CHAPTER SEVEN
ALL THE
WRONG PARTIES
By the beginning of 1966 I was managing the Yardbirds.
Although after my first meeting with Paul Samwell-Smith I'd felt the opportunity to manage them had passed me by, he had brought the others to meet me and they'd decided I was the right person.
Their biggest hit was 'For Your Love', a great pop song, but really The Yardbirds had never been pop. They'd started out playing blues.
Georgio Gomelski, who ran the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, had planned to sign the Rolling Stones for management but at the last minute they were snatched from his grasp by Andrew Oldham. The Yardbirds were the next group to play at the club and Georgio signed them straight away. He did well for them. Under his guidance they had a hit with 'For Your Love', and a second one with 'Heart Full Of Soul'. After that he suggested they mix Gregorian chant with blues and they had a third hit with 'Evil Hearted You'. Then they made a live album with American blues singer Sonny Boy Williamson. But from all this success the group had hardly earned anything.
Georgio was extravagant in everything he did. He poured money into recording and promotion, and when the group went on tour he went with them, egging them on to eat at expensive restaurants when they would rather have had hamburgers. All this expenditure came out of their income. One time in New York, Georgio needed some cash to take someone to dinner. He went to United Artists and offered them the publishing on the next Yardbirds single for the cost of the meal - $60.
Initially the Yardbirds had included Eric Clapton on guitar, but he was a gloomy, troubled person who told people he expected to die before he was thirty. He was far too dedicated to pure blues to follow the Yardbirds into pop, so he left to form Cream and the Yardbirds replaced him with Jeff Beck. Then they decided to change their management and chose me. At the time, the Yardbirds probably knew more about the music business than I did, but I grabbed the opportunity. I also treated it with respect - this wasn't like messing around with Diane & Nicky. The Yardbirds were one of the five most important rock groups in the world - the Beatles, the Stones, the Yardbirds, the Animals and The Who.
To start with I looked at what the managers of the other top rock acts were doing for their acts.
Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp had found The Who playing in a pub on a stage made of beer crates. The singer had crossed teeth. Kit and Chris offered the group twenty pounds a week, then, in the ensuing struggle to pay their wages, they sold both furniture and clothes. Eventually, to pay for the singer's teeth to be fixed, Kit pawned some cufflinks given to him by his father, the celebrated classical composer Constant Lambert.
Initially The Who's image was all pop - music, art and fashion. Their managers told them to watch mods in the audience as they danced then recreate their steps on-stage so the next audience would think the band had originated them. Pete Townshend insisted. 'The mod image was forced on us. It was dishonest.' Nevertheless, mods seemed to hang on his every word. When 'I Can't Explain' was released, they mobbed him, saying, 'You've managed to say something in the song that we've never managed to say for ourselves.' 'But I only said "I can't explain",' Pete responded. 'That's just it,' they told him. 'That's what we find so difficult to tell people ... We can't explain!'
The truth was, the only real connection between The Who and mod culture was the group's excessive use of amphetamine. Nevertheless, when Roger Daltrey sang 'My Generation' with the stutter of a pill freak, it made The Who the figureheads of the Mod movement.
The Yardbirds were complaining of having nowhere to live. The best thing I could do for them was to get them a lump sum of money - say, £5,000 each. The only way to get that was from the record company. Their recording contract was with Georgio Gomelski, who leased their records to EMI. I decided that if the agreement for their management could be broken, so could their agreement for their recording. So I went to Len Wood, the general manager at EMI and told him the group would want £25,000 to sign a new recording contract, and that EMI could have first option, but not for long.
From EMI, I went to Jack Baverstock at Philips who offered me £10,000, the most they'd ever paid for any artist. I called EMI and said Philips had offered the full £25,000 that we needed and within an hour EMI agreed to pay the same amount. They then had to negotiate with me over the royalties about which I was now becoming something of an expert. In the end, the Yardbirds got more than the Beatles were getting.
I took 20 per cent commission, and gave the group £4,000 cash each. In those days that could buy each one of them a house, or even two. But the next problem was even more daunting - EMI wanted a new single, and it had to be a hit. If the first single they made under their new manager wasn't up to the standards of their previous ones, I would have visibly failed. The group's previous records had been produced by Georgio Gomelski. The group's bass player, Paul Samwell-Smith, told me he'd been a co-producer and from here on would like a credit to that effect. I agreed he should have it and put myself in the position of the other co-producer.
