Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (27 page)

The Cohen family had made their fortune in the clothing business, and, again like Hammond, Leonard had grown up in a world of maids, butlers, and chauffeurs. Since 1961, he had been hiding away with other bohemian exiles on the Greek island of Hydra writing to the sleepless tempo of amphetamines. Cohen enjoyed a youth following in Canada, and he had just written folk diva Judy Collins a song with beautifully embroidered lyrics, “
Suzanne
,” which she included on her latest album and showcased on her TV show. The more Hammond found out about Cohen, the better he sounded.

Hammond decided to invite him out to lunch. They met in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, then walked around the corner to a restaurant on Twenty-third Street. Cohen knew about Hammond’s giant legacy as a talent scout; he later remarked, “He stands, and has always stood for, a certain kind of integrity and morality, in music and his dealings with musicians. I don’t think there’s another man of his stature in the country.” Looking across the table, Hammond saw an eccentric with an absolute belief in his destiny as an artist. Cohen was no fake.

After lunch, they headed back to the Chelsea Hotel, where, sitting on the edge of his bed, Cohen played a handful of songs: “The Master Song,” “The Stranger Song,” “Suzanne,” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.” Hammond sat silently, saying nothing between songs. He noticed Cohen’s left hand struggling with basic chord changes, but Cohen had developed his own peculiar style of flamenco finger picking, which was hypnotic. His lyrics were genuine poetry on a par with Bob Dylan’s though different, perhaps reflecting Cohen’s more continental, academic background. Above all, Cohen was an enchanter whose songs drew the listener to a timeless place.

“You’ve got it,” said Hammond, as Cohen put his guitar down. Cohen wasn’t sure whether
it
referred to a talent or a record contract.

Hammond’s problem, as his friend had predicted from the outset, was convincing Columbia. Hammond first petitioned Bill Gallagher. “A forty-year-old poet?” gasped Gallagher in disbelief. “Are you crazy, John? How are we going to sell him?”

In an attempt to assemble some commercial arguments, Hammond arranged to meet with an old friend who happened to be Cohen’s book publisher, Tom Guinzberg of Viking Press. Over lunch, Hammond began his line of inquiry. “I’m about to sign one of your writers, Leonard Cohen.”

“Well, you may be interested to know that we sold five hundred and forty copies for his last book of poems,” Guinzberg replied in reference to
The Spice-Box of Earth.
“You’re really crazy, John!”

“Didn’t
Beautiful Losers
do well in paperback?” Hammond persisted.

“Yes, it’s true. Its sexual imagery has a wide public unappreciative of poetry, and it must have sold six hundred thousand copies by now.”

“Doesn’t that make you believe he has something?”

“No, not really,” Guinzberg concluded.

Fortunately, the complex political situation at CBS played out in Cohen’s favor. Feeling circumstances sliding out of his control, Goddard Lieberson decided to get out while he was ahead. He negotiated a semiretirement position as chairman of the board and passed over the presidency to Clive Davis, just thirty-five years of age.

The revolution inside Columbia coincided with Clive Davis’s attendance at Monterey, which, in his own words, “changed me as a person.” As one of his protégés, the witty Walter Yetnikoff, recalled, “He came back transformed. He described it in lofty terms. ‘I have,’ he said ‘caught a glimpse of the new world.’ He spoke of the sweetness of the flower children and the transcending nature of their music. He put on a necklace and love beads. He became a convert … He started wearing Nehru jackets and tinted glasses. I think Clive was sincere. And just as sincerely, inside his head I believe he saw dancing dollar signs.”

When Hammond explained his belief in Leonard Cohen to the new boss, careful to mention that Bill Gallagher was against the deal, Davis signed the contract. In the studio later that summer, Hammond teamed up the nervous singer with a sensitive bass player, Willie Ruff, to record the basic tracks as a duo. As Hammond had hoped, the chemistry between the two men clicked. Cohen’s haunting ballads were given structure and a hypnotic heartbeat thanks to Ruff’s unintrusive yet supportive punctuation.

To create a powerful mood, Cohen demanded that all the lights be turned off. Placing candles and incense around the relatively small room made Studio E feel like an orthodox church. When Cohen explained how he had written his songs looking in a mirror, Hammond found one in the building. As Cohen sang transfixed before his own dim reflection, the only show of excitement that Hammond seems to have expressed from behind his newspaper was “Watch out, Dylan!” after one particularly powerful take.

