“Would Woody Guthrie have tolerated this shit?”
HCB has just sent over this scathing commentary on the music business by Simon Napier-Bell -- who, managed, at one time, The Yardbirds, and, in another era (and at another extreme) worked with Wham! --which contains some stunning anecdotes like…
“Nevertheless, I was totally in their hands. Here there were 6,000 radio stations. Four thousand were said to have playlists under Mafia control. To promote my record would require cocaine and sex and suitcases full of cash. I hadn't chosen to be with this company: that had been done by EMI. In America I had just one job - to persuade CBS the Yardbirds were worth promoting. But since that was already decided there wasn't much left to do. So I went and had tea with Ahmet Ertegun.”
Or
“Dick was about to have a conversation he didn't want. Eighteen months previously there had been publicity about Jewish-born Dylan becoming a born-again Christian. He'd made a couple of albums full of evangelical zeal but they'd bombed. Now his contract had come up for renewal. Dick especially didn't want to have this conversation in front of me. He took the call anyway. To begin with, it wasn't too interesting but then Dick yelled, 'I've told you, Bob - no fucking religion! If you can't agree to that, the deal's off...' Bob was arguing the point but Dick was having none of it. 'Look, I'm telling you. There'll be no fucking religion - not Christian, not Jewish, not Muslim. Nothing. For God's sake, man - you were born Jewish, which makes your religion money, doesn't it? So stick with it, for Christ's sake. I'm giving you 20 million bucks - it's like baptising you, like sending you to heaven. So what are you fucking moaning about? You want 20 million bucks from us? Well, you gotta do what we tell you. And what we're telling you is... No Torah! No Bible! No Koran! No Jesus! No God! No Allah! No fucking religion. It's going in the contract.'
Click for the full story
The secret word is Larceny
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3 comments:
Very interesting article, Mick. (Which I have duly ripped off for my own blog. Sorry.) I found it interesting that while Mafia, choking to death, etc. came up several times on the American scene, one of the themes in the British scene was class. The bands needed someone with the right school tie to represent them.
That's why I now live in America! (Not the choking thing, the school tie thing.)
If only the 15 words that precede "It's going in the contract," applied to how it is our world was run.
As for me, Dylan's lyric, "It may be the Devil/It may be the Lord/You gotta serve somebody," is one of my favourites.
Hey, Ms P, no need to say sorry everything on Doc40 is there to be ripped off.
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