Dan Beck

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Set podcast. My guest today is Dan Beck, who's got a new book. You've got Michael, Dan, explain the title please.
00:00:16
Speaker 2: It came from my days at Epic Records. I was a senior product manager there and one day Dave Glue, who was chairman of Epic, walked in my doorway and I was on the phone. I put the phone down and Dave said, You've got Michael and walked away. And that meant I was now Michael's product manager. And it was about eight weeks in front of the Dangerous album and I had nothing. I had no files, no background, and it was a time to scramble.
00:00:55
Speaker 1: Okay, who had Michael Jackson before you?
00:00:58
Speaker 2: Larry Stecil had been Mike product manager from the days of Off the Wall, and he had moved to International and then subsequently got an offer from another company and left after that.
00:01:12
Speaker 1: O case, from a distance, it would seem that being the product manager from Michael Jackson would be an honor, but it doesn't quite come across that way in the book. So give us an explanation.
00:01:27
Speaker 2: Well, it was a double edged sword from the beginning. Number one, when had happened. My first thought was, well, I've earned this. You know, I had been a product manager at that point for about twelve years. It had handled a lot of hit acts, so this was the ultimate.
00:01:45
Speaker 1: So what was the first thing you had to do?
00:01:49
Speaker 2: Number One, just immediately did the check around. You know, it's a checked with each department what was going on, where they were with the campaign. And also to reach out to Michael's management, which was Sandy Gallon and Jim Morey and so which concerned me a little bit because I didn't have a relationship with either Jim or Sandy, and you know, I knew Sandy had a very high profile and my initial thought was, does he want to speak to a product manager? You know, he wants to deal with Walter Yetnikov and Dave Blue, you know. And so I was concerned because a lot of times, and particularly in those days, you know, getting things done took extra time. You know, it's the manufacturing process, you know, everything took time. And one of the first things I discovered speaking to Nancy Donald who Nancy had done all of Michael's design work for her for his packaging. And when I spoke to Nancy, she said, I really don't have any photos. And I have to say that probably was kind of visionary on Michael's part, kind of leading up to that time. You know, an artist would come in and we'd take them to the art department, to the album design department, and they would say, Okay, we're going to line up a photographer, blah blah blah. They just kind of took over. But in Michael's case, he really started acquiring photos, and he had photographers on staff at times or on retainer, and so he had all the photos. And so my concern was am I going to be able to get photos for the second single? You know? Because what would happen is you go into the label meeting on Wednesday, and you know, Tuesday night was the promotion departments. You know the weekly report card. Yeah, the report card happened every Tuesday night, So if things were going south, all of a sudden, there was a scramble let's get the next single, you know, and that meant you better have the photos, you better, you know. And in Michael's case also there was a lot of promise to tip sheets and magazines to get covers, you know, and magazine covers and tip sheet covers and the tip sheets and magazines were all, yeah, yeah, we'll give Michael the cover until you didn't have an exclusive shot for them. So, you know, we were kind of in this catch twenty two. So fortunately Sandy turned me over to Evvy, who was Michael's assistant, and I explained by circumstance to Evvy and why the reasons why, you know, and she totally got it, and you know, I knew I had somebody in house who could could explain it to Michael, you know, and then we started on a role. You know, it's every other artist I'd worked with, there were either photos available in the Sony archives or an art director would put together a shoot, you know. But putting together shoots was a challenge with all the superstars because you were You're trying to get high end photographers involved, and they had a schedule as demanding as the artists.
00:05:37
Speaker 1: Okay, you're a product manager in this particular case. Larry Stecil was the product manager before. Just in general, do you ever take over an act and the management team whoever you're dealing with, says, either that's not the way we've done it, or this is new, or is it? Pretty much everybody does it the same way.
00:05:58
Speaker 2: Now, you know, I think there's a lot of feelings that way, Bob. In this case, Michael's management had changed also, and Frank de Leo had been the manager up till this point. So Sandy and Jim were new to Michael and I was new. So you know, I'm trying to understand. You know, I knew Frank very very well. We had been friends. We were both from the Pittsburgh area. You know, we both said Crick and Creek instead of Creek, and we both had worked in Nashville at the same time. He was at Monument and I was at Columbia Epic, and we were friends down there. I'd go over to his apartment and so. And Frank, of course had delivered all the singles on Thriller, and that's why Michael had chosen him as the wanted him to be his manager. And you know, for Larry, Larry had a very close relationship with Frank, and you know, all of us at the label felt like, wow, we're in great hands. We're one voice away from Michael and we're with Took. He could you know, Frank was called Tookie it and Took. He knew our situation. So he he understood our challenges, so we knew we had somebody who can help us get through that. I didn't know that with Sandy, you know, and so it was all kind of new and tried to figure it out from the get go.
00:07:33
Speaker 1: Okay, you lawed Frank in the book. You know, Michael predicted one hundred million sales on Dangerous. Do you think if Frank had still been the manager, A there would have been more sales? Or B was his relationship with Michael such that he might have managed him to a better result?
00:07:57
Speaker 2: How would have affected sales? You know, I'm not sure I have that crystal ball, but I do believe that there were probably some early decisions made that I think Frank could have started the conversation sooner with Michael. Sandy was more hands off, let Michael do what Michael wants to do. Frank was a big brother, you know, Frank. Frank, Frank would tell my Michael, I don't like that idea, you know, And Michael liked that. I mean, you know, he really he really responded to that. And you know, he liked that street sense that Frank brought to the table, you know. And uh, and of course Frank, you know had dealt with all the indies and had that relationship, but I think there might have been some maybe not so much on Dangerous, but later on with history, I think Frank might have been able to hold off some of Michael's impulses that I felt were where Michael maybe didn't understand how the marketplace was going to react, how the media was going to react.
00:09:11
Speaker 1: Okay, you've worked with many acts in your career. The bigger you are, the more you're in the bubble. Having said that, there's some acts that are students of the game. Ultimately you create or he starts a personal relationship with you, he's calling you at home, etc. To what degree was Michael, let's not talk about his personal life, we're talking about business. To what degree was he isolated from the game being so successful, or to what degree did he have his finger on the pulse? And to what degree could he be swayed if he was wrong.
00:09:50
Speaker 2: That's a great question at a great area here, Bob, that I've thought about so often over the time. One of the things that I found with Michael is that, you know, number one, he was competitive, He's enthusiastic, he was you know, he wanted to jump in with big ideas, and sometimes he didn't understand the nuances, you know, and you know, because he was a big thinker, and so he if he got an idea, you know, if he had to be at his bonnet. It was very hard to convince him, you know, because he was so excited about the idea. And if you could get to him in front and discuss an idea as it came up, you could sway him, you know, you could. He would understand your logic, you know, and but you know, he would get excited about something and then really, you know, get stubborn about it. You know.
00:10:49
Speaker 1: Okay, but you come on late with Dangerous. The book focuses to a great degree on history. Let's start with Dangerous. So were you always playing catch up ball? But did you think that you ultimately got a handle on it? There was enough time.
00:11:07
Speaker 2: H Yeah, you know we did get a handle on it, at least, you know, in my look at it. You know, the first video was Larry had already set that up and I was it Singleton shot the really up and coming black director and you know they had Magic Johnson did it and I'm on and it was you know, it was just the star studded and which I was so thankful that it was locked in, and you know, from there, obviously the single really happened, and that was Remember the Time, and of course Black or White was actually before that. They were it was bang bang with those. So we had these two tremendous videos out there. I got involved with Remember the Time, just really basically buttoning it up, you know, making sure the payments were made. We had the master blah blah blah. And there was a question at the end about there was a kiss at the end with them on and so I brought the video into the company and you know, we get the promotion department in, and my joke with the promotion department is is, you know, did you bring your wig and black rogues because they came in, you know, and we're judging everything, and it's basically their own protection. You know. It's like, hey, if we don't have a great video, we're going to have trouble with radio. You know. So anyway, everybody started nitpicking this kiss at the end. So I went back to the production company and I said, you know, I just don't feel like it, you know, connects solidly. So they played around with it state back and then I played it again for you know that half dozen people in the company, you know that, and you know, mostly promotion people, and everybody's still kind of whining about it. So then I took it. I knew the production company was like over it. It's like, you know, they're to say to me, what are you crazy, It's like, And so I took it into an edit bay and I was like shaving, you know, one thirtieth of a second off to try to make it, give it more energy or whatever. And you know, finally the promotion department just I guess we wore them out and the clock was ticking. We needed to get this out there. And of course it was never an issue. You know, but what do we do at record companies. We overthink these things, you.
00:13:49
Speaker 1: Know, well, needless to say, it's hard to get any attention today, never mind these micro decisions. You look back at this era in the nineties, do you say that that's what it took or we took ourselves way too seriously?
00:14:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think And again moving forward, because dangerous, we had lots of radio success, we had lots of video success, and you know, as you mentioned before, you know, did we get a handle on it, and I think we did, you know, it was we did in the Closet, which that video was just awesome. Michael looked so virile, you know, it was just a great, great video. And then we did Jam with Michael Jordan, and you know, some of the people of the company actually came to me. It was my idea to try to get Michael Jordan. And you know, it didn't take a genius to think of that idea. The song was called Jam and Michael Jordan's the biggest star on the planet at the time, and so but some of the people were concerned to say, oh, you know, Mychael Jackson could never stand up to Michael Jordan and a video. And you know, my thought was, you know, Michael Jackson's he's an athlete too, it's just his sport is dance and choreography. And I thought, by the nature of the two of them having fun with each other about teaching each other there there's super talent, that it would be fun. And as it turned out, it was so you know, we were coming into a year on in that marketing campaign and then we hit the super Bowl, and we hit Oprah, and we hit the Grammys, and the American Music Awards and that nineteen ninety three, in that January February, we were just rocking, you know. And to me, the great thing was one of the first things that I really started to connect with Michael was to say, you know, focus on the music. Don't pay any attention to the rest of this stuff, you know, because he was beginning to respond to the you know, the skin color issues and the plastic surgery and the elephant man and all the you know, all the circus stuff, and I said, you know, we got to get back to the music. And and you know, I think essentially everybody felt that way. We'd also remixed everything to bring it into like the dance world. We went back to the previous albums and we did all these remixes on everything basically for the dance floor, and it re established Michael and the clubs, and so we were we were flying at you know, after the super Bowl and after the award shows and after Oprah, and you know, I thought, wow, you know, we've come a long way. And it got harder with history.
00:17:07
Speaker 1: Okay, let's back up. How did you become a product manager?
00:17:11
Speaker 2: Well, kind of a long story, like so many people of that time, I played in local bands and I really got really leaning toward songwriting. And this is in the late sixties and nineteen seventy seventy one, and I came to New York a couple of times pitching songs, you know, re building and sixteen fifteen.
00:17:34
Speaker 1: Whoh whoa, wha, wha, whoah, You're you're in Pittsburgh in nineteen seventy seventy one where you living?
00:17:41
Speaker 2: And nineteen well. I graduated from college in seventy two at Pittsburgh Robert Morris College, and I had been to Nashville this summer before Chris Christopher said I'd started suddenly having this success, and I thought, wow, I can't stain myself going to New York. I could last about two days on my budget. And I went down to Nashville for the summer between my junior and senior year, and I've met a bunch of people that had kind of the same idea as me, and I went back after I graduated in seventy two, and then ended up at Record World Magazine writing a country special puff pieces you know for the annual you know advertorial, and the editor left the regional editor, Southeastern editor and I got the job. And then a year later, Columbia Epic decided to start a publicity department in Nashville and they hired me and we did that.
