Having spoken with numerous insiders, I found out that Doug Morris, who had been President of Atlantic Records since 1980, was having a run of bad luck and was scared shitless of me coming in and taking over the company, which I had zero interest in doing. He didn’t know that, and even if I told him, he wouldn’t have believed me. He came from the cutthroat world of high-stakes business, where employees routinely stabbed one another in the back to get ahead. I have always found that kind of duplicity pathetic. It takes far more courage to be a team player than a saboteur.
I had another meeting with Steve Ross.
‘So, how did it go with Ahmet Ertegun?’ he asked me.
‘I’ll say one thing. He’s a real character.’
‘Yes. Yes, he is,’ agreed Ross. He had one more shot at seducing me to join Atlantic. ‘Honestly, though,’ Steve said. ‘I think this could be the place for you. You won’t have to answer to Ahmet. You don’t even have to see him if you don’t want to. And this is Warner Music. You’ll have the weight of Warner, Elektra, and Atlantic behind you. You can build your own team, and you’re the perfect person to revive ATCO Records and turn it into something great.’
ATCO was founded in 1955 and had released albums by Bobby Darin, The Coasters, Sonny & Cher, Buffalo Springfield, Vanilla Fudge, Pete Townshend, and many others before becoming a mostly dormant Atlantic offshoot. Steve Ross wanted to revive it as a competitive rock label. I liked the idea of being a part of the Warner Music family, which had great acts and lots of cache, and I was impressed that Steve wasn’t trying to sweeten the deal with fringe benefits. During a silent moment in our meeting, I pointed under his desk at a basket of promotional goodie bags that each contained a straw doll, a rattle, and some candies.
‘What are those for?’ I asked.
‘We have a retreat in Jamaica, and we hand out these dollar souvenirs to people when they come in. Do you want one?’
As bizarre as it sounds, that little gesture of offering me a one-dollar doll made a huge difference in my perspective. Steve wasn’t offering me babes and blow, private jets, or a key to the executive washroom. He was asking if I would like a silly little doll. He didn’t say, ‘Oh, take the whole basket.’ He wasn’t treating me like an executive he wanted to win over—more like a dad he bumped into who might want a little knick-knack for his kids. That was enough for me to decide I would accept the ATCO job. As long as I was answering to Steve, who seemed to get me and my ‘non-rockisms,’ this Warner Music Group family was right for me. So, that was it. They offered me a joint venture contract, which was unbelievable from a business standpoint, and we signed the deal.
I gave my notice at PolyGram, went over to 75 Rockefeller Center, and started putting a team together. I needed to make sure everyone at the label was like-minded so we wouldn’t have anyone with conflicting interests or agendas. The people I liked working with best at PolyGram weren’t egomaniacs or hedonists, they were music lovers who wanted to be part of a creative team. I knew I had to build the team quickly and start signing artists that would make a dent right away because Warner Music Group had poured a lot of money into ATCO’s resurrection. I had to perform, and the pressure was on.
I brought in some great people I had worked with at PolyGram. Harry Palmer, who was the head of marketing, became my General Manager, and Ted Green became my head of business affairs. I also brought over some marketing people I trusted, and I hired a guy from Chicago named Craig Lambert, who was at Capitol when Gentle Giant were on the label. He was a total whack-job, tall and crazy, but he had so much energy. And more to the point, he got Gentle Giant on the radio in Chicago at a time when getting our music airplay was next to impossible.
Some of my industry friends told me I might want to think twice about Craig, telling me he was a bit of a loony, but I thought a loony would work at the kind of asylum I wanted to run. The only problem was that I had to lure him over from Capitol, and as far as I knew he was happy there. I called him up.
‘Craig, I don’t know if you remember me, but I was a PolyGram for …’
‘You’re in Gentle Giant!’ Craig interjected.
‘Right. We broke up ten years ago and I became the vice president for PolyGram and now I’m at ATCO, which is part of the Warner Records family,’ I said. We’re looking for a radio promotions …’
‘Wow, yeah, I’d love to work for you!’ he enthused.
It was a done deal. I had my team. Now it was time to let the lunatics do their thing. I told Harry, Ted, and Craig to hire the people they wanted to work with and that they didn’t need to run them by me first. That was the secret. I knew I had to delegate, but I didn’t want to manage. I wanted ATCO to be a team that could pursue a joint vision and celebrate our success together. Now it was time to sign some artists.
CHAPTER
TWENTY
BLACK-TOOTHED
GRIN
One day toward the end of my tenure at PolyGram, I was talking to a little-known lawyer out of New York named Jules Kurtz. He was working with a band from Texas called Pantera, and he was contacting every label around to try to help them get a deal. He showed me a videotape of a live show that they’d shot soon after they hired their new vocalist, Philip Anselmo. After checking it out, I compared it to one of the three albums they had self-released with their previous singer, Terry Glaze, and the new guy was a huge improvement. I found out he had been doing shows with the band since 1986, and he was on their latest self-released record, 1988’s Power Metal, which was a huge development and far heavier than their previous releases.
I was familiar with Pantera as I had seen their name in fanzines and on flyers when I was living in Texas. There was a big buzz about them around Dallas, and their guitarist Diamond Darrell (who would change his name to Dimebag a few years later) was being called a cross between Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen. They played shows all the time, but no record company would touch them.
‘Jules, I’m really interested in this band,’ I told him, shortly before I exited PolyGram. ‘But please don’t tell anyone because I’m moving labels, and I’d like to at least see if I could do something with them.’
I felt in my gut that Pantera had the potential to be a huge metal band, and I thought I could make them a priority at ATCO the way Bon Jovi had been at PolyGram. At the same time, I didn’t want to hold up their career while I was putting the label together. I told Jules not to wait for me if he got another offer, but that once I was on staff at my new job, I wanted to look closely at Pantera and see if I could make them work with the rest of my roster. Strangely, however, I might never have gotten around to signing them if my new boss hadn’t asked if I would hire his son to work for me.
This wasn’t a condition of me getting the job, it was a favor that Steve asked for, and I was happy to help out. Mark Ross wanted to be an A&R man, so I met with him and immediately found him to be smart, knowledgeable, and friendly. He had already worked in various capacities at Warner Music Group, but since he was Steve’s son, no one took him seriously. They thought he was only working in music because of his dad, or that he was a spy sent to make sure everyone he worked with was loyal to the company. It was a shitty position for him to be in.
‘Mark, I don’t give a damn who your father is,’ I told him during our meeting. ‘I’d like to hire you, and if you work hard and things go well, we all win. But I’m not going to give you any special treatment.’