Speaker Well, I was born in Branford, Ontario, Canada, at a very early age, as Dickens would say, and I lived there till I was through my junior year of high school. My parents had come down to the U.S. for the Rose Bowl in 51 and they came home talking about California and we’re moving there. And I picked up on that right away and enforce that idea for a long time. And in that interim period, every friend of theirs moved here, but we didn’t. And it became a little joke in our town, like, yeah, you’re going, huh? And in 57, we moved to Maine, which was actually north, and it was colder there than it was where we lived in South Ontario.
Speaker And then we did a half my senior year, a summer and half my senior year of high school there, which was the most fun I ever had. And in the middle of the most fun I ever had, they moved to Connecticut. So then I had to go finish my senior year in Connecticut, went to Boston College for a year. My family moved to California after school was over. I jumped on a plane and came to California. And I had left a dirty, drizzly, gray New York. And this is before the the ramp went out to the plane and you had to go down and walk across the tarmac.
Speaker And I was three steps down and I went, wow, look at this, I’m home. And I became a Californian in that moment. I never left. So I went to Lhasa, to Loyola Marymount University to transfer from Boston College.
Speaker And I had not turned in a paper at ABC. And I couldn’t get in to Loyola, which was Loyola at the time, became Loyola Marymount later and was my father’s dream that I would graduate from that school. So they sent me down to Santa Monica College to make up this one class in English, which was my best subject. And I fell into the theater arts department quite by accident. In those days it was punch cards.
Speaker This is pre computers and they pull out a bunch of cards and they say, OK, you’ve got to take this. You have to take this and this and this and oh, you don’t want this. And of course, no one should read me that way. And I said, what you mean, I want this. What is it?
Speaker And they said, well, it’s theater arts. I said, you get points for that. And they said, Oh yes. And like any other course, I’ll take it. And then I fell in theater, arts department, started winning acting awards, decided I was a brilliant actor and ran away to Hollywood to become an actor. And I was there a year of rejection and abuse and decided I have to find out how to get an effective agent. So I lied about all my training and got a job in the mailroom at the William Morris Agency. And I was there two days. I said I can do this better than any of these guys. And so I started the Sammy Glick routine. Six months later, I was the fastest guy in the mailroom that got me two weeks as a gofer on the staff of Colonel Tom Parker. And so I went there and I was the fastest guy there because what I was really doing was replacing a guy who had gone into the reserves for two weeks, which the colonel considered his vacation and demanded a replacement.
Speaker And so I got to be that guy. At the end of the two weeks I went to the colonel said, well, sir, thank you very much, Irving. I’ll be back on Monday and I’ll return to the offices. No, Johnny, you come back here. I said, But, sir, and I’ll handle it. End of discussion.
Speaker So I ended up on his staff for the better part of a year, which was really fortuitous because I got to see rock and roll at the highest possible level and I got to meet Elvis. Great story attached to that if you want to hear it. It’s and we made fifty dollars a week in the mailroom and I drove around in a 1949 Ford ah 59 Ford convertible and it was decrepit and it was so dirty Moss would grow on it.
Speaker And the the top was split along the seams on both sides and hung and flapped in the breeze. And the colonel loved to be driven around in this car because that was his style. And so they were making a movie at MGM called It Happened at the World’s Fair.
Speaker And I was called to bring over these contracts from our regular office to Paramount and walked into the room, a tiny little office on the MGM lot. And Elvis was standing in the room and it was like being in the room with a fire. I mean, it was like he’s right there.
Speaker And Colonel says, oh, Johnny, you know, Elvis. And and I looked at him and he looked at me and he stuck us and he says, How do you do, sir? I’m 23 years old. I was wearing a tie. And he was very polite and very dear and. So the colonel signed the papers and he asked me to wait outside, and as I was leaving the room, Elvis stepped off over and opened the door and says, see a man as only he could say it. And I went, yeah, see, I walked out. And then the rest of the story is that I waited for the currently got in the back of this funky old car. And we’re driving through the MGM Main Arch and he says, Johnny, stop the car. And so I stop and right in the middle of the arch. And he says, Here comes Bob Whiteman, who was the head of MGM at the time. And he waited till the colonel told the Weitman got right next to the car and he stuck his hand through the hole in the roof, says Mr. Wyman. Always called everyone Mr. Mr. Whiteman. And Mr. Whiteman comes over. He looks at that. You, Colonel? Yeah. And they have a whole conversation in the hole in the roof.
Speaker And I’m sitting there going, Oh, I got hysterical. So I. I went back to Paramount, where I was alone because they were making this movie at at MGM. And the colonel’s M.O. was to get something free and every deal that he ever made, but he would only throw that in at the end. That’s how he got a full time William Morris employee on his staff from RCA. He had a guy named Graylin Landon, who was a publicist, and he got him for free. And he also got a car from William Morris, full time station wagon paid for insured and serviced by William Morris. So he was a bit of a hustler.
Speaker And I watched him do his thing. But I had to go back to Paramount all by myself in the seven room suite where every square inch of the seven rooms was covered with a picture of Elvis from billboard sized wallet size. And they were all put up in a haphazard fashion, which shocked my vergos sensitivity. And so I took them all down out of sheer boredom and put them all back up symmetrically so that the wallet size were across the rim of the ceiling and then the full sized billboard charts and in-store displays and everything, and waited in dread for them to come back and see because the colonel was kind of scary. And he came back and he went, Oh, and I’m holding my breath. It was cool. Yeah, good, good, nice. Looks good, you know, and goes into his office. But but the story there is hysterical because he had an old bicycle horn on his desk and he had maybe five people in the suite.
Speaker And his habit was to service anyone heavy from every movie star, every top executive, every senator, every congressman, every major sports figure. And he would keep track of their birthdays.
Speaker And he had his other deal with RCA was he could have anything they manufactured for free. So he would call up he would get a list of whose birthday it was. He said, OK, send these guys transistor radios, get this guy refrigerator, get this guy on TV and get this guy on the phone. And that was only the heaviest guy. And then he would honk the horn and we’d all have to come running in line up in front of his desk. And there was a microphone there and we’d have to sing Happy Birthday. And he would hold the receiver to the speakers and and then we would sing Happy Birthday to whoever the celebrity of the moment was. And then and then we’d be dismissed. And and so, you know, it was fun and it was it was educational.
Speaker And I got turned on to music there. That’s when I realized this is where I’m going to make my career.
Speaker And you went back to William Morris, right? Were you in the mailroom then?
Speaker I was in the mailroom when I left, but now I’m the colonel’s boy. So I was out of the mailroom, but I had not I didn’t even have to take the typing in the shorthand test, which we had to learn on our own dime out of the fifty dollars a week. And I could do what we called speed writing, what we learned back then. And my typing was bad then and still bad.
Speaker But I got into the secretarial pool. When you’re in the secretarial pool, you float around for whoever’s out that day. And one day I was assigned to work for a really frantic agent by the name of Jules Shah. And Julie was the head of the Variety Television Department, which was a huge department in those days.
Speaker I was fifteen hours of prime time TV, a week devoted to variety TV. And so it was really fun. My and he was scary, you know. And I went to the what we call Human Resources today, and I said, I want to work for him. And they said, Are you crazy? Everybody who works for him leaves crying. That’s how you got the job. And I said, Yeah, but he’s not boring and I’ll learn something from this guy. And so they called him up and said, Mr. Shah, the kid wants to work for you.
Speaker And he says, Oh, yeah, get him down here. And he said, What do you think? You’re some smart guy, you want to work for me? And I went, Yes, sir. And he says, OK. And so every day for about six months, he tried to break my spirit, like, you know, and he was very precise. He came around the corner at the same second. Every day, and it’s coffee had to be here, his brand muffin here, the treads on his desk and the phone lines, and he would say, give me the list and I give him the list. And if it was more than three calls. Oh, no. It’s going to be one of those days, you know, and then he’d go and close the door is enough and drink his coffee, read the trades. And then he advised me he had brilliant clients.
Speaker George Chakiris, when he won the Academy Award for West Side Story and Mae West was one of his clients, had wonderful conversations with her, and she would call up in and ask, you know, questions and whatever and hardly ever talk to him, got into talking to me, invited me out to her house for a séance. And so I went out and it was it was on below the bluffs in Santa Monica and big, big, huge house on the beach. And and she had all these musclebound guys in tuxedos and little monkeys in tuxedos. And she had this guy, Peter, her cubs. And so we did a science thing and it was really mind reading or whatever. And it was it was very fun. She never showed up. It was just a room full of people and her cousin and he did his thing, but she didn’t appear.
Speaker Let’s let’s go back to the mail. Yes. Sorry. We just need to fix this. That just paint that picture, paint David Geffen in that.
Speaker OK, so I think I’m rolling here about the copycat.
Speaker How’s it look? No.
Speaker Yes, yes, please.
Speaker OK, so I’m going to I’m going to cap off, OK?
Speaker I’ll wrap up the COL thing and then we’ll go back to the mirror. So here I was alone in the in the seven room suite at Paramount, which he also got free in a deal with Hal Wallis.
Speaker Al Wallace, Hal had the most see how well had the other half of the floor. It was the main building at Paramount and the colonel got half of it as the closing point in a deal. And so I started to go a little stir crazy all day. I showed up at nine o’clock and I had nothing to do until the phone rang. Go to lunch. I go to lunch, come back, nothing to do until they said go home. And so that’s when I got into redressing the walls. And I finally started to realize that my career, William Morris was running down the drain. And so I lobbied among the colonel’s colleagues to get out. And so Tom Discon, who was his great associate, said, you know, Johnny must go back.