00:18:47
Speaker 1: Wait wait, wait, I want to go back. Okay, you're playing in bands? Was the inspiration seeing the Beatles on? Ed Sullivan?
00:18:56
Speaker 2: Oh? Absolutely, just like so many other people, you know, the Bob Really interesting thing here. My brother was seven and a half years older than me, and he was kind of, you know, a western Pennsylvania fonds and he was an Elvis guy and people called him Elvis, and you know, it's your big brother. You look up to him, and you know, he had all the moves. He was into James Dean and Dion and all, you know, all the street guys. You know. So I grew up from probably the age of six. I knew all the Elvis lyrics and all that stuff. And when the Beatles came on, Ed Sullivan, it was like, there's my Elvis. You know, I had my own, you know, and uh, you know, my brother was bigger than life in our town, and you know, it was like, well what do I have? You know, well, I got the Beatles like everybody else, you know.
00:20:09
Speaker 1: Okay, when the Beatles hit, were you already taking music lessons or do they start with the Beatles.
00:20:14
Speaker 2: I had taken piano lessons a couple of years earlier, you know, more straight standard piano lessons, and after the Beatles when I was in tenth grade, of us have been fourteen, so it's probably sixty four, you know. And there was a band that called me up and said, hey, we hear you played the piano. You know, want to be in our band? And I was really excited. I went to my parents and you know, I bought this little keyboard. I begged my parents to buy it and went to practice and you know, a few practices, and then I went to a skating rink with them to play a gig and they stopped calling me. And believe me, Bob, I thought my life was over. You know. It's the number one I was doing. I wasn't doing well in ninth grade with academics. And I went to the guidance counselor and called me in and said, Dan, you're coasting and the only way to coast is downhill. And I thought, I'm not. I didn't answer them, I'm just stunned, and I walked out of there thinking I'm not coasting, I'm floundering. You know, I don't know where I'm at, you know. So that summer I just started playing pool all the time, and up with this dirty old pool haul upstairs over a restaurant in my hometown, and there was another band had started and I saw a picture of the paper of that They're called the Invaders, and it just brought the knife back to my chest. You know, Oh my god, I wish this would have worked out. So I'm up there playing pool one Saturday afternoon. I'm just shooting around by myself, and two of the guys whom the band walked in and they just stood around and watched me play for like fifteen minutes, didn't say anything, and finally they said, hey, you know, would you like to be in a band again? And I gave him a long silence and I said I'm not very good and they laughed and they said, yeah, we know that. But the leader of the group, who was in his twenties and married his wife, played the piano and they said, hey, burnus can help you. So anyway, we practiced all week and then we went to.
00:22:58
Speaker 1: Wait, what was the name you can use Burnus Burness, Yes, yes, oh Burnus being the wife.
00:23:05
Speaker 2: Yes, that's the waste stage. Yeah. So we practiced that week, you know, every night, and I played with them that Friday night in at the tin nest of Volunteer Fire Department and we just it just worked and we ended up playing together for three years. We just had a ball jack who was the leader of the group, who was older. You know, we wanted to play high school, you know, after the football game, he had his booked at bars and we were all like fifteen, sixteen years old and we're playing at all these bars, but we were making money. And then at that time, Bob, the drinking age at Pennsylvania was twenty one, but it was eighteen in New York State, and we lived about forty miles from the New York border. So we started playing this club called Melody in in Bustin, New York, just near Jamestown. And it was like, you know, thirty feet across the New York state line in the middle of nowhere, and the Pennsylvania crowds would come up there. And we started playing on Sunday nights. Then we added Tuesday nights, and then we were playing Thursday nights and then it was so we just played all these bars for like three years. And then us three young guys, none of us actually drank at that time or anything, but we had a ball playing and you know, we had a great crowds and you know, we were playing vfw's and you know, Legion halls and things like that, and it was great. And then when I went to college, Bill Thomas, who was the drummer who had become a dear friend, he thought it was over, so he joined the army and I was like, oh, it's going to come home every weekend. And but that ended it. And then Gary Deemer, who was the guitar player, and I started writing songs together and then we put together various formats of bands for a couple of years. And when I went to Nashville, I wanted the last band to come with me, and but you know, they all had other commitments college. Gary worked in the steel mills, and you know, it was like he had a great job. He had a brand new car, and leaving that, you know, his dad had worked in the steel mills for forty years or thirty years, and it was a tough thing to leave. But you know, of course, my hair brained idea of getting in the music business didn't sound too good.
00:25:49
Speaker 1: Okay, you go to Nashville and the goal is to sell your songs.
00:25:58
Speaker 2: Actually, and initially the number one I had a business background in college and business management. So I thought, you know, I thought I didn't have a lot of confidence in my musical ability. I had a lot of confidence in my lyric writing. And that's what I really wanted to do, was to co write. And so but I thought, the only way I'm going to be become a writer is if I use my business background. I get in the business, you know, and can establish myself and then find some partners, you know. And so that's what I went down to do. And that first summer I met a couple of guys that had this similar ideas as me, and then they were calling me my senior year, say you got to go back here when you graduate.
00:26:54
Speaker 3: So I went back the way before you go back, ye, go to Nashville. Do you have any money in your pocket? Do you know anybody? I mean, what do you do?
00:27:04
Speaker 1: You show up?
00:27:05
Speaker 2: And what I did not know one soul I bought a one way ticket on Eastern Airline and it was thirty four dollars. I had one hundred dollars. I sold my keyboard and I had one hundred dollars and I sold one of my keyboards. I had two at the time, and so I had sixty six dollars when I got there, and I was going to take the bus into Nashville, but I was so excited I jumped in a cab. I spent like ten bucks that I shouldn't have spent to get in the city, and then I just walked around and I went up by Vanderbilt University and there were a lot of kids packing up. They just finished the semester, and I said, you know, where did like college people and music people hang out? You know. They were all kind of looking at me like, I don't think. I don't think those two meet anywhere, you know. But actually, right between Vanderbilt and Music Row was this kind of west end area that actually was kind of a young songwriter hippie place, you know. So one kid's told me about this bar, which I forget the name of right now.
00:28:24
Speaker 4: But I went over there and it was like an old house or something that there were like little shops, headshops, and then you got to the back and there were pictic tables at a dirt.
00:28:38
Speaker 2: Floor and David allen Coe was playing, and so I sat down across from this Asian guy and it was very loud in there, and I got the idea that he was a songwriter, and he got the idea I was. So we said, hey, let's go across the street and get a cup of coffee. We went over and met and he, you know, and I he said, hey, you know, you want to hear some of my songs. And so so I went back to his place. In the meantime, I'm thinking, am I going to get staffed right right? You know? And as it turned out, this guy, Willie Fong Young was just an amazing songwriter. I was just blown away listening to his stuff. And so after after listening, he said, hey, you know, I know you're new in town. He had a writer's draw deal with Shelby Singleton, which Shelby owned Sun Records at that time and had genc Riley Harper Velipta and so anyway, so you know, Willy said, hey, look I just got this apartment. You've got the couch for fifty bucks a month, and so and we agreed we were not gonna bother each other about our own passion pursuits as songwriters, you know. And but within a couple of weeks, Wait, we're best buddies. We just had a great todd together. We met a couple of other guys and you know, floated around that West End area and we had a great time. And so I came.
00:30:26
Speaker 1: Back that wait, wait, what were you doing for money?
00:30:29
Speaker 2: Well? I got a job at a place called the House, which was like this old I would say, uh, aaliana building, like brick building. It was like an old you know, probably kind of a well to do house at one time. And they they had high end Hamburgers, you know. And I got a job washing dishes there and then uh then they they ended up liking man. They sent me down to be the bus boy in the basement where there was a piano bar, and people like Bobby had with you know, Sonny would come in, and Sid and he was from Nashville and the Ragent Cage and what was his name? He would come in, all these characters.
00:31:18
Speaker 1: You know.
00:31:18
Speaker 2: And so anyway, Willie and I had a great summer hanging out together.
00:31:25
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, what did your parents say about all this?
00:31:29
Speaker 2: My father didn't say anything. My father was like, you know, got to do what you got to do. You know, it's a he did probably didn't think much of the idea of the music business being the right way to go. I know, my mother was worried about me. Basically, she said, oh, you know, you're going to get taken advantage of. You know, it's you know, that's a you know, scary business. And and but it's interesting because my mother, when I was young younger, would always say, you know, she was talking to me or friends of hers or an aunt or whatever, and she said and she turned to me and say, well, when you leave. And I was like, why am I leaving? But I think my mother knew that I was destined to go someplace. You know that our small town, you know, seventy five percent of the people there worked in the steel mills, and you know, and so you know, if you weren't a steel worker, which they made great money, and you know, everybody had two cars and you know, only one person worked and the quality of life in our town was fantastic. But you know, there really kind of wasn't anything there for me, you know, And ultimately that's I went to Nashville, you know.
00:32:54
Speaker 1: Okay, a couple questions. What did your father do for a living?
00:32:58
Speaker 2: My father ran a mail order house and Bob they sold wallpaper and they had it's called Robinson's wall covering. Actually their catalogs are collector's items down. But my father started working there when he was like twenty years old, before World War Two, and he ended up to be the foreman of the warehouse, you know, where all the stock was stored, where they actually put the orders out, you know. And so he did that and then he did roofing on the side. He takes some of his guys and say, hey, I got a job for us this weekend, you know, And that was where he made some extra money, you know, for the family.
00:33:48
Speaker 1: Okay, we're in this period around nineteen seventy. Although Dylan people can't see my ear quotes Win Country in nineteen sixty nine with Nashville Skyline. There was a pretty big division between rock and country at that point. Absolutely, And were you a country fan? Could you understand that?
00:34:11
Speaker 2: Well? You know, actually no, you know, I mean I listened to you know, and I know some of some of the people you've spoken to had this similar experience. You know, at night, I had transistor radio on and in western Pennsylvania, and I could hear, you know, I could hear WBC in Boston, and I could hear c KLW in Chicago and Detroit and all these great DJs and you know who told stories that's made songs just sound like so romantic. And but you know what was going on then at radio, at Top forty radio, you know, was you know, you would hear Johnny Cash boy named Sue played next to cream and then there'd be a motown song, you know, And so so I had to kind of an eclectic understanding. When I went to college at Pittsburgh, Whammo was Big Porky Chadwick, the Daddyo on the radio who was a white guy who played black music. And so I kind of got a, you know, a vibe for that. But I really wasn't in the country until the summer of seventy two when I went back to Nashville. I went back there and I got a job at opry Land parking cars.
00:35:45
Speaker 1: After wait, just so I understand we're in this story to go to New York to try to sell your songs.
00:35:50
Speaker 2: That I was like nineteen nineteen twenty. I was probably in my freshman sophomore year of college.
00:35:59
Speaker 1: Okay, so how'd you get to New York?
00:36:03
Speaker 2: We drove Gary, my writing partner, bandmate, He and I would drive up there. And it was my first second year of college, and I was in a fraternity and two of the guys were from Ridgewood, New Jersey, and so we stayed in their parents' basement when we've been out. And but we you.
00:36:26
Speaker 1: Know, you went up once for more than once.
