How Music Got Free (4 page)

The clubs weren’t too far from Shelby, but they were far enough. Two hours’ drive for a few hours of fun wasn’t the best trade-off, and if, by some ill-starred arrangement of fortune, you found yourself driving home alone at the end of the night, there was the ever present hazard of the DUI. So it was often easier to bring the club to you, which you did by blasting the music out of the trunk of your car. The new trend in rap seemed specifically designed to encourage this activity. Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, and the other pioneers of the West Coast sound were pushing a resurgence in car culture that popular music hadn’t seen since the Beach Boys. In the parking lots of Shelby and Charlotte, Glover was exposed to this strange new world of hydraulic suspensions and window tints, powered subwoofers and chrome rims. A well-equipped car could turn a barren expanse of asphalt into a spontaneous party zone where dozens of people laughed, danced,
flirted, and drank. It could even lead to the promised land: a joyride with your girl, up and down the town’s main drag.

Despite his good looks and demeanor, Glover was at a disadvantage in this respect. His Cherokee was serviceable as a commuter vehicle, but unsatisfactory as either a mobile stereo system or a chick magnet. The advantages of a better vehicle and the standard suite of aftermarket upgrades were apparent, and the need for them was urgent. From early on he was driven by a sort of narrow-minded cupidity: he wanted a better car.

Soon. For now, though, the Cherokee would have to do. On that Saturday in 1995, after a long shift of dropping and boxing, Glover and Dockery were ready to relax. Something different was on the agenda for that night. One of the machine technicians had invited the two to a house party. Both Glover and Dockery were angling for better-paying permanent positions, and, although their coworkers sometimes seemed a little stiff, attendance at the party was a chance to network.

The night turned out to be full of surprises. The party was more enjoyable than Glover had expected, with plenty of alcohol, and girls, and other things as well. Several representatives from plant management were there, and Glover was startled by how friendly they were outside of work. As things progressed, the host put on music to get people dancing. Glover, the club fixture, was keyed into the popular sound, but he’d never heard any of this music before, even though much of it was from artists whose work he enjoyed. A few drinks in, he had a hazy epiphany. Of course he’d never heard this music before. It hadn’t been released yet. The host was DJing the party with music that had been smuggled out of the
plant.

I
n June 1995—just after Karlheinz Brandenburg’s meeting in Erlangen, just before the party Dell Glover attended with his coworkers—Doug Morris, the North American head of Warner Music Group, walked down the corridors of Time Warner’s Manhattan offices for a meeting with his boss. On the walls around him hung hundreds of gold records commemorating a series of successful releases that went back to Sinatra. Warner Music was itself part of the larger Time Warner entertainment conglomerate, whose legacy went back further still, all the way to the original Warner brothers, and a significant portion of twentieth-century American entertainment history belonged to it.

Morris, who had come to power just eight months earlier, felt confident this streak would continue. Since his appointment as CEO, Warner had dominated the record business, and Morris had been rewarded with a
company car, a personal chauffeur, a corner office with a piano, and access to the company jet. Managing the most profitable music company in America, at the most profitable time in its history, he was earning ten million dollars a year, plus stock options. And on the strength of recent signings, the future looked even better.

At 56, Morris was approaching late middle age, but he retained the body language of a teenager. Broad faced and clean shaven, he eschewed late nights and went to the gym every morning. Years ago he had gone bald on top, and when he smiled, he raised his eyebrows and the lines on his forehead arranged themselves around a smooth notch of scalp where there once had been a widow’s peak.
He affected an air of perpetual bemusement, but his eyes conveyed an expressive, penetrating intelligence, and his personality was magnetic.

A nice Jewish boy from Long Island, Morris had been raised in the tranquil middle-class hamlet of Woodmere, one of America’s first suburbs. There, he developed a pronounced regional accent, and for the rest of his life coffee was “cawfee,” water was “wahduh,” and Long Island was “Lawng.” Morris’ father had been an attorney, but illness had hampered his professional life, and so his mother, a dance instructor, was the family breadwinner. Doug’s ambition had been apparent from childhood, as had that of his brother, who went on to become an oncologist. But although more respectable careers beckoned, Morris, from an early age, knew he was destined for show business.

At Columbia University he was a straight-C student, neglecting his studies to focus on the piano and a potential career as a musician. This wasn’t just a pipe dream—Morris played concerts throughout high school and college, and was even briefly signed to Epic Records, who released his only vinyl single. (It didn’t chart.) After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1960, he was drafted into America’s peacetime army and stationed on a military base in France for the next two years. In 1962, he returned to permanently settle in New York City, then in the middle of the Greenwich Village folk music revival. But Morris was out of step with this scene,
more Bobby Darin than Bob Dylan, and he failed to make it as a performer.

