separate Jac out. He was the head of the company, but he wasn't here enough, and it's the old adage, if you're not here, you don't have anything to say about it.
MICHAEL JAMES JACKSON: David grew. He found his own feet. He liked the accolades, but he was uncomfortable if anything interfered with his self-perception as an artist. Elektra was growing, transitioning from small to large, yet it had to conform to the shoes Jac had made for himself. But there were musical opportunities that David wanted, and he couldn't have them because Jac didn't want them, wouldn't sign them. And enough of those things happened that you couldn't be sure if Jac was disagreeing on taste or disagreeing in order to be exerting power over David. So in a way David was caged by Jac. And the more difficult things were between Jac and David, the more withdrawn David became. He started to shut down. The last six months you could see this.
JAC: For all David's outward suavity and cool, he ate away at his own insides. A metaphor: In aviation, planes are equipped with a self-lubricating vacuum pump that powers the critical "blind flying" directional gyro and attitude indicator. These instruments lubricate themselves by very slowly eroding the material of the pump itself, and after a while it fails. David was like that pump—he took the day-to-day difficulties of the business and internalized them until he ran out of the substance needed to continue.
DAVID ANDERLE: I was hanging a lot, very much into the scene. I didn't want to come to the office every day. I didn't want to be responsible. And I was really loving producing—Delaney & Bonnie, the Bread demo, and I did a demo of Santana, which Jac at that time didn't get, didn't hear the rock and the Latin. I wanted to be an artist and a producer and go out. With all that, I was probably getting a bit sloppy around the office.
Jac summons me to New York. I go to his office and he fires me, tells me it's over and he's letting me go, and I remember being totally awestruck at how clean his desk was. How can a guy know so much, get so much business done, and have a desk as clean as that? There I was, sitting getting fired and just being awed by his desk.
I was sort of expecting it, in fact I was sort of wanting it, because I wanted to get on with my life and I didn't know how I was possibly going to leave Elektra. So that was OK. Then he said, "Let's go have lunch." We had a great time. Driving back to the office, he says, "Maybe you shouldn't leave." Because he remembered how much fun we had with each other, how much we liked each other. But he did exactly the right thing. It was definitely time, time for me. I said, "No, you fired me, I'm gonna stay fired, thanks."
JAC: Losing David was traumatic. Losing Paul Rothchild was even worse.
Paul had contributed enormously to the company. If you review the Elektra catalog, he was responsible as producer for a significant percentage of our early Sixties releases. He kept Jim Morrison on track, and delivered five gold or platinum Doors albums. All by itself that was a mountainous accomplishment and Paul carried a big work load on top of it.
I paid him a generous salary plus a producer's percentage, the standard two percent of the late Sixties. But it was Paul's sense that he wasn't sufficiently rewarded.
JOHN HAENY: Jac and Rothchild had an ongoing fight about money, Rothchild acting it out, picking on Jac in little ways, Jac picking back. They're standing in the doorway fighting and Jac stops the fight. "Paul," he says, "what is it that you want?" Paul says, "Jac, I want a million dollars." And Jac, instantly, very quiet, very gentle, very reflective, looks at Paul and says, "It's not enough, Paul. It's not enough." Classic. Embedded in that is a more profound thought, that the reality of life is that it isn't about money. When you don't have money it's about money, but when you've got money you realize it isn't about money, it's about making peace with life on an entirely different level.
JAC: After Paul's first two years at Elektra I had given him unparalleled freedom to record pretty much whatever he liked, subject only to my reasonable review. He never had absolute signing authority, even though he thought he did—I was too careful and probably too controlling to ever let that happen.
If I was dead set against an act, knowing deep in my gut it was a mistake, then Paul usually backed off. If I was ambivalent, Paul got to record it anyway—for example, Rhinoceros, a Rothchild-confected supergroup.
JANN WENNER: It was the heavy rock period, and everybody was losing their brains over supergroups.
