A Prince Among Stones (17 page)

A variation on the scalping theme was that friends of Bill Graham's in San Francisco were given different tickets and told to enter the theatre through a certain turnstile which had been tampered with so that it did not register anybody passing through. The money for those tickets was never accounted for. The information about this came from people lower down in the Bill Graham organisation, who discussed it with their peers in the Stones' organisation and it was reported to me.

We therefore had a major flare-up with Graham, which required recomputing all the monies, but, surprisingly, when it came to the lawsuit that I was going to bring, not one of the people who had given us verbal evidence about these activities would provide an affidavit, from which one could only draw the conclusion that they had been ‘talked to', and were scared stiff of bringing down on themselves the ire of the people concerned.

As a result of the changes we put in place, it did become more difficult for promoters to continue these scams, which was not so easy for many of the groups whose management was directly involved with accumulating profit from these practices.

I sought advice from people who were in the music business. The father of Steve Rubell, who ran Studio 54 in New York, was a leading New York promoter. (In passing, I remember one evening at Studio 54 when Josephine danced with Mikhail Baryshnikov, which, oddly enough, she herself does not remember.)

So I asked Steve, ‘What can one do about this?' He told me, ‘You'll never be able to get rid of it entirely, there'll always be a skim. What you have to do is see that it is no more than that. You need to negotiate with the promoters so that they are aware that you are aware what's happening. It is impossible to have a policeman standing next to every turnstile, but nonetheless you will know what's going on.' And that was very important.

I had to come to terms with the fact that there was an irreducible core of approximately 10 per cent that would never come our way, and that we should concentrate on securing and accounting for all of the remaining 90 per cent. What that meant in reality was that if somebody was the promoter for a venue like Shea Stadium, where the audience could be 100,000 people, the number of seats not sold would not impact too much on the overall sale. I certainly didn't like it, but I had to learn to accept some of the realities of the music business. I could not change everything single-handed.

Dealing with the touring industry people required a certain amount of adjustment in my business philosophy. Not everybody, for example, was prepared to sign a contract. I was once entering into an agreement with Howard Kaufman, who managed the band Chicago amongst other acts, a very, very shrewd customer. He told me, ‘Rupert, I am not going to sign a contract. I'm going to do this job, I won't take more than what you've said, but I won't sign a contract. I am not prepared to enter into any form of legal discussion on what I do and what I don't do. You'll have to take that as a risk.'

When I reported this back to Mick, I said, ‘Oddly enough, I think it is worth doing, because I have never heard anybody else be quite as honest about this.' However, when that particular tour reached Los Angeles, I received information about a high level of scalping going on. I had a meeting with Howard Kaufman and asked him what the hell was happening. ‘Well, I did buy quite a lot of tickets, in various places. And that's what I did. I put up my money, I bought my tickets, and if I'm selling them or not selling them, that is my business . . .'

Merchandising sales and car parking charges were routinely siphoned off and undeclared. The merchandising was the same as the scalping, only worse, because it was so much more blatant. There was always somebody handling the merchandising who apparently only produced modest sums of money, some significantly more modest than others.

Much later, in the 1990s, when the Canadian promoter Michael Cohl was running the tours for the Stones, he was looking round a particular venue in Italy and could not see any official merchandising stands, even though on his way in he had passed by plenty of unofficial stands selling merchandise that was clearly completely different in shape, size and quality from the products Michael was selling for the tour.

He was naturally very annoyed and asked to speak to the local promoter. Eventually the promoter turned up accompanied by a
carabiniere
, who said, ‘Come this way.' They all went into the promoter's office, where the
carabiniere
took his gun out, placed it on the table, and said to Michael, ‘You will not change the merchandising arrangements. Goodbye.' That was corruption at its most brutal and unsubtle.

One of the key elements in the Rolling Stones merchandising was the tongue logo. The tongue was the most successful side product of setting up the Rolling Stones record label, because it gave the Stones a globally recognisable brand. Mick had found the illustrator, John Pasche, and I thought the logo was excellent. Later on, when we started making significant amounts of money out of merchandising, the illegal copying became an issue: the level of bootlegging was gigantic.

I eventually became very concerned about the illegal use of the logo and covered the copyright in a batch of countries, an incredibly expensive undertaking. At one stage we were paying more than a million dollars a year for copyright protection, and we only made any real money during the periods when the band were on tour.

Rolling Stones Records had been established under the direction of Earl McGrath, a great friend of both Ahmet Ertegun and me. The proposition was that a label fronted by the Stones might be attractive to groups and their managers and that albums could be distributed through Atlantic to make some additional money for the band. This was a phase when major bands felt that having their own label was a way to expand their activities. The Beatles, of course, had Apple; Led Zeppelin started Swan Song Records; and Emerson, Lake & Palmer launched Manticore.

Although the Rolling Stones label had a minor success with
Bush Doctor
, an album by Peter Tosh from Bob Marley's band The Wailers, projects by other artists, including John Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas and the Cuban band Kracker, either failed to sell well or failed to be released (the John Phillips album was never completed, but along the way cost Atlantic a huge amount of money). In the end the Rolling Stones Records label served primarily as an outlet for solo projects by the group, and their own albums appeared under the logo.

Earl McGrath's wife came from a well-known Italian family called Pecci-Blunt. Josephine and I both knew her, and her brother Dino had been my boss at Bache in Rome in the early 1960s. When Earl got the job as the manager of Rolling Stones Records, he proved to be very good at handling the record cover artwork, because he was a picture dealer. Earl's great strength was that he was as close to Keith as he was to Mick and so he was very important in liaising between them.

