Behind The Curtain, On The Road, And Sometimes Up The Stairs
Some music insider stories come wrapped in contracts, managers, lawyers, and the kind of business lessons that cost more than they should. Others come from hotel lobbies, broken mufflers, warm Guinness, and the strange little moments that never make it into the polished biographies. Those are the ones I remember best, because they were not assembled for public consumption. They happened in real time, usually with no warning, and often with nobody around who understood that a small incident was quietly becoming part of a much larger story.
That is the difference between legend and memory. Legend arrives later, combed and perfumed. Memory still has the sweat on it. These music insider stories are pieces of my story my life, taken from the agency business, the road, the clubs, the hotels, and the odd corners where rock and roll actually lived before it became something to be merchandised, repackaged, and explained by people who were not there. My memoir is not only about famous names. It is about the spaces around those names, the business behind them, the absurdity beside them, and the very human comedy that followed them from one city to another.
Rod Stewart And The Chase On The Stairs
Coming back from a gig one night at Cobo Hall in Detroit, Rod Stewart and I walked into the lobby of the Pontchartrain Hotel, which sat right across the street from the venue. It did not take long for me to notice a group of concertgoers gathering near the entrance, and they had that look fans get when recognition begins to travel through a crowd. I told Rod we needed to get our asses in gear unless he felt like being mobbed in the lobby. We moved quickly toward the elevator bank, but of course the elevators were slow to come, because elevators have a wonderful sense of timing when danger is walking toward you in boots.
The crowd was edging closer, not running yet, but moving with purpose, like a wave coming in at the beach. It was crunch time, and the stairs suddenly looked like the only door left in the house. This was well before I started working out, and I still had some extra meat on me, but up we went. Twenty-six flights. Rod and I ran like two men who had no interest in becoming a lobby attraction, with the crowd in hot pursuit behind us. We made it to our respective rooms just in time, breathing hard and probably looking less like music business professionals than two escaped suspects who had chosen cardio by necessity.
On another occasion, Rod and I, along with my then-wife Jean, were on a short holiday in Bermuda. During the stay, Rod asked me to manage him while I was already acting as his agent. I told him I was flattered, and I was, but I could not do that to his current manager, Billy Gaff. It was a matter of loyalty, or at least what I understood loyalty to be at the time. Now I cannot even get my inquiries replied to through his attorney. Such is life. One of the private truths behind music insider stories is that yesterday’s island conversation can become tomorrow’s unanswered message, and rock and roll has a short memory when a short memory suits the moment.
Fun And Frolics: My First Road Tour
While I was still in college at Hofstra University, I was running a nightclub called the Silver Knight. It turned out to be a bust-out joint for the mob, where the owners kept all the cash receipts and paid zero bills until the marshals finally padlocked the doors. That little piece of education was not on any Hofstra syllabus, but it taught me plenty. The Emeralds, a band I had just hired for the club, had their equipment locked inside and could not get access to it. My first move was to get their drums and amps released under the legal understanding that they were the band’s tools of trade and could not be legally encumbered. My second move was to meet Don and Hank, the de facto leaders of the band, for eggs at a local diner, which was a very sixties kind of place to solve unemployment, betrayal, and opportunity all at the same table.
We all agreed that since we were out of work, we might as well join forces, and I would manage them. The arrangement worked out better than anyone had a right to expect. The band started playing the major clubs in Manhattan, beginning with the Gingerbread Lounge, and there we became friendly with two great-looking call girls, each of whom eventually dated one of the band members. On one occasion, I was invited to their house, which meant it was score time. I took along a college buddy named Larry, who I would later join in business founding what became Rock Magazine. Once we got to the girls’ place, they broke out some weed for everyone to smoke. Larry immediately freaked and demanded that we leave, so we did. There went a great time in a hurry.
What made it funny was what happened about two years later. After Larry was discharged from the Army, he drove back from Panama with shopping bags full of Panama Red in his trunk. That was some strong, strong weed. The same man who had once panicked in a room with a little smoke had become a rolling import business with a steering wheel. Life has a way of writing jokes better than any writer can.
One of the things we did on the road, fun to us at least, was blow out the mufflers in our rental station wagon. We would drive through a tunnel, and if a pedestrian was walking by, we would shut the car off while the transmission was still engaged. The engine, still turning from the car’s momentum, would store gas in the system. As we passed the pedestrian or a toll booth operator, we would turn the key back on and BOOM, the gases would ignite and explode, eventually taking the muffler with them. I am not defending this as wisdom. I am reporting it as history. Some music insider stories come with charm, some come with paperwork, and some arrive sounding like a small artillery test under a city street.
We’ve Got The Funk
One of our clients at American Talent International was George Clinton and P-Funk, Parliament-Funkadelic. They began as an early-sixties doo-wop group and band, then morphed into P-Funk, one of the great funk forces in American music, also featuring Bootsy Collins. They were incredible, and one of the gigs we set up was on an island off Manhattan, where 20,000 people showed up to see them. On paper, that sounds like a triumph. In practice, the stage was only about 15 by 20 feet at best, and somehow the band, my partner at ATI, Sol Saffian, and I all had to fit on that tiny stage.
