Ker-ching: reading Hit Men is enough to make you hate music

"All record company executives are low-life scum", says one person on GoodReads about Fredric Dannen's Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business, and that's a pretty good summary of this book on the shady behaviour of the movers and shakers in the music industry in the 1970s and 80s. A book, you'll be delighted to know, I've just sped through and must now - of course - blog about. 

A solid gold hit? Dannen's book

Yeah man, the music biz execs are absolute scum and reading Dannen's pretty heavyweight book about their scumminess only really confirms what many are likely to already think about the people who see musicians almost exclusively as sources of revenue (ker-ching) and as routes to corporate power. So, this - ahem - is the bottom line with Hit Men, but how does Dannen tell the story? First off, he spends a lot of time explaining the workings of the so-called "Network", a group of promotion people ("independent promoters", the "indies") who ruthlessly plugged new-release records at the scores (hundreds?) of radio stations across the USA which played pop music ("Top 40" radio) during this pre-MTV period. The plugging was evidently corrupt beyond belief. Pliable programmers and heads of radio stations were sent - via post office boxes - "birthday cards" stuffed with wads of cash. They got cassette boxes containing cocaine, assorted pricey gifts and pre-hired sex workers. One former director of a radio station in California admitted in 1987 that he'd gobbled up $100,000 in bribes in a three-year period. Ker-ching. From the late 1970s (Dannen dates its rise from 1978, when disco singles were showing they could compete strongly with singles from rock and pop artists), the Network plugging practice was apparently endemic in the industry. By 1985, says Dannen, the US record industry was spending between $60m and $80m a year on the promo people, a cool 30% (at least) of their entire annual profits. The aim was simple enough: to get hit singles to help sell the albums from which the companies were making the really big money. It was a means to an end. In essence it was the 1960 payola scandal all over again, only now the major record companies were turning a blind eye to what the indie promoters were up to.  It was costly, but it worked. To make matters worse (though better in terms of the juiciness of Dannen's story), it seems that several of the kingpin promoters were in cahoots with the mafia. Yep, the mafia didn't just make money out of things like crooked cement companies, illicit gambling, "protection" or boxing or what have you - they also wanted a slice of the millions swirling around the music business. Among other things, the mafia (the Mob as Dannen inevitably calls them) especially liked cut-out albums, those unsold albums that get a corner chopped off to signify that they're unsold ("remaindered") stock which are then sold on - in vast quantities - to specialist sellers who try to flog them off in bargain bins. The mafia apparently saw these container-lorry loads of records as opportunities for easy profiteering, plus they'd evidently do a bit of illegal re-issuing, making super-cheap copies of some of the albums and passing them off as the real thing. So yes, Dannen spends a fair bit of time mapping out the links between individual promo men and individual mafia goons. Actually, too much time. In Hit Men there are pages and pages of stuff about the (not very successful) legal investigations into this tangled web of criminality. Whole chapters, in fact. And then the other big component of the book is the machinations of the major players at CBS Records or the wider CBS corporation - Clive Davis, Dick Asher, Larry Tisch, William Paley, Goddard Lieberson and (especially) the rambunctious one-time company president, Walter Yetnikoff, who traded on his self-made "rock-and-roll-rabbi mythology", a tough "Brooklyn kid" from a Jewish background who liked to shout at people in yiddish and generally be the alpha-male among other corporate alpha-males. For reasons that aren't really explained, Hit Men is heavily focused on CBS. We get brief mentions (as per 1973) of Mo Ostin and Joe Smith at Warner Bros, Ahmed Ertegun and Jerry Wexler at Atlantic, Jac Holzman at Elektra, and David Geffen at Asylum. But mostly this is the CBS show. It was the music company with the biggest US market share in the 1970s so this - presumably - is at least one reason. The other seems to be that Dannen enjoys writing about its various egomaniacal prime movers, plus it appears he was able to get good access to former CBS people while researching the book in the 1980s (Hit Men came out in 1990). Anyway, here's a slice of the atmosphere at CBS during the reign of Clive Davis in the early 1970s:

"It was Clive Davis's custom to hold a singles meeting every Wednesday at eleven o'clock. He would play for all department heads the songs chosen for release that week. He wanted the staffs of sales and merchandising and publicity and business affairs - everyone in the company - to know what his priorities were. It was impermissible to talk or leave the room or read a newspaper while the music was being played. If the song did not get the reaction that Clive wanted he would play it again. Afterward, he fired questions around the room." 