Since each of the Yardbirds' hits to date had been distinctly different from the other, I thought their new single should contain elements of all of them. Moody, monk-like chanting, exhilarating lead guitar, bluesy riffs. But having once persuaded them of that, I was in the group's hands rather than they in mine. I'd never made a record with a rock group before and was surprised at their technique of first devising a backing track, then a song. Moreover, coming from a jazz background in which lush harmonic structures were everything, it seemed strange to have Paul continually telling the others to simplify the harmonies. In the end the entire first verse was played over one single chord. But this was rock music, and I was learning.
By the time the recording was finished, I'd contributed to both the words and the structure of the song, but I felt I'd learned more about production from working with Paul Samwell-Smith than he was likely to learn about management from working with me. The single was 'Over Under Sideways Down' and once it was a hit we went on to make an album, Roger The Engineer. Apart from making occasional musical suggestions, my primary function was to keep a working relationship etween Jeff Beck, their brilliant guitarist, and the rest of the group. They were at loggerheads with him continually. Jeff was moody, brilliant and individualistic. The others thought he was insufficiently part of a team. I was too inexperienced to know which of them was right but brilliance was the more attractive quality, so I sided with Jeff.
If that was my first mistake, I soon made another one. Paul Samwell-Smith said he was tired of touring with the group and would soon want to quit. I didn't know that a manager's primary function was to keep the group together, so I told him to let me know when he was ready. But Paul was the primary musical influence in the group and in my opinion the only musician on a par with Jeff Beck. Letting him go would signal the eventual break-up of the group.
Meanwhile, the money I made from the group's live gigs compensated for putting up with the endless disputes between Jeff and the others. In the UK, The Yardbirds went out for about the same price as the Animals or The Who - £350 a night. This compared with £450 for the Stones, and around £1,000 for the Beatles. We were members of a cozy club of five or six top groups, and everyone did nicely - particularly the agents who took 10 per cent for nothing more than telling their secretaries to accept all offers and fill the group's diary.
On an equal level to the Yardbirds were the Animals. They came from Newcastle and had a singer called Eric Burdon. Eric was into sex with eggs and particularly liked egg orgies. John Lennon met him at one and shouted encouragement. 'Go on - go get it, Eggman ... I've been there already, it's nice.' Later, John used the phrase 'eggman' in 'I Am The Walrus'.
On tour with the Animals, Eric Burdon became fascinated by the differences between girls of one area and another. 'There is a certain kind of female that populates the Arizona area. They are usually brown-skinned, blue-eyed blonde, healthy-looking girls, all apple pie and American flag. Excitable and very desirable, but when they are 15,000 strong and 15 years of age, as the braces on their teeth flash, and wet knickers and jelly babies begin to fall on the stage, they can be a dangerous breed.'Many of the healthy American girls Eric described became dedicated groupies. Gangs of them went hunting together - 'trophy fucking' - keeping a list of everyone they made out with. One gang grabbed British rock stars in hotel lobbies and whisked them upstairs to make plaster casts of their erect penises. Their leader was Cynthia Plastercaster. 'I was horny, I was a virgin and I was very shy. I needed a way to get men's pants down.'
Touring America was what rock music was all about. Groups loved it, and so did the record companies - the group was away, they were busy, they were promoting record sales, and there was a constant supply of free tickets for the record company to give to DJs, radio-programmers and TV producers, building up favours for the future. Everyone liked touring. The manager got 20 per cent, the agent took 10 per cent, the promoter took half the box-office, and the publisher got a share of the performance money. Meanwhile, the artists got love from the audience, sex from the groupies and extrasensory experiences from drugs.
When I went to the States to set up a tour for the Yardbirds the first person I spoke to at the record company was a promotions man who told me, 'This ain't England, kid. In the States we got 7,000 radio stations to be bribed each time a record's released. That's a lotta cocaine!'
In America, there were other complications too. When an artist with an Italian name or background made it big, their management would be made an offer they couldn't refuse by one of the mafia-controlled entertainment agencies. And though British artists were safe from such things, it was just as well to be aware of how the business worked. Thirty years later, Wall Street journalist Frederic Damien would write: There's corruption in just about every business, but I've never seen it anything like the level of the record business. I've covered the coal business, insurance, investment banking, the chemical industry, and trucking; and although they all have roguish elements, they're nothing like the record business, which to my way of thinking is no business at all. I don't know how to describe it except as some sort of cartel.
