Chapter 32
In pursuit of a Queen ... Glam slam, thank you, ma'am ... Fugue of a record man ... A hot tub in Muir Woods
JAC: There were moments like that when everything came together—and always through the music. The business of music was less and less to my taste.
Some record companies were abdicating their responsibility to find talent to the new gatekeepers, the lawyers and the managers. They were not just packaging artists with producers, they were making label deals—take a producer and an act, and that's the beginning of a new label.
These deals carry a high cost. The company funds one hundred percent of the money, paying advances to the artists, all the marketing, tour support, and, most critical, contributing their valuable staff time while also paying for the executive staff of the label imprint. You are fronting all the money and most of the effort, and if it succeeds you have a fifty percent equity ownership. These deals were onerous—and very few of them, Asylum excepted, worked out. But they were now the fashion. Again, it's a parallel to the motion picture companies: all the bad news of the movie business coming to roost in the record business. Except for Countryside, we never made those kinds of deals.
People at the record companies were becoming removed from the record-making process, or at least less essential to it. Which would take a lot of the fun out of it for me. We were no longer full-time record makers; we were becoming bankers and distributors, exercising our artistic judgment less. So-called street smarts were now acing out taste. The production entity could require the company to issue an album. If we didn't like it, were we going to substitute our judgment for the producer's? No—as a choice of evils we would have to issue it anyway. It was not my kind of record making and I avoided it like the plague it was.
JAC: Which is not to say that great music didn't come our way from production companies. Jack Nelson of Trident Audio Productions in London paid me a visit.
JACK NELSON: A casual meeting, a little fishing expedition. I had a couple of hours between planes. Jac was a fan of our work. I was carrying a sample tape of what Trident could do, so that people could hear our studio sound and also the groups we had under management. I was going to see if we could license some bands to Elektra.
Trident was probably the foremost studio of its time in England. It was a beehive of activity because of the engineers and the sound. Everybody from the Beatles and the Stones recorded there. Elton John—that's where he made his first six or seven albums. David Bowie. Cat Stevens was with Trident. One of Jac's English signings, Lindisfarne, recorded there. Carly Simon made her 'You're So Vain' album there.
I had a group called Queen. I had been shopping them for almost a year, and now I was signing them to EMI in England and I was in the process of signing them to CBS in North America. Jac said, "I'd like to hear them." I said, "OK, but I'm already in my third revision of the CBS contract."
JAC: Jack gave me the Queen tapes, a complete album, two full 10-inch reels. I listened to them at Tranquility, first through the speakers, then through headphones. It was so beautifully recorded and performed; everything was there, like a perfectly cut diamond landing on your desk.
Queen
JACK NELSON: Queen reminded me of the makeup of the Beatles. Each guy was so totally the opposite of the others, the four points of the compass. Freddie Mercury was the lead vocalist. He composed on keyboards, and he was classically trained. Very complex guy, incredibly talented. Brian May was a rock and roll guitarist and he brought that influence. Also incredibly talented, scatterbrained as they come, and yet as focused as they come. He had a degree in infrared astronomy. John Deacon was the bass player. He brought the solid bit, as bass players do, grounded them. He had a first-class honors degree in electronics. Roger Meddows-Taylor, the drummer, had a double degree. They were probably the smartest band in the business. And totally diverse personalities—we could get into an airport and one would stop, one would go right, one would go left, and one would go straight ahead. But it made a great creative force. When they got together in the middle, with the stacked vocals, that center was amazing.
JAC: I was knocked out. 'Keep Yourself Alive,' 'Liar,' 'The Night Comes Down'—all great songs in a sumptuous production that felt like the purest ice cream poured over a real rock and roll foundation. I wanted Queen and CBS wanted Queen—this was going to be Harry Chapin times two, Clive Davis and me duking it out again.
JACK NELSON: I flew back to England over the weekend, and on Monday I get a call from Jac: "I love this band." And then another call from him in LA. And maybe a week or two later another call from him in Japan: "I'm really serious." I do my calculations and realize it's the middle of the night in Japan, so I guess he was.
Negotiations with CBS had stalled over something inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, half a point or something. Also I had had a conversation with Clive Davis that was very unsettling. Clive and his A&R staff hadn't really listened to the music like Jac had. The might of CBS was very attractive. However, if you studied your history, you saw that they weren't particularly good as far as rock and roll was concerned. And the fact that one of their A&R guys called Queen one of the best country bands he had heard in a long time made me extremely nervous.
Jac was pursuing us heavily, without being obnoxious about it—it wasn't the bullshit that we knew too well in the business. He called me again, from Australia, I think: "I've got to have them." I said, "You know, if you're really serious, I'll put on a gig and you come over and see them."