Speaker Erving’s here. The Christmas deal is over. And so I got to go back and I was out of the mailroom.
Speaker OK, now we’ll pick that up later and I’ll go back and tell you about the matter. OK, so I was an actor. I left college to be go to Hollywood and become an actor. And I got there lost in the fog of showbiz and, you know, wondering what to do. How do I get an agent? What’s it all about? And I floundered around for a year and then applied to work in the mailroom at William Morris. When I got there, I had gone back to school in those days, you could join the Army on the buddy plan and you and your friend could go and join up. And we’re guaranteed to be together for two years, which was a total lie. And there were 500 guys in a room taking a test. And this was true or false. And there were thousands of questions and.
Speaker So, OK, hang on one second, you just.
Speaker There were thousands of true and false question, and then they kept 500 guys sitting in a room for three hours while they graded these papers by template because again, no computer. And so we all sat that they gave us a peanut butter sandwich and a coke. And the guys are going crazy. And it was loud and rowdy. And suddenly the door slam open and this lieutenant, flanked by two sergeants, stomp into the room and call out my name.
Speaker I turned to my buddies. Look, I don’t know why they’re picking on me. I tried. I really, really tried. And they called me front and center and I woke up to this guy and he says, Are you John Hartmann? I said, yes. He said, OK, you got the highest score. You have an IQ of 154. We would like you to go to officer’s candidate school. There is a bus leaving in 10 minutes. Will you be on that bus, Mr. Hartman? This is before the Namir. And my life flashed before my eyes and I said, no.
Speaker I said, if I’m not smart, I’m going back to school. And so they said, oh, OK, sit down. And by noon, I was out of there and my buddy and I drove away, said, wow, that was close. And good thing because I had been the first wave.
Speaker Tell Kildonan, you know, that’s the bottom line truth. Right? So I walked away from my imminent death on that moment and went to I had like went back to school and I ran into a woman who had her children had grown up and she went back to Santa Monica College just to take some courses. And her husband was an agent at William Morris. Ed Carter, her name was Lillian Carter. And I had decided to go to New York to be an actor. And I said to my teachers, I’m leaving. And they went, Oh, wonderful Mecca and all my student friends, oh, yeah, you’ll be great. And I’m leaving the parking lot. I’ve said my goodbyes that I’m going to get in my car and drive to New York with no money and no contacts and no friends. And I hear someone calling to me and I kind of look back of the corner of my eye and it’s Lillian. She’s running at me. Stop, stop.
Speaker And I go, What? And she says, I heard you were going to New York to be an actor. I said, Yeah, isn’t that great? She says, No, that’s terrible. Don’t do it. It’s not for you. I went, Oh, she said, Did you ever think of becoming an agent?
Speaker And I went, Well, yeah, I did, actually. I applied at the William Morris Agency once, but they turned me down and she said, Well, did you put on your application actor? And I went, Well, yeah.
Speaker And they said, well, you know, they’re not looking for actors. They’re looking for agent.
Speaker I went, Oh, she said, I’ll get you an interview, but don’t say actor on. OK, so Lillian got Ed to get me a meeting with the head of H.R. named Ed Levy, and I couldn’t have an interview with him.
Speaker And he said, OK, I’ll call you. And the next that night and I was living back in my parents house. Then I got a call, OK, come in in the morning and meet Doris Leavitt, who is the assistant to the controller. And I said, OK. And I only had one suit that I wore for acting interviews. And I went, oh, at least on a suit. And OK, well, she didn’t say, OK, I’ll fake it with him and and it’ll be a new suit to her. And so I go in, in my black mohair suit and my custom-made shirt with the initials and gold chain link watch and a pinkie ring. And I meet Doris Levin and she’s OK. We’ll give you a call. And I got a call that night and said, OK, you start Monday. Fifty dollars a week. And well, this was the greatest day of my life. This was like unbelievable.
Speaker I went there and I the first thing that they do is they put you in a car with a guy who runs you around town and shows you what they call the runs. And the runs were to the Hollywood studios, the Valley Studios in Culver City and Fox and Beverly Hills studios. And so the guy says, OK, here’s how you get here at Busi hours of the day. And they had all these little routes that you could zip along and off streets and so forth.
Speaker And so that was the first thing that and that night I was walking around the halls and I saw all these names on these door and I wanted my name. I wanted those doors and the worst possible way. And so I the next day I was walking down the hall and this agent named Ron de Blasio called, hey, you are you a trainee?
Speaker Yes, sir. He says, OK, take this script over to Peter Fox house and don’t look at his bad eye. And he gives me the address. And I said and I said, well, how will I know which ones is better if I don’t look at it?
Speaker And he said, Are you being funny? I said, No, no, no, no. And so I went over to I drove over to Peter Fox house and he came to in pajamas and I delivered him a script and he saw, come on, anyone drink myself?
Speaker I said, no, no, I got to get back to the office. And I said, Okay, cool. Like forty years later, I got to hang with Peter Falk and recalled that moment, that Riviera Country Club one day. You know, it was it was amazing.
Speaker But so and so now I’m really big in the mailroom thing. Wow, this is cool. You get to meet Peter Falk.
Speaker I have to stop here once again. You know, you’re going to hate me for doing this, but the chair is really what do you want to go?
Speaker Well, you know, I think keep in mind that this is about David. So we want to get a sense of what it meant to be in the mail. OK, all right. We’re almost there. Obviously, it was like I know you were in L.A. and he was like he was in New York. He was in New York, but. Did he did you preceded him, of course, or were you there at the same time simultaneously really?
Speaker Yeah, pretty much overlap. I think, you know, we were anyway, so I’ll tell you a story. OK, so now we’re so I’m I’ve started in the mailroom. You want to go back to the starting in the mailroom. Was there squeaky?
Speaker I think it’s important. If you could just kind of say that the mailroom was really the ticket here.
Speaker Yeah, because today’s young people don’t know what that means.
Speaker OK, so the mailroom was the doorway to the rest of the structure that William Morris, every executive in every agent in the company, began his career in the mailroom. The chairman of the board today, Norman Brokaw, was a William Morris mailroom guy. And so the tradition was very, very much like West Point. I always considered William Morris the West Point of show business, that you could go there and you could learn everything there was to learn by just rising up the ladder in the process.
Speaker So when I entered the mailroom, it was it was abandoning an acting career. And it was. A tight little fraternity.
Speaker It was like our guys, our gang was a fun group, it included Barry Diller, who was senior to me.
Speaker And while I was there, Terry Melcher joined the team, Larry Fitzgerald, who became a very prominent manager and is to this day in the country music field, Peter Golden, who became a manager of Jackson Browne and Pocho and Crosby, Stills Nash, I think for a while after me, Herb Nanase and a couple of other guys who maybe didn’t really make it because it was not an automatic. You could get into the mailroom, but you had to show them something. And it was very severe. The dye was a guy named Phil Weltman and Phil was an ex Marine, literally, and he ran the trainees like a squad of soldiers.
Speaker And it was very, very formal. You wear a tie in a suit every day. When I started, I only had one suit and I borrowed money from my father and I went out and bought four other cities. And so now I had one for each day. And even if you went in on Saturday for some special thing, you had to wear a suit and tie. It was rigid and the protocols were very, very strict. In those days there was a thing called teletype and messages would come through from New York and the other offices and that would be circulated in the mailroom.
Speaker Guys would run those around and deliver them to each agent, and they carried the booking information and other facts that were, you know, two sentences about maybe 50 messages. The other system was a memo system where you, as a secretary, typed up a Maine memo to the person it was to and then copies and you could do three or four carbon copies. And then after that, it went to a system called Ditto. And ditto was purple ink on white pages that was mass produced off a stencil. And so we had to learn how to do all these things and we passed all this information around. So that was your job. You disseminated mail. You went to the studios and collected mail. You picked up things. You went to artists and clients homes. And this was your job and it was always fast. You’d get a list of things to do and you would get in one of these cars. They were a little gray Mercury’s and we would buzz all over town and just get back there right away. And the most ambitious of us were very strict about doing this faster and better.
Speaker So in the mailroom, there was this tight little team thing, but underlying it was very competitive. And I remember when Fitzgerald joined the mailroom, we were all totally paranoid that he was related to Kennedy and that this was going to give him an up on us.
Speaker Turns out he was.
Speaker But so walking around the halls and doing all this, you learned how to be around executives and you were really not very important because they didn’t think you’re necessarily going to be there very long. And I, you know, started to get the politics of it straightened out. And I would romance the secretaries and in truth, they make you or break you. And so they were all my friends.
Speaker And and I kept my thing growing. And when I came back from the colonel, I was out of the mailroom and I went to work for this gentleman, Jewell Shah, who was a very severe guy. One of his clients was Burl Ives. And he was managed by his wife and she made an error. In his booking schedule and had him double booked as she tried to blame it on me and Julia, she was going to use this as the weapon to get me out because his whole goal was to prove to me that I, I, you know, I was not nobody and that I wasn’t going to make it there. And he was going to destroy me. And I ended up.
Speaker Going into his office, slamming the door and screaming at him for a full minute about, you know, how it wasn’t my fault and I’m not eating it for this woman and you’re wrong and blah, blah, blah.
