Chapter 33
Options ... Can I change your mind? ... The mogul had to say something ... An evening with friends at Tavern on the Green
JAC: Meanwhile, back at the office, Ahmet Ertegun and David Geffen had each remade their deals with Steve Ross.
DAVID GEFFEN: I had made a deal to sell my record company, Asylum, to Warner Communications, a stock deal. I got the stock at forty dollars a share. In six months it had crashed to eight dollars. I got completely fucked on that deal. At the same time my company had gone through the roof. I was very unhappy.
JAC: And so we come to 1973. This is five years from 1968, when I had briefly gone on the lam, sitting at Lahaina on Maui looking out at the sea, making a promise to myself to be gone from the business in five years. 1973 was my private target date for exiting. Hawai'i was calling.
When Cyrus Faryar, who had lived his young life in Hawai'i, recorded his second album, we called it "Islands," and for the back cover photo we used a snapshot I had taken of my hammock by the ocean at sunset. For me that was a mind-picture, a ruling image.
Under my agreement with Warner, 1973 was the last of my three years' obligation at Elektra. Then there was a two-year option period. If the option was picked up, I would have to serve another two years, to 1975, and it felt like a prison sentence.
If the option was not picked up, I would be a free man. The date for the exercise of the option was July 22, and no notification came. My legal address was at Tranquility Base in South Salem, and I had Marty Richmond checking the mail daily. One key person within the music group knew that the New York office had forgotten the paperwork, and he was torn between his friendship for me and his fiduciary duty to the company. I held my breath. What continued to happen was. . . nothing. I gave it a respectable interval, way past the option date, exhaled gratefully, and wrote Steve a note saying that I had other plans for my life.
When we met to talk, the first thing Steve said was, "Can I change your mind?" I said no, this was something I was committed to and there was no turning back. He then said, "Well, you can do anything you want now, that's not a problem. But I have a problem. The technology area is too important to let go, and nobody around here knows how to screw in a light bulb. We want you close to the company. Let me keep your compensation going, and you just act for us as a consultant in technology." Fine, as long as I could do it from Maui. We worked out the details rapidly and cordially. I was free of my excess burden and also had something worth doing in a field I loved and found challenging. Hawai'i was mid-ocean between the mainland and Japan, to which I traveled frequently. I was already on the board of Pioneer Electronics (the first American to serve on the board of a major Japanese corporation), whom I had put in the cable hardware and LaserDisc businesses while a member of the strategic planning team. Perfect. I could have a foot of my own choosing in two worlds of my choosing, at a level of involvement and energy which would keep me from boredom without coming close to using me up.
For twenty-three years Elektra had been my life. Everything in me told me that that cycle had played itself out, had come to a natural end. To me the Seventies did not look musically promising. But my record company had to be looked after. To me the solution was obvious: David Geffen. David at Asylum was artist-oriented. Elektra was an artist-oriented label. So—move Asylum out of Atlantic, put it with Elektra, and have David oversee both labels.
Steve Ross saw the virtue in the idea at once, and brought it up at the next meeting of the record company heads in LA on August 9. I hadn't discussed it with David because, knowing David, it wouldn't have been a secret any longer, and I didn't want premature rumors of my departure causing unnecessary turmoil within the company. At the LA meeting David was—angry would be too strong a word, let's say upset, pissed off at not being consulted. But David was very ambitious, and the way I saw things I was making it possible for him to take his next step toward wherever he saw himself going.
The public announcement of the change came in New York, at a press conference at Club 21. Steve Ross made it official: I would continue with Warner Communications as senior vice-president and chief technologist, and David would move with Asylum from Atlantic to Elektra. Ahmet Ertegun lightheartedly said that he hated to lose the Asylum billing. The news hit hard at Elektra, particularly among some who had been with me the longest.
ANN PURTILL: Judy Collins got on the phone to Jac and started crying and screaming at him, and he came and got me and said: "I can't get her to calm down."
JAC: Judy didn't talk to me for several years.
CARLY SIMON: It was devastating. It was like I was a child of divorce—my father was leaving me and now I had David Geffen as a stepfather.
JAC: David's executive style was very different. All sorts of scuttlebutt began to leak from Elektra: David hurrying in with a raincoat over his head to avoid being seen; David behind closed doors, on the phone shouting loud enough to be heard in the halls, then suddenly coming out and screaming at someone; David's psychiatrist making house calls at the office. Insecurity rampant in the corridors. All this might or might not have been merely smoke. The harsher substance of the situation was that David almost immediately declared Elektra to be a disaster area and took an axe to the artist roster.
STAN CORNYN: I have found this phenomenon to be the case: if you look at any transition of power, the year of transition is viewed by the person who's leaving as the best year ever, and by the person coming in as saying, "The company was a shambles, they were in terrible shape." That's a judgment call. The manipulations of David coming in seemed to tumble very quickly onto the tabletop, and it seems to me that there was a measured change that happened at that point. Well, with David coming in, you would expect a change.