JAC: I flew to London, listened to them at the gig Jack had set up at the Marquee in Soho, and was dreadfully disappointed. I saw nothing on stage to match the power I had heard on the tape. But the music was there. I wrote them a long memo, four or five pages single-spaced, with my thoughts and suggestions. Then I sent Mel Posner to follow up on my visit to discuss marketing. Then a will-of-the-wisp passionate lady from our artist relations department, Jeannie Theis, who was a real fan of their music. And always more ideas and memos—the Holzman wear-them-down, frequency-of-interaction method.
And I had yet to unleash another potent persuader, the no-nonsense Elektra contract. By contrast, the CBS standard contract was a thing of wonder for CBS, but for artists it was desperation—thirty pages or more, the first sixteen pages protecting CBS and on page seventeen a tiny paragraph about what the artist might receive if all the planets were properly in conjunction.
JACK NELSON: Everybody told me I was crazy to go with Elektra, that they were a great folk label, but Queen was the farthest thing from folk. I looked at Arthur Lee and Love, and the Doors, which was totally different from what Jac had done in the past. Also, his knowledge of Queen's music and his enthusiasm for it. My brain kept saying, "Is he a great merchandiser, can he promote the stuff?" In the end, against popular advice, I said, "To heck with it, we're going for Elektra."
We got the contract done quickly. Certain things I had to have, take it or leave it. Jac didn't give me Elektra Records for Queen, but we came to a very fair deal. I always felt you'd never get sold down the river with Jac. And from then on, everyone at Elektra did what they said they were going to do, and that's a miracle for our business.
"Queen II" EKS-75082
JAC: I was a believer. I wrote an internal memo to staff saying, "I have seen the future of pop music, and it is a band called Queen." And the group took the comments in my memos about staging and performance, far beyond my expectations. By the time of their huge hit single, 'Bohemian Rhapsody'—another seven-and-a-half-minute wonder, by the way—their stage theatrics were phenomenal. Freddie was extraordinarily flamboyant, a great glam rocker. I have rarely seen a band work so hard, have such success, and remain so nice. They were very special people. And when they were in full flight they sold millions and millions of records. All by itself, my signing of Queen more than compensated Steve Ross for what he had paid for Elektra.
JAC: Queen would have been unimaginable in the Fifties or mid-Sixties. Rock and roll had begun with short singles on AM radio. By the early Seventies it had flowered, lyrically and stylistically, moving in as many directions as there were talented writers and performers.
In the first half of the Sixties, British groups—the Beatles and especially the Stones, then others like the Animals and Eric Clapton—had taught young Americans lessons from American roots music. In the second half of the decade, garage bands, building on the instrumental riffs of West Coast surf bands like the Beach Boys and the Ventures, created very tight, AM-oriented pop-rock-punkish records. They were a category of their own, and I thought it would be wonderful to assemble a representative survey of these groups.
I asked Lenny Kaye, a guitarist and rock historian (later of the Patti Smith band), to help me. We assembled a two-record album with thirty tracks featuring the Electric Prunes, 13th Floor Elevator, Amboy Dukes, Blues Magoos, the Vagrants, the Magic Mushrooms, the Seeds, the Standells, the Chocolate Watch Band, and twenty-one—count 'em—more. In an interview years later, Lenny said that he thought the groups we picked reflected the yearning of a teenager aching to play in a band.
"Nuggets" 7E-2006
This was no K-TEL bargain TV ragbag, but a serious study. Already I could sense that we were on the cusp of a time when doctoral candidates would be writing dissertations on the history of rock. I didn't have any designs on a degree; I just wanted to get there first. The only title that seemed roomy enough to contain the whole idea was "Nuggets—Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968." The album created an enormous stir, as much for its concept of an archeological dig into the recent past as for its contents. Harold Bronson and Richard Foos, who founded the celebrated Rhino Records label in 1978, credit "Nuggets" and the Elektra style as the starting point.
What Elektra had begun with the Stooges was furthered by "Nuggets" and would influence the Ramones and others right through to the subterranean revival of retro-punk in the Eighties.
JAC: During my busy, busy times with WEA distributing, WEA International, and the strategic planning group, Queen was a rare opportunity, as Harry Chapin had been. I was too busy to produce Harry's second album. With everything else on my plate, I simply wasn't able to pay as much attention to the label, and I suffered and Elektra suffered too.
The Seventies were impatient to push the Sixties into the past. And Elektra and I were drifting apart. There were things going down that I didn't know about, and wouldn't have liked if I had known, and I should have.
STEVE HARRIS: I saw something I didn't like. Jac had to do a lot of traveling, and he might not have seen a lot of things that I saw going on. I really believe some people got hired because of their good drug contacts. It was to the extent that it was unprofessional.
