Chapter 31
High tech, high performance, high mileage ... Nashville cats... Pecan pie and watermelon in July ... Flee ye from Mount Zion ... Nearly a Sufi, almost a saint ... Taxi!
JAC: If my personal energy output at Elektra before the sale to Warner/Kinney was full out—and it always was—after the sale it was even higher. The extra load was partly WEA, and on top of that was technical work for the Warner Communications strategy group.
Steve Ross understood that with a vertically integrated record group and a film company he had a platform for building a communications empire. Within a few months of acquiring Elektra, he and Alan Cohen invited me to join a strategic planning team. Other members included Ted Ashley; Spencer Harrison, Ted's righthand man, a former broadcast attorney and consummate curmudgeon; and Peter Goldmark, one of my heroes, the co-inventor of the LP and now creating a research lab for Warner Communications. We were the think tank. Our charter was to figure out where to take the company. The invitation was unexpected but delightful. I could put my full range of knowledge and experience to work in a playpen bigger than anything I had ever imagined or could do on my own. The merger with Kinney/WCI was having unanticipated, heady benefits.
JOE SMITH: Jac had a talent for technical things. He read engineering journals voraciously, knew all about the innovations. He left us all in the dust with that.
JAC: We immediately honed in on cable TV as a splendid opportunity. I spent many engrossing hours brainstorming with Peter Goldmark. Though I wasn't as smart about technology as Peter, that didn't stop me from having arguments as an equal. We became very close friends. He gave me one of the three existing copies of the original LP. (Another is in the Smithsonian.)
I put in a lot of time on quad sound, which never took off in the Seventies but has now made a comeback in the late Nineties on the new DVD video discs as accompanying surround sound. And the laser disc—it was being worked on in Holland. In 1970 I flew over to see it, the first glass master, the only one of its kind in the world. I said to myself and anyone within our company who would listen—which wasn't everybody—"I've seen the future. The digital age is coming, and we will have a rare chance to reinvent the business, its economics, and the means of delivering media and communications."
I loved the technology work. It was a game at a much higher level than the record business, and I was a player. It absorbed most of my time. I was flying all over the world, racking up hundreds of thousands of miles, and a sharply rising percentage of those were technology-driven, not music-driven, peaking at probably eighty-five percent technology to fifteen percent Elektra. One year I was in Japan every month for six months, and when I came home, I would have to work twice as hard.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: As Jac dealt with his success, which was coming at him with ever-increasing speed, he was at times short with people. The more successful Elektra became, the more demanding, brusque and inward Jac became. And the memo flow became more excessive. And after Elektra was sold and he got deeply involved in the gestalt of Warner—worldwide communications, corporate strategies—he was at his most inaccessible. I think it was because he was confronting his greatest challenges, and had little time for anything or anyone else.
JAC: Still, amid all the business hurlyburly and the technical brainbending, I kept my ears tuned for music to follow, and at a radio conference in Philadelphia I was led to take a walk down a country road.
During an off-the-record session people let down their hair and told the truth. Dick Clark talked very engagingly about early radio, the ethics (more precisely the non-ethics) of DJs and concert promoters. Next up was Michael Nesmith, ex-Monkee. He was so much more intelligent than the cute ersatz housebroken simian image—witty, articulate, and deeply concerned about how hard it was to get anything going on records in the early Seventies. I introduced myself and said, "You have interesting ideas. We should think about doing something together."
I invited him to Tranquility and we talked. Michael thought there was room for a West Coast record label featuring local country performers. West Coast country had been defined long before by Buck Owens, out of Bakersfield, and nothing fresh had happened since. There were fine natural country singers on the Coast. So—put together a simple studio and Michael would start producing records. Call the label Countryside, and release through Elektra and the WEA distribution system. It was a promising premise, a low-cost low-risk project—reminiscent of Paxton, but with the sizeable plus of being minus Frazier Mohawk, dope, and a gaggle of Cornish game hens.
I always thought of country music as a tributary of folk music. There were terrific writers in Nashville. From LA or New York it looked like a tough music community to enter. Someone would have to build and nurture those relationships. Russ Miller could do that and wanted to.