He decided to try it as a songwriter. He learned the craft at Laurie Records, as an assistant to Bert Berns, the hitmaker responsible for “Hang On Sloopy” and “Twist and Shout.” Despite appearances, successful songwriting was a challenge, even though most hit pop songs consisted of little more than a few saccharine lyrics and a rearrangement of the chords C, F, and G. (Late into his career, Morris would contend that every chart-topping song from the last half century was just a reworking of “La Bamba.”) In 1966, after several years of striving, he finally scored a minor radio hit with the song “Sweet Talkin’ Guy,” performed by the Bronx-based girl group the Chiffons.

The experience of hearing his own work on the radio delighted him, but Morris struggled to replicate this success. Songwriting was a competitive discipline, and Morris wasn’t seeing a lot of interest in his work. In 1967, he was further discouraged by Berns’ untimely death from a heart attack, at the age of just 38. Seeking a change in direction, he began transitioning to his first role in management. Though he continued to offer in-studio guidance, and still occasionally received producer credits, from this point forward he was a businessman.

In 1970 he set off on his own, founding his boutique independent label, Big Tree Records, with a $50,000 investment. Over the next few years, the label scored a few minor hits, most notably Brownsville Station’s “Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room,” which Morris also produced. Like many of Big Tree’s songs, the tune was commercially viable but artistically insipid. Still, sales were sales, and in time he earned the attention of major players, particularly Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic Records, who agreed to a distribution deal with Big Tree in 1974, and bought the label outright in 1978.

Ertegun was a legend. The high-living son of Turkey’s ambassador to the United States, he had made his career by wandering into the juke joints of black America and capitalizing on the rhythm and blues sound, signing Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin. As hard rock replaced R&B, Ertegun followed, assembling the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young supergroup and signing Led Zeppelin off the strength of their demo tape. Ertegun then sold Atlantic to Warner Music Group, netting himself an enormous fortune while retaining creative control. In the early 1970s he completed the classic rock trifecta, awarding the Rolling Stones their own custom label and one of the largest distribution contracts in history. They paid him back with
Exile on Main Street
. Still looking for fresh talent, Ertegun thought he saw it in Morris, in spite of Big Tree’s humble roster.

Morris was put in charge of ATCO, Atlantic’s custom records division, where he oversaw both Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song imprint and Rolling Stones Records. While the talent on the roster was
exceptional, both bands had already peaked creatively, and here again Morris oversaw a series of bland commercial hits. Still, he was charming and he earned the label money, and in time Ertegun came to love him like a son. In 1980, Morris was promoted to president of Atlantic Records, and his office was placed next to Ertegun’s own. After a year of successful service, Ertegun gave him
a bonus of a million dollars.

Meanwhile, the music industry was going corporate. The counterculture ethos of the ’60s and ’70s was being superseded by a more commercial attitude, and “selling out” was no longer an unforgivable sin. The debut of MTV in 1981 marked the end of album-oriented rock and the resurgence of single-oriented pop. The cultural changes extended to management. Cash transactions in brown paper bags were replaced by independently audited financial statements, and the industry’s
long-standing ties to organized crime were finally cleaned up.

Morris adapted well to this new environment, shaving off his beard and donning a sport coat and tie. Ertegun, a creature from an earlier time, did not. In 1989, Warner Communications announced it was merging with Time, Inc. to create the country’s largest diversified entertainment conglomerate. In advance of the merger, Ertegun had been asked to present his strategic plan for the Atlantic imprint to the suits at Warner at an early morning meeting. Morris showed up on time, then waited along with the other executives in the conference room for his boss to arrive. Twenty minutes later, Ertegun walked in, drunk, at the tail end of an all-night bender, his shirt covered in spilled wine. “Here’s our plan,” he said. “
We’re going to make more hits.” Then he walked out.

By 1990 it was clear that Ertegun’s time had passed. Atlantic Records was a legendary imprint—entire books had been written about it—but the 1980s had not been kind to the label, and at the end of the decade its roster looked like a paleontology exhibit. The $300 million in revenue Atlantic generated in 1989 represented little more than a tenth of the overall Warner Music empire, and much of those sales came from upgrading the classic rock leftovers to compact disc.
Behind Ertegun’s back, Time Warner executives proposed removing him and putting Morris in charge. Loyal to his mentor, Morris brought the idea to Ertegun directly. To his surprise, Ertegun approved it, with the caveat that the two would serve as co-CEOs. Under this compromise, Morris would run Atlantic’s day-to-day affairs, with Ertegun serving as a figurehead.

By this time Morris was 51 years old. He was successful by conventional standards, and Ertegun had paid him well. But it was also fair to say that, after thirty years in the music business, Morris hadn’t really left a mark. His songwriting career was a footnote and his boutique label had never produced a truly memorable hit. He’d overseen some big names at Atlantic, but only at the trailing end of their careers. He’d managed to squeeze a single great album out of Stevie Nicks before she’d succumbed to a vicious cocaine addiction; he’d overseen the last two Led Zeppelin albums, widely regarded to be their worst. Ertegun’s shadow was long, and Morris had spent most of his career standing in it. He was well liked, but not necessarily well respected, and
his appointment was regarded with skepticism.

