Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (46 page)

With Island still unable to pay its bills, Robinson had no qualms about canceling titles and cutting off bands who, he felt, “used to smoke dope with Chris but weren’t up to anything.” With the ax falling in every direction, managers stormed Robinson’s office, pleading, “You can’t cancel my record, I’ve got a tour.” Robinson would have to explain to them, “This is not a hit. There’s no point in us putting this record out. We haven’t got the money to support it, and the record is not a hit.”

“Well, how do you know that?” the stunned managers would ask.

“That’s what I’m here for—
to know
.”

“I’m sure I was quite bolshie and a pain in the ass,” acknowledged Robinson, “but we were on a roll and all the Island staff was starting to function properly.” Ray Cooper, for example, although initially wary, quickly warmed to Robinson’s unorthodox style. On a sales trip together in the North of England, said Cooper, “Dave was pacing around my room, talking in his animated way, then he walks over to the corner and pisses in the sink.” Cooper described Robinson’s effect on the company as a type of electroshock therapy. “Island in the early eighties was definitely on the slide creatively and financially, and I could see why Chris would have picked Dave … Dave was hotheaded, he was clever, he was rude, he was careless, and to me, he was a brilliant marketing man. Everything that came out of his mouth was different and challenging—he gave me a real education. He was
alive
when Island was not.”

There were plenty of long faces in the war room as Island’s pecking order got reshuffled. Island’s old guard had what Cooper described as a “cerebral” attitude to music, whereas Dave Robinson was “a man of the street,” whose “naked honesty” created some peculiar culture clashes. In one incident, Robinson confessed he knew nothing about R&B and requested a tutorial from the company authority, Ashley Newton. Although, the snobs tutted to each other behind Robinson’s back, the irony was, as Ray Cooper also pointed out, “Dave couldn’t suffer fools.”

A case in point was Paul Morley, media pundit and ZTT’s communications director, who described Robinson as “a particularly aggressive version of the record man,” expounding that, “if there was previously a certain form of institutional delicacy, almost modesty, at Island that might have interfered with its indeterminate yet somehow incisive plans to achieve a deluxe form of entertainment world domination, and even meant the label’s existence might be threatened by the cutthroat commercial fury of the 1980s, Robinson tore that apart.”

“Full of shit” was how Factory cofounder Rob Gretton summed up Paul Morley—a description Dave Robinson did not contest. “Paul Morley couldn’t stand me. Still can’t,” said Robinson, “because he had all this artistic highfalutin crap which he thought was going to make a difference. I used to trot out all these Irish proverbs to irritate him, like ‘Let the dog see the rabbit’ and ‘You can’t go without the horse.’ You needed a good record, you needed some good attitude, and you needed videos you could use. He made some really gay video for ‘Relax.’ All his friends were patting him on the back telling him what an artistic genius he was, but he couldn’t get it on television because it was far too over the top.”

In the pseudo-intellectual dialectics of Britain’s postpunk scene, ol’ Robbo may have come across like a savage chieftain from the bogs of Ireland, but unbeknownst to employees and affiliated producers alike, Stiff had just lent Island £1 million to help pay its bills. There was a reason for Robinson’s admirable confidence.

Since their dinner in the Chinese restaurant, Blackwell and Robinson had been discussing a Bob Marley greatest hits disc. What Blackwell hadn’t told Robinson was that immediately after Marley’s death, he released the Lyceum concerts as a commemorative live album. It had flopped miserably.

Acquainting himself with his new project, “when I found out that sales for [Marley’s most popular album]
Exodus
were 189,000 in the U.K., I thought that was a terribly low figure,” explains Robinson. “I thought Marley would be closer to a million. I mean, Madness had done seven hundred thousand. Even in America, Marley had been selling around six or seven hundred thousand copies for his best records. So I began wondering—maybe he doesn’t sell to white people?”