Speaker And I realized as I was coming to the end of the rant, well, I just killed my career. I’m out of here. And too much to my surprise, she says, are you finished?
Speaker Allan, yeah, and I expect this is where I get fired and he says, can we go back to work?
Speaker That sounded right, OK?
Speaker Yeah, he says, OK, get me Jane Powell, which was one of his clients and a couple from then on, he never abused me again. So the showdown paid off. And he said, OK, maybe you do have what it takes to do this job. And then he nurtured me and he taught me and he made sure I understood the game.
Speaker About eight months into that tenure, he gets the job of going to international famous artist as the head of all variety.
Speaker And on the way out the door, he says to Phil Weltman, Promote the kit. He’s ready. And so this is now a total of two years. And I’m a baby agent, what they call a junior agent.
Speaker And it was the greatest day of my life. I walked out of that building. I swear I didn’t touch the ground and I had finally done something that was hard to do and that was, you know, going to pave the way for my future. And so my first assignments were to service other agents bookings. And that put you in contact with stars.
Speaker One day I get a call from Bob Shapiro, who later became the president of Paramount Pictures or Warner Brothers, and he said, OK, Mr. Les Vogel’s personal client. Whose name escapes me at the moment, but will come, she was the star female lead of Cecil B. DeMille greatest show on Earth.
Speaker Gently. No. Uh, but you have heard of it. Why am I blocking on her? We’ll come back to this story.
Speaker Lost it anyway, I’m servicing this lady, all named later. And on the Hollywood palace, and that was a thing where you go to the rehearsal, you hang out, you make sure there’s no problems in this case, Bob Shapiro says to me, you be everywhere she goes. All the time, this is Mr Latham’s personal claim for 25 years, and you take care of anything she needs. So I go to her dance rehearsals and she’s a little over the hill at this time. And I go to her dance rehearsals before the meetings with the staff for the cold reading on the show and. And I and I sit there all the time. She’s dancing and she’s, like, grateful for the attention and we show up the show and things are going smoothly. She has to dance numbers and and I think some comedy. In the in the show, and so there’s a break, they would tape the dress rehearsal and then there would be a break and you come back for the actual show taping and then they could intercut them. And so I and before that, there’s lunch.
Speaker And so I’m coming back from lunch. And the producers, Nick Xenophon, Bill Harbach are huddled over in the corner and they see me coming through the theater and they go, there he is. And I watched and they said, your client is in there destroying the dressing room, throwing flowers and vases all over the place. She’s swearing like a sailor. Her husband is petrified. And you’ve got to go in there and fix this. And I went and I’m now only twenty four. And I said, well, what’s the problem? Why is she upset? Well, she doesn’t like the outfit that Bob Mackie wants her to wear for one thing. And she wants us to reset all the lights that we spent all day setting because it’s too hot.
Speaker And I said, OK, you can. Give me the address and I’ll give you the lights.
Speaker And I said, OK, OK, just get it done. We got a roll tape and so I walk in and in her, she was married to Pete candidly, the trumpet player, and he’s up against the wall. She’s screaming and pacing and throwing and yelling. And and I go over to say, darling, what’s what’s wrong? What’s the matter, you know? And she said, oh, the. I mean, they’re just, you know, got us all wrong, I’m going to ruin this. I’ve waited all these years to be on the show and now it’s come down and there’s just terrible and awful as hot out there. I’m going to sweat like a pig. I’m going to look terrible on camera. And this little Bo Peep dress that Bob Mackie wants me to wear is totally awful. And and I said, show me the dress as she comes out. And it truly was a little Bo Peep dress and, you know, calico, pink and white. And I said, well, you’re not wearing that. And she’s a baby, you know, but. And they know what I said. Well, I’m like, you wear that, show me the dress. But they said I didn’t have to wear the dress. And I said, no, no, no, you just show me a dress you want to wear. And she comes out with this neck to floor, green sequined dress form fit. And I went, That’s it. That’s fabulous. I love it. You’re going to wear that. But they Billabong’s and Nick Xenophon, the dress and the thing in the Bob Mackey. I said, no, no, no.
Speaker Who’s your agent? Well, you are. And I said, OK, so I’m telling you, I won’t let you wear Little Bo Peep.
Speaker You’re wearing this. Put it on. We’re getting ready to roll in five minutes. Now, what else is wrong? She said the lights there. Unbelievable. I mean, it’s hotter than a sauna out there and I’m going to be sweating and dry.
Speaker You don’t start at rehearsal. They don’t turn on the air conditioning when it’s on, the people are in there. It’s like freezing in there. You know, you’re not going to be sweaty. You’re going to be shivering. So just go put it in. Besides what the sequence. You need those lights. But I’m telling you, it’s going to look fantastic. And she says, oh, OK, great. Yeah, yeah, OK. And I go to the door and I go. And they go roll tape and the whole thing, and I save the day, so she goes back and tells me it’s the last photo that this Harmon kid, you know, he he really took care of me.
Speaker So now I got the top brass endorsing me and I start to rise and they give me my own assignments, which are scale TV and game show. I didn’t I didn’t hear about David while I was in the mailroom. That was kind of insular. And but when I became an agent and probably around the same time that he’s getting out of the mailroom, my you would have a New York contact. And my contact was a guy named Larry Kurzon, and that was for music artists. And of course, Variety TV was about music and comedy. So Kurzon told me that David Geffen and I’d heard about Guthman and I went to New York.
Speaker I finished the ticket on a deal where the producer, if I deliver Gene Pitney for a show called Where It’s At, which was a local rock and roll show, but they were doing their big celebratory show in Hawaii and they wanted a big star. And I delivered through Kurzon, who was the agent for Gene Pitney gene to the show. And the producer had told me, if you give me Gene Pitney, if you get me Gene Pitney, I’ll get you a ticket to L.A. so you can go to the thing. And I said, well, I don’t really want to go to Hawaii, but I want to go to New York. I want to meet the guys in the New York office who I talk to all the time.
Speaker And so how do you think in New York, I don’t get what you want?
Speaker I said, OK, so I deliver Pettine through Kurzon and I go to New York and I’m going around the office. And this is where I first met them, introduced to David. And it was brief and and more or less just a hello, how do you do? And blah, blah, blah. And while I was in New York, Gene Pitney cancels the show. And now I’ve taken their ticket and this was really not kosher to take anything personal on a deal, it was like that. And but I just so badly wanted to be there that I did not. I got caught in the cookie jar and the producer, Albertan, goes to an agent who had joined William Morris, who was probably the first guy to join William Morris, who didn’t go through the mailroom, a guy named Jerry Perenchio, who became a hugely successful producer. And he was for a moment an agent there, and he happened to be this producer, Albertans agent, and when I got back from New York, Perenchio Al had complained like, you know, I made this deal and I didn’t get Pitney. And I went to New York and Jerry called me in and he asked me about it. And I told them and and sweetheart that Jerry was he did not report me for this transgression. And I got away with it. But I did meet Guffin when I was in New York on that trip.
Speaker And then as my career marched on and was jail TV and game shows, you’re put in the presence of stars, major, major stars all the time. And so I learned how to talk to them, how to be part of them, how to be quiet now, how to take care of business. And so I and I did a lot of coordination with Kurzon. And I kind of came to we became friends and he told me that Geffen was a bad guy.
Speaker And so I assume it was a bad guy and so I had a certain aversion to him, I think to some degree I was jealous of his success.
Speaker And maybe he was just a man, I don’t know, but we were not together, and one day David came to California on his vacation, you know, in search of the same connections that I went to New York in search of. And he came walking into my office and he says, you know, if we worked together, we’d be a lot more powerful.
Speaker And I went, hmm, yeah, that’s true.
Speaker And so that night now, by then I was a rising star. I had discovered Chad and Jeremy and signed them as an unknown act and they got hits. I followed that up with Sonny and Cher as an unknown act. And they 30 days later had five singles in the Billboard Top 100. I was now looking like a genius. And then my follow up act was Buffalo Springfield. I’d also been very successful as a salesman. Booking clients on my shows got more than my fair share of booking, and so they had given me a brand new Buick Skylark convertible. They had given me the money to get into a ranch out in Woodland Hills where I had stables for eight horses, a corral, a pool, a circular driveway with a giant oak with vines growing up in it. And I was looking and feeling pretty good.
Speaker My biggest success didn’t invite David over.
Speaker Yeah, I was going to say I’m going to I hate to say.
Speaker Yeah, the squeaky al. You think if you put a sound blanket underneath him, maybe it’s the plastic pack that you’re almost maybe a little bit might because I don’t know what happened.
Speaker And it’s a sweet potato. It’s a mouth because you’re very, very engaged, which is great. And I don’t want you not paying the price.
Speaker So I think it might be about being against the back of the chair.
Speaker Well, no, I don’t think I actually was. I think I think it’s the for the fire in the room.
Speaker Before you go on that, I want to know why Larry Craig’s Larry surgeon said that was a bad guy.