There was no backstage to speak of and no real security. There we were, two white faces standing on stage with P-Funk, looking out at a sea of brothers, and the whole thing could have gone wrong in ten different directions if the mood had shifted. But it did not. All went well. Everyone had a good time. That is the part of music insider stories that rarely survives the official version. People remember the crowd, the act, the show, the name. What I remember is the size of the stage, the lack of security, the absurdity of the setup, and the fact that sometimes a night works because the crowd, the artist, and luck all decide to behave at the same time.
Uriah Heep And The Airport Heist
Black Sabbath taught me a lesson I never forgot: never book a tour for a band without first having a signed contract. When Sabbath changed management from Pat Meehan to Don Arden, Arden pulled the tour and the band from us and handed them to Frank Barcelona and Premier Talent Agency. That was not a lesson written in pencil. It stayed with me, and after that, every artist signed a contract. No contract, no tour. It was that simple, at least in theory, and theory was about to meet Uriah Heep at John F. Kennedy Airport.
Uriah Heep, with their then-manager Gerry Bron, had been sent the papers and kept stalling with the usual nonsense: “They’re forthcoming.” The papers were always forthcoming in the music business, until they were not. So I decided to play hardball. When they arrived at JFK, they called and asked where their visas were so they could enter the country for the tour. I told them the visas were in the same place as our contract. They were then told there would be no tour and no entry unless they signed our contract. They agreed, and I sent Wally Mayrowitz to JFK with the paperwork in hand. They signed, and only then were they presented with their visas.
It was all good from there. Some music insider stories are about parties, hotel rooms, and rock and roll foolishness. Others are about knowing when to stop being agreeable and start protecting your business. That little airport drama may not have been elegant, but it worked, and in the agency business, elegance was never worth as much as leverage.
Raven: The Band That Should Have Made It, But Didn’t
One of my first signings, right out of college and in my new job at Associated Booking, was a group called Raven. They came from upstate New York, were friends with The Band, and frequently interchanged members with them on gigs. Their sound was somewhat similar, but Raven were closer to pure blues, and they were simply brilliant. I booked them to support B.B. King at the Fillmore East, and they blew me away. They were that good, the kind of band that made you believe the business still had room for justice.
I was able to secure a record deal for them with Columbia, with an assigned producer. But Raven were a band whose power lived on stage, and what needed to be captured was the fire in the room. It was not. The record came out dull, and that dullness put a major dent in their career. I was heartbroken, because I knew what they were and I knew what the record failed to show. That is one of the crueler realities behind music insider stories. A band can have the goods and still be damaged by the very machine that was supposed to carry them.
They had also been offered a recording contract by Peter Asher with Apple Records, but turned it down to sign with Columbia instead. Although they had played at the Woodstock Sound-Outs a year earlier, they declined invitations to appear at both Woodstock and the Isle of Wight Festival. Fate was not on their side, but fate had help. Between the band’s bad choices and Columbia’s poorly produced record, it was enough to break them up. The public remembers the winners. The business remembers the bands that should have been winners, and Raven was one of those bands.
My First Glass Of Guinness
It was Rory Gallagher who took me to an Irish bar in London and introduced me to Guinness. My first pull was typical of those days, on draft and warm. The only beer you could usually get chilled in English pubs back then was lager, often Harp. Rory made me a lifelong fan of Guinness, and that memory has stayed with me not because it was dramatic, but because it was decent. He was not performing a scene. He was simply being himself.
It was terribly sad that Rory died so young of liver failure. He was the nicest person I ever met in the music business. That may sound like a small thing compared with contracts, tours, managers, record companies, and rock stars running from crowds, but it belongs here. Music insider stories are not always about spectacle. Sometimes they are about someone sitting with you in a bar, handing you a glass, and becoming part of your life without making any noise about it.
Why These Insider Stories Still Matter
A good music autobiography should not read like a museum label. It should have shoe leather on it. It should carry the smell of hotel carpet, rental cars, club dressing rooms, bad coffee, warm beer, nervous money, and people trying to survive their own momentum. That is the kind of music autobiography I know how to tell, because that is the life I saw. I was not standing outside the glass. I was inside the machinery, sometimes turning the wheel, sometimes ducking the gears, and sometimes wondering who had the contract, who had the money, and who had just walked off with the truth.
These music insider stories are part of my memoir, but they are also part of a vanished business. It was a world where deals were made on trust until trust became too expensive, where bands could be brilliant and still lose, where fame could send you running up hotel stairs, and where an unsigned contract could teach you more than a year of polite meetings. I have read plenty of rock and roll memoirs that polish the furniture until the room disappears. I am not interested in that. The truth was messier, funnier, rougher, and far more human.
That is why my story my life keeps returning to the smaller moments. They are not smaller to me. They are the grain of the wood. These music insider stories are not meant to turn the past into marble. They are meant to let it breathe, cough, laugh, and occasionally explode in a tunnel. For anyone looking for polished legend, there are plenty of places to find it. For anyone looking for music insider stories from someone who was actually there, this is where the door opens.