"Rhinoceros" ... an early supergroup
JAC: Rhinoceros showed promise on paper but couldn't make it work in the studio. Like its namesake, the group was ponderous, and no amount of prodding or pushing or retakes was going to bring the ignition of life to a band that, despite flashes of brilliance, was a put-up job to begin with.
The blowup came over a much less consequential group than Rhinoceros. In fact, for the life of me I can't even remember their name. Paul insisted on signing them. Many superb producers are magical with bands assigned to them but that doesn't make them great A&R men. Paul's work with the Doors and others was brilliant, but he never signed a major act, Butterfield excepted. He fired blanks with Clear Light, Ars Nova and Rhinoceros—all ambitious signings of his—and I thought that the band he wanted now was not worth having on the label. I stood on my judgment, Paul stood on his dignity. For him it was a matter of principle. I wanted him to concede in this one instance. Normally, in the give and take of our relationship, it wouldn't have been a problem. But Paul was now a star, courted by other companies and with the usual gaggle of lawyers whispering sweet temptation into his ear. This ridiculous brouhaha between us led to him going.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: Supposedly I could sign anything I wanted, as long as it lived up to Jac's conditions of being able to sell enough copies. Maybe only two or three albums that I've ever made haven't at least paid for themselves. Jac and I came to loggerheads over this one. Jac really dug in his heels and said, "No way." I said, "Are you breaking your promise?" He said, "You've got to give me this one, Paul." And I was so full of myself with my success that I wouldn't let it go.
The conversation got more and more heated, and finally Jac turned to Larry Harris. He says, "Larry, what should I do? I hate this confrontation with him. This guy's important to my company." And Larry says, "Let him go. You don't need producers any more. The bands will produce themselves." I said, "You're serious, aren't you?" He said, "Oh, yes. Producers are just a drain." And that's where I leave Elektra.
The one mistake I ever saw Jac make publicly—mean it, support it, defend it, even when it was obvious it was a mistake—was Larry Harris. Jac didn't stand on the side of wrong too often or for too long. He was usually very well placed in his judgment of the future, and about people. But Larry Harris he missed cold. I hated that man from the day he came. He was Uriah Heep alive and well at Elektra Records, with the personality of a dead mackerel. More than any other single factor, Larry Harris destroyed the spirit of Elektra. He put a wedge between Jac and everybody else who had been important to Jac up to that point. He created coastal rivalries that didn't exist, caused internecine fighting. And later he took a philosophy out into the industry at large which was so deadly a virus that its effects are still being felt today—that record companies could and should be run by attorneys and accountants.
JAC: It's a great story and far more interesting than the rather bland truth, in my memory, of sitting down with Paul and Irwin Russell at Dan Tana's restaurant in Hollywood trying to resolve an A&R issue, which is what I originally thought this was. My mistake was in not understanding that the problem went far deeper, to Paul's sense of self-worth. Had I made a gesture, financial or emotional, to show how valued he really was, I think we might have worked it out.
For any proposed album, casting the right producer was my most critical A&R decision. Out of this choice came magic or mayhem. I believed in a strong core of resident staff producers and we had them: Paul, Mark Abramson, David Anderle, Peter Siegel, Russ Miller, and engineers who could double on the job like Bruce Botnick and John Haeny. Yet as the record industry grew, we could no longer maintain enough staff producers to handle the wide variety of music that presented itself. With more artists and different genres of music, we began to reach outside, the way a director would be selected for a film project. What had happened in film, with the shift in emphasis at the major studios from studio system to freelance, was now showing up in music. Producers found artists and became attached to the project. Though I wasn't necessarily thrilled with these structural changes, I recognized their inevitability and tried to work with them.
Paul's take on Larry is a catalog of frustrations and observations that he had accumulated over time and he tossed those, in his own mind, onto the small blaze already smoldering about the right to unilaterally sign acts. That having been said, his evaluation of Larry is shared by many, if not most, of the Elektra staff. Once Larry himself had gone, I agreed.
