Did it work?
Of course it did.
Within a few weeks, the place in the Village was packed, every seat filled, and the patrons three deep at the bar.
"Okay," I said, "now let us see what we can do about this seventy dollars a night nonsense."
John had cut a record for RCA. This was part of his long-term contract. He had already made Rhymes and Reasons and Take Me to Tomorrow. This was all before I got there-pre-Jerry. The new record was called Poems, Prayers and Promises. It had one obvious hit: "Take Me Home, Country Roads." But the challenge was the same as always: get people to hear it, to recognize it as a hit. This mirrors the greater challenge of the talent manager. I did not invent John Denver. I did not write his hits, or create anything that was not there before I arrived. No manager does that. As I tell aspiring agents and managers, remember where the engine lies: with the artist. If the artist makes nothing, I have nothing to sell. It's as simple as that.
It's best, when selling something new, to envision the goal-let the entire world hear John Denver-then work your way back. How do we get there? Now and then, it happens by itself. This is a matter of luck, zeitgeist. More often, you have to be creative, crabwalk your way. Once the new record was released, I sent John on a tour of the biggest radio stations in the country. He would turn up by himself, with his song and his guitar, as if he just stumbled out of the mountains.
You have to remember what John looked like back then. He was simple and blond with the bangs and the glasses. This was the early seventies, when everyone was looking for his own Jimmy Carter, a man he could trust. John, with his apple-pie face, was perfectly cast. He came to hate this, but he was lucky. He had just what the market was demanding. It was his trademark, as the blue suede shoes and pompadour trademarked Elvis. It was his thing. You can evolve and grow but you should never resent your thing. If you look at how few artists actually make it, you will recognize that those trademarks, though in some ways limiting, are a gift of providence. John would show up with his pageboy and all-American smile and say, "Hi, I'm John Denver. I would like to play a song for you." And bang, he was on the air.
At times, I used my other clients to break John. Fame is a private party. You can dazzle your way in with talent, or you can be vouched for. How far this can be carried depends entirely on who is doing the vouching. If it's Frankie Valli, okay, maybe. But if it's Sinatra? I arranged for John to cross paths with Elvis on the road. They went to radio stations, or Elvis mentioned one of John's songs. I had learned something important from the incident of the unsold scarves. A mention by Elvis was the same as a multimillion-dollar ad campaign.
I had Sinatra talk about John, hook up with John, be seen with John. You might think of Sinatra and Denver as a mismatch (like Weintraub and Denver; like martinis and moon-shine) but everything blurred in the seventies-this is when Sinatra recorded "(It's Not Easy) Bein' Green." It was an odd moment, and yet another lesson for producers and managers: know your age, sing its songs. If you cross-breed the Elvis audience with the Sinatra audience, you get the great big everyone the Colonel spent his life chasing. We were not interested in niche marketing, or in targeting a selected demographic: We wanted them all.
Soon after its release, "Country Roads" was dominating the charts. You could not turn on your radio without hearing it.
The song, the tour, the public appearances-these were means to an end, which was not merely to have a hit, but to turn John into a star: not a star in prospect, but a star now and yesterday, someone who has already happened, so accomplished it's no longer up for debate. It's why I did not present John Denver as an exciting find, or as someone who had recently been playing to an empty house in Greenwich Village, but as talent that had already made it, an accomplished fact. I sold him in the past tense, as someone you've known about for years. I was telling the audience to relax and enjoy, as the judgment has already been made. You love him! In this way, we skipped several steps, jumping directly from the early days of struggle to the golden years.
I bought every billboard on Sunset Boulevard from Bel Air to Hollywood. On each, I put a different picture of John, a different posture, a different mood. You could not drive to work without being bombarded. He was all over the place. By the time you heard his song, you already knew him. I met with executives at RCA. They wanted to cut a follow-up to Poems, Prayers and Promises. I convinced them to do a greatest-hits album, which was amazing, considering John only had one hit. This is what I mean by selling John as if he were already a star. They paid us a million dollars for the record-a huge sum in those days. It came out in 1977, went straight to the top of the charts, and stayed there.
We branched out from there, transitioning John to TV. Within a few years, he was almost as well known for his work on the small screen as he was for his songs. He made his first appearance on The Tonight Show in 1972. I was friends with Johnny Carson and hooked them up at a party at my house in Beverly Hills. John became a regular on The Tonight Show, appearing again and again. America was still one market, and Carson stood at the center of it-it's hard to explain just what a big deal that show was. Then, one summer, when Carson went on vacation, the producer asked John to fill in as guest host. It was a milestone for any entertainer-like the moment the mob takes you into a basement with the wood paneling and makes you swear loyalty over a book. You're a made man after that, untouchable.
In 1974, I signed a deal with ABC under which John would do five guest spots on various network shows, getting paid $2,500 an appearance. In the end, ABC only used him once, in a Chevy Special, then called and canceled the rest of the contract. In other words, they dropped him. Four weeks later, "Country Roads" hit. A few weeks after that, I signed a new deal with ABC, under which he would be paid $350,000 an appearance. Remember, when I found John, he was playing in the Village for seventy bucks a night. What happened to him, the way he blew up, was amazing.
John understood all this, and appreciated it. He paid me a fortune. There were many years in which I made ten, twelve million with John. But for me, the money was a by-product of what was a labor of love. I had many clients, some of them bigger than John-Elvis and Frank, Neil Diamond, Bob Dylan-but John and I were very close. Because I broke him, because I understood him, because he understood me, because I loved him. We started as friends but became brothers. He made me the executor of his estate, he was executor of mine. Jane and I were to take care of his children if, God forbid, anything were to happen to him and his wife, Annie.
Yet there was something troubled about John. Success and money, rather than making these things easier to deal with, often bring them to the surface. He had an overwhelming need to impress and be accepted. It probably came from his father and the fact that John never seemed to win his approval, even when he made it big. He was in search of a father, really, someone who could stand in the old man's place and say, "Yes, John, I love you. Yes." And though he wanted a father and wanted approval, he resented the fact that he wanted those things. He needed you to love him, and hated you for making him feel that need. This sowed dangerous seeds in our relationship. After all, who was I? The man in the suit who paid the bills and made the schedule. In other words, I was the father. As he became more successful, he began to resent me. He needed me, but hated me for that need. I understood this only later.
John was beloved by fans but never accepted by critics, and it drove him crazy. No matter how many records he sold, no matter how much adulation was showered on him, he needed to win and be loved by the people who had already made up their minds, who thought he was lightweight and silly. I would say, "Hey, John, who gives a crap?" Or: "You know what? Screw 'em." If you want to survive, if you want a long life and career, if you want to go wire to wire and have a decent time doing it, you need to have a deep strain of "Screw 'em." I would say, "Believe me, John, you're better with the people than with the critics. That counts if you're an actor, a producer, a politician, or a singer."