RUSS MILLER: One night Lonnie Mack came to my house in the Hollywood Hills with two albums under his arms. He said, "Put your ears between those speakers and smoke one of these and don't say anything." The first album was Roberta Flack. I freaked. The second was a Nashville singer-writer, Mickey Newbury, and I was so moved I cried.
Lonnie Mack
Lonnie was a hero in Nashville. He said to me, "I've got some great friends there, great musicians." He introduced me to a lot of people, including Mickey, who was close to Kris Kristofferson, and he wrote songs for artists from Joan Baez and Buffy Sainte-Marie to Ray Charles and Jerry Lee Lewis.
Mickey wouldn't come into town to see me, but he sent word to come out to his houseboat at Hendersonville. It was raining, and he welcomed me on board, and in the rain he sang. What an experience. We stayed up till about four in the morning, talking metaphysics, all kind of things. As I left, he shook my hand and said, "If you can get me off of Mercury, buy my contract out of there, I'll go with Elektra."
So I worked with Mickey. He wrote great songs and had interesting soulful ideas. He was the one who put together 'American Trilogy,' that Elvis Presley sang during his Vegas period: 'Battle Hymn of the Republic,' 'Dixie,' and 'All My Trials, Lord,' the classic Northern song and the classic Southern song from the Civil War, and a song of black suffering.
Lonnie Mack also led me to Memphis, Tennessee, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and I was gathering up artists: Don Nix, Marlin Greene, and Marlin's wife Jeanie—she was white, but she sang black, she heard voices and truly believed she was the reincarnation of Mary Magdalene. Out of my Southern travels came a proposal from me to Jac: a tour, knock-down, boogie-woogie, bang-bang, funky great music, two drummers, black backup singers, Lonnie Mack's band and the band from Muscle Shoals, and Marlin and Jeanie and Don, and we would call it the Alabama State Troupers and the Mount Zion Choir and Band. Jac said, "Go for it."
I put everything together, and six days before the tour was supposed to start, with all the publicity cranking for Lonnie's new album, I'm visiting Jac at his house in the country, sitting in the sun, and Jac yells that Don Nix is on the phone, and what does Don tell me but Lonnie has disappeared.
I say to Jac, "Don't worry, I'll find him. We're friends. I'll get him back." I fly to Cincinnati where Lonnie lives. He's not there. I finally trace him to a place in Kentucky. He's w-a-y out in the country—he's a real country boy. I cross dirt roads, I ford streams. I finally come to a farmhouse, no electricity, and there's Lonnie's standing on the front steps. He says, "I'm not going back." I say, "How can you do this? We have a hundred thousand dollars tied up in this thing." He says, "I had this dream. I was running with my baby and my wife and the devil was after me and flames were coming out, and I woke up in a cold sweat and I walked over to the Bible in the motel there and the Bible was open to this text—'Flee ye from Mount Zion.'"
And that was it for Lonnie. I flew back to New York and walked into Jac's office, and Jac—I'll never forget this—took me in his arms and said, "Don't stop loving the artist, Russ. It's OK. We'll do something else. See who you can find." I flew to Memphis and got this black blues guitar player, Furry Lewis, and he was great, he charmed the audiences. He was a heavy drinker. I'd hand him a bottle of Seagram's every day and shave him every morning. And the tour went on.
JAC: I went on the road with them. The publicity department had very authentic-looking promotional shoulder patches made that said "Alabama State Troupers." In some of those roadhouses, with the boys at the bar barely able to sit their stools, and orthographically challenged anyway, not all that well equipped to distinguish between Troupers and Troopers, they thought we were the police.
RUSS MILLER: At that time the governor of Alabama was George Wallace, and when the tour was over he sent me a beautiful letter and a Confederate Civil War pistol.
JAC: Did we make any money? No. Was it fun to do? You bet. And the icing on the cake was how reconnected to the music I felt.
RUSS MILLER: In Nashville I was this freak from the West Coast, long hair, dressed like a cowboy and smoked dope, which was an acceptable thing in LA, while everybody down in Nashville was really hiding it.