Speaker Yeah, I don’t know. You know, I mean, he didn’t offer a lot of excuses. That’s why, you know, I I think he said is obnoxious and and he was probably jealous of Dave is David’s ambition. You know, like David was driven like me. And that’s kind of why we identified with each other. It was because we were not waiting. We were pushing the envelope, trying to get ahead, looking for opportunities, pursuing them within a structure where we’re lost in a whole lot of other guys. Because when you come out of the mailroom, which is half a dozen guys, you’re now among twenty guys who are secretaries, what we call assistants today. And so, you know, I think probably Curzon was jealous of David’s speed of growth as and he translated that to me and I picked up on it. But when David came into my room and said, you know, we we should work together, the light bulb went off. And I went, yeah, that’s true. So we go out to my house in Woodland Hills and we sit in my barn on bales of hay and we talk all night long, all about the business, about what he was doing in New York, what I was doing in L.A. And he said to me, why do you sign all these music acts? Don’t you know movies is where it’s at? And I went, yeah, I know movies is where it’s about. How do we get into the movies? I mean, they all know that to all these other guys. And so, you know, the only way we’re going to get into the movies is on the back of a star. And the only stars that we have access to are the music people because they don’t care about them.
Speaker And so I actually got involved in my first movie deal because of Sonny and Cher. They had a movie called Goodtimes that was produced by United Artists. And I remember when Sonny and Cher. Were their first trip to England and they got kicked out of the Hilton Hotel in London for having long hair, which and believe me, Sunny was the only guy with hair to here in those days.
Speaker I mean, the Beatles hair was only there, you know, and it was called long hair. Mine was so short, it looked like it was painted on.
Speaker But when Sonny and Cher got in this trouble in London, it made all the papers in America like because they had hits hair going, you know, screaming up the charts. And so our little lovebirds are kicked out of a hotel in London. Who are those people? And so they came back and they arrived at the airport.
Speaker And now they did have the thing that went out to the planes, the walkway. And the trouble was there were 5000 kids waiting for them. Literally, you could not get into the satellite.
Speaker So we had to take a limo onto the tarmac and load them into the limo and drive away. And all the kids were like pounding on the windows. And so we went straight to the Morris office and we walked into the Morris office and. Every single employee in the company was either in the lobby or along the route to Mr. Las Vegas office, and I remember walking that walk and share on my arm, Sunny was there with his managers, Charlie Green and Brian Stone, legends in their own right. And we went into Mr. Last Philosophes, which was interesting in a way, because Mr. Las Vegas is famous for being five foot one and the furniture in his office was slightly undersized so he wouldn’t look too short. And so you walk in there, it’s like you’re in Munchkin Land and suddenly you’re very tall. And it was very interesting. And he had the the president of United Artists in the room and we sat down and put together their first movie deal in the room in the middle of the whole thing. Cher turns to me and says, Johnny. And I said, OK, so we leave the room, she says, that’s boring, let’s go, let’s go get in the limo and run around Beverly Hills. I said, OK. And so we get in the car and we drive around. And she’s been in Vogue magazine by now and she’s a fashion icon in instantly. And so every upscale store that we go into, they just open up for her in a fabulous way. So we spent the whole afternoon shopping and while they closed up the movie deal and and then we went back and they went on their way.
Speaker But it was a great afternoon.
Speaker Were you surprised just jumping way ahead here. But were you surprised when you heard that they didn’t share an item?
Speaker You know.
Speaker Only only in that I knew David’s proclivity, I mean, that night in the barn back in Woodland Hills, he came out to me and by then I had been come out to enough times to not be shocked or concerned. You know, I and in those days, it was not something everybody did. There were plenty of gay people at William Morris, but no one said so. And everyone knew who was and who wasn’t, but no one talked about it. So for David to tell me this intimate secret, which was really an ultimate trust because you’re endangering yourself, you know, if you were openly gay, like in the Army, you’d be kicked out, you know, even though half of them were, you know, but my my best friend in college came out to me. I cried. I did not understand. I’m in a little town in Ontario.
Speaker What you said when you came here, I said, cool, you no problem, because there was a guy named Mike Alvarado who came out to me who worked at William Morris with me.
Speaker We’re in the same he was in the Brady TV department and he explained it all to me. And I was naive. And he took me out to places like this is a basket bar. You know, this is a leather bar. This is how it works here. When they sing the songs, everybody emphasizes the S’s, you know, and stuff like that. So by then, I was no longer afraid of it. You know, it was to me, it’s natural. I mean, there’s three sexes in the beehive. Isn’t that what we used to tell people about the birds and the bees? You know, so I see it as natural. And by then I did. And so when he told me I had no problem, that’s cool. You know, and we were and I think my immediate open acceptance of it really bonded us tighter.
Speaker And so the thing now was he’ll look out for my clients in New York, I’ll look out for his clients in L.A. And so I represented those people in the conversations, in the various television meetings or movie meetings or other meetings that I might attend among the agents.
Speaker So we were helping each other build our client rosters importance. And so the greatest thing we did in this regard is a legendary story, and that is that in those days as baby agents, we weren’t allowed to make long distance phone calls without filling out a sheet. I talked to this guy about this client for this reason. Right. And then you’d have to file that. And if you made unnecessary phone calls, you would hear from Phil Hartman, you know, like, what are you doing? You know, you’re wasting money. You know, someone one sentimentality. So to get around us, because David and I had a great conversational rapport going, David would call up CBS Television in New York City and he would identify himself as Jerry Rubin, who worked for CBS. And they had a thing called Pie Lines, which was a permanent direct line to the coast.
Speaker This is too important story. You might want to take that over because of the. Yeah, this is a great story. So, OK, let me jump in and let us know when we’re in the clear here. OK, take it back. Take it back to right.
Speaker So now David’s looking out for my clients in New York and I’m looking out for his in L.A. and we’re enhancing each other’s career by keeping our clients present. It’s the worst thing about a full service major talent agency is what they call getting lost on the list. And if you are not constantly being presented to the other agents to do their job on your behalf in their area of assignment, like that studio or that network or whatever, then it’s OK.
Speaker Then then then, you know, you would be lost on the list. So in order to keep that from happening, David and I would have daily conversations. He would call up CBS in New York, identify himself as Jerry Rubin, who worked for CBS and say, get me John Hartman at William Morris in L.A. on the tie line.
Speaker And they would put the call through and it would come into my office from CBS and say, we have Mr. Rubin on the phone for you. Mr. Hartman, thank you very much. That must be texting coming through on my phone.
Speaker But I thought I turned my phone up at the Playboy.
Speaker You can you can pick it out of the room, just decide.
Speaker OK, I got a baby right now. OK, so I’ll go back.
Speaker You were you were you just you got interrupted when you said when you were just talking about that last. All right.
Speaker So, David, David would call up CBS in New York and identify himself as Jerry Rubin, who worked for CBS. He would say, get me John Hartman on the tie line at William Morris and in L.A. and the call would come through directly from CBS here. And David and I would speak for at least an hour, five days a week on CBS dime. And we kept ourselves very tightly coordinated, like what this client needs out of this department and vice versa. And so our clients all started to do quite well. And it wasn’t costing William Morris anything to keep this this thing flowing.
Speaker That was that. I mean. Were there are a lot of other people, were you more suited to do that? No, no, this is Guffin esque.
Speaker Say that, you know, this is Guffin esque. David was a breaker of the rules. The rules were made to be bent and or broken as needed. And that’s a really important thing in a strict corporate structure. But the whole object is not to get cut because getting caught gets you in trouble.
Speaker For example, one day there was a situation at CBS here where Phil Weltman called four or five agents over to service this event. And Mary Tyler Moore was preparing for an appearance on The Danny Kaye Show. And I knew that she was in rehearsal upstairs in another studio and I slipped away to go and say hello to Mary. And Phil Weltman looked around, said, where’s Hartman and some other? Well, he went upstairs to see Mary Tyler Moore and get him down here. And he read me the riot act. He said, Don’t you ever leave your station when I’m around. If I say you’re here, you’re here. Don’t worry about the clients. They’ll take care of themselves. And I. Yes. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. So I learned a big lesson then. And meanwhile, David and I are co managing within the office various clients. There are two types of agents. There are bookers and there are personnel managers within the office. I was the opposite. I was the personal manager within the office. I was the guy who made sure the clients were happy, satisfied, booked and so forth. And I worked the other agents on their behalf, as David did in New York. So that was really, really an important function. And also I was a signer. I was someone who could talk the act into coming with us instead of in those days, General Motors Corporation or Creative Management Associates, which later became my client.
Speaker So we were buzzing along, being quite successful when I left the office. And the reason I left was we had just signed Buffalo Springfield. I thought they were America’s answer to the Beatles. I thought, OK, these Beatle guys are doing great and they’re happening and I love them, but we got this American act that’s going to be bigger than them. And so our goal was to make that happen.
Speaker And a guy named Howard Wolf, who was a manager of some artists that William Morris represented, came to me, said, you guys, you know, you think you know what’s happening, but you don’t.
Speaker What are you talking about? Well, this Buffalo Springfield, you think that they’re the next big thing. You’re wrong when you’re talking about.
Speaker It’s all going down in San Francisco. You don’t have a clue, and so we heard about this band called Jefferson Airplane. Now, I had brought a guy in on the Buffalo Springfield sounding names, Kip Taylor, who William Morris had signed to make record deals. We wanted to get into the record business, saw the money that was being made there. And Skip and I went up to San Francisco to see Jefferson Airplane. I think it was October 18, 1966. The gig was at Winterland and it was Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. And I saw three things that defied everything I had learned about show business that night. One was that unknown Axe could fill the venue. That defied everything, how can they draw 5000 people and I never heard of them? That’s absurd. The other thing was every guy in the room had hair down to here, if not here.
