‘Look,’ he shouted with bulging eyes, his face reddening. ‘You have a contract. You signed it, and that’s it! If you try to hire a lawyer to get out of it, you might just find yourselves unable to walk.’
The Faces knew Arden didn’t make empty threats. He was a thug; he had guns and Billy clubs. He worked with a network of criminals, and there were stories of members of his team holding disgruntled musicians upside-down from open windows, the vice grip of the mob being the only thing preventing gravity from sending them into a death plunge.
But Patrick and Don like us, we thought. They wouldn’t mess with us. We soon learned how wrong we were.
When we signed with Columbia in the US, we were promised a $150,000 advance for Three Friends. When we finished recording Octopus and still hadn’t received the money, we wondered if we had missed something. Columbia was a good company, and they did a good job supporting us. In fact, the label’s president, Clive Davis, introduced us at one of his huge, weekly meetings. Everyone from the company was sitting at a huge table, and Clive called us ‘the big new UK thing.’ We felt like a goldfish that had jumped out of the bowl. We cowered in the corner of the room as thirty-six industry guys in suits mentally gauged our worth to the company. We couldn’t wait to get out of there.
Clearly, Columbia expected big things. When Three Friends reached only #197 on the US album charts, our product manager told Phil that we needed to up our game on the next album. If he had stopped there, we might have been none the wiser, but then he added, ‘We paid you a lot of money, and it would be great to see that it was worth spending that on you.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Phil said.
‘The $150,000 we paid you when you signed,’ said the label guy.
‘No fucking way! We never saw the money!’
Phil told me about the conversation, and I knew right away that something smelled sour. If we had been paid a hundred and fifty grand, we wouldn’t have been operating under such a tight budget. Phil had house payments. There were crew guys on salary, and any spare money we made went back into the band. After we returned from the States, Phil and I confronted the management, and we were told that the entire advance had gone on tour expenses. That didn’t make sense. We had guarantees for all the Sabbath shows that were canceled, and all the other tours were great for us. Venues were packed, we sold lots of merch, and our earnings were far outweighed our expenses.
Phil hunted down the paper trail and gathered evidence that showed that not only were we owed the full $150,000 from the signing advance, but other payments we got weren’t as much as we were owed—and some never arrived. The more we dug into the paperwork, the more we realized that Worldwide was stealing from us.
That was disturbing for obvious reasons, but we knew we had to handle the situation with kid gloves. Worldwide had made it clear that they liked us and our music, and we didn’t want that to change in any way. At the same time, we weren’t going to roll over while we were getting screwed. As problematic as our contract was, we soon found it was far more equitable than the legal papers that had been drawn up for our friends in The Groundhogs and especially Black Sabbath. Our tour manager, David Hemmings, who worked for WWA and managed the emerging Judas Priest, spilled the beans about how badly every band was being treated. Several weeks later, we heard he had ‘committed suicide.’
We scheduled a closed-door meeting with Patrick Meehan Sr. and his son, Patrick Meehan Jr., Sabbath’s product manager, and some other people from the company. We wanted to make sure Black Sabbath were there. Our contract was one-sided, but Sabbath’s deal was so bad it reverted ownership of anything Black Sabbath had to Worldwide Artists, much as Arden had done with The Small Faces. Only, Sabbath were earning far more money for Worldwide Artists than practically all of their other bands combined, and WWA needed to hold onto their prized livestock. Black Sabbath thought their managers were encouraging them to act like rock stars to help them live out their fantasies while everyone got rich. In reality, the management were distracting Sabbath so they could steal everything from them. Sabbath were snow-blind. The showers of cocaine and groupies were tantalizing, but they were merely distractions. With groupies reaching into the front of their pants, the band members would never feel the hands of management removing their wallets from their back pockets.
I was the one who told the guys in Sabbath that their contracts were worthless and that they needed to attend this urgent meeting if they wanted any chance of renegotiating their deal. At first, they were skeptical, especially Ozzy, but I was able to convince them that they were not rich rock stars and that they owned nothing. The management contracts they had signed made Worldwide Artists the custodians and owners of Black Sabbath’s houses, cars, boats, bank accounts—everything they were permitted to use. They were devastated. All they had left was a meeting to attend to try to hold onto a fraction of their earnings.
Gentle Giant met with WWA to discuss our issues first, and as we opened the doors to the office, we were terrified. It felt like entering the lion’s den at feeding time. We hoped that speaking out would get them to pay us what we were owed or agree to invalidate our contract. We were their first band to realize we were being fucked and say, ‘We want out.’ But even though we were livid, we walked into the meeting calmly and rationally, determined not to lose our tempers.
‘Thanks for meeting with us,’ I said to Patrick. ‘Now, what’s that deal you got us at Columbia? Because we’re not seeing any money from it.’
‘Well, yeah, it’s in an account for you. Don’t worry about it.’
‘What account?’ I shot back.
‘It’s fine. It’ll be there.’
He smiled through gritted teeth, and we could tell he was lying. There wasn’t a whole lot we could do, but because the Krays liked us, they had convinced Arden and Meehan not to completely fleece us. As outrageous as it seems today, in the 60s and 70s, so many bands went through this kind of thing at the beginning of their career that it was almost accepted in the industry as a rite of passage. You paid your dues by getting fucked over.
I had always naively thought that we were smarter than everyone else, and maybe that’s why Patrick Meehan didn’t treat us as badly as his other acts. I thought he respected our intelligence and our intelligent music, and I swore I never would have signed a horrible record contract. Then, much later in my life, I looked back at our old contract and saw how dismal it was. We owned a mere four percent of our album sales, which is minuscule even for a new band. And there was my signature on the page. We were suckered into the swindle, just like everyone else.
We figured there might be strength in numbers, and that if the other WWA bands were aligned with us, maybe we’d all get out of the situation with unbroken kneecaps and a few quid. The second meeting was the one that tore the band-aid off our relationship with Worldwide Artists. This was the game-changer attended by us, Black Sabbath, and The Groundhogs. Phil and I were able to show them that our receipts didn’t add up to what we were owed. Patrick glanced them over, begrudgingly copped to an accounting error, and promised to pay us back some of the money—but not the $150,000, which he still insisted had already been spent on us.