Do Good, Bend Over, Occasionally Repeat
Life in the music business has a way of teaching lessons no university would dare print in a course catalog. Some lessons arrive with applause, handshakes, hotel keys, and the warm smell of a stage after the amplifiers have gone quiet. Others arrive in the mail, typed by lawyers, carrying the cold little perfume of betrayal.
One of my sharper lessons began with a Canadian promoter named Ray Daniels.
Life In The Music Business Begins With A Canadian Promoter
Ray was working out of Toronto and trying to buy acts for the Victory Theater, a thousand-seat former burlesque house with the kind of worn-out glamour I always liked. The theater sat near a delicatessen famous for “baby beef,” which sounded like beef but was actually veal brisket. My father was from Canada, and I had a soft spot for the country, the food, and the mistaken idea that a straightforward conversation might lead to straightforward business.
That was my error, and life in the music business would soon make the lesson expensive.
One of my agents, Wally Meyrowitz, would not sell Ray acts, so Ray came directly to me. I began putting shows into his room, and for several weeks the arrangement worked well enough. Then Ray appeared in my office carrying a vinyl pressing of the first local album by a Canadian band he managed.
The band was Rush.
Hearing Rush Before The World Heard Rush
This was not the Rush the world would later know. They were an unknown Canadian group with a local record, almost no sales activity, and a bar circuit that paid them about $150 Canadian a night. I put the album on my turntable, dropped the needle, and moved through the tracks. The record was rough, but it had force. There was a Zeppelin-like punch to the music, and beneath the rough edges I heard possibility.
That is one of the gifts and hazards of life in the music business. You learn to hear what is not yet obvious.
I told Ray I would become involved. Then, rather late in the conversation, he mentioned that he had another partner named Vic Wilson. The arrangement became a three-way management situation, though not an equal one. I insisted on a 15 percent commission share, with Ray and Vic splitting the remainder. I was not going to take on an unknown band for less, and considering what my work eventually produced, they had no reason to complain, at least not while the money was still finding its way to them.
I flew to Canada to meet Vic and their attorney, a man whose ethics made divorce lawyers seem like a choir of altar boys. Just before I met the band, Ray told me they had used the momentum of the Mercury Records deal I had secured to fire John Rutsey, the drummer who had played on the album that helped get the deal.
I should have paid closer attention. In life in the music business, the first knife rarely travels alone.
Music Industry Stories Are Built Behind The Curtain
When I returned home, I moved fast. I sent the record to people who mattered, people who could listen past the surface and understand the chance in front of us. One was Donna Halper, the respected music director at WMMS in Cleveland. Donna heard what I heard and began playing the record immediately. Her support gave Rush a crucial American opening and helped create the early radio story the band needed.
I also sent the album to John Scher, a friend who owned one of the largest record-distribution companies in the Northeast and specialized in imported rock records from Europe, Canada, and other territories. John liked the record, although he was not actually selling any meaningful number of copies. At my suggestion, he agreed to make the import action sound healthier than it was if record labels checked with him.
That may not have been carved onto tablets brought down from a mountain, but life in the music business often required enough smoke for people to believe there might be a fire.
The next move was to get Rush onstage in the United States. A record could be ignored. A live band making noise in front of paying customers was harder to dismiss. I booked them as an opening act for groups such as Uriah Heep and Savoy Brown, and they did well on those dates. In fact, they were stronger live than the first album had led me to expect. They began creating fans, industry talk, and the kind of motion that makes people who previously said no begin pretending they had always been interested.
Life In The Music Business Turns Noise Into Leverage
With Cleveland radio play, some manufactured import heat, and live dates proving the band could work, I started shopping the album. Irwin Steinberg, president of Mercury Records in Chicago, was the hottest to trot. By then, there was enough evidence around Rush to make the deal credible. Mercury released the album in the United States, and it became the biggest first release for a rock band in the label’s history.
That part of life in the music business still matters to me. I had taken an unknown Canadian act, helped create the story around them, helped build the proof, and helped turn a local record into a national American release.
Then came the touring grind, the part of life in the music business where glamour gives way to calendars, cities, and calls. Beginning in the summer of 1974, I booked Rush continually across the United States. They opened for Rare Earth, KISS, Uriah Heep, Rory Gallagher, Sha-Na-Na, and others. I was thirty-three years old, living in a summer rental in Greenwich, Connecticut, spending long days on the phone, personally arranging dates through the end of the year. Even after I left American Talent International that fall, I continued booking and overseeing Rush dates because I believed in the band and in what we were building.
Rock And Roll Memoirs Often Miss The Office Work
In rock and roll memoirs, people often remember the lights, the noise, and the backstage carnival. They do not always remember the office work, the routing, the pressure, the promises, and the thousand small acts of belief required before the public ever sees the miracle. My version of the story of my life includes plenty of music, but it also includes paper, sweat, and men who smiled before reaching for your pocket.
One problem with doing your job well is that others may begin to resent how necessary you are. Whenever Ray Daniels or Vic Wilson went to one of the Rush shows, promoters often told them the best thing they had done was hook up with Ira Blacker. That should have been a compliment to the whole operation. Instead, it became fertilizer for jealousy.
Life in the music business can turn praise into poison when the wrong people hear it.
Rock And Roll Autobiography Meets The Business End
Within a couple of months after I left ATI, Ray and Vic sent me a letter breaching our written co-management agreement and demanding that I return money I had earned from the Mercury album advance, even though I had made the Mercury deal. Their position had no honest foundation. They had the band physically close to them, though, and I did not. I had not traveled with Rush on the road the way they had, so by the time I ran into the group at Mercury Records after the breach, they looked at me as though I had committed some unspeakable crime.
I do not know what Ray and Vic told them. I only know the room had changed, and life in the music business had once again proved that access can distort truth faster than talent can correct it.
Not long after that, Ray pushed Vic aside too, which explained plenty.
The Most Influential People Are Not Always Onstage
A year or so later, we went to trial, and the court ruled in my favor. A significant amount of money changed hands. From a legal standpoint, I won. But in life in the music business, winning in court is not the same as getting back what was taken. I lost the band. I lost the future business that would have come from having Rush on my roster. More than that, I lost the satisfaction of standing beside a career I had helped lift from almost nothing.
That is why the phrase stays with me: do good, bend over, occasionally repeat.
It is crude because the lesson was crude, and life in the music business did not soften it for polite company. I helped build something valuable, and the people who benefited most decided I was more useful removed than remembered. That does not erase what I did. It does not rewrite the history of life in the music business. It only proves that life in the music business can reward talent, punish loyalty, and still leave you with a story worth telling.
For anyone trying to write a story about this world, the truth is not only in the stars who make it. It is in the deals, betrayals, strange loyalties, and people behind the curtain who heard the music before the marketplace caught up. That is where life in the music business really lives, and that is why life in the music business is never only about music.