Speaker And I’m going, wow, what is this? I mean, up till now, I’ve seen Suneetha here and I thought that was strange.
Speaker And so there weren’t a lot of long hairs in L.A. There were sunny and there was a band called The Seeds who had got a big number one record called Pushing Too Hard. Great story there, too. I became their manager.
Speaker But the other third thing I saw was what was known as liquid lights, where every act had this pulsating lights behind whatever they did with collages and film and just this amazing visual, which, of course, was to enhance the appreciation of the LSD that they were all on, unbeknownst to me. So that afternoon, I had met Albert Grossman in the Morris office because we had signed Peter, Paul and Mary to the agency that day. And so here I am in my mohair suit and my painted on hair standing in this room, the packed to the rafters, long haired people, crazy clothes, lights everywhere, flashing and booming. And we just found out about pot. So like we maybe we had smoked a joint, but whatever it was I looked at, Skip and Skip looked at me, went, wow, man, this is really going to be big. And we went out to Lookout Point at Sausalito and look back at the city. We said, we’ve got to do this in L.A. We will. We will. And another thing we had learned was that bands happened out of venues that we saw that the Fillmore was producing the Jefferson Airplane, the Avalon was producing the Grateful Dead. Johnny Rivers had come out of the whiskey. Buffalo Springfield was coming out of the whiskey. We said, we’re going to start a venue in L.A. called the Stampede and we’ll use it as the launching pad for Buffalo Springfield. And they will be huge. And then the other thing we said, wow, if we could just get William Morris to open a San Francisco office, we could control this thing. And if it developed in the hands of professionals, it’ll be ten times bigger than if it happens. And this hippy commie organic sort of faction that’s going on now because they’re going to make all the mistakes that we’ve already made and we wouldn’t make again. So we went back to William Morris and we said, look, it doesn’t have to be fancy. We’ll just rent a house next door to the Grateful Dead and we’ll just work out of there. We’ll live there will be one of them will grow our hair, but we will capture a dozen major artists who are going to be part of this gigantic thing.
Speaker And they said, you guys sit down, shut up and stay out of San Francisco. You know what? And then we plotted to do the stampede in L.A. ourselves, can we go back minute?
Speaker Because this is kind of interesting.
Speaker What was what was going on at William Morris that these people did not see what you saw?
Speaker What was the OK, because this has a lot to do with how both you and David. Yeah. Got out into the world. And you are. Because they didn’t see it. Yeah. What was it they were not seeing and why were they not seeing?
Speaker Well, the the reason that the William Morris brass didn’t recognize the value of this was because they were wrapped up in TV and they were wrapped up in movies. And this is where they made their money and music, which had been the source of the William Morris when it was founded in 1898, was not important anymore. And and the guys who were in the music department were left wing of their people. Right. And they didn’t even always wear ties, you know. And so they don’t like William Morris on the first floor. That’s where the old school suit and tie, you know, drill instructor sort of executives were housed. When you got to the second floor, that was TV and movies were on the first floor. TV was on the second floor. The third floor was music. And that was like, you know, up there somewhere. So they didn’t recognize they didn’t recognize the importance of music, except they were starting to come down like we had the Beach Boys and they were making a lot of money. We signed Simon and Garfunkel. They started making a lot of money. So there was a curiosity, but not a commitment. And that’s why they didn’t get it. Also, they they knew that there was drugs going on. And they and they you know, you guys just want to go out there and get high, you know? But the point is that that’s not what we wanted. We wanted to create an empire. We wanted to make this San Francisco thing a lot bigger, a lot faster, and control the hierarchy of which acts came first.
Speaker And we saw the airplane. We saw the dead. We saw Janis Joplin, you know, honoring the Monterey Report that I’ll get to wonder if I could is a great story.
Speaker So they didn’t they didn’t recognize the signs. We were young. We saw what was going on. And I think if we’d walk them up there, if they would be willing to go and say, see this hair, see this flashing lights, see these unknown bands filling venues, they probably would have gotten it, but they didn’t. And so we. Started to resign from William Morris at that time.
Speaker But before let’s go back, because my sense is that. David’s taste was musically was someplace else, too. He came out to L.A., he went to your house, he saw, hey, you can make a lot of money in this. He was very impressed with that. But I can tell me about that. He also met this guy named Jerry Brandt, who said the same thing, you know, and he began to think that music is where it was at and he began to shift in his priorities.
Speaker But that’s kind of tell that story, too, because I don’t think, David, what he was there. I think he really thought it was movies, too, as you said earlier. Yeah. What effect did that change for him?
Speaker OK, I think I think David’s perspective on his own career changed from actors to musicians when he saw me his age living quite handsomely on a William Morris commitment. Know, and that and then, you know, our discussion that night in the bar, you know, kind of focused on like, wow. Yeah. You know, I get it. I see what’s going on here. And another big influencing factor was a TV show came along called Shindig. And that was the first time that rock and roll went on primetime television in America. And I was assigned that show because it was a scale show. And they paid scale plus 10 percent to the agency, and to give you a rough idea of how committed I was to that show because of my Colonel Parker background, I realized if I’m going to be a music, this is a weapon. And the weapon it was in those days was equal to what MTV became like. It was the only way to get massive exposure on rock and roll. So. I represented the director, Dean Whitmore, the House duet Dick, indeed, the House chanteuse, Donna Laurer, the House quintet, The Shindigs. And I ultimately signed the producer, Jack Goode, to William Morris, and as a kicker, I married a shindig dancer. The ultimate package, the ultimate packaging, and because Jack Goode was my friend and client, I had better access to him than all the other agents combined. Now, in music, in those days, music happens regionally and then it spreads. And so there are little boutique agencies all around the country that promote and book the acts in that region. Not many musical artists who hadn’t achieved a certain amount of success had full service talent agencies which covered every spectrum of entertainment. So Jaggard was so sought after that he could not go to his office in the daytime. Every record promotion guy, every record company guy, every agent was climbing fences down at ABC Prospect and Talmage to get to Jack good so they could get their act on that show, which was the ultimate record promotion vehicle. Well, I knew that Jack worked all night and slept all day. And so one day I got up and I went down to ABC at six in the morning and I walked into his office as he was finishing the running order for 13 weeks of show. And he gave me 54 firm offers. For various music acts that he wanted on the show, and I walked out of there with a bucket full of trump cards. And I was able to say to the Kingsmen. I guarantee you, Shindig, if you sign with us. And they did Louie Louie, which is the greatest frat party song of all time, and many other artists.
Speaker I discovered Sonny and Cher on the set of Syndic because I was shocked by the fact that the Rolling Stones are singing on stage and 300 kids in the audience are calling to someone in the wings.
Speaker And I look over in a Sonny Bono. And I’m gonna start bona fat.
Speaker What is going on here? So Jack Goode committed the shindig cast and crew to to a show at the Shrine Auditorium for UNICEF benefit, and I had all these people on the show. So I’m up in the balcony watching it go down. And I see this phenomenal event. Cher comes out, she sits down at the foot of the stage, right in the face of the audience, and she’s singing the opening verses of a song called Just You.
Speaker Sony has the answering verse from the wings and he walks out.
Speaker No, no, I got it wrong.
Speaker He comes out first, he sits down, she comes out. And sits down beside him and she strokes his long hair.
Speaker I got goose bumps over my entire body.
Speaker I went, oh, my God, this is the most fantastic thing I’ve ever seen. I jump out of my chair, I run down backstage. By the time I get backstage, the song’s over and he’s standing there watching the next act. And I go to Sunny. I want to be your agent, should you do? Because he knew I represented all these people and he said, I mean, just call my manager, you know, fantastic. And so then a baby agent isn’t allowed to sign anyone.
Speaker You know, you have to get, you know, a committee to say, OK, it’s OK. We’ll we’ll cover him here. We’ll cover him there with government. So I’m going around with this picture of Sonny in the Furbies, in the striped shirt and long hair and Cher looking gorgeous. And I’m going like, we got to sign these guys. And I go to everybody and they all say, Now, kid, don’t blow your career. You got lucky with you and Jeremy.
Speaker I mean, why take a risk? I mean, look at this guy.
Speaker And I said, you don’t understand. This is going to be big. And finally, I got upset. I said, you’re blowing it. I’m signing these guys with or without you.
Speaker And so I remember IRA Oaken, who was the head of the music department at the time, said, OK, go get your Sinem. You want to sign a risky career, go ahead and do it. And then again, 30 days later, they had five singles in the Billboard Top 100. Couldn’t be done today. And there’s a great story as to how that happened and why it happened. But we don’t have time for this.
Speaker It’s a long story. So so now, you know, that’s when I’m Mr. Laswell themselves. Come on. I have a manager here. He’s got this act, Bob Lind, who had a big hit on Elusive Butterfly of Love. Do you think we should sign his act? Yes, sir. Mr. Laswell. Well, that’s a big record. We should get that guy. OK, thank you, John. You know, and like for him to know my name was it was a miracle, you know, like, this guy is a legend. He ran that company for fifty five years. He made it one of the most successful, privately owned companies in the history of show business.
Speaker So did you know that David used to just get away from here? Yes. OK, but David had no doubt.
Speaker David Geffen had absolutely no doubt that he was going to own the world. I, on the other hand, was a person who hoped I would own a chunk and was pretty convinced and confident that I would certainly I was going to succeed there.