BOB ZACHARY: Elektra was shifting from dope smoking to coke snorting.
FRITZ RICHMOND: In the studio at La Cienega there would be cocaine in quantity. People wouldn't be singing on the records, but they would show up because they knew the coke was going to be there. You know those cigars that come in a glass tube that's about as big around as your finger? Well, one of those would arrive half full of cocaine. Walk over to the new building, walk down the hall where all the gold records were and take somebody that was thought to be somewhat stodgy, like Carly Simon or Judy Collins, take their gold record, lay it on top of the grand piano in the studio and cover it with a layer of cocaine. Someone would chop it up and then spin it out in a giant spiral, approximating the grooves of the record, and straws would be handed out, and on the word Go, six or eight people would start honking this coke in spirals until it disappeared.
LENNY KAYE: As drugs became less smart, when that Sixties sense of LSD's promise and the whole pot thing became subsumed by the Seventies—all of a sudden, Jac was less comfortable in that environment too.
JOHN VAN HAMMERSVELD: The drugs broke the scene down and took the people with it. You can go from '61 with a group of people, and by the time you get to '74 or so—you can watch them, they go through these different drugs and the whole thing changes.
JUDY JAMES: When speed came to Laurel Canyon, that's when we had to start locking our doors.
JAC: The familiar was turning unfamiliar, in many ways—unfamiliar behaviors, unfamiliar people. Elektra had been on both coasts since the mid-Sixties, and that was fun—my Chinese banquet table east and west. Now there was security at both locations, Gulf & Western and La Cienega. There were over a hundred people on staff, and there was a lot of bloat in that number, probably twenty too many. Who were they? And what was I to them? One morning I walked up from the garage into the La Cienega offices, and somebody I had never seen in my life, so full of himself, from the Seventies hot-shit heights of working for Elektra, stopped me and rudely demanded to know who I was and what I was doing there.
Further down that bad road, I was at a sales conference in New York, and the comedian they had hired to provide laughs leered at Carly's photo on her latest album and said, "Now, there are two critical points about this album," and he pointed to her nipples. I got up and walked out, in something approaching a trance, upset and too tired to fight. The dynamic was about to shift and that shift would bring with it excesses and insensitivities that would take what I considered a calling and convert it into a career path. What I had fought for, to keep the music ahead of the money, would change. The galoots would be coming to the party.
JAC: Feeling very cut up, not knowing where I belonged, I had to squeeze moments of personal life through the cracks, get away whenever I could.
JANN WENNER: Jac and I used to go to Aspen together, to ski and hang out and have fun. I have one particular memory of playing Monopoly with him there. We were pretty rusty, we both wanted to win this thing, and it got pretty tense. We were friends, and he would always tell me what was going on. I had Rolling Stone up and running, and during those days if you had a little youth company, everybody was poaching all the time. Jac would say, "Don't ever sell. I don't know of anybody who sold a small company who has ever been happy after that." He had lost this formative big thing in his life, and he was never going to duplicate that experience. I think he hadn't anticipated how much that meant to him. He took it pretty hard, and I don't blame him.
BRUCE BOTNICK: After Jac sold the company, he would call up at night and talk for hours. It was a rough time for him. The company wasn't his anymore, he was divorced from Nina, he had separated from Ellen, and he had pangs of loneliness—a double whammy.
JAC: Although the decision to merge the company made enormous sense, it still left me feeling disconnected emotionally, and without a family or someone to love I felt disoriented, afraid, and out of my element. Elektra was truly mine only if I continued to contribute to it with full energy, and when I chose to leave, as I had planned to do, I knew it would be lost to me forever. The decision to go was the right one for me. The changes in the music business climate were going against my grain. My juices were sapped. But leaving was an emotional sea change that would take a long time to reconcile myself to.
MO OSTIN: I think Jac could adapt himself to any time in the music business if he wanted to.
JAC: The question was—did I want to?
LENNY KAYE: The great trick in pop culture is to make a million dollars doing what you love. It's not that hard making a million doing something you don't like doing, or it's not hard to do something you like and make two dollars from it. I think Jac had it really nice, especially in the late Sixties, leading the artistic vanguard and putting gold records on the wall from it. That's a great thing. Then there comes a time when either the art drives you or the money drives you. I think he came up with a choice where he could put those gold records on the wall, but the art was becoming more an empty exercise in sussing out popular taste. Some of the art wasn't getting through, and sometimes you just get sick of the bullshit.