JANN WENNER: The Geffen thing was a painful period for Jac, seeing what became of it all. And David, he looks to be a tough person to take over your company.
DAVID GEFFEN: Candidly, Elektra wasn't doing well when I took over. I kept most of Jac's staff, although frankly a lot of the people who were there were not very good. My desire not to fire people got in the way of putting the best people in place, and I was hard-pressed to make the kinds of changes that I thought were necessary. I dropped a huge amount of artists. I kept, I think, a total of ten or twelve and dropped everybody else. Let's put it this way: Over time, eighty percent of everything you sign turns out to be shit. That's pretty much the industry average, or maybe even worse than that. And it was the same at Elektra. It was the same with Vanguard. It was the same at Columbia or Warner Bros. or Reprise, but people tend to pat themselves on the back for their good things and forget about their bad things.
As for technical excellence, Jac makes a lot of that because it interested him, but I'm not sure what you think technical excellence does in the record business. You hire engineers. Engineers are like bringing in a plumber to fix your toilet. Let me put it this way: if I was deaf I'd still be a great record executive, because I had a nose and a sense for it.
Building Asylum Records was an accident that turned out to be fortuitous. Taking over Elektra Records was something I did because I wanted to make sure I didn't lose all my money in Warner Communications stock. The success rate of Asylum Records in 1973 was higher than any record company in history. And putting the two companies together revitalized Elektra Records bigtime. It was really heading to oblivion in 1973. I don't think Jac likes to look at it that way, but that's the way it was. You know, I love Jac. Jac is a very dry guy, a very tough man, and I've had difficult times with Jac, and he was very upset with the idea that after I took over Elektra I talked about how I had to drop all these artists and resurrect the company. He was offended by these things. It was simply the truth.
I was not a person who would say I was in this for the music. I used to be offended by people who would tell me they were in it for the music, who were just trying to make tons and tons of money. It's all self-serving crap, one way or the other. Jac took the money and left, so what can I tell you? I think Jac got a very poor price for it. We can simply look at where I am in the world today and where Jac is.
JAC: David was interviewed by Time magazine and said, in essence, most of the above. Ahmet ran into David and asked why he had given that interview, because from Ahmet's perspective it wasn't true. David shrugged, "Well, they called me and I had to say something."
David always hankered to be a mogul, a power in the world of entertainment, and he got his wish. I wanted something far more personal and less public, and with an eye to my well-being, not just my wallet.
My $10,000,000 for Elektra stacked up well next to the $17,000,000 paid for Atlantic, when you take into account that Atlantic was twice our size. If I had approached Steve just the right way and committed to two additional years, I could have had my deal remade, but Steve had paid me a fair price. Far more important than the money—indeed decisive—was the gift of a moment of time, to change the way I lived.
Making records had been my entire life. Starting in 1965, I had enjoyed my biblical seven fatted years of good fortune. My confidence in my instincts had grown. By 1973 the only thing I had never done was walk away from it all, and my instinct was screaming, "It's time to go."
I was happy to leave with the affection of my artists and the good opinion of people in the business whom I respected.
JOE SMITH: Jac started Elektra with a love for the music and an IQ very high on the charts. And he had an ongoing influence. The company's origins and success make for textbook reading in the music business. On a short, short list you've got to look at Jac.
AHMET ERTEGUN: Artists liked Jac because of his straightforwardness and his intelligence. He didn't record things just because they would sell. What was different about Jac was that he had the same dedication as people who had jazz labels. He was more interested in recording things that he thought were worthwhile, of intrinsic value, with people that he liked. He was one of the most reputable people, a man of integrity, honesty, and dedication to art. Very few people in my business have that. He gave the business a better look. I was proud to be associated with him.
CLIVE DAVIS: Jac was a major learning experience for me. I have tremendous admiration for his standards of excellence at every stage of his career.
JUDY COLLINS: He had a sensibility that extended itself from one end of the business to the other. He could look at a project and make it make business sense. And he could also walk into the recording studio and pick the right phrase. I don't think anyone can do both anymore.
NESUHI ERTEGUN: Jac was a very special person, a visionary, a pioneer, in the forefront. And personally a brilliant producer. He proved it over and over again, through the years, with the records he made with much less means than the biggest companies. Jac's music survives because he had more than good taste, he really did the best to bring out the best from his artists and wouldn't accept anything else. After thirty years those records are still in the catalogs, still selling very well.
BHASKAR MENON: A large number of the artists on Elektra were not passing-hit single artists. They are artists who had a career arc and had something to say that transcended a hit record. Jac had a rare ability to see and foster that. He combined that insight with a really extraordinary shrewd knowledge and judgment of the business. In that respect, in a whole generation that had some extraordinarily gifted and talented people in it, I would say he is without peer.
MO OSTIN: Jac was a consummate record man who had incredibly broad experience and ability. I mean, he could produce records, he could engineer records, he could promote records, he could bargain records, he could conduct the business on a first-rate basis. To me, he, more than any other record executive that I'm aware of, including all the guys who were in the room at WEA, had all the attributes, all the pieces.