That was in the 1990s. In the sixties it was even worse. In America you had to step more carefully than in Britain. The man at the top of your record company might produce a ghastly blue-rinsed wife to whom he expected you to be nice. It was best not to offend her, because her husband would also be the friend of several mafia bosses - in America no-one at the top of a major company could do his job properly if he was unable to deal with gangsters. Even so, every British artist wanted to make it there. First there was the prestige of taking popular music back to its roots, and secondly there were the groupies. American singer Joan Baez did a show with the Beatles and stayed at the same hotel. 'These poor little girls, just sitting downstairs waiting to see whether they were gonna be picked up by somebody. They don't talk ... They just sit there in these little outfits that they've worked on for months, waiting for this thing to happen. And eventually a Beatle will come by and pick one of them, dragging her off to his lair.'
For British record companies, the size of the American market meant money on a scale impossible to contemplate in the UK. For artists, it offered more sex and more drugs. Most groups considered touring the USA to be the principal reason for being in the music business. And that went for most of their managers too.
Like other managers, I soon decided taxis were a thing of the past - only limos would do, and soon it became stretch limos. Then I discovered hotel suites, and from there it was only a small step to the best suites - the Presidential, the George Washington, the Suite on the Park - that sort of thing. After that, it was only a matter of getting used to dining at the Four Seasons and America had you hooked. Of course, this was all quite a drain on the budget which in turn meant the group had to stay there longer to earn enough to cover the costs. On top of this, groups had their drugs to pay for.
One Saturday morning I sat in the lobby of New York's Warwick Hotel with the manager of another British rock group. We watched as well-to-do parents arrived, one after another, with schoolgirl daughters. The girls would be given five minutes to go upstairs and get their idols' autographs. Five minutes would become an hour. Then they would reappear, jabbering with excitement, their faces aglow. The group's manager told me, 'They each get a joint to smoke, and some speed, that's why they come back so happy. It's like a conveyor belt up there - drugs and sex, drugs and sex. The parents haven't got a clue.'
'Don't you feel responsible?' I asked.
He shrugged. 'Groups don't hire managers to moralise about their private lives.'
It was no secret, most of the best managers were gay.
An upper middle-class public school background was still the principal key to success for the behind-the-scenes people in the music business, including managers. Record company executives were nearly all of that background and found difficulty in communicating with the new generation of young artists. However, young men in their early twenties with a public school education plus a modicum of unconventionality could cross the divide between the two cultures. And the most frequently found 'modicum of unconventionality' was a touch of homosexuality.
As well as Brian Epstein with the Beatles, there was Kit Lambert with The Who, Tony Stratton-Smith with The Nice, Ken Pitt with Crispian St Peters, Robert Stigwood with Cream, Vic Billings with Dusty Springfield, Ken Howard and Allan Blaikely with Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Titch, me with the Yardbirds, and Andrew Oldham with the Rolling Stones (except on the days when he preferred to be straight, playing gangsters, threatening people with a beating from his tough-looking chauffeur, who of course was gay).
If being a popstar was going to be fun - if there was going to be sex and booze and pills and pot - perhaps these gay managers were the perfect choice. 'In London at the time,' noted Marianne Faithfull, 'there was a great honouring of the homosexual side of life ... It was just in the air everywhere.'
And so were drugs.
Although Larry Parnes had unwittingly presided over a stable of pot-smoking rock 'n' rollers, he himself had shown a puritan streak with regard to such substances. His successors showed no such inhibitions. If their sexuality was going to put these gay managers on the wrong side of the law, why shouldn't they go a stage further and indulge in recreational drugs as well? At the very least, they had no objections if their artists chose to do so.
Pete Townshend enjoyed having a gay manager. 'Gays were different. They didn't behave like other adults; they were scornful of conventional behaviour; they mixed more easily with young people, and seemed to understand them.'
It was gay managers, and their friends in fashion and media, who were chiefly responsible for creating the image of British youth culture that was being sold around the world. But as artists gained more power, they became increasingly more difficult. Managers found that their principal job had changed. It was no longer to build an artist's image, it was to mediate with the record company. Managers had become the link between self-centred, self-indulgent artists and insensitive, profit-driven corporations.
Personally, I found the job to be classically two-faced. The manager had to instigate promotion and touring plans that would gain the approval of both sides. I sometimes sat in record company meetings disagreeing only very moderately with their plans before heading back to the artist and pretending that what had been planned came mainly from my suggestions and had been pushed through despite record company opposition. To be a mediator required a certain subtlety of background. Gay managers seemed to be the best at it. Most of them had got used to playing a two-faced game between the straight world and their own. Jewish managers were also excellent, many of them having played the same double game since they were schoolkids. ((Missing part))
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