Robinson called in a market researcher, Gary Truman, with whom he profiled a mainly white, mainstream target audience. Truman conducted eight groups. “He’s a funny little geezer who blends into the background,” said Robinson. “He gets them on the case but he lets them do their own talking. He’s a big fan, as I am, of the spontaneous things people say having listened to four or five tracks [and] looked at some photos or album titles we made up for the sake of conversation. During these sessions, it came out that a lot of people were saying ‘legendary’ or ‘he’s a legend.’ The public picked the title,
Legend.
They also came up with the rather interesting clue they were worried Bob Marley might be slightly antiwhite. People felt that maybe Bob Marley didn’t like
them.

“Island had great photographs of Bob Marley, but the problem was there was nothing smiley about him. There was no friendliness. It was always a bit tough, a bit aggressive. And also quite political.” Truman’s observations suggested mainstream record buyers wanted to cut through the whole Rastafarian agenda and get to the universal heart—the love songs, the uplifting whistlers. Having pinned down the handsome portrait that pushed all the right buttons, “the running order on
Legend
took me a month at least,” Robinson remembered. “I agonized over it.”

Released in May 1984 with a campaign of television commercials,
Legend
bolted out of the stable and entered the U.K. album charts at No. 1—Bob Marley’s first ever. Just a week later, Dave Robinson turned forty on May 14. Island picked up the bill for a birthday party Robinson’s pregnant wife organized at their new family home in Hammersmith. In retrospect, that night celebrated the beginning of a dream harvest.

Bob Marley stayed at No. 1 in the U.K. for fourteen weeks, all summer long, while on the singles charts Frankie Goes to Hollywood detonated their second smash hit, “Two Tribes”—No. 1 in Britain for nine weeks, selling 1.5 million copies. With Britain gripped by a second wave of Frankie fever, even “Relax” climbed back to No. 2. As it was happening, the year belonged to Frankie, but in time, the true monster would be
Legend:
25 million copies to date and God knows how many million more counterfeits in Africa, where Marley has become a giant symbol of freedom and progress—arguably their biggest-ever music icon.

Fired up by Island’s spectacular renaissance in England, Chris Blackwell was rethinking his American operations. In need of new blood, he recruited a whole crop of marketing staffers, then appointed a former A&M promotions man, Charly Prevost, as president.

Just before Prevost started the job, he was invited to a small party at Blackwell’s New York apartment attended by Malcolm McLaren. Among the group of faces was Blackwell’s local sweetheart, a beautiful black lady he affectionately called Chocolate Cake. During the party, she took Prevost to one side and asked, “Are you gonna work for Chris?”

“Think so,” replied Prevost, trying to contain his excitement.

“Well, just be careful, because he likes walking on thin ice. But he never wants to go first. He’s gonna have you go through—first.”

In America, Island was distributed through Atlantic, but due to the astronomical costs of radio promotion there, Ahmet Ertegun had long tried to persuade Chris Blackwell to move to a license deal. Convinced Atlantic wouldn’t work his left-field records, Blackwell battled on as an independent, even putting out his 4th & B’way records through independent distribution networks. “In my conversations with Doug Morris, who was running Atlantic Records at the time,” explained Prevost, “he’d look at me and shake his head in despair and say, ‘how can you do this with no money?’ Because we didn’t have a lot of cash to market and play the game. We certainly couldn’t play it on Atlantic’s level. So Chris was always looking for creative ways to make things happen.

“We did a lot of creative stuff with Frankie Goes to Hollywood,” continued Prevost. “We looked at what Robbo did in England and devised our own version of it.” Thinking up ways of getting around independent radio promoters, “we brought in a ton of imports and worked them everywhere except radio. And because we worked the retail reports so hard, ‘Relax’ began selling everywhere, without airplay. The sharper programmers always monitor local sales to check if they’re playing the right stuff. We consciously decided not to service the track unless we got a call from a programmer who guaranteed us airplay and a report. In the first two, three weeks we got enough of the trendsetters on board and we coordinated their reports to ensure that the record first appeared on the airplay chart with velocity and a major set of important call letters. We actually got airplay by withholding servicing—the only time it ever happened, to my knowledge.”

Prevost adapted the reverse psychology trick when announcing Malcolm McLaren’s
Fans,
an innovative operatic hip-hop concept album. “We took out a full page ad in
Billboard
on the inside front page, saying, ‘We don’t care if you hate this record. We love it.’