00:36:29
Speaker 2: We went up twice.
00:36:31
Speaker 1: And okay, so you go there, you don't know anybody, right, So you say you went to the real building and knocked on doors.
00:36:39
Speaker 2: Well, essentially we did, but I wrote letters. I wrote letters in front to Kamasutra and you know all these little labels of their publishing companies, you know. And so we had some meetings set up and then once we were in the building, we'd see another publishing company. We knock on the door, and usually it was pretty casual. Is generally a couple of songwriters said there, who were you know manning the office too, and so the yeah, come on in, you know, And basically what we got was, ah, hey, these songs are pretty good. You know why don't you come back when you have some more? And when we went back the next time, we heard the same thing, and it was like, you know, we're dead in the water here, you know. So so that's when Nashville struck me because of Christofferson, and I thought, wait a minute. Number one. He was such a poet, and you know, this guy was flying helicopters for the military and he was a Rhodes scholar, and I thought, God, there must be something different going on down to Nashville. We could be different going down there. So that was my whole fantasy. We you know, take the rock band down there, and you know, and I went by myself.
00:37:58
Speaker 1: Okay, so you graduate now of parking cars at over Land.
00:38:03
Speaker 2: Yes, So you know, music Row was pretty small at the time. You know. I met a bunch of children of country stars, Charlie Walker's two daughters and Webb Pearce's daughter Debbie, and Felice and Boodlo' Bryant who wrote all the Everly Brothers' hits, their two sons, Del and Dane Bryant, and you know, they're just hanging out and very friendly and so got to know some people that way, you know. But when I went back. Willie had another roommate, so I moved in and the three of us were splitting. It was a one bedroom with a fold out couch in the living room and another just regular couch, and we rotated. You've got the bedroom every three weeks. And anyway, our other roommate was Kinky Friedman.
00:39:00
Speaker 1: You're a kidding wow.
00:39:03
Speaker 2: And Kinky had just come back from the Peace Corps. He was at Borneo in the Peace Corps and just had come back. And you know, his his parents ran a Jewish kids camp in Kerrville, Texas. And Kinky the way he started writing songs was for the kids. He was a counselor, so he started writing silly songs for the kids, and then he got more devious and started to write you know. Basically, Kinky's thing was he was an equal up employer of ways to insult you. And so we had a absolute ball three of us, and Kinky got signed. At that time, David Wilkes was at vander Our Records signed him to the Solomon Brothers who owned Vanguard, and Jim Glazer at the Glazier Brothers Studios was producing. So we were hanging out at Glazier brothers, you know, for the next couple of years. So we were all all of a sudden we were the cool street people, mostly thanks to Kinky, you know, but they were all these characters down there. It was a guy jumping Jack Michaels, who was like did Shakespearean readings of Jerry Lee Lewis songs. You know, It's like he douced soliloquies of the lyrics, and a lot of a lot of crazy street people, some of them who were actually they called themselves songwriters, but they were basically were homeless. And you know, everybody in nash was it was like La with actors. You know, everybody in La was supposedly an actor. Well, in Nashville, everybody was a songwriter.
00:41:13
Speaker 1: So whatever happened to the third roommate.
00:41:15
Speaker 2: To Willie, Willie had this writing deal and then he had he had a mentor who brought him up. Willie was from Arkansas and he was playing in a soul band in Memphis. He's playing horn in a soul band, and this guy, Fred Birch, brought him up to Nashville. Fred wrote, he made a was it he made a woman out of me? Which was a Bobby Jetry hit. He wrote Tragedy for Thomas Wayne, which is like a nineteen fifty nine like you know, death pop song. You know, there was an arrow where there were a whole bunch of those songs where people were dieded carbrecks and things. And then he wrote the John Kennedy It was kind of an informal campaign song that I think it was called the Ballad of the of p T one O nine.
00:42:13
Speaker 1: But let's get back to Willie. What happened to Willie?
00:42:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Willy ended up he had he and Fred started writing a musical and they ended up doing the show at Lemma and Experimental Theater in New York, and then that show got picked up and they did it at the Kennedy Center, and Willie was on his way. I mean, he's just a great, great writer. And Willie never pitched his songs. I it used to kill me that he'd have these these great pop songs you know that that I thought, oh my god, will you gotta you gotta pitch that, and he just couldn't do it. You know, they were his chill. He just he just didn't want to hear him criticized. I guess, you know, then he and Fred wrote another show that ended up at Radcliffe in Workshop, and Norman Lear backed that show and they opened it off Broadway in New York and it closed opening night, and it just Fred and Willie were just so negatively floored by that. It took Willie at least a year to get over that. You know.
00:43:38
Speaker 1: Okay, So let's get back to you. How do you get from Oprily into Record World?
00:43:42
Speaker 2: So this woman at ASCAP. I was getting my male at ASCAP because I was I was an associate member. I never had a song out, but they were. You know. Again, it was such a small town then, and I would get my mail at ASCAP and there's this Weben I forget her maiden name, Karen Conrad. Her husband actually ended up to be a very very big publisher in Nashville. And Karen I would stop in and you know, and I'd asked her if she'd heard of anything, any jobs or whatever, and she said, Hey, I think Record World is looking for somebody to write the Country advertorial that will come out in October. This is like July. And she said, I don't think they're paying anything. Well, I went down. I met Chuck Nice, who was the Southeastern editor he said, I could buy you cigarettes and hamburgers, but I can't pay you. And he said, what, I need somebody to help me write puff pieces on all the companies in Nashville and then we do this big advertorial. Then they would sell them ads. You know. Oh, we got a nice story about you buy an ad, you know, and that was to come out Country Music Week CMA Week in October. So I quit my job and took the free job and started writing. And over the course of the next three months, I met every office general manager in Nashville, record labels, publishers, everybody, and I was writing positive pieces about them, you know. And that's how I really started learning about country music and then listening to it. And Chuck Nice, who was the Southeastern editor, he reviewed all the country records every week, so I would sit in and listen while he reviewed all the records. So one little side story, as about two weeks before I went to Record World, I got an interview with the general manager of RCA. He was he was chet Atkins business guy ran the office. So I got a meeting with him and I went in to meet him and got in his office. At his office was like sixty foot long. You know, he had a putting green and he was you know, he was decked out in the white shoes and you know, three different types of plaid, you know, his shirt and his jacket, his pants and the whole thing. And so I gave him my elevator pitch.
00:46:37
Speaker 5: And he listened and he sat there and he said, well, the best advice I could give you is you should go back to Pennsylvania.
00:46:48
Speaker 1: That's fantastic.
00:46:50
Speaker 2: Oh I love it, So Bob, listen to this. So what happened was, now I'm at Record World writing these stories, you know, and I've been doing it for you know, six weeks or eight weeks or whatever, and check us now, trusting me with bigger and bigger stories. You know, it's like, oh, okay, hey, you're doing good. So I walk in one day and he said, hey, I have an appointment for you at eleven o'clock with this guy at RCA. And that's the guy. So I go over. When I walked in his office, he almost died. It's like he knew he and told me to go back to Pennsylvania and here I am to write the Record World story about their year. So I never said a word. He never mentioned it. It was, you know that the air was thick, and I took down all the information and wrote a nice story. But it was like, yes, I'm in I'm in this business. You know. It's except when the addition came out that that week in October, that was it for me. There was nothing for me to do a record world after that. So that Monday, I went over to Monday morning, I went over to the office. They had given me tickets, they gave me. They got me a tuxedo to go to some of the shows, you know, they rented it for me. And so that Monday morning I went over to the office and I'm just going to pick up my stuff, and I wanted to say thank you to There were two women in the office. One was handled the art for the ads and the other one ran the country charts and Chuck. But Chuck was gone. Chuck had taken a job with Jack Clement and to run his publishing company. So anyway, I went. John started it was the vice president of charge of the office. He sold the ads in the whole thing. So I waited around for John to committee didn't commit toil like noon that day and I went in and said, you know, John, I just want to thank you for the opportunity. And you know, I said, I just came in to get my stuff and the whole thing, and he said, what are you talking about? And I said, what do you mean? He said, you're the Southeastern editor. And that's how I found out I had a job, you know. So I went back. I called Chuck and I said, Chuck you know, and Chuck told me, he said, ask him for one hundred and fifteen dollars a week. He said, that way, you'll walk away after taxes with a hundred and I the next week, I'm doing the country record review, said all the promotion guys, So the labels are coming in to see me.
00:49:48
Speaker 1: So how long do you do that before you get a label? Gig?
00:49:52
Speaker 2: I was there like fourteen months. I went down to the Grand Old Operay down to the Rhymen every Saturday night and just I had backstage pass. I just went back there and hung out and just took it all in. Never talk to anybody, just took it all in for every week, and you know, and of course over the course of that year, I met all the promotion people. They were all, you know, trying to get me drunk or do whatever there. You know, the promotion people back then, no one had a fact. No one could tell you a sales figure that they didn't make up. You know, they they tell you, oh, it's playing on five hundred radio stations. There was no facts, and I thought, I at the time, I thought, oh my god, I wish there was one fact in this business. You know. Now go forward to Sound Scared and BDS and all that, you know, in nineteen ninety five, and it's like there's no theater anymore. Now, it's all fact. You know. Those guys were as entertaining as the artists, you know, they they were characters, and uh you know that's how they got the records played along with you know, maybe a bag full of money. I don't know, but uh so I had that job and then people were coming in, you know. Burt Reynolds would come in because he was doing those those country movies, and Olivia Newton John would stop by. And the dear friend I made was Shel Silverstein.
00:51:29
Speaker 1: Wow.
00:51:29
Speaker 2: And Shell would come down from New York like every three months and he would stop by the office and just hang out. We'd hang out for three four hours, you know, and uh, he'd tell me stories about pitching songs and you know, and uh he he telled me every he said, every time I go to these see these producers, the first thing they say is you got another boy named Sue and and he said, yeah, I got you know, you know, he I got this song you know, on the cover of Rolling Stone or whatever, you know, all the other hits that and he said. They said, no, no, I'm lucky for something like boy named Sue and Shelle. Tony said no, what they wanted was the success of boy name Sue. They didn't know whether they he said, they probably couldn't hear it if it hit him. But I love Shelle. He was such a warm, wonderful guy at such a brilliant, brilliant talent on so many levels.
00:52:35
Speaker 1: So how'd you get your label gig?
00:52:37
Speaker 2: At that time? So this was end of seventy two, all of seventy three. Something was happening in the South. That one, Southern rock was evolving out of Georgia and the Carolinas and Charlie Daniels and Nashville, and the outlaw movement was happening in Texas. So I was covering those things. I was down in Macon all the time, and down in Atlanta and Muscle Shoals, Memphis, you know, Austin writing for the magazine. So I got to know a bunch of the publicists from LA and New York, and Charlie Rich had exploded in Nashville and Tammy Whinett and George Stones were doing great, and of course Johnny Cash was there at Columbia and CBS Records decided to start a publicity department in Nashville, and really there weren't very many people, you know, to interview, really, and so I got the job. Actually, they wanted me to start the beginning of would have been seventy four, and the Clive thing happened and they put everything on hold, and then they came back to me like in May, and I guess the dust settled and they hired me. They were starting to expand again and they hired me to start the publicity department. And one of the guys that was a real supporter, somebody who would stop by the Record World office was Steve Popovich. And Steve was, you know, a Pittsburgh, Cleveland guy. So he and Frank and I were kind of, you know, we all kind of had that same Pittsburgh ease thing, you know. And so Steve and I kind of hit it off. And I set Steve some some a couple of my songs and told him it was somebody I had heard. I didn't say it was me. And he figured it out and he he liked it. He thought it was funny, and so so he was maybe calling me all the time, and he was a big supporter of me getting that gig. And I had done a recor rolled at the time, like once a month, would do these what was called dialogues, and it was a big interview in the middle of the magazine with a major figure, you know, it might be Clive Davis or you know Mo Austin or you know, big people in the industry. And I did. I did a dialogue with Billy Ryl who was producing Charlie Rich and Tammy and George and Billy and I hit it off, you know, And so when the job came up, I got the job. And so there was no other publicist in Nashville at a label. There were a couple of Indian.
