Music Business Secrets Begin Before The Audience Arrives
Most people hear the words music business secrets and think sex, drugs, crooked managers, disappearing money, and somebody throwing a television out of a hotel window. I saw enough of that to keep a psychiatrist and accountant occupied for years. But some of the most important music business secrets were less theatrical: decisions made in offices, record-company meetings, and record stores that determined whether an artist ever got heard in America.
A great record was not enough. Talent was not enough. Sometimes even a signed deal was not enough. The music business secrets that mattered were knowing where an artist belonged, who needed to hear them, when to push, when to wait, and occasionally when to keep your own big mouth shut.
Music Business Secrets I Found In The German Record Bins
After years of working heavily with English rock acts, I started prowling the import bins at a record store on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village and found Kraftwerk, Neu, Harmonia, Randy Pie, Inga Rumpf, Klaus Doldinger and others. England was crowded with agents looking for the next big thing; Germany looked like open territory. That became one of my favorite music business secrets: if everybody is staring in one direction, look somewhere else.
I went to Germany, met artists and producers, signed acts, and chased American record deals. Kraftwerk became the obvious success, but the others were just as instructive. I placed a Harmonia album with Motown, but Motown never released it. I had secured an American deal for Neu, but they chose not to take it; Randy Pie was a band I liked but could not get a U.S. deal for; Atlantis, with Inga Rumpf, toured America and, in my opinion, should have made it here.
That is the part missing from many music memoirs. History remembers the acts that broke through. The better music memoirs also contain the near misses, because that is where you learn how little distance there can be between a career and a footnote.
Building Deep Purple Up — And Management’s Questionable Decisions
Deep Purple was another lesson in how careers were actually built. When I first became involved with them, they had not toured America. A few years earlier, they had done only a couple of dates with Cream. To many American promoters, they were basically remembered as a British band that had one hit single here, and that hit wasn’t exactly yesterday.
I placed them in special-guest billing as the first step. They were not yet ready to be sold as a major American headliner, and I was not about to pretend otherwise. The idea was to put them on the right packages, in the right buildings, route them properly, and gradually move them up the bill so promoters and audiences began seeing them differently. That is exactly what I did. I packaged and toured Deep Purple with Rod Stewart and Faces until special-guest billing gave way to headlining, larger buildings, arenas, and eventually major festivals. By the time we reached the Ontario Jam, Deep Purple had probably become the biggest arena attraction on the ATI roster.
Then came the part that made me wonder how much good work could be undone by other people’s decisions. Ontario was a huge payday for Purple, yet the promoter claimed he was losing money and I watched one of Deep Purple’s managers give him back $100,000. I was the agent who had made the deal, and I was bypassed. Why? I did not know then, and I do not know now. Maybe there was a perfectly good explanation. Maybe there wasn’t. I leave that to the reader.
Later, management made another decision that, in my opinion, was just as hard to understand. They left ATI with Bruce Payne, an agent I had hired and allowed to become the responsible agent for Deep Purple. During his time at ATI, Bruce had never signed a single artist to our roster. His history with us was booking dates for acts that were already there. At that point, he had no independent record of finding, signing, or developing an artist into a major attraction. In my opinion, that was a history of mediocrity, not accomplishment.
So there I was, having helped build Deep Purple in America from special-guest billing into one of our biggest arena attractions, watching management make decisions that I believed chipped away at what had been built. That was another of the music business secrets nobody put on the album jacket: you could do everything right building a career, and somebody else could still make decisions that left you wondering what the hell they were thinking. This was, after all, the same management that had returned $100,000 to the Cal Jam promoters.
When A Record Deal Still Wasn’t Enough
One of the music business secrets outsiders rarely understand is that getting the deal is only the beginning. Tea was a Swiss-German band with Marc Storace, who later became the singer in Krokus, and I had a deal worked out through Bud Prager’s Windfall Records, which was distributed through RCA. RCA kept dragging its feet with the paperwork until I lost patience and my temper and told them, in less diplomatic language, what they could do with their delay. This was not exactly Harvard Business School negotiating.
I had allowed my ego and temper to interfere with business. That belongs in any honest rock and roll memoir, because music business secrets are not always about what somebody did to you. Sometimes you are the schmuck who helped screw up the opportunity yourself, and my rock and roll memoir would be dishonest if I only remembered when somebody else was the schmuck.
Artists Can Kill Their Own Careers Just Fine
Then there was Ya Ya. I managed them worldwide and liked them, which did not prevent me from watching them commit career suicide with professional efficiency. I had put together a roughly half-million-dollar Warner U.K. deal, plus publishing, and the ink was barely dry before they fired their lead singer. Warner lost interest, and all that work went out the window without needing a crooked executive, a gangster, or even an imaginative villain.
That is another of the music business secrets I learned the expensive way: sometimes the people you are trying hardest to help are perfectly capable of undoing the whole thing themselves. Readers of rock n roll autobiographies and best rock autobiographies usually get the finished history. A real music industry true story also includes the careers that stopped one decision short of becoming history.
Music Business Secrets Were Never Just About Talent
The real music business secrets involved timing, judgment, positioning, relationships, persistence, and dumb luck. Klaus Doldinger was a major jazz name in Germany, but in America he had to open shows and prove himself again. Success in one country did not buy you a passport to success in another. The biggest problem I had with Doldinger was his being obnoxious and demanding. I didn’t know whether to smack him or give him the Nazi salute.
Atlantis had the voice but not the breakthrough. Harmonia reached Motown but not the record racks. Neu had an opportunity and walked away. Tea had a deal slowed by RCA and an impatient agent named Ira Blacker. Those are the music business secrets I remember because they explain the business better than the glamorous stories do.
My memoir contains plenty of success, insanity, and backstage foolishness, but these quieter failures taught me just as much, and they are why music industry true story is more than a phrase to me. The truth behind the music business secrets is that nobody can guarantee a hit. We could create opportunities, build tours, open doors, and sometimes kick them open, but everybody still had to walk through.
That may be the biggest of all the music business secrets.
Read all of my music business secrets in my memoir, available on Amazon.