PAUL WILLIAMS: Even though Jac does have this genius for money and business, there are other things that he cared about tremendously, and being sucked up into the headlong plunge of the record industry in the early Seventies was not fitting with the Jac Holzman who was my brother out there on the front lines of consciousness expansion. Consciously or unconsciously, Jac didn't want to be sucked up into the unstoppable, the forces that were bigger than him, of what the fucking record business became in the Seventies. That was distasteful to him. He made the choice not to be a billionaire.
LENNY KAYE: If I can indulge in a little amateur psychologizing, I think Jac never really wanted to have a standard music business company. He wanted to have one that furrowed out things that were a bit arcane.
We can work these metaphors: I think he had a scientific sensibility in music, where he was almost like a sociologist visiting far-off New Guinea, bringing back these exotic specimens, and sometimes, like exotic specimens will, they will run amok in civilization, unleashing weird plagues. So it's an interesting dichotomy, and like most dichotomies, when you blend these disparate instincts together, you get an intriguing personality and certainly an adventurous record label that has the seeds of its own dissolution in it. Sooner or later, you start getting spun, one against the other. And I think Jac was not only feeling these pressures, but feeling the drift of the music business which was becoming more business than music.
He enjoyed odd bands, and when it seemed like it was either these odd bands were killing themselves or it was the music business as usual, I don't think he found his place in it. He really did like art that was somewhat white, that was articulate and intellectual, art made for the New York Times. And if it spilled over into complete excess on the one hand, or if it spilled over on the other hand to kind of formulaic Top-40 stuff, he really wasn't interested. His sense of control, maybe, matched his sense of adventure. Later, what might he have done with a Patti Smith? Would he have discovered the Talking Heads? They might have been the perfect Jac group. But that was several years on. I guess at the time he came to feel disengaged from what he was doing.
JAC: I had a way of disengaging that I particularly enjoyed. I would drive the Pacific Coast Highway to Muir Woods, north of San Francisco, to visit Roger Somers. Roger had this small community, in a wonderful sylvan setting, little craft houses that people lived in, or came to at weekends. It was yet another gift from Kim von Tempski, the purser on the President Roosevelt, who had first brought me to Roger's.
BILL ALEXANDER: Roger was a carpenter-builder. He was white-haired, but he would be up at four in the morning on projects, wearing out a couple of shifts of vigorous younger workmen. He always had the energy of ten. He was creatively wild.
FRED WILLIAMS: The first time I met Roger was in Sausalito. He leaped on me, wrapped his legs and arms around me, kissed me on the mouth, held out his hand, and said, "Watch," and blood came out the back of his hand.
JAC: I always brought music with me. Business I left behind. Roger had built a hot tub big enough for ten. He played the saxophone slightly better than Jack Benny pretended to play the violin. As the moon shone through the woods, Roger would tootle, like the Pied Piper, and people would come from all over the property, near naked, and walk to the hot tub, single file. We would all be loaded. On hashish at Roger's I would vibrate like a tuning fork. We would get in the tub and talk and do what people do in hot tubs. Then, one by one, we would curl up into a tight ball, and the others would twirl you around underwater until you couldn't hold your breath any longer. I loved being curled and spun around, like a child from another dimension.
BILL ALEXANDER: Roger was a creative artist, an architectural and design genius. He built Neil Young's touring bus, a fantasy of redwood filigree arpeggios, an adult playpen. He also built a limo for a crazy mufti type who went to Maui with it—it had a built-in hot tub.
Model of Hana House... unbuilt
JAC: I had Maui on my mind, always and increasingly. I bought land in Hana, five acres by the ocean, deliriously beautiful, gave Roger a design commission, and let his creativity loose on a model for a house.
Roger's conception, which he showed me in a full-on colored rendering and model, looked like a starfish with three points. It was set in the middle of the property with the ocean frothing below and several miles of mountain rising into the clouds.
The northern point was the entrance and you came down a long, rather narrow hallway into the main communal body of the house which contained the living room with fireplace, kitchen, dining area and tiny alcoves where you could be private.
Then, to the southwest, a similar long hall which led into the master bedroom suite, bathroom, outdoor shower, hot tub— connected to but away from the hub of the house. To the southeast, a matching starfish point which was to be my office.
All of this was open to the air and covered with a roof, rather like a dinosaur skin crafted by Frank Lloyd Wright. Totally unusual and totally divine.
Simple living in paradise
And then one day I called Roger and said, "I'm not going to build it."
I would have been replicating my life on the mainland. Too much bigness, too sumptuous, and needing people to constantly maintain it. I felt as if I might lose myself just as I was ready to find me. Regrouping, I opted for something on a much smaller scale, simpler, lighter—a home right on the beach just outside Lahaina, where I could sling my hammock and feel the trade winds. I gave Roger carte blanche to make the six-hundred-foot interior over completely, and he went to work with his craftsman's feel for wood and his unflagging energy.