Suddenly Jac and Mickey Newbury's publisher, Wesley Rose, decided that we should have a picnic to introduce Countryside in Nashville, a country picnic, and invite all the country-rooted people—watermelon, everything, at the lake, on the Fourth of July.
It was hot. Wesley Rose has sweat pouring down him, and there is Mike Nesmith and Mickey Newbury and Lonnie Mack, and Mel Posner. And Jac Holzman, president of Elektra Records, in a tank top. There's a picture of it someplace. I remember thinking, "What a culture clash."
At that time Nashville wasn't like it is today. We were staying at the Holiday Inn, and Jac—that night he nearly hit the fan: "You want to go to the movies?"
Jac and Mickey Newbury in the studio
JAC: I wasn't much of a Nashville cat, but I loved the music. And there was nothing more seductive than spending an evening on Mickey's houseboat. His wife, Susan, just happened to bake the world's most sensuous all-Southern pecan pie. The lake, the quiet, the magnolia, a second piece of pie, Mickey singing—it doesn't get any better.
JAC: In the early Seventies the Sixties singer-songwriter was an endangered species. They were either swallowed up in rock and roll, or off forming electric bands of their own. Carly Simon was of a differentiated species, but it was almost impossible for me to spot rarities, female or male. I simply didn't have the time anymore. It was Ann Purtill of our New York office who brought me Harry Chapin.
ANN PURTILL: I used to do reports for Jac of acts that I saw live that were of interest. These were called my hanging-out reports. I just typed them as if I was talking to Jac. He always said he liked them—I was listening with his ears, as he put it. I would do my report every Wednesday, after I had been out in the clubs on Tuesday night. Tuesday at the Gaslight or wherever was hoot night—it was still called that. I saw Bonnie Raitt; she was unsigned then. One night at the Bitter End I walked into a little ante-area and a woman smiled and said hello, because I have one of those faces that people think they know, and it was Lily Tomlin. I remember she did the rubber lady, the one who started out eating erasers and ended up with Goodyear tires.
After much badgering by a man named Fred Kewley, I went down to the Village Gate to see Harry Chapin.
FRED KEWLEY: Harry was opening solo for the family group, the Chapin Brothers. "Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris" was playing from seven to nine, then we'd take over. We rented the Gate, $400 a week for five weeks, and continued on for nearly thirteen weeks. After expenses we cleared enough for bus fare for the musicians.
We were on the phone trying to stir up some action. We bugged and bugged and bugged the New York Times. Finally, at the second show, this guy came in with his girlfriend. He was the writer. He was stoned out of his mind, drunker than a skunk. The show started and he fell asleep, put his head down on the table, and was gone. He never even saw Harry, but his girlfriend flipped. So Harry got a rave review from the girlfriend, with the writer's byline. And it was placed in the Times where the lead story about this sniper or hijacker started on page one, went to page twenty-three, and where that story ended the Harry Chapin review began. There were a lot of lucky things like that.
About the eighth week or so, Ann Purtill came down. She was the first one who heard something.
ANN PURTILL: It was the best thing I had ever seen unsigned. It started out in the darkened room with Harry singing, 'Could You Put Your Light On, Please,' and slowly bringing the lights up. His background singer, John Wallace, could sing very high falsetto, very low bass. There was a cello underscoring the songs. Harry didn't have a very good voice, but it didn't matter. When they finished, Harry said, "I have a new song, we've never done it before, so bear with us." Then he sang 'Taxi.' And I just went, "Aaah . . ."
FRED KEWLEY: She dragged Jac down. The first time he didn't like it. We changed songs so he would come back. Ann kept pushing him. The second time he came down was the night before Clive Davis was coming from CBS. Jac liked Harry that time.
JAC: I asked Ann to arrange for Harry and his band to go into the studio and do a tape, one take of everything, so I could find my way into the music. Out in LA I'd often drive the Pacific Coast Highway at night, looking at the ocean and listening to music with a stereo unit and big headphones. I had been a bit lukewarm about Harry. He wasn't an impressive singer, but you could tell he believed every word he wrote. And in the process of listening without interruptions in a beautiful setting I came to understand and love the songs and knew that this was the kind of artist who belonged on Elektra. We made an offer.