Hearing Cohen and Ruff’s enchanting simplicity, Hammond envisioned an arid album with as little instrumental arrangement as possible. As Cohen listened to the stark-sounding playbacks, however, he winced at the naked tremble of his own voice. Can I have reverberation, strings, mandolins, fairground organs, lady backing vocalists, he pleaded. The inevitable disagreement on production style led to a standoff. In a familiar scenario, a twenty-six-year-old producer, John Simon, was wheeled in to embellish the recordings with a whole host of orchestral frills, but Cohen quickly got confused when Simon suggested adding drums and syncopated piano to “Suzanne.”

Cohen tried to mix the final cuts himself but struggled to nail down his ornate creations. Hammond dropped in to have a listen. “Whatever spell you’ve created has been lost,” he told Cohen bluntly. “This isn’t you any longer.” Throughout his long career, Hammond had seen hundreds of efforts to make records more commercial actually turn buyers off. Imperfect as his singing performances were, Cohen had to admit his songs spoke more poignantly as naked confessions. So Hammond began paring down the mixes in a backward process he described as “like trying to take the sugar back out of the coffee.” Nonetheless, by editing and reverberating the orchestral detail into the background, leaving Cohen’s trembling voice prominently in the foreground, he created a stark black canvas containing just occasional splashes of abstract color.

The unusual record by the middle-aged Canadian poet went from cult phenomenon to classic, earning Cohen justified comparisons with Bob Dylan. Revered as a genius in Europe throughout his long career, Cohen would go on to sell over 10 million records for Columbia—leaving in his wake an artistic legacy that has grown cumulatively for decades. At a time when most record men were scrambling around for young rockers, Leonard Cohen was another timeless legend personally escorted into the pantheon of modern music by the great John Hammond.

Although he had countersigned the contract, Clive Davis was only moderately impressed with Leonard Cohen. To put Columbia firmly back in the driver’s seat, Davis needed a roster of psychedelic rock. He drew up shopping lists of acts he’d seen at Monterey; his obsession was Janis Joplin, whose band, Big Brother & the Holding Company, was already signed to an independent but, following Monterey, had signed a management contract with Albert Grossman, who in turn succeeded in moving them to Columbia for $250,000.

As contracts were being formalized in the boardroom, Joplin suggested to Davis that they consummate the deal by having sex. Turning slightly green, Davis, with his disarming manners, managed to wriggle out of the room unscathed. Before he did, he assured the musicians that Columbia was not as formal as its boardroom looked. One of Joplin’s entourage, feeling those comments needed to be put to the test, duly removed all of his clothes.

Although Clive Davis didn’t really have an ear to begin with, he learned the necessary skills of the hit-making business. “Clive’s upward climb was impressive and, at times, funny,” Yetnikoff remembered. “One afternoon I dropped by his office and saw he was taking dancing lessons so he could shake his ass to the contemporary music he was championing … ‘Loosen up,’ his teacher would urge. Clive tried, but rather than resemble the free-flowing free-loving hippies he’d seen at Monterey, he looked like Dr. Frankenstein’s unwieldy monster.”

Turning a definitive page on the Lieberson epoch, Davis ominously told Bill Gallagher’s loyalists in the sales departments that if they weren’t reading
Rolling Stone
maybe they were in the wrong business. “Clive was obsessed with success,” explained Yetnikoff. “I’d accompany him to midtown Manhattan record stores to inspect the placement of our product. When Columbia records weren’t in the front of the bins, Clive would move them there.” Speaking, moving, and dressing up like an entertainment don, Davis “sold like crazy,” said Yetnikoff. “He fought off fierce competitors like Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler at Atlantic, seasoned vets with vast music backgrounds. By haunting concerts and hanging out backstage, Clive stayed on the scene. By carefully cultivating his persona as a hit-maker, he drew ambitious artists into his circle. He and his PR staff worked the press. Clive couldn’t get enough press and soon began believing the hype surrounding his ascension. Rather than opine, he pronounced. He was the new Pope of Pop.”

In the difficult art of seducing pop stars, Clive Davis’s archrival was Ahmet Ertegun, New York’s other self-ordained monarch, who was also leading his company, despite some internal resistance, into the new world of psychedelic rock. The son of a decorated ambassador, Ertegun was arguably the most deviously charming of all the great American record moguls. Wining and dining his way from London to Los Angeles, Ertegun had developed a special relationship with Brian Epstein’s partner, Robert Stigwood. As well as getting the American rights to the chart-topping Bee Gees, the Stigwood connection led Ertegun to his proudest scalp of the late sixties—psychedelic blues shredders Cream.