JACKSON BROWNE: There's an aspect to the music business—bottom line, nuts and bolts, money—so much falls away and you're left with just that, it's just a business. But Jac's spirit was always more grand and generous and adventurous. He understood that everybody should get well paid for what they do, but that the real treasure is the doing of the work that matters to you. He always seemed to go for fostering the creative, recording the original, trying to figure out how to capture things. And at the same time he was recording obscure music from all over the world, out of left field—send these guys to faraway places with a Nagra, capture the festival music, and put it out on Nonesuch.
Nonesuch records—they were everyone's secret possession, like the secret lore. On Ridpath everyone would roll a big fat joint and put on "Music of Bulgaria" and say, "Listen to this." It was like the first time I tried acid—"Wow! I didn't know this was going on! How long has this been going on?" He had this adventurous spirit, the spirit of someone documenting his time. He had started with folk, moved to electric folk, and white blues, and singer-songwriters, and on to rock and roll, with enormous commercial success for Elektra. He won the lottery with the Doors. The Sixties coin of the realm was people making a new order of things. Jac did this on a huge scale, involving business and finance. He took what was a fortune then and he made these eclectic records with people who ordinarily would not be signed. So Jac was this sort of mystic purveyor of all these things, kind of like the Wizard of Oz. There were legends about him.
CARLY SIMON: It was the best feeling I ever had in the music business. And I think an era died when he left. It became so corporate. It seemed like graham crackers or things that had nothing to do with the music business were in charge. Jac should start a new record label right now. Tell him I said so. Tell him that I'd be there in a second and come running.
RUSS MILLER: The day Jac left, the butterfly died.
JAC: Mel Posner asked me to save the evening of Wednesday, August 22nd. I smelled a party. I was already feeling the post-partum blues, but it would be sweet to have my time at Elektra wrapped up with a bow on it, and to publicly thank everyone I had worked with for their skills, their loyalty, their devotion.
This would be the greatest turning of a page in my life, just a few weeks shy of my forty-second birthday. I had much to look back on, and enormous good fortune to celebrate. So much music history had been written since I started. Hundreds of independent labels that had been born in hope had passed away. Elektra had stayed afloat and ridden the rapids of enormous change, and that was rare. From the time of my beginnings only Elektra, Atlantic, and Vanguard made it into the Seventies with their founders at the helm, and in a few years Vanguard would not be a company, just a collection of masters to be sold.
I had followed the music. We had touched so many lives, left so many marks; some powerful, some subtle; all traceable, many indelible. Our artists were seeded and cultivated at the company. It was a proud roster of the famous and talented as well as the talented and not so famous: Jean Ritchie; Frank Warner; Ed McCurdy; Sabicas; Phil Ochs; the Toms—Rush and Paxton; Joseph Spence; Tim Buckley; Theodore Bikel; Judy Collins; Carly Simon; Queen; Harry Chapin; David Ackles; Jean Redpath; Lord Buckley; the Incredible String Band; the Stooges; Earth Opera; Paul Siebel; Carol Hall; Bread; Koerner, Ray & Glover; the Holy Modal Rounders; Paul Butterfield; Delaney & Bonnie; Lonnie Mack; and the Doors. Their records entertained and they reverberate still.
Nonesuch brought a freshness to the recording of classical and world music, very much like Elektra's impact on popular culture. We were the early explorers of electronic and synthesizer music, the music of Bulgaria and the Indonesian gamelan, now routinely heard in hundreds of films. Composers whose repertoire had lain ignored were relaunched on Nonesuch and none more touching than Scott Joplin.
All these sounds were in my ears and in my heart on the night of August 22nd. It was a storybook New York evening, warm but not hot, the sky cloudless and a very deep blue-black. You could even see some stars. George, my driver of many years, wheeled us over to the Tavern on the Green in Central Park, a festive setting, aglow with little Tivoli lights twinkling through the trees. The largest party room had been reserved. The Warner company jet had been shuttling back and forth, bringing people in from the West Coast. Many of the Elektra artists were there, alongside people who had sustained me at every point in my musical life, all the way back to Anne and Frank Warner, who had fed me Brunswick stew in my scuffling Village days. The Warners' son Jeff had been in the fourth grade in the Village with Harry Chapin; Frank had played for the schoolkids, and that was the first time Harry ever heard folk music. The room was filled with these human connections, linkages of lives braided with mine.
I ate very little of my dinner. Just before dessert, Mel Posner—Mel, who had been with me all the way, from stock boy to senior executive, through days rough and smooth—made a short speech. He presented me, on behalf of the company, with a crystal ball to divine the future and a sextant to guide my path. I had no words prepared, just trusting to the moment. I spoke, finding faces, speaking of them and to them. What I wanted to communicate was love and gratitude. When I could say no more I stepped into the crowd and said my personal farewells to everyone in the room.
The evening ended. George drove me home. We had traveled many miles together, George and I; this was our last.