Paul had a great career, as he deserved to. He was a prodigious talent. As an independent he produced records that remain classics: Janis Joplin's "Pearl," and Bonnie Raitt at her best. And Paul continued with the Doors for Elektra as an independent, receiving healthy advances and a lifetime of royalties. We remained warm and devoted friends, and in 1992 we did another album together that recalled our best days. We had fun and laughed about the past . . . and the present.
JAC: 1969 seemed to race by. In August, Woodstock seized the imagination of the entire country—the high of all Sixties highs. Looking back in time, it's hard to imagine that there were only a few months separating the biggest coming together of music, peace, and love in a farmer's field in upstate New York from Altamont in December: the Rolling Stones concert at an auto race track in northern California, where Mick Jagger sang 'Sympathy For The Devil,' and in the name of security a Hell's Angel killed a member of the audience in full view of the stage and a film camera.
Not long before Altamont, at Elektra in LA we had our own brush with ultimate dreadfulness. We received a demo tape from Charles Manson.
RUSS MILLER: Elektra was a magnet for the weird. We'd have all kinds of people dropping by. The Doors were really the first punk artists, I mean they started it, and everybody was trying to copy them, and Elektra was the place where they would send this kind of music. So this guy comes in, he was representing Manson, he kept saying to me, "You gotta go to the ranch. Broads and smoke. I mean, it'd be great, you know? This guy's magnetic." I was curious, so I made a date to go out, but I had to do something with Jac that evening, and didn't.
Then the tape came to me. When I listened to it, I said, "This is crap." The worst of garage bands. It wasn't music, it was noise. All guitar noise. They were all whacking away there. It was totally violent. And soon after that the murders happened.
NINA HOLZMAN: After I don't know how many months of keeping our Mexican divorce secret, I told Jac, "You're living your life like you've always lived it, but I can't live like this, I'm going to tell people." He was very upset. So I started telling people, and together we told the children. Adam's response—he was eleven—was, "This is a joke, right?"
JAC: Simon Taub, who in the past had represented both Nina and me, urged Nina to get a California divorce because Mexican "quickies" were under scrutiny by US courts.
NINA HOLZMAN: It wasn't acrid, there weren't any fights, but there was real property involved, and I realized early on that I couldn't be negotiating with Jac, I had to let the attorney handle it.
In the depths of my gloom late in my marriage, I had this fantasy that The New Yorker would do a profile of Jac, and I would be able to tell them the real story, and it would be cathartic. But I don't have any big thing about what a terrible person Jac is, because he's not. And since then, he's always been a wonderful friend.
JAC: With Nina's decision to live in California, I no longer needed the large apartment in the Village, so I sold it and moved into something smaller and closer to the office. I was single, and record company presidents were becoming stars. We had our own groupies. A local underground newspaper assigned a piece to an "investigative reporter." Her assignment/assignation: to "get" every record company president and publish the results. I was inordinately fond of my review.
ELLEN SANDER: I was first introduced to Jac at a Judy Collins concert. Then I was in the office—I had been doing some writing for Elektra, artist bios—and Danny Fields said, "I think you're going to get a compliment. Jac really loves the last piece you did."
JAC: I admired Ellen's writing in the Saturday Review, and particularly her omnibus piece on the "Pantheon of Rock," a well-done primer for the uninitiated. And of course she had written the legendary piece on the Plaster Casters.
She invited me and some journalist friends to a private exhibition of the Plaster Casters' work. I arrived to see the reporter from Rolling Stone tape-measuring the significant dimensions of Jimi Hendrix.
Several days later Ellen phoned me about a rumor that I had a copy of the Beatles' yet-to-be-released album, "Let It Be." She was anxious, let's say desperate, to hear it. In fact I did have a master lacquer, given to David Anderle and me by Derek Taylor when we were in London at Apple Corps to discuss Delaney & Bonnie. I invited her to dinner.