Speaker David had an underlying confidence about his ability to make things happen and to articulate sophisticated opinions and ideas to his superiors.
Speaker And as 20 somethings, we were not always regarded as intellectual or even as knowledgeable or capable.
Speaker But David knew that he had these skills. I felt I was learning those skills and but he had them and he was he was quietly. And not arrogantly.
Speaker Convinced that his trajectory was going to be very high and very long and he wasn’t necessarily certain of exactly what the mechanics of that evolution would be, but it was clear to me that his ambitions were much more defined in his mind. He had probably the goal of being who he is today back then. And so the trajectory of his growth and rise was attached to very specific, very long term certainty that he was going to be the David Geffen that we know and love today.
Speaker Where did that come from? I believe it came from his mother. His mother was a fabulous woman and she was, of course, at MCR. And he, as a young kid, used to hang out in the store and look up in the balcony. That’s how I remember it and watch his mother conduct business, watched his mother sell. And pitch and talk women into their corsetry, and she was a brilliant woman, sweet as they come. Tough as nails, and he got who he was from her, as I recall, I never met his father, but he was a quiet, dominated guy. And I believe David was dedicated to not becoming his father. And so he did not allow people to dominate him or manipulate him. And he had he had something I didn’t have.
Speaker We were intellectual peers, but. What David had that I didn’t. Was. He did not need to be loved.
Speaker I built my life on making those people love me and I mean those people, everybody, David was willing to risk relationships. He was willing to.
Speaker Not follow the rules and not follow the political game in order to succeed. So that difference is what made him a star, because where I would. Band. He wouldn’t and so if if you weren’t ready to make this deal, he could stay tough, strong, hard if necessary, cruel.
Speaker To get that client, that job or to accomplish that specific goal. So here’s a guy with a long term goal, and if you cut him back from his 50 year goal to his 40 year goal, he would know what that was. If you went through his 30 years ago, he would know what that was. And he knew all the way back to what he had to do today to make that long term goal come to fruition. And that’s what made David Geffen who he is today, and he was able to burn bridges to get the job done.
Speaker And this is this is his greatest talent, this. He was able to rebuild those bridges. Nobody has that skill.
Speaker This is as low as gold, though, is it so that they don’t one, that no one has the best explanation, that it was up 25 maybe so far?
Speaker The best. Absolutely the best. That’s my job.
Speaker Come Bravo.
Speaker No, I’m still curious about something. Did he say that to you? I mean, he didn’t say did he say, I’m going to take over the world? I have.
Speaker Because they might know the bales of hay.
Speaker No, remember, I believe that a closeted gay man. Was indeed in the closet, and he was not only his physical world was in the closet, but his intellectual work was in the closet. David did not come off as a raving intellectual. He was calculated. He did things specifically to accomplish things. And so he would not have bragged about that to anybody.
Speaker But this intimate conversation of eight hours, I think we sat there chewing on hand and talking about the mechanics of getting the job of agenting done. We were you know, that goal was an intellectual goal. The immediate goal where we were living and working on a day by day level, it was to get so-and-so a job. I had signed a director named Steve Binder. He did the Tami show, he did the Elvis comeback special, many other great things, and when I left the office to start the kaleidoscope, which we couldn’t call the stampede, because when we left, we no longer had the Buffalo Springfield, they had management and they were signed to William Morris. An act that I was in the process of signing was canned heat. So we decided to make the kaleidoscope the vehicle to break canned heat, which we did. So David would be he took over this career for Steve Bender when I left. And this will give you a little insight into. What really happens in the real world Bender was now agented by David Geffen, who’s now a rising star in the New York office. And known on the coast and there was a meeting, David was in L.A., I believe it was in L.A. and there were a group of agents and David was in stature. The lesser of the group in terms of tenure and power and William Morris was very much a power base.
Speaker Steve Bender made a terrible mistake because when the moment came.
Speaker To identify the responsible agent in the vernacular, the one who you, the client talked to and who disseminates your opinion to the others, the responsible agent. Instead of identifying David as that person.
Speaker Steve Bender went to Mike Rosenfeld later, one of the founders of CAA, and said, this is my guy.
Speaker Which was not loyal and not true. David was this guy, and he lost David in that moment and that affected his career in a huge, huge way because David was the ultimate manipulator of that system and he no longer manipulated that system for Binder. And it was a costly, costly error. So. There’s a vindictive nature to this man, and if you’re his friend.
Speaker He takes care of you if you’re not, he doesn’t, and he could even do you harm.
Speaker And that has happened, so.
Speaker I had left to start the kaleidoscope, and I have to say I was thinking about this conversation and I said, what really was David Geffen to me other than a friend? And what I realize is I would not be a teacher at Loyola Marymount University today teaching music business.
Speaker I would not have done. The kaleidoscope.
Speaker He raised he connected me to the money that started my nightclub.
Speaker I would not have signed Poca. If I hadn’t seen Pocho.
Speaker I I would not have signed poker if I hadn’t signed Pocho, I wouldn’t have signed America. If I hadn’t signed America, I wouldn’t have signed Crosby and Nash, which led to the reunion of Crosby, Stills and Nash, who are still reunited and played L.A. last night.
Speaker If I hadn’t put Crosby, Stills and Nash back together, I wouldn’t have gotten Peter, Paul and Mary to put them together for their reunion and so on down the line. And I realize that.
Speaker All of my greatest history. Was because David Geffen was my friend and he brought me into his organization. I was given the opportunity of working with Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, the Eagles, Jackson Browne, a myriad of other artists, because David said so. And it was that experience and the executive access that that created for me in the industry for the rest of my life, that allowed me to live an extraordinary life I love today.
Speaker So I owe him.
Speaker OK, I have two more questions on the way, more shares that were moving out of Limor, what did you know the story? Because I don’t think we actually have anybody telling us very well about the college that he lied on the application.
Speaker Oh, yeah. I don’t know, sir. OK. They told the story. Well, no, no, actually, they’re very Barry, if you know anything about their relationship. And then we moved. Now we go into music out of college, which everybody likes to give you for what?
Speaker Are we wrong? Yeah, OK.
Speaker No expert, but I like to better. OK, so the question is the college college stuff.
Speaker Just because you like the the.
Speaker Access to the mailroom.
Speaker Was one of the most coveted positions in the entire entertainment industry.
Speaker Harvard MBAs and lawyers kill each other to get that job today. Back then, it was more about nepotism. Who do you know who can get you in?
Speaker When David applied, he came out of a certain knowledge of show business. He had spent a lot of time in a legitimate theater in New York, and he he was that’s hawks, hawks crowing. And so, you know, he had much more of a clear idea of what this business was, what this company was all about than I did. All I knew was I was looking for an agent. I was looking at how do I get one? But he went into it with a with a clear vision. And in those days, although it wasn’t requisite that you have a college degree, he put down on his application that he had graduated from UCLA. And once he started in the company, he realized, wow, this is the place I can learn it all from here. And so he became petrified that they would discover that he wasn’t a graduate of UCLA. I think he had been registered there one semester and probably goofed off whatever. So every morning for the first several months of his tenure at William Morris, David would be the first guy in and the mail would come in giant canvas bags and there’d be thousands of letters that would have to be distributed.
Speaker And David got there early enough every day to get into this bag and be the first guy to see every letter. And he did this for months. And eventually the letter came and it was from UCLA and he opened it up. And there, sure enough, they were denying his graduation from that August academy and he had protected himself. He had saved the day he had kept from being fired, which he surely would have been caught in that particular lie. And so it became a legendary story, which was when he got the letter, what did you do?
Speaker He destroyed the letter. That was the end of that. No, he didn’t. Oh, he didn’t. Oh, well, I don’t have UCLA stationery reproduced.
Speaker Oh, even more clever because in those days.
Speaker OK, getting in the way here. Yeah.
Speaker Go away. Hope we’re not allowed to kill the Hawks. Yeah, I think we did. I think yeah. So but I mean without. OK, so you want to tell that as long as that’s what he got the letter.
Speaker So, so are you own Joan. Yeah. OK, so David gets the letter. Now one of the most recent inventions in in business was the Xerox machine.
Speaker And David went out and copied the letterhead and duplicated it created a letter that said he did graduate from UCLA and then generated that into the system and therefore protected himself from the negative result that might have accrued to the situation.
Speaker And once again, ultimately clever and brave, willing to break the rules and bend the rules in order to get ahead.
Speaker And that’s the we prevailed the way this is just a side of, you know, it jumping way ahead. Isn’t there an irony here, like, you know, the Dow of the school?
Speaker Oh, yeah, yeah. OK, OK, good, good, good.
Speaker So so the ultimate irony is that David taught at UCLA. He became a chancellor of the Board of Regents of the State of California universities and most recently donated 200 million dollars for the establishment of the David Geffen Hospital on campus at UCLA. So it came full circle and he paid the school back for the abuse of their letterhead.
Speaker That’s right. Okay, just one last question and then we’re out of those years altogether.
Speaker Did you observe anything about the relationship between David and Barry Diller?
Speaker Barry Diller was one of those people who.
Speaker You identified in your own mind as gay.
Speaker This was never an admission. But and it may not be true. I don’t really know, but there was. A bonding. Which I would assume was based on that identity. Diller was a sourpuss. He did not care to placate anybody’s interests other than what his own job was on any given occasion.