Negotiations were well underway—and then Harry disappeared from my radar screen. I called his house on Long Island repeatedly and could never get hold of him. His wife, Sandy, would say, "He's out running on the beach." Mike Mayer, Elektra's East Coast attorney, couldn't get hold of Harry's attorney either, and they were close friends. Something weird was going on.
Indeed. Atlantic, Elektra's stablemate label, was chasing Harry. And Clive Davis at Columbia had got hold of my demo tape.
Clive was trying to convince Harry that he should be on the label of legends—Bob Dylan, Paul Simon—and that was a damned good argument. Clive trotted out computer runs showing how many records Paul sold, how many Bob sold, and predicted that Harry's numbers would be in that range.
Since the Doors, any artist that I truly went after I had been able to sign. I didn't want to lose now, and not this artist. It became something of a crusade.
FRED KEWLEY: We had been hoping for $5,000. Jac made an offer, about $15,000. Clive flipped and offered $20,000. Jac upped to $25,000. Clive went to $30,000. Jac upped that. In between those jumps, we committed definitely to both of them.
ANN PURTILL: Finally I said to Jac, "Do you have a memo of understanding with him?" and Jac said, "No, just a handshake." And I said, "Fuck it, don't sign him. I don't want to do business with him. He's not a man of his word. He has no honor."
JAC: Harry calls and says he has to talk to me. I was on my way to the West Coast, so we met in the Admiral's Club at the airport. Harry and Fred told me they had decided to go with Columbia, and I was miserable for the entire flight.
Arriving at the office the next morning, I played the tape for Mickey Kapp, the son of Dave Kapp, who was now VP of administration for the West Coast Elektra office. Mickey had A&R chops and years of experience. When the tape had finished, Mickey turned to me and said, "Jac, that sure is a tough one to lose."
I was having lunch with Joel Friedman, head of the WEA distribution network, and I told him the story of Clive Davis and the computer printouts. Joel says, "Hmmm. Would you like to see an authentic CBS run?" Within hours it's messengered to me, and the numbers Clive has been quoting to Harry are exactly double what is on the printout.
Armed with new data—also known as the facts—I start calling again. Harry was still "running on the beach" (at 10pm?). Eventually I got to Fred and said, "I'm coming in early Sunday morning, and I'll bang on doors, I'll haunt you guys until somebody talks to me."
JAC: I couldn't get there any earlier than Sunday, because on the Saturday night there was an Elektra party in LA to celebrate my friend Cyrus Faryar's first album.
Cyrus was the product of one of those romance-novel marriages: English showgirl-Persian diplomat. He was a sexy devil, between handsome and beautiful, with beckoning dark eyes and an effortless baritone voice that came out, speaking or singing, as smoothly and sweetly as some sort of rare fragrant Middle Eastern unguent topping from a tube—attar of Faryar.
OONA AUSTIN: Oh, Cyrus . . . Nearly a sufi, almost a saint.
JAC: Cyrus and his friends lived, somewhat communally, at a place called the Farm, just over the hill from Hollywood toward Burbank and up a treacherous little road off Barham Boulevard. It was one of the scenes where you could drop by any time, and among my favorite spots to spend an evening. John Sebastian dwelled for a spell in the yard in a tie-dye tent of his own creation.
HENRY DILTZ: Tie-Dye Annie taught John how to tie-dye, and he tie-dyed everything he owned—every piece of clothing, every pillow case, the sheets that lined the inside of his tent.
JAC: There was a nice little studio in the house, built by a journeyman carpenter named Harrison Ford. That was where Cyrus recorded his album, gentle songs that felt like warm ocean breezes, under the guidance of his friend Ron Jacobs, a powerhouse Boss Jock of Southern California rock radio. Ron also produced "A Child's Garden of Grass" for Elektra—
CYRUS FARYAR:—On which I was the voice of the Indian guru.
HENRY DILTZ: All the Farm ladies worked on the party—Renais, Lynn, Annie, Oona.
Cyrus Faryar in full bloom EKS-75068
OONA AUSTIN: I was there as a complete born-again Cyrus person.