00:55:39
Speaker 1: No label had a publicist.
00:55:42
Speaker 2: No label had a publicist. Every label had an A and R guy or two in house producer whatever, and they would have a promotion person with a secretary and that was it. I was just put it on the radio that it. So when I got over there, I mean, there were no bios there or no pictures. The pictures were just awful, and I probably spent the first three four months just either hiring somebody to write a bio or writing it myself and then having pictures taken or finding better pictures. So all the artists, I mean, you know these are like Barbara Fairchild, Joe Stapley, and you know, Bob Luman, and they were like, wow, I got a guy he's writing eyes and then you know, they thought it was great. Tammy absolutely. I think this came from her being what she called the beauty operator, you know she was she had worked in the beauty salon in Alabama, and she read all those romance magazines you know that they have in the beauty shops, you know, and so to have assist was like to her, it was like the greatest thing. You know, here I am. I'm a twenty four year old kid, you know, I've never gotten anybody in the newspaper ever, and she just took to me and then she was always plotting and planning, how can we get George involved in some press, you know. So she and Billy and I would plot and plan how to get George to do an interview or do a photo shoot, you know. And so I had this great roster, you know, I had Tammy, George, Johnny Cash, you know, we just and we had some pop stuff starting to happen. Dave Loggins please come to Boston, and Dan Fogelberg, and so there were other things starting to go on. And when the acts would come through from New York, you know, there was a great club circle it back then, you know, the you know, the bottom lines of the world. But at Great Southeast and nash in Atlanta, they exited in Nashville, Lafayette's in Memphis, and I would do I was writing reviews from those clubs at Record World, and then when I started to become when I became the publicist, when the rock acts would come through, I'd try to get them suppressed. So New York really, you know, really liked what I was doing, and we had no competition, you know. So so this guy came down. His name was Patrick Anderson, and he had been a speech writer for John Kennedy, and he knew Fred Birch, who was Willie's mentor, right and Fred called me up and said, Hey, my friend Patrick is coming down here. He works for the for the Washington Post, but he's doing an article for the New York Times Sunday magazine on Nashville country music. Could you help him out? So when Patrick came down, he didn't have anybody else to talk to, so we got him to every one of our acts. He ended up asking me, can you do something to help me get to Loretta Lynn on MCA, And literally I was putting together interviews for him with people from other labels. I wanted him to be happy. So, as it turned out, this story came out in the New York Times Sunday magazine and David allan Coe, who had recently been signed but didn't He might have had a single out, but he hadn't finished his album. He used to sit in my office all day long and watch me make calls for other ears, And so they ended up putting David on the cover of the New York Times Sunday magazine. You know, it was the tats because at that time there weren't people like all Tatted up like that. So thew York Times thought, hey, that's a visual, you know, and so I didn't. You know, I'm not thinking of it. I'm twenty four years old. I'm a kid. I'm just learning how to be a publicist. I'm making friends at all the newspapers across the country because they were interested in country artists, you know. And so this New York Times Sunday magazine comes out and all of CBS in New York is going nuts. It's like, how did that happen? This huge story, it's all epic and Colombia. Well, before long, I was in New York head Ofgethic Publicity, you know, and which is you know, kind of where I peeked out because I had Susan Blonde as the New York publicist. You know, she knew everybody. She she was New York, you know. So I ended up being really more of a manager of the department and working internally to get the field staff at CBS to respect the publicity department because the field staff said they just do stories about the dictators or you know, you know, all these New York acts. They never sell any records, you know, why don't they get a story on Kansas, you know, or Reo Speedwagon. Well I knew those daily newspapers. So we ended up hiring the first tour publicist to go out with bands and really work the heartland, you know. And that was the only thing I could bring to the table. You know, Susan owned you know, Rolling Stone and you know the all the rock press, you know. But Kinky helped me, you know, just meet a lot of people, Lester Bangs. I was staying in the Warwick Hotel and Kinky bring Lester over hang out in my suite. Well I was, you know, while I was trying to find an apartment and Nick tashis who you know. Nick and I became dear friends. But most of the major media, I was milk toast America to them. You know. I didn't live up to the standard of the rock elite, you know, But anyway, I did that for a little over a year, and then I went to liber Krebs Management Company with Aerosmith and Ted Nugent, and I had kind of spearheaded, you know, forgive me that Ted Nugent the press campaign that really broke him, and you know that's back when Ted actually thought it was funny what he was saying. He didn't. He wasn't, but he wasn't believing himself then. So liber Krebs said, Hey, we need somebody to run our music publishing and troubleshoot pr things with Aerosmith. Aerosmith at that time was a lot of drug problems, and they'd end up setting me out on the road with a briefcase to bring the merch cash back so that it didn't get spent on the road. I'd walk out of Boston Garden with one hundred thousand dollars in my bag, you know, and did that for a year, And then I went back to Nashville. I had friends back there say, oh, man, you're a manager, now come back here. Well, none of the accident Nashville needed a manager. They'd go out and play the Johnny mac Brown High School for three thousand dollars on Friday night. You don't need a manager for that. Yeah, So we went back. We started a band called Riders of the Sky, cowboy band that's still playing today and playing old Western themes. And I went broke and I came back to New York and at the time I had kind of an on off relationship with Gail Sparrow, who had worked at Columbia on to the West Coast and then ultimately went to MTV when they started, and I was up at Christmas time, this would have been end of seventy eight, and I ran into Don Dempsey, who had become the new head of EPIC and previously I had worked for Ronald Lexeburg was head of EPIC. Said Don said, hey, why don't you come back in marketing as a product manager? And I was broke, so I said, yeah, what do you want me? How about Monday? So I came back and moved back to New York and became a product manager. And the first thing that happened was Charlie Daniels was handled out of New York because at that time Charlie was not considered country. He was considered a rock band and a boogie ban, you know, Southern. Ron and I knew Charlie from writing an article about him at Record World, and then when I was I knew Joe Sullivan, who was his manager, and Charlie and I kind of continued on a relationship when I when I headed publicity and he was signed. He was so happy that he had a natural guy in New York, you know. So and then when I came back, he called Don Dempsey and said, I got to have Dan as my product manager. So I got Charlie and within six months we had Devil went down to Georgia and exploded, and we just had a ball marketing that because Charlie was owed favors by everybody. He had always done everything for everybody, and literally when he when that record started to break, my phone exploded with people saying I owe him? What can I do to help? And you know, it just shows you what hard working artists you know that it can't come back to you, you know.
01:06:18
Speaker 1: Okay, when did you give up the dream to be a songwriter?
01:06:21
Speaker 2: I didn't and I didn't have the courage. You know, I was writing. Actually I signed with April Blackwood when I was in the publicity department seventy six, and they started putting me with people. I had met Zachlickman and we had become really good friends. He managed d On Democci and I showed him a lyric and he said, oh, Dion has to see this, you know, And so he took it to d On and he said, Dion loved it and wants to meet you. Blah blah blah. It took a year, and about a year later I got a call. I was at liber Kreb and I went out to lunch. I came back and the receptionist said, some guy named Dion called you like fifteen times at the last hour and bingo. So I called him back and he said, man, I'm so into this lyric. Send me everything you've got. And I said, well, I'm not going to do that that I have a title. I'm going to see if I could finish it tonight, at which I did, and I sent it to him the next day, and those two songs ended up on his Return of the Wanderer album, which unfortunately didn't happen. We got some great reviews, and then later Epic A and R connected me with Felix Cavalieri and we wrote a couple of songs together. And Popovich put me with the Iron City House Rockers and we wrote a couple of songs. And Popovich and Lenny Pizzi put me with this group called Gasoline from Denmark, and I had to rewrite the album in a week. What happened was they were decided to put the put the album out and the band got an English writer in Europe to rewrite the lyrics, is their English wasn't so good. So when the band showed up in New York with the new lyrics, Lenny and Steve went, oh my god, this doesn't work. And Popovich called me up and said, Dan, I needed to rewrite this album by next Thursday. And I said, I said why next Thursday? And he said, Roy Thomas Baker is exploding because of Bohemian Rhapsody, and he's their producer and he only has one day open on his schedule. It's next Thursday, and to redo all the vocals. So in the meantime, the band was in town. I hadn't met them. Popovich said, I'll have them in your office tomorrow morning. So they come over and he's told them, by this time, this guy's going to rewrite your lyrics. So they're meeting the head of publicity and the guy who's going to rewrite their album. It's like, I thought, oh my god, these guys probably are what what the hell is going on? But we did it, and we got some good reviews, and the band went out on tour with Jack Cassidy in Taorma and the audience hated them. I mean they were throwing fruits and vegetables at this band within half a song. And the band was so disillusioned they went back to Denmark and said we will never record in English again, and we're never coming back to America. And they were huge over there that, you know. They they were selling a couple hundred thousand of Denmark, which was like twenty million here. And so anyway, the next album came up, and Roy Baker called me up and said, hey, why don't you come to Denmark. He said, I want to convince the guys to put a bonus track on this, the Danish album, you know. So I went to Steven Lenny and that they very graciously said, look, we'll pay for you to go over there. We're not going to put the record out, you know, we'll send you over there. So I went over there and for about three weeks we were on a mushroom farm and Odense. It was not a it was a commercial mushroom farmer. And I wrote a couple of songs to be bonus tracks, you know. I wrote the lyrics and we finished the songs and I came home. I never heard anything again. And the band broke up like a year later, and Kim Larson, who was the leader of the band, became this like Bob Dylan of Denmark. He had like fifty the albums after that, all in Danish. So he died back in I think twenty eighteen, and a week after he died, U two played Copenhaggen. They had two nights there and after the first night, Bono was talking to the local crew backstage and they were telling him about Kim and how you know this guy was a hero to them and the whole thing. So the next night, Bono put a picture of Kim up on the screen in the in the arena they were playing, and then he recited a.
01:11:39
Speaker 1: Lyric come full Circle.