According to Ertegun’s own account, at a party for Wilson Pickett at the Scotch of St. James in London, he was struck by the skills of a twenty-year-old guitarist playing onstage. Turning to Stigwood, Ertegun insisted they develop and sign the young man by the name of Eric Clapton. Stigwood, however, claims Cream came together themselves—drummer Ginger Baker and bassist Jack Bruce had already been members of the Graham Bond Organisation, which Stigwood also managed. Ertegun “wanted the Bee Gees but he actually wasn’t so keen on Cream,” explained Stigwood, who became Cream’s manager. “I played him their demo at Polydor in London and [Ertegun] said, ‘Oh fabulous, fabulous. But not very commercial.’ That’s from the horse’s mouth … Part of Ahmet’s charm was that he was a great storyteller but he could really [cut] many corners in his storytelling. I made him take Cream because I gave him the Bee Gees. And that is the absolute truth.”

What is undeniable is that Ahmet Ertegun did a fine job guiding Cream to American stardom. Atlantic licensed Cream’s American rights for the single “I Feel Free” in early 1967 and enjoyed good sales, but Ahmet Ertegun winced at its tinny, English sound. “There wasn’t enough blues for my taste,” said Ertegun. “Then we took over production.” Fired up by a shared love for the real deal, with Ahmet Ertegun supervising operations in Atlantic’s New York studios, Cream reworked an old blues song, “Lawdy Mama,” into “Strange Brew.” “Boy, did they play loud. I don’t know how I never lost my hearing,” Ertegun remembered of that session. A vibrant album of trippy blues,
Disraeli Gears,
came together in a few days, including “Sunshine of Your Love,” a No. 6 smash hit that broke Cream in America. Ertegun later admitted to Stigwood, as they flew to London together, that collectively the Bee Gees and Cream constituted 50 percent of Atlantic’s album turnover.

Jerry Wexler, who had a somewhat wary, competitive relationship with Ahmet Ertegun, looked on in horror as all these long-haired “rockoids” began flooding the charts. Sticking to the only music he truly loved, Wexler continued producing R&B in his favorite Alabama studio. He had no desire to accompany Ertegun chasing hippie rockers through airports. In June 1967, Atlantic had no less than eighteen singles in the
Billboard Hot 100,
including the first two slots, “Respect” by Aretha Franklin and “Groovin’” by the Young Rascals. Being conscious of history, Wexler knew his latest successes were lucky flukes defying the general flow. In the R&B landscape, VJ had collapsed, Chess was in steep decline, Stax was struggling, and Morris Levy, the Mafia-connected owner of Roulette Records, had retired.

Jerry Wexler had always been, by nature, a prophet of doom. “I never think anything is going to work out—and I think that’s better than being a smarmy optimist, walking around with a happy grin while the roof’s caving in over your head … Ravening fear was my motivator at Atlantic—that ran the engine for me.”

For some time, Wexler had been gripped by “this feeling that a puff of wind could come along and blow us all away instantly. All you had to do was make a succession of flop records … It was either grow or disappear.” Sharing Wexler’s bleak prognosis, Atlantic’s third shareholder, Nesuhi Ertegun began petitioning his brother to sell, even though as Wexler remembered, “Ahmet never had those feelings, or if he did he would never yield in the way I did … Ahmet had a true courage and insouciance. You know, he’s always been a devout practising voluptuary. He really lived it—he gambled, took shots, and didn’t worry about failure.”

“I saw no reason to think that disaster was imminent,” said Ahmet Ertegun. “However, they were so intent on selling, I really didn’t have an option.” The three partners shopped around until a potential buyer appeared: Warner–Seven Arts, neither the Warner Bros. film giant of old nor the Warner conglomerate of modern times. In 1967, Warner–Seven Arts was an unhappy marriage between the ailing Hollywood giant and a film distributor. For $184 million, Jack Warner had sold out the entire Warner Bros. group, including the two record labels Warner Bros. Records and Reprise, to Eliot Hyman, owner of Seven Arts.

For Ahmet Ertegun, Hyman was “a businessman and wheeler-dealer of questionable reputation. There was nothing about Warner–Seven Arts that enchanted us.” The only remaining question was how much. “We had some Wall Street big shots come in to represent us,” explained Wexler, “and they did a horrible job. We wound up selling for about half what we should have got … We sold it for $17.5 million when it was worth $35 million … I just have a feeling that our main negotiator was of a very low order of intelligence.”