How Music Got Free (5 page)

Morris was struck by this anomaly. He convinced the order-taker to give him the phone number of the customer. He was soon talking long-distance with the Cumberland store’s owner, who told Morris that through repeated heavy airplay, a local radio DJ had turned this unexceptional song into a regional hit. In fact, the owner was already planning to place
another
order for the single, as the two crates of Laurie 3380 he’d bought were running out.

Was there anything special about Cumberland, Maryland? No—a town of 30,000 people in the Allegheny Mountains, it was a stand-in for Anyplace, USA. Was there anything special about “Little Bit O’ Soul”? No—the song was about as exciting as a mashed cracker. But Morris suspected that what played well in an Appalachian coal-mining town in western Maryland would probably play well anywhere. He pushed the executives at Laurie to market the song more aggressively, and soon DJs around the country had moved it into prime-time rotation. By the end of 1967, “Little Bit O’ Soul” had peaked at number two on the
Billboard
charts, and Laurie 3380 had shipped more than a million copies.

Morris never forgot the experience of his first gold record, and he began to trust market research more than he trusted expert opinion—more, sometimes, than he trusted his own ears. Let the other A&Rs scout bands, and go to nightclubs, and fall in love with demos. Let them guess at trends, and fool themselves into believing they had some special insight into the next big thing. From now on, Morris was scouting the order-taker.

Twenty-seven years later and he was still doing it. When it came to Hootie & the Blowfish, Morris didn’t have to listen to their music; he just had to look at the retail sheets from record stores across the
Carolinas, where Hootie was outselling even top national acts. Morris believed that the regional audience for a no-name Carolina bar band understood something about music that the more sophisticated A&Rs who worked for him did not, and he was soon proven correct.

Of course, there was an unstated assumption behind this approach: that aesthetic quality and commercial popularity were identical. In other words, the album that sold the most copies was by definition the best. This could sometimes lead to unusual outcomes. For example, to a corporate label executive the best album of 1967 was not
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
or
Are You Experienced,
but
More of the Monkees
. The best album of 1975 wasn’t
Blood on the Tracks
or
Tonight’s the Night,
but
Elton John’s Greatest Hits
. The best album of 1993 wasn’t
Enter the Wu-Tang
or
In Utero,
but the soundtrack to
The Bodyguard
. And so the best album of 1995 was therefore
Cracked Rear View
. The critics might howl in protest, but the people bought the album, and at Time Warner that was all that mattered.

But scouting the order-taker didn’t mean that Morris didn’t take risks. In fact, it was precisely this populist economic logic that often led him into dangerous cultural territory. For further down the ledger—and located across an unbridgeable cultural abyss from the anodyne yodeling of Hootie and company—was the 50 percent stake Morris had negotiated in Jimmy Iovine’s Interscope Records. Iovine was Morris’ best friend. Although Iovine lived in Los Angeles, Morris saw him often, and the two talked on the phone several times a day. Morris had first contacted him at Atlantic as a producer for Stevie Nicks, and the collaboration led to her breakout solo hit “Edge of Seventeen.” He’d followed up with albums for U2 and Tom Petty that had dominated the 1980s airwaves. Iovine was short, energetic, rakish, and always wore a beat-up baseball cap that, in more than ten years of friendship, Morris had seen him take off exactly once.

Iovine could, at times, be a little bit difficult. Morris, more of a political creature by nature, knew you had to manage him. Once, in a
meeting with Michael Fuchs, Morris’ Time Warner boss, the executive had immodestly described his multifaceted approach to the media business, and then referred to himself as the Michael Jordan of management. Iovine, acid-tongued, had provided a quick retort: “
Yeah, but to us, you’re the Michael Jordan of baseball.”

But you needed Jimmy for his instincts, both as a producer and as a scout. He had a terrific ear for the hit song, and his pop music instincts approached clairvoyance. He had, in Morris’ words, the ability to “see around corners.” In touch with hidden currents of culture, he was the greatest trend-spotter Morris had ever known. And lately, he’d been pushing a new frontier: hard-edged gangster rap.