CYRUS FARYAR: A great tent was erected over the driveway, which was then carpeted in oriental rugs.
OONA AUSTIN: We made a hundred-fifty pillows.
HENRY DILTZ: A ton of pillows.
CYRUS FARYAR: Bigger than your head, bigger than your body.
JAC: And the ladies appeared that night in all their best makeup and finery.
OONA AUSTIN: We were there for the love of Cyrus, worshipping Cyrus.
BILL ALEXANDER: It was an Arabian Nights scene.
JAC: There were caftans all round.
ALLEN DAVIAU: Marrakesh meets hippie tie-dye psychedelia.
HENRY DILTZ: Very tasteful. Not your Hog Farm hippies.
ANTON GREENE: The party menu was planned by Jack Poet, loosely based on the Shah of Iran's great party. Hummus. Stuffed grape leaves. Stuffing the quail eggs with caviar was meticulous work. None of us had done it before. We were in the kitchen it seemed for days. The caviar was real beluga, and we sneaked a little along the way, licking the finger.
HENRY DILTZ: I had taken the cover photo for Cyrus's album, Cyrus in profile in the desert, and for the party the picture was reproduced on the wall in flowers, huge, no expense spared.
JAC: Invitations went out to perhaps a hundred people, and two hundred turned up.
ALLEN DAVIAU: Music business hondlers, Laurel Canyon creatures, friends and lovers.
CYRUS FARYAR: We had a glorious time, rejoicing in one another. I sang the album for everyone, and it was over. We had spent the entire promotion budget. It was like fireworks. For one night I promoted myself, and then disappeared into invisibility. To this day I have the tin in which the caviar came and which now holds guitar picks.
JAC: I was having a wonderful time. I didn't want to leave. But I had to be on the red-eye to New York in the big game hunt for Harry Chapin.
Deep in the night, somewhere over the heartland, I decided to offer to produce Harry myself. I had been away from the studio far too long and I was curious if I could still hack it.
At the airport at six in the morning, George Graves met me with the limo and drove me to Long Island. In civilized fashion I knocked, not banged, on the door. Harry and Fred were both there. I walked in and turned into a manic terrier with Harry's trouser cuff in my teeth. Nothing was going to make me let go. Forget that they were signing with Columbia, act as if there was no doubt that Harry would record for Elektra, ignore all evidence to the contrary.
Harry Chapin
I said I would fly Harry and the band to LA in the Warner company jet—equipment and ladies and dogs and cats. I offered to produce; we would do the album together, go into the studio, and stay until we got it right. I took a leaf out of my book of the Doors and promised to release no other album in that month.
Then I showed them the real CBS numbers. Harry happily collapsed. He said, "We'll do it. Let me call Clive." And as light began to peek over the transoms of the east coast he made the call, and Harry Chapin was an Elektra artist.
CLIVE DAVIS: That was a wonderful, valuable lesson that I've attempted to use myself, after I started Arista. A terrific example of where, with not only tenacity but with imagination, a small company with an extremely imaginative, tasteful head—which is really what Jac has always been—was able to win out in competition with a large company, where I personally established an equally strong connection with the artists.
Jac came up with things that a large company could never match. No other artist being released at the same time—with the size of the Columbia roster it's inconceivable, just by the nature of the obligation to release product, that you could ever match such a commitment. Also, a trade advertising commitment, in which a small company does not have to rationalize it to other artists, who say, "Why is this artist getting something as compared to other artists?" So, Jac very imaginatively thought of at least two different areas that a company like Columbia could not possibly match.
JAC: An independent enjoys greater flexibility in its actions. We pinpoint exactly what needs to be done rather than take the more scattershot approach of the majors. An independent rises and falls on its senses, its feel of the audience, on its judgment and taste, intuition, and, of course, luck. Without much margin for error we dance on a tightrope over the moat that is home to the crocodiles.
ANN PURTILL: The day Jac signed Harry was my birthday. Harry and the band took me out to dinner and bought me a bicycle.
JAC: I hadn't produced a record in years. My ass was on the line.