ELLEN SANDER: He picked me up on his motor scooter. I was living on Third Avenue between 35th and 36th Street, in a tiny apartment, and the doorbell was broken, the intercom wasn't working for me to talk back to him, and the elevator wouldn't come, so I had to run down the stairs, and he said, "Well, I thought you weren't home," and he was put off by that, and I tried to reassure him that I would never not be home for somebody to pick me up for a date, it was a technical problem—I was both there and not late.
JAC: Off we went to a candle-lit restaurant in the Village, one of those atmospheric places so thick with the vapor of romance and garlic that you don't even notice the marginal food.
ELLEN SANDER: Neither one of us had love on our agenda. Jac was not quite finished with his divorce from Nina, and I was very, very busy, not at all interested in keeping company with any one person. But I was curious and he was curious.
JAC: Before that evening I had no emotional interest in Ellen, but during dinner I found myself strongly attracted to her. She was beautiful, razor-sharp, full of opinions, and with an eclectic taste that paralleled my own.
ELLEN SANDER: And so we had a very romantic evening. I didn't taste my food. We were just talking and talking. I think we were just so overwhelmed with the attraction between us.
JAC: We scootered back to my apartment. I had promised to play her the record, and I hesitated to make any move until the promise was kept. I had a tape copy of the album cued and ready to go. I lit a few candles.
ELLEN SANDER: My memory is of walking in and he had candles lit. And it struck me, I guess he anticipated that we might be coming back here.
JAC: I rolled a joint and we settled back. When the final notes of 'Let It Be' had faded, I leaned over and kissed her. When we awoke next morning Ellen said, "I thought it was very gentlemanly of you to wait until after I heard the album."
ELLEN SANDER: He called the office and said, "Pearl, I'm not coming in today." I heard her on the other line saying this, that, this, that, and he said, "That's all I have to say." And he hung up.
He never spent a night at my place. I kept my own apartment and my own phone number, but most of the time we spent together at his place.
We'd have dinner almost every night. And go to concerts. If it was going to be a mess we'd use the limo, but we'd go to the Fillmore East on the motor scooter, the little under-powered scooter. He got me a helmet, and we get off, and he's parking it, kicking the stand down, and a big black guy comes up and says, "Hey, man, you with the Hell's Angels?" And we both cracked up.We shared a love of music, to the same depth, certainly. One of the ways we communicated was to program tapes for each other. Jac would create these tapes, always beautifully segued, with themes weaving in and out. I started doing tapes for him as well.
Sometimes the tapes would be short. They'd be like three apologetic songs together, because we would have disagreements, or worse. I can't be dominated, I have that kind of a personality, I can't be bossed around. Although I've learned to handle it a lot better, at the time I was a raving brat, and we would come to loggerheads about things.
It usually worked out okay. Still, we had what could probably be characterized as a tumultuous relationship. We were very passionate about each other, we were very passionate about our own opinions, and we would have the clash of the titans. Off the scale. Especially on my part, because I come from a family of shouters.
And I was under a great deal of pressure. There really wasn't rock journalism before me and another half dozen people in the mid to late Sixties started writing it. I felt that I had a message to bring, more than a once-over-lightly on the product: it was the phenomenology of the politics and lifestyle changes that were opening up in the Sixties. And I had a lot of pressure from my contemporaries, none of whom liked me very much, and I always felt under pressure to perform. That was the load I was carrying for myself, in my early twenties, feeling terribly inexperienced and under-qualified, but having a great deal of feeling and certainty too.
I tried to keep my own identity, but it was difficult. Jac was under a lot of pressure also and he was obviously working at a much higher level as far as the power he was dealing with, and even though I knew he admired my work, I felt that sometimes he belittled my work as well.
And of course I was the junior member by thirteen or fourteen years. It was a new experience. I didn't have that many relationships. I had married when I was nineteen or twenty, it lasted ten months, and I never knew what went wrong, so I was frightened to be in another relationship. But it wasn't as if I had a choice. I was very in love with Jac. He was my hero.