Speaker He was out of the mailroom shortly after my joining the company, and he was a secretary to a brilliant agent named Stan Kaiman, who was also a closeted gay.
Speaker For some reason, Barry and I really liked each other, and I was one of the people that he got along with, we were warm and fuzzy. And I remember that Barry left the Morris office before he actually became an agent.
Speaker Little bugger back.
Speaker And he moved over, I think, to ABC television, where he was, I think, an assistant or junior executive there, and of course, went on to invent the movie of the week and become a superstar and remains so today.
Speaker But I remember how touched I was when Barry was leaving office and he called me over to his house, an apartment in Beverly Hills, and he made a special point of informing me that he was leaving and that, you know, we you know, he’d always liked me and he appreciated my friendship and so forth. And he went off to great glory, which, of course, in small business like show business, you observe and you watch and you take a certain pride in your friend’s success. And like like most of the people from that era, I ran into him on an airplane one day and we had a warm reunion and it was real sweet and fun and went our separate ways. And, you know, I haven’t talked to him since, but I remembered that he did this wonderful thing. Well, while in the mailroom, this this jealousy among the peer group prevailed a lot of the time. And we all kind of took exception to.
Speaker Terry Melcher, the son of Doris Day, who joined at the mailroom level on nepotism but didn’t have to actually be in the mailroom.
Speaker He was in charge of what we call then the kinescope room, and this is before videotape. And this is where a lot of the television shows were kept in records called Kinney’s. And so Melchor would come in. We all had to be there on the dime before nine military would come in. Ten, ten, thirty. And he was the first guy I saw who didn’t wear socks. He’d wear loafers, no socks, which of course, turned out to be cool. I didn’t know it at the time, but he would come into the kini room where he had his own little desk and he’d have his coffee and he would have, you know, he was wealthy and we weren’t and he would have lunch sat in. And so we were all a little envious of Terry’s position. But Terry was a very sweet guy and he was always nice to others.
Speaker He didn’t like flaunt his class, which in show business, if you’re Dorsay son, you’re high class and but very resented this along with the rest of us, how much he got away with murder in our eyes. And one and Melchor used to take off his shoes and walk around Kini room in his bare feet, and so he would keep his shoes under his desk. And and legend has it. And I’m not sure Barry admits to this, but we all believe that Barry was the guy who glued Melchers shoes to the floor so that when he attempted he put on issues like this and then he tried to get up. And of course, he was stuck and felt so bad.
Speaker He won the prize and admiration of all for being the guy who glued Melcher’s shows to the floor. And that was always one of my fondest memories of those days.
Speaker So let’s let’s move on and talk about the music scene in a way. Let’s start with Monterey Pop, this very popular sort of kind of a linchpin moment in the burgeoning music movement.
Speaker Here’s I first heard about Monterey Pop.
Speaker From a band, the band I was managing, candy, and they had just broken their first single in L.A., it was a song called Going Up the Country, and it was a smash hit out of the box for a blues band that was extraordinary to get a hit single out of a blues band. And the publicist for Monterey Pop was the Beatles’ publicist, Derek Taylor. And I knew Derek Taylor because he had been the publicist for Chad and Jeremy, another English act. And my first signing to William Morris. And I called up Derek and I said, look, we got this band, can’t he? And I said, Oh, yeah. And he said, you know, they really, really want to be honest. Monterey Pop show.
Speaker And he said, wow, interesting. Yeah. Well, hmm. We’re looking for someone to open the show. And that’s the only booking left, I said, we’ll do it. No problem. And so he says, OK, OK, you got the deal.
Speaker I think they paid seven hundred dollars or something for the band. Well, it turned out that since that was the week before the event, that there were only four tickets left. And they were holding these tickets in case the Beatles were going to show up and the Beatles were not going to show up, and since they were the last four seats, they gave them to me. So my partners and I had front row seats for the entire Monterey Pop event, which. Was the first. Cultural. Multi genre rock event of all time, and it had the broadest range of artists probably ever to appear on the same bill, and it was the cream of the crop and it was focused around the Mamas and the Papas, who were the clients and production artists for Lou Adler, who’s one of the true greats of our business, Lou probably produced more hit records on more artists than any other single person. And of course, some of those artists turned out to be the greatest artists of their genre in several different directions. So.
Speaker The Kanti did open the show and is part of the movie, and I got to sit in the front row and watch all these amazing artists come down.
Speaker I was there when Jimi Hendrix burned his guitar. I could smell the smoke. I was there when the who demolished their instruments. I was there when Ravi Shankar introduced the sitar to America, which was shocking and wonderful. I was there for the most impressive event of that occasion, which was the debut to my eyes of Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the holding company.
Speaker And I fell in love with her. But this was an amazing woman, amazing star, amazing artist.
Speaker And David Geffen. Used to say this and probably still does when it comes to music, it’s easy to tell what’s great.
Speaker When it comes to music, it’s hard to tell what’s not great. And that axiom is ultimately the truth about music, music in and of itself is so cool. It’s kind of like sex even once bad. Not bad. And so.
Speaker It’s not hard to see a superstar in one viewing and you looked at Janis Joplin and you knew this girl is one of the true great artists of all time.
Speaker And the whole event was filled with those kind of magical moments where the audience had not quite all turned on, tuned in and dropped out. Yet the hair on most of those people was not long.
Speaker And.
Speaker Not too long afterwards. When you got to Woodstock, the full impact of what was coming out of San Francisco, ideologically anti-war was musically greatness had hit. And you compare those two audiences and you’ll see what had happened in the interim period.
Speaker A period of how many years, David?
Speaker I’m not sure exactly how many years that was, I could look on to videos over there and tell you two years.
Speaker Two years, yes. Yes. OK, and 69, what happened? Yeah.
Speaker So. So this entire transition was provoked by Timothy Leary, whose message was turn on, tune in and drop out, cradled in the idea of do not trust anyone over 30. And that audience at Monterey Pop who saw the incredible power of this great, great music two years later at Woodstock had joined the force. They had turned on, they had tuned in, they had dropped out, and they did not trust anyone over 30.
Speaker They had created a complete counterculture that refused to participate in the Vietnam War, that took the civil rights movement that was provoked by Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary and Joan Baez and Pete’s children and.
Speaker Took the residual effect of what was supposed to happen as a result of the civil war and started to push it into the places where it had a crude no effect, the south we marched, we embraced the Black Panthers.
Speaker The hippies and the Black Panthers are the only united effort ever to beat the United States at war.
Speaker We stopped the Vietnam War. I’m personally shocked that the youth of today are not precipitating those same events.
Speaker Me too, because I was part of that whole thing. Yeah, yeah. Making me a little emotional here.
Speaker Well, it’s interesting because in my rock on film class last week, I showed Scorseses No Direction Home. Bob Dylan and I saw all those clips and I saw those people and I remembered those days. And I got up after the film and I did a 20 minute rant on my class about, you better get this corporatocracy under control.
Speaker You better stop this Afghan war. There are no good wars. This is. You’re being sold that this is OK and it’s not OK. You better make sure that you get universal health care and you better make sure that there is election reform in this country, because if you do not, the corporations are going to become more powerful than the government. And and that’s fascism. And that’s what they accuse anybody who tries to change the game for the better of being as a bad word. Well, Tammy. Socialism is tainted by Adolf Hitler’s use of the word, but socialism means that people and if you don’t stand up and assert your rights as the people, if you allow the continued erosion of your constitution, your sacred constitution, then you’re going to end up in the army because there will be no jobs for you. You will they will have the tools they need to continuously fight to protect their corporate profits. Greed used to be a sin and now is the motivating force of this country. And if it doesn’t change, your children will forever be paying the price and their children and their children.
Speaker So one of the signature events of Monterey Pop was the introduction of Laura Nyro to this mostly West Coast crowd and the influence of the San Francisco scene, combined with the L.A. scene, which was slightly in front of it, The Byrds, Mamas and Papas, Buffalo Springfield emerging.
Speaker And there was a certain style. It was a little cowboy Little Rock and roll and outcomes.
Speaker Laura Nyro. Now, everybody in the higher executive level of Monterey Pop, the event and the film, both being produced by Lou Adler, was allowed to bring in some artists that they were going to endorse. And somebody presented Laura. I forget exactly who it was. Maybe I never knew. And she walked out on stage. Being introduced. And her image was completely out of sync with all this color, the flower children emerging and the California. Style, and she was what we would call today, goth. Black clothing, black fingernails, a darker image. And whether there was booing or not and I wasn’t a cop, we got to stop this refrigerator.
Speaker Oh, you can unplug. Sorry. I’m so sorry because I don’t want to lose any of what you’re saying. It’s so wonderful.
Speaker OK, you want to pick that up. You don’t realize there was booing that making the everybody.
Speaker So I don’t know if there was booing per say. I don’t think it was booing. I think she thought it was booing and that really distressed her and she floundered.
Speaker Probably did not have a lot of experience as a performer, not behind the piano, and so standing at the mic alone in this perceived hostile environment, she barked and rumor was at the time.
Speaker And I don’t know if this is true was that someone had given her acid. And that she was affected by this and lost in the environment of what that is a kind of unification of all visual aspects into one energy field.