FRED KEWLEY: Jac acted like it was his first project. He put in eighteen-hour days.
JAC: My going into the studio with Harry created problems with other artists. Judy Collins, for one, admired Harry's songs and his politics, but there was some light scratching. I was willing to pay that price.
This was the first record scheduled for our big new and improved Studio A. No studio ever works right the first time, there are always little things that go wrong, but you can't anticipate these snags until you put the facility through its paces during real sessions. We had some minor breakdowns but soon things settled in.
Harry was an extraordinarily fast study. He had the kind of rapid assimilation and facility that Bill Clinton has—in fact he was like Clinton in many ways. He quickly figured how a studio worked, which was important because the more he knew the more he could conceive of doing. During breaks the band would be taking fifteen minutes and Harry would sit in a corner writing a new song. We talked a great deal about the difference between craft and art. Harry had craft down pat; I was pushing him for more art. After several weeks of pressure-cooker days that went on till we dropped, we became close friends.
Harry Chapin "Heads & Tales" EKS-75023
When the album was finished, mixed, and ready, we sat around the studio listening to it, trying to forget all the tension that went into its making. I thought we had done very well. But the studio can be a very deceptive place. Everything sounds fat and happy coming through those enormous speakers, but how will it sound on a home stereo? How do you take great sound and stuff it through a car radio? Most studios would check a final mix through a set of smallish speakers, surrogates for the home system. I went one step further. I had gotten hold of a little AM transmitter to which we attached a wire coat hanger for an antenna. It had a range of about a hundred yards. We tuned to an open space on the AM band, which was tough considering the crowded spectrum in Los Angeles, transmitted the mix illegally over the air, and then ran outside and jumped into our cars and listened. Me being me, I went from car radio to car radio. That was the final test.
JAC: 'Taxi' was the single—the touching story of a guy whose dreams of flying, being an ace pilot, have come down to driving a cab, hacking. Late at night he picks up a fare, and by chance it is a girl he once knew, whose dreams of becoming a star have come down to hooking.
It was one of the all-time singer-songwriter songs. It was also outrageously long for conventional airplay: 6:37. We had another 'Light My Fire' problem.
KEITH HOLZMAN: I think we put on the record label 4:69 or some bizarre time that didn't exist, pretending it was shorter than it was.
JAC: With the Warner jet, the hotels, and all the studio time, the album cost about forty thousand to make. The packaging was expensive, and there was a fund for tour support. All told we had well over a hundred thousand invested. We had to sell a lot of records. We did.
GEORGE STEELE: Harry was involved. He wanted to know the marketing strategies, what the promotions were, what the process was. There were forty other projects on the line, but he wanted to make sure he was Number 1 in your heart, so he would work at it. He knew how to work the room at Elektra better than any other artist.
JAC: He got everyone to go out of their way for him, and it wasn't artifice. He genuinely cared.
JACLYN EASTON: He was a great guy, a conflict resolver. At Tranquility, Adam put milk in my soup and I was militant. Harry said, "Mmm, I love milk soup! Jaclyn, can I have some?"
KEITH HOLZMAN: Harry and his four brothers volunteered for our softball team. Mel Posner got us into the music league. We had the most anemic team in America, the Elektra Butterflies. Most of us could barely lift a pen to sign our names. Harry and his brothers were great athletes, and we started winning.
JAC: Harry had tremendous energy and he was brilliant at promotion. He could do the softest of hard sells nonstop and forever. We'd put him in a room and give him a phone and he would call every DJ in America, every program director. We gave him endless lists. We had little notes: this DJ loves the Dodgers, this one is an Orioles fan, and Harry would have these really nice conversations, not bringing up the record unless they did, but imprinting himself indelibly upon their hearts and minds.
MITCHELL FINK: After he had a hit with 'Taxi,' he and Sandy had a party at his house and gave out plaques to people who believed in him before—the Harry Chapin Early Believers Club. He was very appreciative.
KEITH HOLZMAN: And he went out and toured like crazy. These were the times when we knew touring was absolutely essential, and a lot of acts didn't want to do it.