The concern of bands for their fanbase could obscure them from the commercial realities. That was typified by groups' obsession with cover design, which was certainly true of the Stones. When they were discussing the artwork, which Earl used to do with Mick in the first instance, there were always terrible problems over whether it should be purple or yellow, a poodle rather than a dachshund, three girls rather than five, two black girls rather than one – it went on and on and on.

I remember hearing a story about the moment when Peter Grant, the manager of Led Zeppelin, delivered an album to Ahmet Ertegun. Ahmet was very fond of and amused by Peter Grant, but he, Peter, was fastidious – just like Mick – about album covers. Peter Grant had the album delivered, and came round the next day to the Atlantic offices to ask Ahmet what he thought of it. Ahmet kept him waiting, then said, ‘I don't know what to say to you. But I'm not having it in blue. The colour's got to be green', or whichever colour it was. Peter Grant was most disturbed. ‘But that surely doesn't matter so much, it's the music you're after.' Despite the considerable force of his personality, Peter lost the argument, but gained the colour.

Alongside merchandising was the whole issue of sponsorship. At concert venues we would see huge sponsorship banners, but no money coming into us. One time in France, before a show in Nice, I asked Bill Graham about these banners. ‘Oh,' he replied, ‘that's all handled by the local promoters.' I said, ‘No, that has to change. We will negotiate with the major industrial companies, and you will have to help them put up the advertising.' He was furious.

There was no backstage lounge at the venue so he had to take me down to the gents' lavatories, shouting at me, ‘This is absolutely impossible, you're ruining my career.' I simply said, ‘This is the way it is going. That is the end of the discussion. Now, is there anything else you want to do down here?'

There is a story, possibly apocryphal, about the early days of Coca-Cola in Atlanta, Georgia, some time during the First World War. The head of the company was sitting in his office. His secretary, very embarrassed, told him that a young gentleman was desperate to see the chairman and they had not been able to persuade him to go away. ‘All right,' said the chairman, ‘we'll send Jim to talk to him.' Jim was the number two in the company.

So off Jim went to talk to him. ‘No, I'm talking only to the boss,' insisted the young man. ‘And I will want the chairman to sign this piece of paper, saying that in return for my idea Coca-Cola will use it and pay me one million dollars if they make more than that.' Eventually they relented and he was ushered into the chairman's office. He persuaded the chairman to sign the piece of paper. ‘Now, young man, what is your great story?' And he heard two words in response: ‘Bottle it.' At the time the Coca-Cola company were only selling the drink through soda fountains. ‘Bottle it.' And, sure enough, it was only once the company started selling Coca-Cola in the iconic glass bottle in 1916 that the brand really took off.

General Electric was, I think, the first company to sponsor a tour. The people there were delighted with the concept and had never thought of it – the rock'n'roll equivalent of the ‘Bottle it' story. The band, however, were not happy: ‘General Electric?' They were suspicious of any corporate organisation. I said, ‘What do you care? You are not doing anything dishonest but selling a business product.'

By 1978, most of my time was spent working on Rolling Stones business, and that coincided with Mick taking me aside and saying he would like me to be on tour for longer periods of time than I had been before. I said, ‘Would a third of the dates be enough?' He said, ‘I hope so.' From that point on I always had a room booked wherever they played, whereas previously I had gone only for a few days and to sort out something specific.

Shortly before that exchange, there was one very significant and potentially career-shattering moment in the life of the Stones. The contract with Atlantic had come up for renegotiation. I had turned down Atlantic because they counter-offered a deal which was not as attractive as I wanted. I was leaning towards recommending that the Stones signed with the Philips/Siemens company Polygram.

I was in Los Angeles in February 1977, staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel. When I arrived in my room there was a magnum of Krug from Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic, some Bollinger from MCA and a bottle of dubious American champagne from Robert Stigwood at RSO. As I rang to thank everybody, I heard Ahmet hooting with laughter down the phone saying, ‘You do realise the cheap champagne didn't really come from Stigwood.
I
sent that!'

A day or two later I was ready to enter the final stages of negotiation with the various parties involved, when I took a telephone call from Mick, who said he had to warn me that Keith had just been arrested in Canada for peddling, but not using, heroin. It was all going to come out in the press the next day and he thought I would need to know that, especially given the state of play on the contracts.

I had to ring up in turn all of the people with whom I had been negotiating and tell them the news. ‘This has come out and I just wanted to make sure that you are still in for what you said.' One by one each record company dropped out. Only Ahmet Ertegun stayed loyal in the face of such a serious blow. In due course I went back to Ahmet Ertegun and said that he and I should both concede all the small contractual points that we had been arguing about. And Ahmet said, ‘Of course.'

As the legal case against Keith continued, the future of the band was under an immense cloud – the prospect of the Stones playing without him was, to most people, and most of all to Keith, inconceivable.

As soon as Mick had called me I had immediately started working behind the scenes to get a good lawyer to help us. I had also had to build into the contractual discussions that we would have to change the basis by which ‘the Rolling Stones' were defined. We would commit to produce ‘Mick Jagger and two of the Rolling Stones'.

When I went through the wording of the contract I showed Keith the paragraph in the letter in which I had set that out. ‘Keith,' I said, ‘I am afraid the sting is in the tail of this letter.' He was understandably most concerned. But to give him credit for his professionalism, he did not make a scene about it. He understood why it had to be worded in that way, although he was distraught that this had happened.

My contacts in Canada and Washington both said that the likelihood was that Keith would receive a prison sentence, even if only suspended. I am sure that Keith also thought that he would be going to prison. In the end we avoided that although he was banned for coming in for work during a certain period of time, which we managed to overcome through a specialised lawyer who had good contacts within the immigration authorities.