01:11:43
Speaker 2: This is a song. This is like forty years later, and I mean, for like, I never even knew the track had been actually on the Danish album. Yeah, so anyway, so I didn't know about it. Then about a month later, there's this one fan who had always reached out to me, Hey, you got any pictures some gasoline when they were in New York and all this, and so we stayed in touch over the years. He sent me a note with a link, a YouTube link, and he said Dan, I think you should watch this, and I went on and it was like bon overciting my lyrics. Well, it blew up on the streaming service. It's we had like eighteen million plays and it was all in Denmark and it's now, you know, which isn't a lot in the big scheme of things, but it's like fifty million now. And the YouTube stuff was like a similar number, you know. But what a strange tale for a song. You know, it's just such a weird thing. You know. I love crazy stories about songs, you know, I think it's great. So anyway, reeling back, I was product managing Mighty Clouds of Joy for zachlickman manage them and we won the Grammy for Best Gospel Record, and I was product managing the Clash, and of course we broke the Clash, and you know, everybody said, there's no way you could break them in the US, you know, and we just kept pounding away. We found those people within the CBS distribution, you know, we had hundreds of people out there, and you know, you get with the college reps and the account service wrecks who were in doing inventory and record stores and the assistants and the branches, they were twenty one branches back then, and you'd find the people who who favored that music, who were out there talking to store clerk, and you know, that's how we would build, you know, a little base. And then you know, when you have a band toured those clubs, you know, you could count on the Atlanta branch. We'd have twenty twenty five people there, you know, and that's how we would get things started on a band, particularly a band, you know, in those days. For most of those days, you know, we'd have a marketing meeting and somebody said, what's the marketing plan, and everybody's head would swivel to the head of promotion, radio promotion. It was like, yeah, put it on the radio. We don't need any marketing here, you know. So I think for a product manager, it was trying to find those those other ways of finding some buds, finding some little ways of getting a hook into something, you know.
01:14:53
Speaker 1: Okay, so how long were you were product manager before you started to work with Michael Jackson.
01:15:00
Speaker 2: I started product managing in January of seventy nine, and I started with Michael in let's see about September of nineteen ninety one.
01:15:15
Speaker 1: Now, you also say, in this process, you wake up one day and you realize you're never going to be promoted into the top job. What was that like?
01:15:28
Speaker 2: You know, you're kind of taught that that's what you're supposed to do. But you know, Bob, what I hated was. You know, there were different times where I was a department head or East Coast department head or whatever, you know, and they come to you and say, okay, you have a four percent pool, split it up between your people. So okay, so I'm going to give this one three point seventy five and piss them off. And then I'm going to give four point twenty five to this one and they're going to say it's not enough for what I did. I just hated all that. You know, I hated it, and I wasn't very good at it. You know. It's I was good at getting people excited and interested and you know, going out and explaining why we should break this act, you know, and getting people in the company into it. You know, so much of it was working the assistance. The secretaries knew more was going on than anybody, and they were the ones who could spread the word. You know, this secretary of the Dallas branch was talking to this secretary and promotion and they were both excited about a band.
01:16:41
Speaker 5: You know.
01:16:42
Speaker 2: That's that's how things would get started, you know. So that's what I loved. I you know, I didn't like the management stuff. I was better at it later in life, but in that time and finally, what I I just came to the conclusion, screw it. You know, I'm just going to work these acts. That's what I like to do. That's what I know what to do. It's the small problem solving. You know. A product manager didn't ever take a record order, didn't ever get a record plate on the radio. But we were in charge of all the screw ups, you know, and you know something was going wrong, it's like, go fix that, you know. And I liked that and looking for ways of turning on the field staff because we couldn't get to the consumer. You know, the only way to the consumer was through the record stores or through radio. You know, we didn't have enough money to market you know. I mean we could take three hundred sized ads and college papers for the Indigo girls. You know, we just didn't have the money for it. You know. I actually a number of years ago through some of my old notes, I wrote down what we did in nineteen ninety five, as far as how many posters we did, how many snipes we did on construction sites to announce shows, and how many TV spots, how many music videos you know. And by the way, that was one of the things that the product managers we started doing back around nineteen eighty and that was it fell to us to contract the video producers and directors.
01:18:34
Speaker 1: Okay, you worked with a lot of acts. Leave Michael Jackson aside, he's in his own world. What did you learn about musicians.
01:18:46
Speaker 2: That? I think the ones that sustain fundamentally keep it simple. I found the biggest acts that I worked with were the ones who were most grateful, were the easiest to talk to. They were also people that you could have a conversation about weaknesses, you know, strengths and weaknesses of their their career. You know that that if they were strong enough to be successful, they were strong enough to be objective about circumstances in their career, you know, and and hey, how do we overcome that?
01:19:28
Speaker 1: You know?
01:19:29
Speaker 2: And obviously the bigger part of that was leading on strengths, you know. The so I found the access sustain number one. They're hard working. You know, they work. If you have if you have a longer career, you've worked a long time. You know. It's Charlie Daniels on the nineteen was it seventy nine million mile Reflection album. The tie was based on his buses had traveled to me by nineteen seventy nine, So when you consider the man passed here just a few years ago, you know, the buses had a lot more miles on him. And you know, I saw that with Gloria Estefan. You know, Cyndi lauper Shade in her own way. She she didn't like all the promotion stuff, you know, and all that, but she had a sense of humor about it, and as cool and collective as she is, she's very nervous, very you know, It's like she didn't know what to say to salespeople or things like that, you know, and so she and I kind of made a deal on how we were going to do things. And you know, one of the things is is she said, you know, over the course of an album, she said, it just never ends. Somebody pops up backstage and you know, all of a sudden, I'm supposed to do something. And I went back to all the people from publicity, sales, promotion, and I said, look, I think it's essential that we try to put everything in a time period that and I told her this, I said, I'm going to go back to the label. She told me, she said, it just totally freaks me out. And I said, I said, how about if you give us a month just before the release. And of course now we'd had a huge hit, a four million seller, so we had a little more control of the marketplace. But I said, give us a month. I said, you're gonna hate it. You're going to hate every second of it. But we're going to put everything in that month, and when that month ends, no one is going to bother you. I said, I'm going to go back and try to sell that to the people at the label. I went back, and you know, for all the you know dysfunctioned sometimes of record labels and things like that, everybody came to the party and agreed. And we did that on every subsequent album that I worked on with her. And I would tease her in front, so a month is coming up that you hate, you know, and she'd laugh and said, yes, I could. I hate it. But we crammed everything into that month. You know, we tried to you know, have a vision for what was needed for every single, and you know, and it was easier with her to kind of understand how the flow should happen on single releases. You know, I think other artists it wasn't so kind of uniform, you know, maybe Luther Vandros. You know, it's a Luther was great working with Luther. Luther. Luther would say to me, you know, because I'd give him the bad news too, that he would say things like, Dan, don't make me eat donuts, which meant which meant if if I gave him bad news, he was going to go on a bingch. We just had so much fun. We were at one video shoot.
01:23:30
Speaker 6: And he had his little posse there and it was before everybody's just having coffee or wait for the crew to set up, and Luther, I'm over on the other side of this warehouse where we're shooting.
01:23:43
Speaker 2: I'm gonna a cup of coffee. And Luther said, Hey, Dan, come over here when you get your coffee. So I go over and and he's got his buddy sitting around and he said, uh, Dan, you know this album and tour is going to become be the Picasso. And I said, wow, Luther, it's going to be that great and he said, no, Dan, he said, I'm going to take all the money from the tour and the album. I'm not going to buy it. And you know, Luther had an album every year because because he was a big shopper. But I loved working with it. He was he could be a pill, he was. He was tough on himself. After he was so tough on himself, he had to share it with you.
01:24:35
Speaker 1: So to what degree were these stars accessible or were there handlers managers in between and kept them from you.
01:24:44
Speaker 2: For the most part, with the managers and artists that I worked with them very sharing. I think partly because the managers who managed those acts on that level had a lot more confidence than themselves. You know, if you we had a young manager, you know sometimes they you know, they would get protective, but they're really protecting their own their own situation. You know. I would see a lot of like young English managers come over and basically they were intimidated by the United States. You know, it's too big, you know, it's a mess, merchants, you know, world, it's you know, you go on a chain of radio stations, you go in a chain of record stores, you know, and it was scary to some of those those managers, and so they, you know, sometimes they would really kind of put a defense up, you know. But part of our philosophy was to try to get a young manager and educate them and train them about how the company worked, because if they could push our buttons properly, it was going to help us, you know. So if we could get a young manager to know how to work, you know, we tell him, hey, here's Jack Chase is the branch manager in Dallas, and here's the music he likes, you know, and this is the bourbon he likes it, you know. And he's a guy who will step out on a record and I think he's going to like yours, you know, and so we you know, you try to do that to kind of get these people, you know, as a manager and an artist, they've got a booking agent, maybe an outside publicist, the road manager. That's their world, you know, and they're coming into a big corporation. So it was like trying to demystify the corporation and get people to realize it's just a bunch of people. If we can work the people, you know, we can maybe get someplace.
01:26:57
Speaker 1: Okay, here's the manager basically a traffic cop and just putting the pieces together for other people or what kind of decisions does a product manager.
01:27:10
Speaker 2: Make that that's that's a lot of it, Bob. You know, essentially you're a coordinator. You're dealing with every department. As we got into it, we had a one sheet that was a budget sheet for every aspect. You know, how much of the DJ's going to cost? You know, you know, what's that inner sleeve cost? What? You know? But the product manager would go to the head of promotion, and the head of promotion would say what that number is for their promotion budget. Hey, this is what I'm going to spend on tip sheets. You know, we're going to work with an indie budget of X. Put that in there, you know. And then I was essentially ahead of East Coast product management for almost all that time that I was a product manager, So that would come back to me, and then I would have discussions with the president or vice president you know, of marketing basically talking about, hey, we got this number, you might want to question it, you know. And but a lot of product managers would initially feel kind of helpless. You know. Number one, they usually got artists who were down the priority list, and you know, so they get anxious and want to spend some money, and it's like, this is a business where you hold your cards. You hold your cards until something tells you something that you can leverage with a little bit of money, you know, and otherwise it's not going to not going to help. As a senior product manager and as the East Coast had and later when I was senior VP of mar Marketing and Sales, you know, I was designating what our price and positioning budget would be with the accounts, what the what kind of video budget we needed. If we were tour supporting, you know, I would be negotiating with a manager about how much money to get, how many dates involved. You know, it's you know, I'd sit down with a manager who come in with, you know, well we're going to stay at the Hilton and blah blah blah, and I'd say, well, look, you know you could probably weasel about thirty thousand dollars out of us if you want that the last two weeks or three months. You know, I think you'd make a better decision if you went with the three months, you know. And so once again it was educating people to say, you know, we got to hang in there for the long run. Our spending is better down the road. We need to get something going without the spend to start.
01:30:04
Speaker 1: Did you ever negotiate with the artist teams over who was going to pay or basically you argue who of a number and it's always charged to the artist's account.
01:30:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, there were. Basically we kind of established some levels. Initially it was on music videos. It was if it was a superstar artist, it was like, hey, one hundred thousand dollars and it's it's fifty to fifty and over one hundred thousand indulgence, so that's yours. You know, we'll pay it, but it's going to be charged back, you know. And then you know, sometimes I'd be on the phone with an Emilio Estefon or you know, and say, hey, you need to call you need to call Dave, you need to you know, if I thought there was some wrangling that a manager could do, I'd tried to let them know. There was one time when an artist came in renegotiating their deal after the first huge album, and I got a deal sheet back that said that the music budget would be completely a marketing cost. And I went back to business affairs and said, this is an absolute disaster. You have to have the artist having some skin in the game. Otherwise they're just going to they don't care, They're just going to you know, So we'll have a seventy five thousand dollars video budget that's going to go to four hundred thousand. You know, we have to cap it somewhere, you know. And at times, once again, there would be negotiations on it. You know, it might be you know, Dave Glue might say, hey, look, if we hit this level, I'll make it one hundred percent marketing, you know, that kind of thing. So there was a lot of give and take on those things. You know, as you know, Bob that the labels always had the leverage in those situations. You know, we were essentially given guidelines you have to come into this, you know, and if again, if there was a problem with an artist or manager, it was just hey, here's here's how you might be able to deal with it, you know. And you know, different managers might have a different relationship with different people, you know, it's like, oh, hey, talk to Richard Griffiths. You know, he's going to get you. Talk to Dave, he's going to get you. You know, talk to Waldert you know. I mean, you know some of the artists you know, had great relationships with Yetnikov. You know, it's in his day.