“People used to say Chris was a flake and he smoked pot, but we would walk around the office at night when everybody went home and both get incredibly irritated because somebody spent seven-eighths of a penny writing a note on something with an Island logo on it. So we stopped doing the company stationery.” Prevost quickly noticed “he had an eye for detail and he knew about royalties and he knew where the dollars were.”

Blackwell replicated in New York his ghostlike presence in London. Prevost described how “he’d come in at night and work all night. Somehow he never slept when he was in New York, he just kept going. But he had installed a very expensive and sophisticated security system so that from his desk he could watch everybody that was walking around the front door, certainly anybody that came into the building. Another set for the elevator and another set for the front door.”

After a while, Prevost started to understand Chris Blackwell’s idiosyncrasies. “I talked to him on the phone ten times a day and my impression of him was Howard Hughes, a guy you didn’t see often. When he goes to Jamaica, he doesn’t want to be reached, that’s his refuge. But when he’s in Nassau, he’s totally ready to go. The thing about Chris that everybody always marveled at was that he had all these different compartments. He had different girlfriends in different countries, he had different businesses run by different people. When he was in the studio he was sort of a different guy than he was elsewhere. Especially if he played music for you; it’s a sight to behold, his entire body would start vibrating … It’s what’s at the heart of it with him. He always told me he’d never sell his label, he’d sell his pants before he’d sell his record company.”

In reality, not only was Dave Robinson aware of the long-term plan to sell Island, but Blackwell would soon have to share the secret with U2 manager Paul McGuinness. Considering U2 had scored Island’s two biggest hits in 1983—
War
and
Under a Blood Red Sky,
McGuinness had mixed feelings about Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s giant breakthrough. Noticing the tide ebb on raw postpunk, throughout the summer of 1984, U2 was back at the drawing board with producers Brian Eno and Steve Lillywhite. Called
The Unforgettable Fire,
their next album was a deliberate effort to enlarge their sonic canvas with delay pedals and synthesizers. It was released in October 1984 and hit the No. 1 spot in the U.K. for two weeks.

As irony would have it, back in 1979 when McGuinness was shopping U2’s demo around London, he had called into Stiff for contacts. “Actually, U2
were
pretty terrible,” asserted Robinson of their early years. “But Blackwell signed them to a deal where they got tour support … Blackwell introduced [McGuinness] to Frank Barsalona, who was
the
hot agent in America. U2 settled down for two years just touring around America in a station wagon with a U-haul trailer behind it. Frank Barsalona put them on a support of every single gig that he could. So they played with everybody and Bono ripped off everybody. He absorbed everybody’s
hot licks
. He would stand at the side of the stage and spot what was
the thing
. That’s what he’s great at.

“Bono is the manager of U2,” ventured Robinson. “If you listen to the early demos of U2, they’re not very good, but within two years they had metamorphosed completely because of Bono’s media savvy … McGuinness was just the accountant … He handled the money. The brains is Bono.”

In the early years, Island staffers joked that U2 was the only band in the world whose manager partied like a rocker while the saintly boys went to bed early back at the hotel. All that would change with money. A few years before U2 could afford the trimmings of rock stardom, Charly Prevost in particular got a taste of the manager’s growing reputation. “McGuinness said to me, ‘we just re-signed with Island. If we knew you were here, we never would have re-signed with you. You’re a fucker!’ And from that moment on, he and his staff would call people in our office by their wrong first names on purpose. We just decided to work the record because it was our job to do it. And we would work it as hard as we could, take no prisoners, spend whatever it took. But we had no relationship with them—at all.

“Because of our lack of funds, it was virtually impossible for us to go after U2 and Frankie at the same time,” admitted Prevost. “In those days, it cost about two million bucks to bring a record in—tour support, independent promotion, etc.” Prevost remembered “one really uncomfortable evening when we were going to Philadelphia to see them play. This is way before the arenas, they barely sold out a theater. And we were in the car with his attorney, the two of them facing me, several bottles of wine there. ‘Charly, what are you gonna do? You got Frankie Goes to Hollywood or us, which one are you gonna work?’ Maybe that’s the way U2 did things in the record business, but by the time we got to Philadelphia, I was furious I got put in that position.”