Power tripping like this seems to have been the norm at CBS in those days, with part of it being a competition to prove that even as an industry "suit" you still understood the music market and could spot a record with hit potential (that you had good "music ears"). Ah yes, music ears for listening to ... music. This is a major problem for me with Hit Men - there's just not very much about music in it. The industry, yes. The major music industry moguls, again yes. Who these moguls knew, who they helped or feuded with, how much they got paid, who their lawyers were - yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. But the poor old music itself: not so much. Mostly, music - the artists, their records - is just glimpsed in passing. For sure, these glimpses can be fun/interesting, but you have to wade through an awful lot of corporate chicanery to find them. And when the musicians and their music appear it's invariably from the perspective of whether or not they're making money for their record companies or causing professional problems for the endlessly careerist executives. It's a bit like taking a canalside walk through your home city: everything's "upside down", strangely out of position and defamiliarised. So you get fleeting mentions of CBS artists like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, the Clash and Culture Culture, but they're all seen almost exclusively through the lens of their money-making potential or in relation to this or that person's place in the music biz hierarchy. Not that this isn't sometimes worth hearing about. For example, the Clash get a mention (page 206) in relation to perceptions within some quarters at CBS that the company wasn't giving them enough promotional support in the USA. Dannen recounts how a man at CBS label Epic - Frank DiLeo, of Goodfellas fame - had received an $8,000 gold Rolex watch from REO Speedwagon's management company and apparently proceeded to push their album rather than one from the Clash ("a critically-acclaimed band from London", as Dannen calls them). DiLeo, suffice it to say, was a big supporter of the indie promotions system, so we can assume he made sure the Network of semi-criminal pluggers were strenuously touting some godawful REO Speedwagon single over the Clash's Straight To Hell or Should I Stay Or Should I Go. Yep, that's how it worked. Meanwhile, here's another guest appearance from an artist - none other than Bob Geldof, when he was just plain old Bob the lead singer from the Boomtown Rats, not "Saint Bob" from Live Aid. This is a quote from Dick Asher, who - as Dannen tells it - was one of the few people with influence at CBS who ever tried to challenge the power of the corrupt plugging system:

"Bob Geldof is a lovely guy, very bright, very articulate. And very interested in independent promotion. When he was in the Boomtown Rats, he was all over CBS that we didn't use enough of it."  

Uh-ho. Evidently, Geldof's complaint came at the time of an ill-fated temporary boycott (for cost-cutting rather than moral reasons) of the Network system by all the big record companies in 1981. According to Asher, Geldof was blaming the boycott for the fact that the Boomtown Rats weren't selling many records. Asher rather nicely ripostes with:

"If you really examine it, Geldof has never sold records. It's hard to get an artist to admit a record didn't have it. Quite frankly, any time an artist is unsuccessful, they blame the record company."

Oh dear, it's a rat trap, Judy, and we've been ... caught. Meanwhile, in other Hit Men artist mentions we hear about how the rock group Boston infuriated CBS's then boss Walter Yetnikoff by massively delaying the release of their third album Third Stage, seemingly because of their main man Tom Scholz's extreme obsessiveness (according to Dannen, Sholz once "redid a drum track seven hundred times until he was satisfied"). We hear - surprise! - about Bob Dylan being inscrutable when asked by Dick Asher what Dylan's next album (John Wesley Harding) would be like: "Oh, further down the road, I guess". And we hear about the monumental value of Michael Jackson's Thriller album to the CBS coffers, an album that sold 20 million copies in the USA, equating, says Dannen, to one being owned "by every 4.25 American households". Hmm, 4.25 ... And cuddly/spooky Jackson's mega success seems to prove Hit Men's main point - that success at this level has more to do with corporate clout and its various inglorious means and methods, rather than simply being the possessor of a certain amount of er, musical talent. Case in point: it was none other than gold Rolex-sporting Frank DiLeo who pulled out all the promotion men stops to get behind the seven number one singles from Thriller. Each of the singles was allegedly backed by a $100,000 promo spend - which would, I guess, buy a lot of cocaine in cassette boxes. Jackson himself seems to have appreciated the value of all this. In March 1984 he gave DiLeo the much-sought-after job of being his own manager. Ker-ching. In one rather sickening passage (page 229), an acquaintance of DiLeo's recounts how DiLeo told him one day in late 1984, a few months after he got the Jackson job:

"You know, I can't believe what a different world I'm in now versus the one I left. I just concluded a clothing deal for Michael this morning. It took me half an hour and I'm a millionaire, just today." 

A basic truth revealed (confirmed?) by Hit Men is that the biggest artists were often - or usually - the ones who benefited most from the money-hype funnel. In fact, even if the record companies themselves weren't paying the promo men to flog by any means necessary their new releases to the radio stations, the artists themselves would often step in to do it (ie their managers/hired pluggers would), using their own funds. According to Dick Asher, "The heaviest users seem to be the successful artists, because they have the money, and because they want any edge they can get". Yeah, get out of my way little artist. Meanwhile, as Dannen shows all too clearly, companies like CBS were more or less content to continually milk their big-name artists - their "legacy" catalogue etc - as opposed to breaking what Dannen calls "baby acts", meaning new artists. And this basic aversion to nurturing new acts meant CBS would usually prefer to snatch a major band (eg the Rolling Stones) from another label. "Buying rather than discovering talent", as Dannen puts it.

So there's a lot like this in the book. Despite it being almost sclerotic with corporate and legal detail, Hit Men still rams home the basic - and thoroughly depressing - message that money buys you hit records. Not always, but often enough. And it's not just this in Hit Men that could easily make you hate music. It's the rank dishonesty and cartel-like cynicism of the record companies. From the infamous 1950s-era trick of palming an unpaid black artist off with a flashy-looking (but low-value) Cadillac instead of thousands of dollars in unpaid royalties, or - fast forward 35 years - to the way that Sony bought out CBS in 1988 very largely because it wanted a readymade music catalogue to go alongside the DAT cassette machines it was developing in the (wrongheaded) belief that these were going to supplant CDs as the lucrative new format and they could corner the market, suppliers of both the latest hardware and the latest media consumables. "An aversion to rock never thwarted anyone in the music business", says Dannen, and his book is stuffed with examples of corporate lawyers, tax experts, Trumpian deal-makers and buy-out experts who just happen to be doing their thing in the music industry. It could just as easily have been other "entertainment" products, and indeed several of the main players of Hit Men also get involved in film production. During the hey-day of the coke-dealing Network pluggers of USA's Hit 40 radio, I was myself the tiniest of tiny cogs in the music industry: a sales assistant on the singles counter of a branch of HMV. And yet even here some of the promotional tactics weren't that different. True, I received very little cocaine or hard cash, but I did get things like freebie white-label 12"s ("you can have this to have a listen, it's out at the end of the month"), branded knick-knacks like badges or er, rulers, and plenty of record label/band t-shirts (I probably had about 20 of these at one point). Add to this the fact that as a matter of routine the record label sales reps would offer you discounts on the stock you ordered directly from them (buy three, get one free etc), all the while insinuating that they were cutting you - and you alone - this deal because they liked you, and it's easy to see how it all worked. A lowly shop assistant couldn't do much to push a record (they're minnows compared to the big beasts of radio or TV exposure), but every little helps, and that's presumably why that over-friendly CBS Records sales rep used to act like my best mate, promising me a good deal on orders the following week and leaving a bundle of display posters he thought "I might be able" to staple up on the walls to advertise the latest dire release by Adam Ant, or Bros or Luther Vandross. The manager of this shop once said to me - as if imparting an important secret - that the role of HMV was to "be like a supermarket" for music. The hell of retail, eh? As CBS poor promo cousins the Clash once said, "I'm all lost in the supermarket / I can no longer shop happily / I came in here for the special offer / A guaranteed personality", and this more or less sums up the HMV world. Working in a record shop of this type could easily make you hate music, and so could reading a book such as Hit Men. I don't hate music though. Miraculously, I still like it ...