01:32:55
Speaker 1: So okay, you make a point in the book that Dave Glue hipped the company to the economics and the business more than previous major domos. Can tell me about that.
01:33:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, Dave really instituted this one sheet with the costs on it, and you know, we would have a one seat every six months, a sit down and Dave would bring in those worksheets with the actuals beside them and said, well, hey, you guys, you know, promotion, product management, you guys were talking you needed X amount of DJs and that sort of thing. Why is it four times? You know, and you know some of the just natural aspects of that were the simple things. So just realizing, hey, if it's a pop record, you're going to use more DJs than you are on a rock dricord, you know, and it's just but people saying oh yeah, let's just uh, let's let's order the DJs nobody was looking at those at those fundamental costs. So a lot of it was learning, hey, we if we're more efficient, we'll have more money later in the game to invest in it in trying to break a band if we don't waste it, you know, and other things like I know on my list from nineteen ninety five, we did sixty three videos that year, and I think, what was it how many we had. I think we had five that went to number one, and we had nine that were top ten, and we charted something like half of them, you know. But what was really interesting was is that and this is one of the areas where it was, well, we couldn't get that first video on the air, why did we do the second one?
01:35:09
Speaker 1: You know?
01:35:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, or the third one? You know, And it was just hope on hope, you know, and and you know, there were times we needed to make those risks. Living Color, the first video we did the company's hair was on fire about living color. This is going to be the greatest thing on earth, you know, Mick Jagger's behind it, blah blah blah. And they're so cool. There's such great players, and there's and they were so colorful and great live on stage and we made a video on Middleman and they brought it, you know, a couple of people. I don't know what there was who was involved in it, but some of the people who got involved and they got like some really arty person to come in to do the video and everybody thought that was cool. Well the video we took it to MTV and they said, yeah, you know, and so what happened was you know, and then Jim Grant and Roger Kramer were the managers who were on the phone to me about nineteen times a day. It's Jim still apologizing for that, and I love them for it. It's uh the But anyway, Jim was calling me up and said, damn, we got to do another video. And I said, you know, Jim, there's no way I'm going to get disapproved. I mean, you know, we just don't have anything, you know, and I said we They were out doing some dates, you know, Toads and New Haven and you know, playing the clubs in New York and going down to Philadelphia and says that we just need to expand that in the Northeast. You know, let's see if we could sell some records and then I'll go back in and see if we can get some money. Well, that's what happened that band. The reason the Cult of Personality video blew up that band was because the band went out and work their butts off in clubs and started selling records. That gave us the ability to convince the bosses to let us shoot another video. And you know, we had something going, and then we shot Cult and Cult didn't go on MTV, but it went on a video local video program in Denver, and I think it was called the Colorado Music Channel or something, but it was, you know, just an independent music video channel. And the branch manager for that area called me up and said, hey, we're seeing some sales here, you know, and there's nothing. There's no radio, are player or anything. It's got to come. The band hasn't been through here. It's got to be coming from that video. So we watched it a couple of weeks and then I think Harvey leads I took the information to Harvey. Harvey went over to MTV and they didn't believe him at first, and he came back the next week with more information and then they put it into head Banger's Ball and boom. We immediately saw you know, ones and twos and threes and fives around the country, and we brought that back to MTV and then they played it some more. You know. We got kind of into weekly rotation at head Banger's Ball, and then it went into regular rotation and boom the record blow, you know, and of course the band was out there touring, you know, doing the clubs, you know, so they could back it up.
01:38:55
Speaker 1: Okay, so Dangerous is put to bed. When's the first time you get in inkling there's going to be a new album.
01:39:05
Speaker 2: Well, so we finished that campaign basically in March of nineteen ninety three. That's when we had finished Oprah in the Super Bowl, and then Michael was off on tour, the Dangerous Tour internationally that summer, so we didn't see him, you know, he was in the hands of the International company, you know, and other territories, and we were fundamentally wrapped up with our campaign. We were probably sixteen months seventeen months into it, and so we were kind of quiet. The only thing I was trying to do was finish the Dangerous home video, which I thought I was going to finish in three weeks, and it was fourteen months later. Michael was still making changes, and so that summer, you know, I didn't see him or hear from him or anything. And then that August is when the initial charges came out. And that went on until the end of January of ninety four, and at that point we heard on the news Michael had settled. And as I've heard later, you know, as I heard shortly after that, it was that his attorneys told him, settle, get it over with, get it, get it out of the way. It's if you could try to beat this, but you're just going to linger it. It's just going to get muddier and mundier. Just settle. So that was kind of the word. And later it was actually years later that I had heard that it wasn't the attorneys, it was the insurance company. And the insurance company didn't even consult the attorneys or Michael. They said we're settling, and so Michael really didn't have a chance to do that. But anyway, so in January, so now it's on the news, Michael settled, you know, And through that those dark months before that, I thought I'm never going to see him again. It's ober, you know, it's just I mean, who could come back from something like that. I just didn't seem possible to me. So I go into a marketing meeting end of January nineteen ninety four. Dave turned to me and said, crank it up there, We're going to do the greatest hits. And Michael had actually been in recording stuff previously, probably for the the last year whenever he was, you know, on the West coast, and you know, the formula back then was record two new songs, we'll put them on the radio, and we'll put ten hits on there. And we've got the formula for the greatest hits, you know. So anyway, then Dave and I went out to LA and went to the studio and Michael played us some tracks, no vocals on or anything. Played this a few tracks. He was very upbeat and turned to Dave and said, Dave, I've got five new songs and number one. I'm thinking, how do we get his greatest hits on a single album to begin with? You know, I mean, you know Thriller was the greatest hits out, you know, and you know there are five hit singles off of Off the Wall or whatever. And so then Dave and I are like, okay, if we get into a double album. What you know, you know, and I think you know, for Dave, there's a lot of pressure from Matola and uh, you know, the the leadership camp that wait a minute, how much is this going to cost? And we just had a scandal and you know, wait a minute, you know, what are we what are we doing here? But but Dave sold Michael's idea of the double album to Tommy and mel Oberman and and off we went. So that end of that January, then we started scrambling to put it together. And then it was like trying to get Michael to visualize the album out because he was in the studio where he has lots lots of fun, there's no judgment. He's with people he loves, he's doing stuff he loves the most. It's such a protected environment. We had to convince him it was just as nice going up the charts, you know, so and of course, you know, you had to know that in the back of Michael's mind is you know, as optimistic of a person as he was. He had to have a sense of am I still valid out there? So trying to convince him and then that's where we came up with a title to work with, and then visual ideas to get him to start living with the idea of it released.
01:44:35
Speaker 1: You know, Okay, you came up with the name of the album. Tell us about that.
01:44:40
Speaker 2: Dave and Polly Anthony and I would meet often in Dave's office kind at the end of the day, you know, six forty five, seven o'clock, and I'd come up with kind of the issues of the day, you know, oh, we're having trouble finishing this video or you know what this is going on with It was always a Michael tale to it, you know. And we were up there basically talking about, you know, getting Michael to visualize the album out, and uh, you know, I said, we don't have a title. We don't have any visuals or anything, you know, And you know, Dave said, you know, call Sandy and see if we can get a title out of Michael. You know. So I called. I called Sandy and I said, you know, does Michael have any ideas for the title for the album? And Sandy said, well, no, why don't you come up with Why don't you guys come up with something? And I said, geez, Sady, it's a little personal. You know, this is his greatest hits. You know, I think maybe we should ask him. So Sandy said, okay, I'll ask it. So anyway, I took that story back to Dave and Polly. We all laughed to check her head. And so the next Sandy called me and said, well, I spoke to Michael and he doesn't have any ideas and he wants you guys to think about it. So okay, all right. So I go back that night to Polly and Dave, and Polly said the perfect thing. She said, just kind of wistfully, said, you know, I just wish Michael could come up with an idea like the Immaculate Collection by Madonna. It was such a cool title for a greatst dance and you know, and I walked away from that meeting and I thought, wow, she's right, you know, that's what we need. So on the train going home to Long Island that night, I got to thinking about what Michael had said in the studio, and that was and what was being talked about is that there'd be one album that was the greatest hits and the other album that would be the new songs. And by that time we kind of knew that Michael was writing some songs about what was happening to him. The new songs were going to be edgy. So I got to thinking, well, the old songs are his history, and these new songs are his story. And so that I wrote it down on a piece of paper capital H capital I capital S small t r Y, and the next day I sent it to Sandy and Just I faxed it to them. You know, we were dealing with factses and the trap like that. We didn't really Email wasn't even functional at the time anyway, so then we don't hear anything, and I ran the the idea by Polly and Dave and everybody kind of said, man, you know. And so about two weeks later, Dave is getting antsy and he said, we got to come up with some packaging, you know. He said, go out, go to Arnold Levine, who runs creative services for Sony, and he said, let's offer bounties fifteen hundred dollars twenty five hundred dollars for concepts for the album, and that Nancy Donald and Arnold would go out to ad agencies. They talked to their own creative services staff, designers, photographers to offer concepts for the album. So we ended up and they were all sent to Nancy Donald's office in LA and then Dave and Polly and I flew out and we went went to Sandy's office. I went with Arnold and Nancy and we rented a van and hauled all this stuff over to Sandy's office. There were concepts that were like books and big frame pictures and this all this concept stuff, and we're holing it up from the basement garage up to Sandy's office and into the his conference room. And as we're coming in with the first load, Sandy's assistant leaned around the corner and said, Hey, Dan, isn't it great. Michael's going to use your history concept. We're sitting there with about one hundred thousand dollars worth of concepts, and I thought Nancy and Arnold were going to kill me. It's like, oh my god, I felt about this big and I had no idea. So anyway, we haul all this stuff in and we win the conference. So Sandy comes in and Michael comes bouncing in and he loved the presentation, and he kind of giggled through the whole thing, and I guess he was thinking, yeah, I've already got this, but he wasn't telling. And we finished all the presentation and he and Sandy said, oh, thank you guys, this is great, wonderful. Thanks, no conclusion and we left. So we fly back to New York and we had something going on. I couldn't go right back out. I said, hey, Dave, I can go out. Week after next. I'll go back out and see if I can get this thing moving, you know, and you know, Nancy's got all those ideas there, and we'll see what we can do, and I'll find out what he's thinking on this history thing. So I fly out a week and a half later. Now we've been trying to get something going from months on this. Now it's like ten days from us hearing that he likes this history idea. We get out there, Nan I go to Nancy's office and she said, Michael's already got a vendor. Who are sculptors and computer animation people working on an idea and it's a statue. And it was like, uh oh, I knew there was no stopping him, you know, it was and we felt that, you know, Michael, I think really just took it as kind of sixth graders idea of history. Well, it's statues and it's you know, it's it's everything he you know, he learned in social studies class, you know. And in the meantime, we're going, oh my god, people are going to think he's a meglomaniac, you know, and and of course we faced that later, you know, but we couldn't we couldn't get him off the idea.