FRED KEWLEY: There wasn't anything we wouldn't do on a last-minute basis—if we get four days' notice to go to El Paso to open for the Temptations, we're there.
MITCHELL FINK: When an artist is on the road, usually there's a field guy who meets them—someone from the Philadelphia market; or maybe someone from artist relations in the record company goes with them. In this case it was the president of the company; it was Jac. That was the first time I had been exposed to a record company president who would put himself totally on the line for an artist—I mean, who believed in that artist to such a degree that he was, in fact, like a road manager. When Harry walked up to the stage that night, Jac was walking in front of him, kind of almost an advance man, or a roadie, and just in that spirit. Jac Holzman was there as someone who was on the road with Harry Chapin. I'll never forget that.
JAC: We presented our artists and new releases to our WEA marketing and sales staff at our annual conventions. These were very important meetings.
For the weekend event we held in Palm Springs in 1972, we chartered an American Airlines 727 from New York. On final approach the stewardess' announcement was: "Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for choosing American and would you please extinguish whatever it is that you have been smoking." Definitely a music business charter in the early Seventies.
On Friday evening we showcased the Doors. After Jim died, I had re-signed Ray, Robby, and John to a multi-record deal, my way of showing them that it wasn't all Jim and saying thank you, with Warner's money.
The Doors "Other Voices" EKS-75017
Their first album, "Other Voices," was released in October 1971, and to launch the record and the new reality, we put on a Carnegie Hall concert. Carnegie Hall was big enough to hold the crowd and small enough to go three-quarters of the way back toward intimacy. With Ray doing most of the singing, the Doors wowed the sell-out audience of soaked-in-brine Doors fanatics. At Palm Springs they played another killer set at the restaurant atop the tramway overlooking the city.
During dinner, some kids who had snuck in to hear them were found hiding in a serving cabinet behind the bar. Security was called, the police were called; and when the cops came piling off the tram car the paranoid among us were sure it was a bust, and we were treated to a performance-art spectacle, a frieze of promotion men feigning not to be tossing baggies over the railing and down the slopes of Mt. San Jacinto.
For the closing Saturday banquet we showcased both Carly Simon and Harry Chapin live. Harry opened. Being Harry, he had been working the house all day like a seasoned pol, and the audience was primed and ready. He more than lived up to his billing.
STEVE HARRIS: Harry was a hard act to follow.
JAC: Carly had flown in separately, and the airline lost her bags—
CARLY SIMON:—Not my guitar. But all my clothes. I had this beautiful American Indian chamois dress that I wore on stage. Gone. My jewelry. Gone. All I had was my handbag. And I had nothing to wear, because I came in, like, a nightgown, because I was traveling at night; it was like a muumuu with a monk's hood. But the thing that killed me was my journal. It was a black leather notebook with looseleaf pages, Gucci, that somebody had given to me. My whole first smell of success, my opening at the Troubadour, that whole year, was all in my journal. And it had all my lyrics up until that time, all the different versions of all the songs. There was an earlier version of 'You're So Vain'—it was like a year before it actually came out, because that's a song I wrote originally called 'Bless You, Ben' and it was completely different. But I did have the line, "You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you." All gone. I was sick.
JAC: What a theft of memory. Despite everything, and in a dress hastily bought on the spot with Steve's wife, Nicole, Carly gave a wonderful performance. I was the MC. I said, "Remember our success last year with Carly. Harry Chapin is this year's Carly Simon." And Carly said—she was so quick, so smart and funny—"Harry, if you're this year's Carly Simon you must have had some very interesting boyfriends these past twelve months."
STEVE HARRIS: And then she sang her ass off and the audience went crazy.
GEORGE STEELE: Those conventions were very powerful. I remember one where Bill Harvey's visual presentation was computerized slides, with the music synchronized. The logo for our Elektra singles was a caterpillar, and as the lights went down and the room hushed and the music came up, the caterpillar went through a metamorphosis and became a butterfly. Beautiful job. And as the various artists came up on the screen with their music, there was some magic that came into that room full of jaded salespeople. A hush, a stillness, as the message of the songs unfolded. It was spiritual. It was mystical. It was overpowering. People left in awe. That was Elektra.
