And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records (16 page)

Our Sherbourne offices had never been designed to house more than six or seven people, but, with the staff we’d hired over the past twelve months, we were now sitting on top of one another. Offices that had once been for the private use of Cecil, Buck, or me were now home to four people. Most of us were sharing desks, if not chairs and phones. Never one to think small, Neil had found space for us at 8255 Sunset Boulevard. Not only had he bought the building, but he had also purchased the entire block. He had put together a small investment group, and with the help of Richard Trugman’s close banking relationships and his own good credit, he’d raised enough money to buy the block as a real estate investment. He offered me the opportunity to join the group. I appreciated the invitation, but I declined because I couldn’t afford it.

One perk of owning this block of offices was that it came with its own billboard overlooking Sunset, and we made good use of it. Each month, we would promote another artist with it, and soon those who thought they had the clout were angling to get the billboard for their new product. This led to some heated arguments with artists over whose album was going to be hanging over the Sunset Strip that month. We’d defuse these blowouts with a bullshit excuse: an artist had to sell over half a million units to be on the billboard. This was totally arbitrary. Anyone who was paying attention would have noticed that any number of our pet projects, all of which had sold very little, ended up on the billboard. We would do everything we could to make sure Hollywood knew we were big players.

To decorate the new digs, Neil hired Carol Eisenberg and Lynda Guber. They were both into the LA scene, and both had husbands in the motion picture and television businesses. “Ah, there’s the rub,” I thought: this wasn’t as much about decorating as it was about networking with players. In Hollywood, the motion picture business is king, and the music business is a distant tenth on the list. Even though the music business generated double or triple the revenue of the motion picture business, it just doesn’t have the same prestige, and it never will. Neil was friends with Lynda Guber’s husband, Peter, who had a five-picture deal with Columbia and was a major Hollywood power broker. But the ladies were the decorators from Hell. Everything with them was “fabulous” this and “fabulous” that—it was like dealing with Zsa Zsa Gabor, dahling. They had a certain Hollywood flair that no one but Neil enjoyed, but we lived through it.

Hollywood operated according to some strange mathematics. The bigger your office, and the more important people thought you were, and the harder you were to reach, the more power everyone assumed you had. Being from New York, we tried not to fall into this Hollywood mentality, and we developed (in truth, stole) this line to live by: “Assumption is the mother of all fuckups.” It’s hard not to make assumptions based on appearances, but we did try.

I had the same interest in office decor as I had in fashion, which is to say none. I couldn’t have been more indifferent to what my office looked like. I just needed a phone to call radio and retail, and a turntable and cassette player to listen to albums or demos, and I was a happy puppy. I wound up with an office furnished with a couple of cane chairs and large desk that had cane embellishments along its edges. I guess it looked good, but the decoration made it difficult to write on the desk top unless you used a thick pad.

The decoration scheme was, yet again, Moroccan. Where was the creativity in that? There were pillows, cane, and bamboo everywhere. Buck and I had similar rooms on the second floor. Cecil was on the other side of the floor from us in a little suite of offices that he shared with his secretary, Fran. He also had on his staff Renny Roker, who came from a very talented family. His cousin was Al Roker, and the late Roxie Roker (of
The Jeffersons
fame), was his sister. Renny was a robust guy, much like Al, and he would pester Cecil to demand more for their department. In the long run, his passion was a good influence, even if his constant requests were a pain in the ass.

Neil’s office was also on the second floor. It took up half the front of the building. It had a bar (though it was never really used as one), faux-stucco walls, a large desk, and a huge conference table (it could seat about twenty people), all with bamboo accents. But the thing that immediately drew your attention upon entering the office was the speakers. They were enormous—maybe five feet by four feet—and they were as loud as they were big. In a Moroccan-style armoire, Neil kept his stereo equipment: record player, reel-to-reel tape deck (a big one), amplifier (the biggest), cassette player, receiver, TV, Beta video player, and professional three-quarter-inch video player. Neil would frequently change his office decorations just to impress visitors. He’d swap the artwork out, or he’d put up funny signs, like “All bad news is due by 4:00 p.m. tomorrow.” Anything to make a positive impression. He had a separate office for his secretary, as well as a waiting area, complete with a table, chairs, and a white canvas couch.

Adjacent to Neil’s office was another large room. The two rooms were linked by an adjoining door. The question was: Whose office would it be? Neil, impressed with the job I was doing, decided to give me the adjoining office and make me executive vice president. He had initially offered the job to Jerry Sharell, but Jerry declined. He wanted to stay where he was, at Elektra. I was happy to be the beneficiary of Jerry’s decision. I actually had my choice of titles, and I chose to be called “senior vice president,” not knowing that “executive vice president” was a more prestigious title—but, what the hell, everyone knew what I did, and the title meant little. I moved into the big office and had the same sound system as Neil’s—an exact duplicate—installed. This was living.

I was running all the day-to-day operations of the company except accounting and legal. Trugman, who’d joined us after he helped close the Carson deal and found someone to lend us money after we left Warner, was running legal. Neil was overseeing the accounting department (which was run by our controller, David Powell), as it seemed that every day there was another major cash flow problem. Even though Trugman was ostensibly running the legal department, nothing was done without Neil’s approval—especially anything to do with artist contract negotiations. Neil was thus able to use Trugman to help him play a good-guy/bad-guy routine for managers and attorneys.