As Ertegun had long taught, understanding the popular sound meant understanding African-American culture. Jazz, blues, soul, R&B, rock, funk, disco, techno, house, electro, and rap—all had their roots in the black American slum. Lately, conditions in those urban ghettos had reached an astonishing level of decay. The crack cocaine trade had triggered an epidemic in crime, peaking in the early ’90s in an uncontained frenzy of gang violence and homicide. Heavy-handed police crackdowns followed, culminating with the 1992 Los Angeles riots, a catastrophic outbreak of low-grade urban warfare in which more than fifty people were killed and more than a thousand buildings torched to the ground.

Iovine and Morris were certain that therein lay the future sound of pop. In 1992, they had heard an advance copy of Dr. Dre’s
The Chronic
. The album was confrontational, catchy, packed full of hits and sonically brilliant, but so explicit that the corporate majors wouldn’t touch it. Sensing an opportunity, the two had arranged for a meeting with Suge Knight, the CEO of Death Row Records, the label behind the release. Scheduled just a few weeks after the riots, the meeting took place in Los Angeles at the Ivy, a restaurant better known for the celebrity of its patrons than the quality of its food. Suge wore an oversized white T-shirt and a blood red baseball cap, tilted to the side, and his massive bulk barely fit into his chair. Across from
him sat Morris and Iovine, impressed, excited, and maybe even a little afraid. Earlier in the day, Iovine had worked out a plan to win Knight’s confidence: at a certain point in the meal, Iovine would excuse himself to the bathroom. Then Morris would tell Knight that Iovine was a genius.

Halfway through, the plan was executed. “Suge, listen,” said Morris, indicating the vacant chair that Jimmy had left. “That guy is an
authentic
genius.”

Morris wasn’t above a little razzle-dazzle at a sales pitch, but in this case he meant what he said. Anyone could get lucky and produce a hit record, or maybe even two, but Iovine had released dozens. Talent like Iovine’s was exceptionally rare, and when you met someone who had it, you grabbed on to the back of his shirt collar and held on until he ran out of ideas or croaked. If Morris had a secret—he denied having one, of course, but if he did—it was whatever combination of personal qualities that allowed him to keep artists and executives locked in his personal orbit for years, sometimes decades.

Morris had spent years building this reputation. He was well aware that, in the public imagination, executives of his station were regarded as smooth-talking swindlers. He had certainly known many who had bolstered this stereotype, but he had also noticed that, over the long run, the swindlers ended up marginalized and forgotten. Burning an unsophisticated artist on a record deal might net you some short-term riches, but word soon got around, and then your phone calls weren’t returned. Musicians gossiped. In fact, they bitched incessantly. They complained about even the most generous contracts, and often aired these grievances in extremely public fashion. Cultivating a reputation for probity was the only way to stay in the game. It was an eternal truth of show business: “The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

Suge Knight was convinced. He was authentic, too. Shortly after the meeting, Death Row signed with Interscope, with Time Warner acting as its distributor. The deal was like a half share in the future:
Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, and Tupac were poised to dominate the radio waves for years to come, and albums like
The Chronic
and
Doggystyle
were destined to become back-catalog bestsellers.

And that was where the real money was. An entire generation was upgrading its vinyl collection to compact discs, and anytime some kid in Wisconsin bought a digitally remastered copy of
Physical Graffiti
, Morris got paid. As his fortune grew, though, Morris kept a low profile. Unlike Ertegun—who chased after starlets and partied with Mick Jagger—and unlike Iovine—a fast-talking Brooklyn sharpie who made sure others were aware of the presence of genius—Morris shunned publicity. He was famous in the music business, but not well known to the world at large, and his relationship with the press was icy. He rarely gave interviews and encouraged his subordinate executives to do likewise. No one had ever accused him of shyness, of course. He simply knew his business, and that meant putting the artists first. Iovine, Suge, and others could make the headlines. Morris signed the checks.

But the Death Row deal made publicity inevitable. The label was incendiary, and sales of
The Chronic
went on to surpass even Morris’ best expectations, establishing both Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg as bankable long-term stars. Snoop’s menacing persona was just the gloss for a brilliant comic sensibility and a talent for singsong hooks. Dr. Dre was the Phil Spector of his era, whose musical skills and work ethic augured a pop music dynasty that might well last for decades.

