The situation was exacerbated by timing. I had just experienced an incredible high and then come back to a soul-ripping low. I still had time left on my contract, so we wrangled around different ideas, but none of them involved keeping ATCO going on my terms with my staff, so I refused everything. The imprint was worth about a hundred million dollars, and I owned a piece of it. I had signed a joint-venture deal. I could have fought them for the money I was owed. Instead, I used the leverage I had to justify my exit as an executive and prepare for my future.
‘I don’t give a shit about any other label, and if you want to keep me from going elsewhere, you better come up with a deal I can stomach.’
I stayed on for a year in a diminished capacity under Irving Azoff and kept my salary. I still made money, but it was a low point in my career. I put together a small staff and kept showing up at the office every day. I was going through the motions, acting like a record guy but feeling like a fucked-over artist. I was, as my brother Phil would have put it, licking the ass that fed me, acquiring the taste until I couldn’t stand it anymore.
That year, Warner Music Group went through more shakeups that splintered more labels and left former peers without jobs. I had no more fight left. I kept playing my role and cashing my checks. One morning, I looked at myself in the mirror as I was getting ready for work. I was clean-shaven, wearing an expensive suit, and about to scurry to the office like a corporate pawn.
‘Who is that guy?’ I said with a frown, poking the mirror where it reflected my chin.
Later that day, I was sitting in the office with Harry Palmer, who was now the general manager of ATCO. The radio was on, and I was listening to a poppy love song with a syncopated beat, buoyant horns, and sugary female vocals.
‘I’ve heard this before,’ I said. ‘I like it. Harry, do you know who this is?’
He chuckled, looked at me like I was joking, and went back to scrolling through a spreadsheet.
‘No, I’m serious,’ I said. ‘Who is this? It’s catchy.’
‘What are you talking about?’ replied Harry. ‘It’s “Sincerely Yours” by Sweet Sensation. We signed them, and it was a big hit. It’s ours.’
This was an epiphany as poignant as the moment when I decided I couldn’t be Simon Dupree anymore. Okay, I thought, I’m doing it wrong. This is not who I am. I’m not good at this anymore, and I don’t even care. This music is not for me, and maybe it never was.
It was the first real wake-up call for me since Doug Morris pointed to a sales chart and showed me what was important to him. Not the music, the sales. And now I had learned the hard way that he would threaten and intimidate people into doing his dirty work so that his job remained safe.
The corporate game was over. Much of the old guard was gone, anyway, so I worked out a deal where I would be taken care of for the eighteen months that were left in my contract and left the company. I was still financially secure. Mentally, I was broken.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
LEADER
OF MEN
After riding out my contract with Warner Bros, I took six months off to figure out what I wanted to do next. The taste in my mouth on my last day at work was like sour bile. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to stay in the music, but if I did, it sure wouldn’t be in a cutthroat corporate environment where artists were only as important as the number of records they sold.
I took a couple of business meetings, including one with Columbia. They were still very interested in having me work for the company, but it was the same team that offered me hookers and blow, and I took that as a warning sign that I should stay out of the corporate world. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Everyone in the music business knew about the fragmentation of ATCO and my subsequent departure, so I wasn’t surprised that people kept checking to see if I was looking for another job. I ignored most of them, but one that interested me was from Cees Wessels. I had known Cees from when he worked in marketing at RCA and I was at PolyGram. He seemed like an interesting guy. I had heard that he’d moved back home to Holland and started an indie metal label, Roadrunner, and I was curious about an operatic, face-painted metal artist he signed named King Diamond, who was originally in the popular Danish black-metal band Mercyful Fate. There was a time when I’d considered bringing King Diamond over to PolyGram. At the time, Cees was calling the company RoadRacer after receiving a cease-and-desist from Warner Bros, whose cartoon friend of Bugs Bunny took exception to a label stealing his name. When enough money (or ACME TNT) exchanged hands, Cees regained the name Roadrunner. I was aware Roadrunner had risen to some recognition in the underground, but I hadn’t kept track of any of the bands.
When Cees called and asked if I would meet with him, I was determined not to go back to being a major label executive. But Roadrunner was an indie label with respectable clients, so I agreed to get together. I didn’t realize he lived only a few blocks away from me on the Upper West Side. We met for dinner and talked shop for a bit. He told me about the history of Roadrunner, and we discussed his plans to expand the company. He was already working with a sharp A&R guy named Monte Connor, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of metal and had signed underground bands including Death, Deicide, and Obituary during the heyday of the Florida death-metal scene. He also signed the Brazilian thrash titans Sepultura, who went on to solid success at Columbia, and the artsy, gothic doom-metal band Type O Negative—the first act on the label to go platinum. Cees wanted to develop the label beyond metal and sign a more diverse and hopefully lucrative roster. While he wanted to remain independent, he was intent on signing acts to compete with the major labels. He started by buying a hip-hop label in Atlanta called Power Records and a dance label called Next Plateau, and he was recruiting electronic dance groups and new wave bands to other imprints. His intentions were good, but he lacked the musical savvy to make sure he was signing promising and profitable acts.
‘We don’t have a proper setup,’ he admitted. ‘Would you be interested in overseeing everything?’
‘What do you have in mind?’ I asked.
‘I want you to run everything and make sure we have bands that will make money.’
I followed him back to the office to take a look at the place and the people who worked there and I immediately noticed a huge difference between the Roadrunner staff and the employees of Warner Music Group. Roadrunner’s team wasn’t made up of business-school majors and communications graduates moving product. They all seemed like they had worked for college radio stations or mom-and-pop record stores. They loved what they did and they lived for the music they promoted. They were dedicated, knowledgeable music fans, and when they weren’t in the office they were at shows or hanging out elsewhere with their artists and co-workers. I thought these would be great people to work with and oversee. At the same time, I noticed they were predominantly rock fans, yet they were also working with hip-hop and dance acts they didn’t quite understand because they weren’t part of that culture.
‘Well, Cees,’ I said. ‘You’ve got the makings of a great company here. But if you want me to be involved, the first thing I’ve got to do, unfortunately, is to undo some of the things you’ve done.’
I told Cees that I felt the company could do really well, but that they were trying to tackle more than they could wrap their arms around and spreading themselves too thin. To make it work, Roadrunner had to get rid of all the other genres he had put money into—namely, hip-hop and dance music—and be really, really good at one thing. This was going to be a bit unpleasant for me, since the founder of Next Plateau, Eddie O’Laughlin, was a good friend and a talented label guy who’d signed Salt-N-Pepa in 1987. I’d have to tell him that Roadrunner was shedding everything hip-hop or dance-related, including Salt-N-Pepa, and focusing exclusively on rock and metal.