Neil and I controlled the outer doors of our internally joined offices with buzzers under our desks. Most of the senior management staff would eventually have similar devices installed. Often, Neil and I would get so messed up on Quaaludes in the middle of the afternoon that we’d both take naps in my office. The corner of the office had been taken over by a couch, massive mirrors, and tons of throw pillows courtesy of our delirious decorating team. Neil usually crashed on the couch, while I’d grab half a dozen pillows and create a makeshift bed on the floor. When we wanted to get high, we would go into my office and close the door; we’d go back into Neil’s office for meetings. We thought we were fooling the entire staff. Of course, everyone knew. They could smell the grass on our clothes, hair, and breath, but we thought we were really putting something over on them. I’m sure the smell coming out of my office was responsible for more of the legendry surrounding Casablanca’s drug use than anything else. It probably didn’t help that Neil and I both loved to run the air conditioners in our offices at arctic levels, circulating the smoke throughout the entire building.

I don’t believe that we at Casablanca did more drugs than people at any other company. The difference was that at Casablanca, the executives (except for Cecil), not just the employees, did the drugs. In the 1970s, everyone seemed to be doing drugs of some kind. For instance, in his autobiography, Walter Cronkite mentions that after CBS sold their record division to Sony and no longer occupied a few floors at Black Rock (CBS headquarters in New York), the one thing that changed for the better was that he could enter an elevator without fear of getting a contact high.

I had a very seedy drug dealer in LA who had the worst complexion you could imagine. His name was Tom, but I nicknamed him Pockface. He would come to the office with three or four kinds of pot for me to choose from. There was Panamanian red, Hawaiian gold, Mexican, Thai sticks, and sometimes hashish. Quaaludes or cocaine—whatever you needed, he could deliver. He would come to see me at the office maybe once a week or once every two weeks. Selling drugs out of the office was never OK, but acquiring them for others at the going rate was just fine. I was brought up in the drug culture, so I knew that you did not try to make a profit on others. If you could help someone out by giving something to them for the price you paid, then you did it.

Tom would bring bottles and bottles of Quaaludes. There were usually five hundred pills per bottle, and the cost was only twenty-five cents per pill. We went through them like they were M&Ms—not just me, but Neil as well. I recall that one evening a dozen or so of us were celebrating something in a private room at the Palm restaurant in LA when someone mentioned Quaaludes. No one had any on them. Neil fished around in his pockets and brought out a set of keys. “Someone drive over to my house and go into my closet. In the inside pocket of my brown suit you’ll find a big bag of ‘ludes.” With Howie Rosen, one of our promotions guys, I drove over to Neil’s house and rummaged through the bedroom looking for the brown suit. When we finally found it, I stuck my hand into the pocket and pulled out a gallon baggie filled with ’ludes. Everyone floated out of the Palm that night.

I collected dozens of empty bottles and proudly displayed them at my house, like a kid lining up his Matchbox cars to show to his friends. Quaaludes were eventually outlawed, and the price jumped to one dollar, five dollars, even ten dollars a pill. An ounce of really good pot was maybe $350. It all went down on the expense reports. An ounce of weed was steaks and a nice Bordeaux with Alison Steele. A bottle of ’ludes was surf and turf at Roy’s with the sales department.

Blow put me to sleep, and Quaaludes made me want to stay up and talk, which is the opposite of what these drugs do to most people. Same with Neil. He did not smoke as much grass during office hours as I did. I started smoking most days after lunch. I kept the ’ludes and grass in an unlocked drawer in my office. Just about anyone could go to the desk when I was not there and take what they needed. The atmosphere at Casablanca was open and loose, and I usually left my office door unlocked and open unless I was in there stoned, taking a nap, or doing drugs with a visitor.

Despite the prevalence of drug use in the office, to my knowledge we never sold drugs to people or used them to buy airplay. We did invite radio people or artists to join us while we did drugs, but we did not exchange drugs for spins. While I say that, I do admit that I would have given drugs for airplay if Neil—or, for that matter, a DJ—had asked me to. But the fact that we simply did drugs instead of selling them alleviated any worries we might have had that the cops or feds would come crashing through the door and bust us for possession. Actually, we never thought about it. Bankers were doing it with us. Lawyers were doing it with us. Even doctors. In those days, it was expected. It was very much a part of everyday life in our world.

The only time I worried about the police was when I went to the acupuncturist. Sounds weird, but, believe it or not, acupuncture was then against the law. The acupuncture therapist we used had a house in Laurel Canyon that was fifty steps above the street. These steps were on what seemed like a seventy-degree incline, and I nearly had a heart attack every time I had to climb them. Bobby Klein was the acupuncturist’s name, and he had been recommended to us by Evelyn Ostin, Mo’s wife. (Before taking up acupuncture, Bobby had been an album cover photographer, and he may have met the Ostins via that pursuit.) He had a guru-ish way about him. His house was open plan, incense burned everywhere, and bees buzzed around inside, but they’d never sting you. Bobby was a very calming influence. During the sessions, he’d stop every fifteen minutes, walk over to a window, and look down at the street to see if the cops were there. He was very paranoid about it, and the paranoia soon rubbed off on me.

But when it came to drugs, I never worried, because I figured everyone was doing it. There was safety in numbers. I even did drugs in front of Alison Steele’s husband, who was an assistant district attorney in New York. He didn’t join me, of course, and neither did she, but this just goes to show how accepted and commonplace drug use was.

While pot, hash, ’ludes, and coke were prevalent, we steered clear of the really heavy stuff. I tried mushrooms once, and they did nothing for me. I never took acid, and I don’t think Neil ever did either (except once, when Tom Donahue from KSAN-FM spiked the punch at a get-together), and we never did heroin. If anyone brought a needle within twelve feet of Neil, he’d start to sweat. I took him to my acupuncturist once because he had a problem with his knee. It was so bad that he’d be walking along, the joint would buckle, and he’d lose his balance and fall. Bobby started the treatment, and Neil screamed like a stuck pig. I was receiving treatments every week, and knew it didn’t hurt anything like his level of screaming would suggest, so I told him to calm the fuck down. After the treatment, his knee didn’t bother him again for months. But Neil never saw Bobby again.