Within five years he was the most powerful music executive in North America. Ertegun’s apprentice proved to be a risk taker, an indefatigable corporate climber, a man who had spent his life waiting for this opportunity. He transformed Atlantic, investing aggressively in new, unproven talent, even running a loss at the label in 1991, the first in its history. But his bets all paid off, and by 1994 he had tripled Atlantic’s revenues. He moved toward neglected arenas, like bubblegum rap and mainstream country, scoring hits with Gerardo’s “Rico Suave” and John Michael Montgomery’s “I Swear,” among other masterpieces. He developed a pugnacious, confrontational management style, lobbying for larger budgets and greater personal compensation. He frequently butted heads with his overseers, and when they opposed him, he engineered their removal. Toward the end of 1994, with Ertegun’s assistance, he masterminded
a daring corporate insurrection inside Time Warner, one that ended with his
promotion to his current position, the top slot in North America, where he oversaw nearly a quarter of the national market for recorded music, amounting to nearly $2 billion in revenue, and where all of the company’s U.S. labels—Warner Brothers, Atlantic, Elektra—answered to him.

Those who joined Morris on his rapid rise to the top spoke of his warmth, his openness, and his extraordinary charisma. Others, more distant, were critical, and complained of his inconsistency, his stubbornness, and his world-consuming ego. Only those closest to him knew of his best asset: the careful, analytical approach he took to solving problems. This aspect of his personality was well hidden. He seemed like a Long Island schmoozer who led with his heart. He was actually an Ivy League graduate with an excellent head for figures. His business decisions were balanced and deliberate, and though he loved music passionately, when he talked of investing in new acts he used the measured language of a scientist. An associate who spent years observing Morris came finally to understand that this was deliberate, and that being underestimated was a way to maintain power. “
Morris was like an old country lawyer,” he would later say. “You think people are getting one over on him, but he was always thinking three steps ahead.”

Now on his way to meet with Warner Music chairman Michael Fuchs in 1995, Morris looked undefeatable. It was only June, but Morris had seen the sales figures and was certain he had the number one album of the year:
Cracked Rear View
, from the gentle frat-rockers Hootie & the Blowfish. The cargo shorts and hacky sack crowd had turned Hootie into state college superstars, with sales approaching eight million units. Their hit single “Only Wanna Be with You” was a song that seemed scientifically designed to play over the stereo system at the Gap.

Hootie had not been an obvious winner by any means. In fact,
all of Warner’s A&R men had passed on them. The consensus opinion among major label scouts was that the Blowfish were an unoriginal
bar band with terrible stage presence and no songwriting ability. Morris disagreed. Or perhaps he granted that this was true, but then contended that it didn’t matter. For Morris, the only important thing was that the band’s popularity was spiking, crossing over from the University of South Carolina to the rest of the state.

He had learned this lesson many years before, at his first job at Laurie Records, when he transitioned from artist to executive. The shift in roles required Morris to pay closer attention to sales, but in the 1960s keeping score was difficult. Record stores weren’t always inclined to share their sales figures, and even if they had been, in an era before computers, collecting and sorting the data from thousands of retailers around the country was impossible. For this reason the
Billboard
charts weren’t especially reliable. Neither were radio play statistics—the industry suffered from routine payola scandals, and even in the absence of bribes, DJs tended to play favorites. Only one person at Laurie could provide the numbers Morris needed, a functionary clerk whose real-world job was about as far away from the glamour of the music business as you could get: the order-taker.

Morris haunted him like a ghost. Whenever a big order came in—which at Laurie meant anything more than a crate of a hundred vinyl records at a time—Morris demanded to know who had placed it, exactly how many units they wanted, and why. The order-taker was understandably perplexed. Shouldn’t Morris be at a nightclub somewhere, looking for the next Jimi Hendrix, instead of here, in the accounting department, pestering a back-office employee? But to Morris the order-taker was the key to the whole thing. How could he know what to sell if he didn’t know what people were buying?

One of the acts on Laurie’s roster in those days was a generic garage rock band from Mansfield, Ohio, called the Music Explosion. Side A of their lead seven-inch single was a schlocky two-minute cover of a 1964 British Invasion tune titled “Little Bit O’ Soul.” Morris, however, would forever remember this platter by a different name: Laurie 3380, the catalog number the order-taker used to track the
sales of the song. Those sales were generally unimpressive, with one exception: a record store in the small town of Cumberland, Maryland, which had, during the most recent inventory cycle, inexplicably ordered two crates of discs.