Kingdom Come came out and went gold that same week. However, our calculated tactics were problematic for the band. Lenny was a prideful creature who was melodramatic on the surface yet insecure deep down. He didn’t want to appeal to us for guidance, and he didn’t understand what he needed to do to get people to align themselves with him. Everyone compared Kingdom Come to Led Zeppelin, which caused a backlash. Lenny could have dealt with it by telling the press he was influenced by Zep—he loved them, and he was flattered that his band was being compared to the legends. That would have ended most of the media snark right away. But he didn’t do that. He became defensive and insisted that Kingdom Come weren’t trying to be anyone but themselves. He threatened to shut the band down and became abusive whenever anyone asked him about Led Zeppelin. The press fed off the negativity, became even more spiteful, and left Kingdom Come facing an uphill battle. The first album was still getting strong airplay when they toured, and they landed an opening slot on a great bill, the 1988 Monsters Of Rock package tour that also featured Metallica, Dokken, Scorpions, and Van Halen. Kingdom Come’s second album, In Your Face, came out in 1989, after I had left PolyGram. It had some decent songs and was initially well-received, but the band broke up before heading out on tour.
Although I was never a huge metal fan, I had my greatest success at PolyGram signing hard rock and metal bands. Those weren’t the only kind of artists I worked with, however. I also signed Dexys Midnight Runners to the label and pulled a 180 by bringing the quirky Montreal new-wave band Men Without Hats into the PolyGram family for their third album. The group had a huge, wacky hit in 1982 with the synth-pop novelty ‘The Safety Dance.’ By 1986, they were out of the mass public’s consciousness, but they were silly and fun, and I liked them. One day, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Ivan Doroschuk brought a bunch of demos to me. One of them had a quirky instrumental keyboard riff, which I loved. But that’s all it was. It was called ‘Pop Goes The World,’ and, as with Cinderella, I suggested to Ivan that we work on the song together to turn it into something special.
I thought he might be resistant until he told me he was a massive Gentle Giant fan and was excited to co-write with me. I wanted the song to be silly and funny but also have commercial appeal. Without dampening the joyous main hook, I added a structured verse, and we worked it into the fun part, which became the instrumental chorus.
‘Pop Goes The World’ became the title track of the band’s third album, and it revived their career, going platinum in Canada and hitting the Top 20 in the US. The single had a long life, reaching #1 in Austria, #2 in Canada, and #3 in South Africa. Again, I received no songwriting props, but helping out a fan of my former band was its own reward.
During this time I was hyper-focused and working around the clock on this new career. I was incredibly lucky that Sharon and my kids supported me, but there were more than a few times when my anxiety peaked and I wondered whether I was abandoning my family as my father had done. When I brought up my fears with Sharon, she talked me down and said I was ensuring the security of the family, not cavorting all night with my drinking buddies. We bought a bigger apartment close to where we were living, and I was able to purchase a weekend cottage in Putnam County, where the whole family could be together away from the city.
By the time my contract at PolyGram was nearing the end of its term, I was in demand as an executive. I had discovered and signed three of the biggest rock acts on the label and risen to the role of senior vice president. Now, I decided, it was time to run a label. Instead of directing the guy steering the ship, I wanted to be the captain behind the wheel. I scheduled a meeting with my attorney, Nick Gordon, to discuss my options before I made my wishes known to the company.
‘I want to make it absolutely clear that your contract is ending. So, why don’t you see what the folks who sign the paychecks want to do?’ he suggested. ‘I bet they offer you a blank check and let you fill in the amount.’
It wasn’t a farfetched notion. I was riding one hell of a winning streak. I had signed Bon Jovi, Cinderella, Kingdom Come, and Dan Reed Network, as well as rebooting the careers of Men Without Hats and, to a lesser extent, Uriah Heep. But at PolyGram, I had climbed as high as I was going to get. They could have made me an executive, but I wanted to go somewhere that could give me the kind of autonomy that didn’t exist in a company where everyone had to confer with a committee of departments staffed by people with their own agendas.
PolyGram offered to make me the president of Mercury Records, which the group had obtained in an umbrella deal along with Phillips and Phonogram. It would be a European and US-based company that I would run, but in effect, it would be more of the same, since I would still have to report to other people, and after my seven-year apprenticeship with PolyGram, I wanted to launch a new venture.
I let it slip in the right circles that I wanted to run a new company in a new way. As I expected, big-time label heads who had seen how successful I was at PolyGram wanted to charm me into working for their companies. They asked me to join them for meals at five-star restaurants, accompany them on first-class flights to visit their European offices, or take a weekend to visit satellite offices in exotic foreign lands. I knew I was hot shit, but it was funny how much everyone bent over backward to bring me on their team when, a decade earlier, I had had to struggle, compromise, and practically beg to get Gentle Giant a deal with a label with staffers who thought outside the box. I was still a square peg, and I wanted to find the right round hole to squeeze through.
David Geffen, who I have great respect for, flew me to LA to meet with him. He was a convincing, powerful leader and a straight shooter with a finely tuned bullshit meter and amazing ears. The first thing he told me when we sat down was that if I came over to Geffen, I would work closely with John Kalodner, who was one of the best A&R guys in the business, having signed deals with Aerosmith, White Zombie, Madness, XTC, Jimmy Page, Whitesnake, Nelson, Damn Yankees, and others. David added that he was also working with Tom Zutaut, who signed Mötley Crüe, Guns N’ Roses, and others. Knowing how I wanted to run my own company, he told me he could offer me a splinter label and I could hire anyone I wanted to work with. David was even-keeled and persuasive. I met with him three times, and he always shuttled me around in limos, put me in the best hotels, and even offered me a piece of the company, which was extremely tempting. I told him I would let him know, while continuing to explore other offers.
I sat down for several meetings with Tommy Mottola, the US head of CBS Records. As established as the company was, and as much as it had to offer me, the world Tommy and his staffers inhabited was almost as foreign to me as the comedy of Yakov Smirnoff. The company executives were all dressed to the nines and acted like support characters in The Godfather. I guess they were too busy cow-towing to the boss to learn anything about me; when I sat down with them, only one of them knew who I was or what I had done. It was surreal to me that none of them knew anything about Gentle Giant, who ironically had released three albums on Columbia. Nonetheless, the label had big guns and made an enticing offer. Tommy said I could take over Epic or Portrait Records, the former of which had a great history.
My next meeting was with Tommy, CBS Records president and CEO Walter Yetnikoff, and Don Ienner, the president and future chairman of Columbia. There were big lunch spreads in the upstairs executive suite. We didn’t talk music. Their biggest pitch was, ‘Look, you know, we’ll give you a huge salary.’ It was fascinating to see how hard all these top executives tried to woo me, and it was good for my ego to take these meetings and hear what they had to offer. What amazed and baffled me was how many times I was offered the finest cocaine—as much as I wanted—and beautiful escorts to serve my every desire. More than one exec would tell me, ‘Blow and babes. They’re all yours.’ They were that up front. I was laughing about it because it was so absurd to me, but they were serious. This huge international corporation wasn’t even subtle or discreet about telling me that cocaine and prostitutes were fringe benefits of working at Columbia …