01:52:00
Speaker 1: Well, tell us about making the promotional teaser video.
01:52:06
Speaker 2: So Michael had ideas that he shared a little bit of it, but he wanted to get a director involved. And Scott Spanchik, who worked for me, who we brought in to kind of elevate our production abilities, and Scott was just amazing, and so Scott sent reels out to Sandy's office for Michael, and Michael honed in on, gosh, I'm forgetting his name now the director anyway, So we were just happy that there was something happening there. The kind of internal feeling was is that unless we go along with Michael's plan for the statue being in this teaser spot, he's not going to deliver the record. And so it just seemed like the statue video now, Michael said, oh, I want to do this as a teaser and I said to Michael at the time, I said, you know, but Michael's you have classical music on this, you know, in the plan, and I said, that's really not teasing the music for the album, and it just, you know, it didn't connect. He was so excited about his idea once again, once he got a B in his bonnet, you weren't going to change it, you know, And so we braced ourselves and we thought, you know, we'll just try to limit the use of this thing boom. We'll put it up there, well one weekend on MTV, and we'll shelve this thing, you know, and so that it, you know, doesn't create huge negatives. And so then they product company they came back to us and said, Michael wants to shoot in Hungary. And so anyway, we got the storyboards. We knew what was coming. You know, we didn't like it, but we knew what was coming. And all I was trying to do at that point was damage control things like you know, they had all these flags in it with symbols on them, and I said, you know, to the production company, I said, you have to understand, this is a global artist. You know, if one of those symbols means something in a country that we don't know what that means. We could have a terrible situation on our hands, you know. So there were things like that that we were trying to limit the possibilities of problems, you know. I mean, here we were, we're working on this, and this is after the scandal situation, so you know. And and in nineteen ninety four, and we brought Sandy and Michael in for this big marketing meeting. They're trying to get him out of the studio, and we brought everybody in from all different departments to talk about what they would do if he would deliver the greatest hits for the nineteen ninety four Christmas season. And at the end of that, I mean, we just threw every pots and pans, everything in the kitchen sink at it. And at the end of the meeting Sandy said, you know, Michael and I would like to sell one hundred million albums. That it just sucked the air out of the room. It's like our salespeople were like, we were just stunned. And so here we were facing this kind of unrealistic optimism versus the real roll up the sleeve issues that we had that we were trying to minimize how he might be portrayed by the media, and you know, we may have overreacted to that, but you know, Polly was definitely afraid of At one point, Sandy said, we want to have every radio station call Michael King of Pop and Polly said, you know, we got more of a fight at radio than you think, and if we do that, we're going to turn off some program directors. And so we fought that one off. But a lot of what we were trying to do at the time was just limit the damage. And you know, I think some of it we might have overreacted or we were trying to, you know, save two pebbles of sand on a big beach, But that's kind of what we were dealing with.
01:57:05
Speaker 1: So tell us about when he delivers the video and the promise made by the company relative to movie theaters.
01:57:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's We had this big marketing meeting on the West Coast and all the marketing had from around the world, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, you know, Israel, Germany, France, everybody, South America there all came. We were at the Peninsula Hotel and the I guess it's kind of a small ballroom there for a dinner. And that day there had been an international marketing meeting, and you know, and basically I had fed into Lisa Kramer, who was my counterpart internationally, and she made a presentation of all the tools we were making available, timetable, et cetera. And they had a very very successful meeting. Wasn't there, but they everybody came out of there just very very pumped. And you know, Michael's marketplace internationally was I kind of gauged it at we were thirty percent of the market in the US and North America and seventy percent was outside the US. I mean, he was much bigger internationally than he was in the States. And so anyway, they came out of the meeting, everybody's blowing. We have a big dinner. There's champagne flowing. Michael's there, and Mickey Schulhoff, who's chairman of Sony Entertainment, gets up and Michael had told him all about the teaser, and Mickey didn't have any other guy. You know, We're thinking, how we're gonna kind of keep this thing on the down low as much as we could, And so Mickey gets up at dinner and said, you know, Michael, I'm really excited about this teaser. I know you're excited about it. I'm going to make sure it goes in every Low's theater that Sony elms and Michael is just so excited and happy, and we're sitting there going, oh my god, no, now this thing's going to be everywhere. So anyway, so I go back to New York and about a week later, Michael calls and said, have you spoken to Mickey about the Low's theaters? And I said no, you know, I said, we're still waiting to get the video in, and you know we got you know, you know, wasn't quite ready to be walking over the Low's to make the pitch. So anyway, as it turned out, Michael kept calling me about it. That was like the one thing on his mind. And I kept holding him off for probably a month of easily a dozen calls, you know, specifically about where's Mickey on this? You know? So I called Mickey's office and a couple of times that I didn't get any response. So I went to Dave and I said, Dave, you've got to help me. I can't get an answer out of Nicky's office. So Dave got a meeting and we went up like the next day and sat down and we explained to Mickey the situation about the promise he made to Michael, and we felt that the delivery of the album might be influenced by that promise. So anyway, Micky picks up the phone and he calls Mickey stein Burg, who was head of Lows Theaters, and said explained the situation to him, and Steinberg said, can I see it? And we had a rough and so anyway, Mickey Schuloff said, well, Michael's product manager, Dan Beck, will bring it over to your office in the morning. How's that great great eleven o'clock ran over boot? So he's in Trump Tower and we're at five point fifty Madison right around the block, you know. So the next day I go over, go up the Trump Tower and I go in. I meet Mickey Steinberg and he puts the three quarter deck in his in his player, and it was like about an eight minute piece, and he watches the thing where just he and I were in total silence. He finishes it, he ejected it, handed it to me and said that'll never play in a low stare. What are we going to do now. So I'm raced back to the office. I tell Dave. So we're sitting there, just cutted numb, and I said, you know, I said, I got it off the wall idea. I said, I have a friend to help put some music videos in front of movies, in front of the previews, you know. And I said, you know, so we pay to do that and just market by market, you know. And I said, he may be able to help us, you know. So Dave said, do whatever, you know, see what you can do. I didn't tell him who it was, so anyway, so I call my friend, who was Bob Kardashian. And this is in the middle of the OJ trial and Bob is one of the attorneys on the defense on OJ's fence. So I called it uber. I don't even know they still had the business since the OJ thing and happened. So I get a call back. I leave word on the voicemail and it's the company, you know, so it sounds like they're still operating. So next night I get a call from Bob and he said, you know, hey, what's up. You know, I said, hey, what's up with you? You know, how are you hanging in there? With this this OJ trial, and so we talked about that for a minute and he said, tell me what you got. So I explained the situation. We had this video, there was a promise made to get it in the Loew's theaters, and we need to find a solution. And I said, I thought of you, and he said, he said, well number one, he said, I don't go to the top people at low So I go to the individual's theater managers and as long as there's no sexual you know, content violence kind of thing, you know, over the top. He said. You know, if the managers feel good about it, you know, they make some extra money from this, and I make some money too, you know. So I said, well, how do we proceed and he said, well, I need to look at it, and he said, can you send it? I said, I can't let this out of my hands. I said, but I'll fly out to LA with it. And I said are you available? You know, and I think this was a Thursday or something, and I said, look, i'll fly out on Monday and he said great. He said, I'll be in court all day. He said, just leave a message on my voicemail on Monday night. I'll call you back at which he did, and so he said where are you staying and I said, I'm at Shutters and he said, oh, that's really close to the courthouse. And he said, how about I come over on my lunch break from the trial and if you can get a three quarter deck set up and room and we'll look at the video and we'll see if we can do anything. So the next morning I have an engineer putting a three quarter deck in my room and we're the engineer and I are watching the trial that you know, it's Bob was right there on the screen. So engineer gets it set. Ten minutes after twelve, knock at the door. It's Bob. He comes in, looks at the video. He said I could put that in theaters. And so we started talking money, and of course to do it nationally was just out of the question. And I said, look, how about I send you a list, And I just ran off some markets that, you know, basically where Jimmy and Terry were the producers in Minneapolis, you know, southern California and New York and you know, any place where we felt Michael would get the feedback that wow, I saw your video, you know. Anyway, I think it cost us one hundred and forty thousand dollars and Bob did it, and I was able to call Michael and say, we're in the Loews theaters. And I always hoped that I would run into Mickey Steinberg in an elevator sometimes and have him say, oh, hey, you're that kid from Epic Records. Right, it's that piece of shit video. What did you ever do with that? I put it in your theaters?
02:06:36
Speaker 1: So just for my audience, what was wrong with the video?
02:06:41
Speaker 2: Well, it had all these marching troops that it really had a kind of propaganda's feel. At the time, everybody kind of took it as a fascist video. Also had a statue was probably you know, you know, it was all computer generated, but probably had the look of being a couple of hundred feet high, you know, and there were helicopters flying between his legs and little kids yelling Michael, I love you, and everybody that we showed it to at the label was just had their heads on the table groaning. You know. It was just everybody felt, you know, he's going to be accused of being a megalomaniac. He's going to be you know that these kids, little kids. It just brings back all the negatives. And so there was all of that and here we were doing literally the exchange for the for the master, you know.
02:07:46
Speaker 1: So ultimately there was a problem with the lyric.
02:07:50
Speaker 2: Yes on, they don't care about us, And Michael had some very kind of shocking references to Jewish people in the song. I kind of you know, knowing Michael, it's like he put himself in the victim's position, you know, and and he was saying those words like they were being said to him. But the fact is is that not everybody was going to accept that, you know. And what happened was the Sunday or was it the Thursday before? Maybe it was the Thursday before. The in store date was June twentieth, so it was either the Thursday. I think we got a heads up copy of the Sunday New York Times story that was going to explode this story about the antisemitic lyrics, and so we were scrambling, again, what the hell are we going to do about this? You know, So I mean literally, Sandy, you know, it was one of the best efforts I saw from Sandy, because Sandy went out and really got some of the scholars and leaders, the theologians from the temples to really address it and support Michael Inniz. But the fact was it was it was just another inflaming issue, and it was happening right on the release. It's just, you know, I had raised the issue, you know, when we really heard the final version, which is probably five or six weeks before the album was hitting, and we played this. We played the record for a lot of people at Sony Studios. We brought in Diane Sawyer, we brought in all kinds of press people, accounts people, and I had it was kind of there that it kind of hit me, hey, wait a minute, are we listening to this lyric here? And I brought it to Dave's attention, and Dave said, I need to talk to Tommy about this, you know. So he spoke to Tommy. I'd spoken to him in the morning, and that evening Dave called me back in the office and you know, I said, this is going to be a problem. And so Dave said, well, I spoke to Tommy about it, and he said, you know, you can't dictate what an artist says on the record. I said, I'm not dictating what's going on the record. I'm saying, we need to have a conversation in front with Mike and Sandy to talk about the impact. You know, we need to be prepared, and nothing ever happened. And I get it, because that album was set on a release date. If anything was going to change, it was going to push that album back to who knows when, and the company was going to lose that Billy and I don't think the leadership of the company was going to ever go for them. So we put it out there and bang, there was a problem. And then then the conclusion was that Michael needed What was suggested to Michael that he should re record those lyrics, and he agreed to do that, and then it was I was told to go speak on background to the journalists who had the biggest problem with it. So I spoke to probably six or seven or eight journalists who were upset had written about this, and told him that Michael had agreed to re record the lyrics. Well, then Michael had second thoughts on it, and it became a real issue, and we kind of pushed and pulled, and finally, you know, Jim Morey was a big part of getting him back in the studio, and Jim and I went over to the Sony studios with Michael, went in and Michael did re record the lyrics.