And then there was Tupac. Under the beneficent guidance of Suge, the onetime drama student had emerged from the politically conscious underground and struck a posture of uncompromising fuck-the-world menace. Even on Death Row’s roster he stood out. Snoop looked like a greyhound, and Dre looked like Mr. Toad, but Tupac was beautiful. His hooks were immortal. His voicing and cadence were sublime. His lyrical content was earnest, sometimes almost embarrassing, but he made it impossible to look away. And his fans were legion.

Talent came at a price. By 1995, a significant portion of Time
Warner’s shareholder dividends—paid out to jowly GOP aristocrats in expensive three-piece suits—were being funded by a mobbed-up posse of black hoodlums who rapped about murdering hookers and selling crack cocaine. The malfeasance went beyond lyrics: Suge was on probation for assault; Snoop Dogg was facing a murder rap; Tupac had been sent to prison for sexually abusing a groupie. This uncomfortable intersection of corporate sobriety and glorified crime narrative had drawn attention from the self-appointed guardians of the family, who worried about the corrosive nature of the recorded material on the nation’s morals. Bravely leading this self-described “moral crusade” was Bill Bennett, Ronald Reagan’s former secretary of education.

Bennett was a bloated neoconservative, a blithering culture warrior, and a major-league asshole. Under George H. W. Bush, he had served as the nation’s drug czar, overseeing federal antidrug policies that had targeted the same environments from which the gangster rappers now came. He had teamed up with C. Delores Tucker, a black civil rights crusader who had, decades earlier, marched arm in arm with Martin Luther King. Together, the two were calling for Time Warner to divest its share in Interscope and abandon the genre entirely. Bennett took to the airwaves and the cable channels, and wrote scathing editorials in major newspapers. Tucker purchased twenty shares of Time Warner stock, then showed up at the company’s shareholder meeting, and, in an excruciatingly uncomfortable moment, requested that the executives there read the most explicit lyrics from Death Row releases aloud to their shareholders. (They declined.) After Tucker’s performance,
Henry Luce III, the heir to the
Time
magazine fortune and a director of the company’s board, was seen applauding.

Bennett and Tucker had criticized the artists, the label, the overall corporate parent, and the executives. They had even succeeded in making rap lyrics a campaign issue, with Bob Dole, the heir presumptive to the Republican nomination, piling on. Two weeks before
Morris’ scheduled meeting with Fuchs, Bob Dole had called Morris out personally, in front of a crowd of Republican donors.

“
I would ask the executives of Time Warner a question: is this what you intend to accomplish with your careers?” Dole had asked. “Must you debase our nation and threaten our children for the sake of corporate profits?”

The answer, at least to the first question, was yes. Morris’ career had never looked better, and if success meant turning “Bitches ain’t shit but hoes and tricks” into a schoolyard catchphrase, so be it. Morris had weathered these hurricanes of political outrage many times before. One of his first signings after taking control at Atlantic had been 2 Live Crew, the Miami booty bass quartet whose strip club anthem “Me So Horny” had startled everyone, Morris included, by becoming a massive underground hit. “Me So Horny” had been the single from
As Nasty As They Wanna Be
, the first (and to date only) musical work ever to be banned in the United States on the grounds of obscenity. Morris had signed 2 Live Crew in the midst of this controversy, and put out their next major label release,
Banned in the U.S.A.
, led by their immortal single “Face Down Ass Up.”

Controversy was temporary. Royalties were forever. Soon, Morris was sure, the Death Row critics would find something else to complain about, just as they had with 2 Live Crew. The moral panic would subside and he would be left to cultivate the label’s singular genius. As he had so many times before, Morris sought to hold on. Though he rarely sat for interviews, he often posed for photographs, and among them was a new favorite, which he kept in a frame on his desk:
a black-and-white party shot of himself, dwarfed by Suge and Snoop, smiling alongside Pac, his eyes alight with joy.

If Time Warner could take the heat on “Face Down Ass Up,” they could take the heat on “Gin and Juice.” On the strength of Morris’ signings, Warner Music had moved to the top of the leaderboard, besting the five other corporate conglomerates that comprised the Big Six. Morris, investing in quality, believed it was a position the
company could maintain for years. The important thing was to win, and surely Michael Fuchs, with his Jordan-esque greatness, saw it this way too. And so Morris was optimistic as he shut the door to his boss’s office in 1995. In fact, he thought he might be promoted to oversee the company’s entire international music division.