02:12:47
Speaker 1: Okay, ultimately you get rewarded with getting a job with V two Records with Richard Branson? How was the experience running that company working with Branson?
02:12:59
Speaker 2: Was working with Richard was fantastic. It was a lot of fun. Basically, his directive was, if you need me for profile, if you need me for fun, got some great events or whatever. If you need money, call me and otherwise go do what you're going to do. The company had been formed, I think in March of ninety six, and I came on board in January of ninety seven, and they had already set up offices in several of the European countries, and they also had started buying up small labels. And all those labels had two, three, four employees. So we took all those employees and they all did the same thing for a small label. So now now we had all these people who did the same thing for a small label at a bigger label. And I think when we opened the doors, the other was they'd gotten really pretty crazy about signing acts. I think when we opened the doors, we had sixty four artists on the roster, and the principle that have been set up in the headquarters office in London was to break artists globally at the same time, and that was kind of totally against the grain of what I knew. You know, it's you know, how did Pearl Jam break They build a base in Seattle and the Northwest. You know that, you know how to Southern rock start in the south. You know that you got to form some bases. You can't break things globally unless you have some big pop hit. So that was going to be a challenge, particularly with that big of a roster. And the idea of V two was to be artists, really super friendly to artists, so we couldn't sit there and just draw thirty acts, you know. So we were really hung up on this and Pete Jones, who was I made the distribution deal for North America with BMG, which Pete Jones ran their distribution company, and I begged Pete to set up an indie distribution wing that I could put out a lot of these records that I knew were going to sell fifteen hundred three thousand copies, to do it independently and keep it out of their branch system because I knew the branch managers they're sitting there, you know, counting their bonus based on you know, big numbers. And I thought, if we put ten Niche records out through BMG, this branch managers are going to totally turn off to the label. And then we'd start to get something going with an act and then the international company would say, well, let's bring them to Algium or France or Germany. And you know, I don't think there was an understanding of how long it takes to break and act in the US, and so that was that was an issue. And then Kate Hymen brought the Mobi record play into me, and number one, I knew he had scanned like fifty two thousand on the previous album, so I knew we could break even on it, you know, but I love the fact that the record was had so much air in it in terms of I thought it was a great, you know, trailer soundtrack commercials type of thing, and we signed Mobi on that idea. I sat down with Mobi and I said, look, I forget who I think MCA was trying to had a little better offer than us on the table, and I said, if you have a hit single, sign with MCA. I said, but if you want somebody to work your record for the next year, signed with Thoughts. And I told him, I said, I really believe we had had a couple of publishing songs that David Steele, who was our publishing licensing person, had had some success with some publishing copyrights that we had, and we were getting had some nice licenses. And I said, I'm going to have David. This is all he's going to do is work your record. And I said, I think it's a marketing plan. I had a circumstance at Sony with a band called The Insiders. They're a bar band, like a great bar band. Just love them, and we over at rock radio and everything on their first album, and we got ourselves at a little bit of trouble with the finance people. When we had the second album come, everybody wanted to drop them. In the meantime, the manager called me and said, hey, we've got an offer for this little indie film. And of course this is back in like nineteen eighty eight or something ninety and indie films weren't that big of a deal then, you know. But he said you know, they're offering like three thousand dollars. But I talked to the Sony licensing department and they had no sense of marketing. They were just a dollars and cents. If the song was the opening track of a movie, the price is X. It doesn't matter if it's Barbara streisand or it's The Insiders, and if it's the end track, this is the price. And it was all total formula. So I called the licensing department. I said, look, this band is totally unearned. Our publishing company has has signed them, the record company has signed them. This band is never going to see the three thousand dollars, you know, but it'll give us something to go to the marketplace with. You know. We we can we can talk that up, you know we can. We can probably get some airplay based on some enthusiasm for the c Indie movie. Sorry, can't do it. They don't pay the price. That's it. So I swore to God if I was ever in a position again, that was never going to happen. So with Moby, it was like, we're going to go and we're going to use the whole damn album as a marketing tool and that's what we did, and David Steele just rocked. I mean, he and the publisher, I forget who the publisher was, Tom. They rocked and they worked together. And by the time we had I think forty thousand scans on the play album, we had grossed a million dollars un licensing, and of course it ended up every track license and it just it was, you know, just an absolute unique situation. Probably couldn't have happened on any other record. It just it just fit the moment. And of course it changed things because then everybody started pursuing licensing in a more strategic way after that, you know. So that was a great thing. And as it turned out, Bob I had hearing problems and I started realizing they were getting worse. What you know, I would go over. I was in Europe every couple of weeks in other of our regional offices, and of course everybody's got an accent, and I didn't realize it that I was. I was reading lips and you know, and when you're in an environment where people aren't speaking the way you know, the way the people you're around every day, I started realizing, Hey, I'm kind of losing touch. Here, you know, but I thought I had a fatigue syndrome. And I told my wife, I said, you know, I said, you know, here, I am working for the nicest billionaire on earth who's given us all this money, and we got this great young team, and I'm feeling miserable. She said, yeah, you are. You're miserable right now. She said, you need to get to the doctor and see what's going on. So I went to the doctor, and I think the doctor picked up on it right away. He gave me all the tests for everything, but ultimately said, I think I'm going to send you into an audiologist. And I said, oh yeah, I got a I know, if I'm at a concert and somebody speaks to me in my left ear, I tell him talk to me in my rightear. And because with all the noise, I don't quite hear, so I probably have a little issue. He came back, said, you've lost sixty five percent of your mid range in both ears, which is conversational, you know. And by the way, all the people that I worked with over the years, the upper level people, many of them all had hearing problems. And you know, back in the seventies and eighties and we used to laugh at them, and you know, oh my god, those guys can't hear anything, you know. I know one A and R guy, he had the treble cranked up so high on his system. It was like, you know, it was like aluminum, you know. And one thing that I did that then was I swore to God I would not change my dials. I kept them completely neutral in terms of bass, you know, top end, low end, kept everything right in the middle, so that if I ever had a hearing issue, I would notice it. And so I didn't notice it, you know, and a band would come in, you know, and so I lost mid range and that's where people speak, you know. So well, what happened is a band would come in and they play an album and I would say, oh, you know, you got to bump the vocals up a little bit, and the lead singer would always say, yeah, yeah, bump the vocal up. But it was my hearing problem. And so anyway, I after I realized I had to get hearing aids, and frankly, I didn't know what hearing aids would do for me. And this is nineteen ninety nine, you know, it wasn't exactly a cool thing. I got to step away. I I you know, I don't. I can't embarrass this company, you know, I don't want to be a joke out there. You know, people are talking about, oh yeah, the label with the guy can't hear, you know. So I stepped away, and it kind of lost my mo for a couple of years. And but you know, you got to plow ahead. You gotta, you know, you gotta take those things and just put them on the side and do what you can do, you know, and see if you can if there's something some other way you can approach things, you know. So it's all problem solving, you know that. I think that's the product management thing is we had a bunch of little problems. You're trying to fix all this little stuff so it doesn't get in the way of promotion or sales, you know. And that's kind of the way I saw it, you know.
02:24:54
Speaker 1: So do you know what caused the hearing loss? Yeah?
02:24:59
Speaker 2: I do, And Bob, you know what it is? Hereditary. It's it was not based on all the decibels that I listened to from Cheap Trick and Aussy and Boston and you know, all those bands. Uh, it was none of that. It was it was I had it was it was my genes. So you know, it's most people lose high end with due to sound or due to age, and that's that's the typical issue for most people.
02:25:36
Speaker 1: Okay, So when Michael Jackson dies, are you surprised?
02:25:42
Speaker 2: Uh? Yeah, I think a figure that large that you're naturally surprised, you know, based on all that he'd been through, you know, Number one, when I was working with them in the early nineties after the scandal issue, I couldn't imagine how he could get through. It had to be so painful, you know. I mean he had me bring research to him that was you know, he would read these surveys I bring in and be like a New York phone book stack of surveys people saying really nasty things about him, you know, and he would flip through a read him and he wanted me to bring them. And I think that was part of why Michael and I. He knew I would tell him the truth, you know, if I knew it, you know, and I also told him, well I didn't know it, you know. I would say I would say to Michael, Hey, Michael, I'm just a guy from the record company. And the first time I said it, he burst out laughing and he said, you're just the guy from the record company. And he's laughed and laughed and laughed. So after that, he every time he'd asked me an opinion, he said, damn, what do you think of this? You know? And I said, well, you know, I don't know. You could do a b C. You know, there's different ways. And he'd said, yeah, but Dan, you're just a guy from company. And it was our little joke all, you know. But when he died, you know, obviously extremely sad. You know, I knew Frank de Leo raced over to the hospital. It was one of the things I was aware of from watching CNN, you know. I had told Dave Glue. We had breakfast after he told Tommy I was leaving Epic, and we were just kind of this is end of nineteen ninety six and we were just kind of reminiscing our experience working with Michael, and I said, you know, five years he's going to be bankrupt, you know, and you know, I don't just don't know, you know, his health. We had been through the thing with the which was crushing the HBO concert that we were doing live from New York back in November, I think November thirtieth of ninety six, and that fell through because Michael went to the hospital. And I think sometimes the only way Michael could get out of something was making himself sick. And I just thought, you know, he was probably making himself sick. I thought he owed so much money at the end that you know, he had to promise those shows. And one thing about Michael was he was a good answer to the man, you know, and I think that the man was going to steal the joy that he had on stage with the audience. That was his heart and soul, that was his that's where his heart beat, with the audience's live shows, and to do them because he owed money. I just you know, I told everybody that I ever spoke to at the time, they said, this won't last three shows. It just won't. I said, one, it's too physically demanding. And number two, I said, he's not going to play for the man. He's just not going to do it. And you know, it's so sad, you know, in the end, I mean, the last you know, fifteen years of his life were terribly sad, you know. I mean, one of the things that I felt in writing the book was that my kids only knew a really negative side of Michael. They didn't know that eighties thriller all you know, all that phenomenal stuff that we saw, the Motown twenty five and you know the you know, the Moonwalk and Billy Jean and and you know all of the amazing stuff that happened. You know, you know, something would come up on TV with my kids were ten or twelve years old and Michael and it's oh yeah, I used to work with him. They'd look at me side eyed, like by dad, yeah you're cp you know, and and I would think, God, they just don't they just don't know that other side that you know, they only see the dark side of the room.
02:30:33
Speaker 1: Okay, Dan, this is you know. I love getting your history in the early days, especially for people who were there and other people wonder how to make it. There's a lot more about Michael and the book, and it's certainly in depth. He'll give you all the information you want. Dan, I want to thank you so much for taking this time to speak to my audience.
02:30:55
Speaker 2: Bob, Well, thank you. You know, I I love your inquisitive nature and you know your your curiosity and I know you love this business, the music and all that goes on about it, and that's just your your gift to all of us for doing it well.
02:31:14
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, And on that note, till next time, it's Bob Left sets