Speaker And as I recall, she didn’t sing or maybe she sang a little bit, but it wasn’t going down as she wanted it to. And she left the stage. And I think at the point that she either started to leave or someone in the wings perceived that she was going to leave, someone escorted her off. Rumor was it was Kris Kristofferson. I don’t recall, but that that was an aborted event that I’m sure affected her in a huge way because it had to be devastating for an artist of her sensitivity, especially considering her talent. Like, I don’t find talented artists to be unconscious and conscious of their value. And so if you know you’re Laura Nyro and you’re out there experiencing this, it had to be devastating for her.
Speaker And what did you hear that happened? I mean, did you hear the story that has somebody told David about this when he was on the West Coast and he went racing back to New York to find her?
Speaker And I know that that was the motivational event that David being from New York, was conscious of who she was.
Speaker Clive had presented her as, I believe the album title was not just another artist or something like that. And and David went up there, corralled her.
Speaker I don’t think that Clive was representing her, wasn’t at that time.
Speaker OK, so she had one record on a smaller label.
Speaker OK, David was aware of Laura having been from New York City and he went back. And rescued her really from probably some kind of ultimate despair and they became more than artist manager, they became partners and his ambition was directly tied to her. Hers to he. And they proceeded from there to do it together. And I remember one time David told me where the title of one of her albums came from. They were standing on a balcony in the city looking at the lights, and she turned to him and said, New York is a tender Barry. And that became New York tend to bury and then David put his skills to work on her behalf and she start to move, she got covered by major artists, delivered huge hits, and this is the Fifth Dimension and Barbra Streisand and others. And and then she started breaking on her own.
Speaker And when I joined David, she was a client. And in the launching of asylum records, David was wise enough to know that a label, a boutique label, starting out needed star attractions.
Speaker And there was a savage battle that went down between Clive Davis and David Geffen over whether or not Laura Nyro was going to leave Columbia Records and join this upstart label, Asylum Records. And David had Laura convinced that this was OK. And obviously there was a conflict of interest. The manager signing the artists to his own label was something that the traditional people in the industry would say. Whoa, wait a minute, what’s this? It was not common for managers to have labels in those days. The big boutique label was A&M, Lou had owed and that was about it. And so when when Laura was going to leave Columbia to go to this label, Clive had a pretty solid pitch against why this isn’t good for your career. You know, who knows what’s going to happen to asylum records? Who knows if David Geffen is going to be successful or not?
Speaker Johnny Johnny didn’t didn’t I mean, I understand that it might have been crossing some traditional boundaries and then not taking a position one way or the other. But he was a rule breaker and he did call her publisher. He didn’t have some reasonable expectation that because of as I understand it, this was not a traditional manager artist relationship. I mean, they want each other and they need it to get a reasonable expectation that she would sign with him.
Speaker David was convinced that Laura would sign with it and he didn’t have a right to think. I’m trying to get it. I don’t I don’t.
Speaker I think I think that conflict of interest plagues many artists, manager relationships. For one thing, we never had contracts with our clients. I have only had one signed artist management agreement with an act ever. And I’ve managed over a hundred acts in my life. And that was because I was funding the act and I wanted to make sure that I was locked in. And I and I did have half the publishing that was an act on Arista called Silver. But I think that. At least in my case, and I think certainly in that case, that that there was love involved, that David loved Laura and Laura loved David. And I believe that since peace and love was our motto in those days, I believe that we all loved our clients and all of our clients loved us. I mean, it was always about love.
Speaker So, Joanie. Was loyal to David and to Elliott, that was their label, she loved Morto, but she loved David more.
Speaker And so she courageously made the leap from a super established label where she had enormous success and made the transition. Laura had agreed to sign with asylum records to her love partner, manager, co-owner of her publishing company, Tuna Fish Music. And Clive, I was in the room with David when that battle for that transition went down and he and I sculpted the conversations in advance. This is what I’m going to say to Clive or to whomever about this and ultimately, Clive. Got pretty tough about a defense of Columbia Records versus a new label for you, Miss Nero, and we lost that battle and David was vindictive. And I remember standing in David’s office watching him, he made a savage deal. I mean, the deal on paper for deals of that day look like Clive had lost his mind because he offered her so much that that it wasn’t there was no way that a baby label could compete with the money. And in the process, they sold and they made Clive buy tuna fish music. They made her advance probably greater than any other advance any artist had ever gotten and other really hard ball terms in the deal.
Speaker But this was before asylum was going to start.
Speaker He sold Lorretta to Clive, got a great deal for her, made them both rich. Then he decided to start asylum. I’ve got my facts right. And then she said, I’m going to side with you, he announced. I think that the big thing here is he announced it. And then when she didn’t, it was a very public embarrassment.
Speaker There was there was an embarrassing moment when when the announced deal didn’t come to fruition for sure. And David’s revenge on Clive was to dictate all the terms of both deals to the Hollywood Reporter, who did it as a feature story and made Clive look foolish. No one thought that Laura Nyro would ever be worth this kind of deal. And subsequently, David had his moment of revenge. But the deal probably did pay off in the long haul because of her enormous success that continued to accrue.
Speaker The clerk tells the story a little bit differently. He says that.
Speaker David, as you know, I assume he was going to start asylum, I assume Laura was going to sign with him and then. He claims, I believe, that she called him and said, why haven’t you called me? And that this is Clive’s version and that he went, well, you know, and then she said, but I want to stay with Columbia, this is where I’ve always been. And that was my goal in life, to be with Columbia, which David got for her.
Speaker And I love Clive. It’s a bit easier. However, you were in the room when the deal was going down.
Speaker This wasn’t the deal for sale and this was the deal when he initially sold and I sold it.
Speaker Got Clive to sign her, right?
Speaker No, no. This was the deal that David made with Clive to make it tougher for him to sign her after she decided not to go with the sale.
Speaker No, no, no, no. This is the way the decision is being met. Yes, exactly.
Speaker So the decision is being made by Mesero, who was no dummy. Am I going to go with my manager’s fledgling label by a star or am I going to stay with the biggest record company in the world, Clive Astar? And so as it unfolded, Laura and she may have precipitated the first call to Clive because that would be a thinking person’s call. Clive, what’s your opinion? What am I doing here? Is this the right move for me? Now, Clive is going to say no, OK? Clive’s ego is as big as Davis. And you know that this was a duel of titans. These guys were at war for something extremely valuable, more valuable to David than to Clive Davis had not put out a Jonie record. I don’t think he put out any records. So Clive had Dylan and, you know, Santana and Janis and others, you know, so the loss of it was not as important to Clive as the gaining of it was to David. But Clive, the battle of the egos was gigantic. And so neither it was about winning or losing. And so the battle that went down was whether or not Laura would honor her commitment to David or be talked out of it by Clive. I doubt that she went to him for a reason not to. It might have been to tell him goodbye. But Clive, a brilliant man. Record man to his soul had the pitch. The whole game of show business about your pitch, who can you sell on your product and Clive Salter, you know, I will give you more money. I will give you me Mecklai, who was a proven commodity. Clive, as a record man, was the ultimate song person. He knew a great song better than Moe Armitt Jerry. Jerry Moss.
Speaker They call him hitmakers.
Speaker Yeah, maybe, maybe I don’t want to say, Lou, because Lou was pretty genius about this himself, but, you know, these were record producer record men.
Speaker You know, David was a personal manager come record man. And so there was an unproven thing. Now, I knew because I knew Dave, but Laura only knew him as a manager. And the record business in those days was a much more mysterious thing than it is today. So Clive’s reputation, his talent, his contribution that he made to the life and career of an artist was proven. It was a huge factor. And she and he pitched her to stay. And that was heartbreaking for David because it was a love affair and it was his reputation, his honor, his dignity that he had said, Laura is going with me. And I remember how heartbroken he was. And I’m not saying there weren’t tears involved, but he made a hell of a deal and it was. A cornerstone piece of income in his fortune.
Speaker And.
Speaker I always felt like David, when he was flat broke, was a millionaire when he had a million. He had that when he had 10, he had one hundred twenty one hundred. He had a billion.
Speaker And so did he do, to your knowledge, to hear him speak again?
Speaker I don’t know, I don’t know, but knowing David and his. Rebuilding of Bridges ability, I would say probably, yes, probably return to love, but I could be wrong. May not may not have ever happened.
Speaker I think it’s over. He was concerned.
Speaker You know, there’s nothing more vicious than sparring over a spurned lover.
Speaker It’s so interesting. I never thought about that. But I yeah. You know, it’s not about the spoiler thing because I definitely thought about that. But just in terms. But I don’t think that they were physically lovers, but I think.
Speaker No, no, they were they were lovers. They loved each other. You know, they weren’t lovers. The hurt was a lot of love right back bigger.
Speaker What was so interesting about what what John said is that, you know, I never thought of it in terms of the deal making, that it was almost punitive about it. I mean, when he was. Yeah, yeah. She declined like he was like, well, that’s it. I’m not taking no for an incredible deal on that publishing. Unheard of.
Speaker Yeah, unheard of deal at the time. And definitely you need to say that on camera. Yeah.
Speaker Yeah. The deal that David made with Clive as a result of the decision that had already been made, I’m not leaving Columbia was as savage a deal as had been made in the record industry up to that time. And we’re talking about a business that is essentially founded and run by criminals.
Speaker I mean, there was nothing fair or right about the music business. It was always anti artists. And David and I, in our careers as managers of of recording artists, spent our lives fighting record companies on behalf of artists and the deals that were originally constructed in the early days, the early days of of Ahmet and Jerry Wexler and and Chess Records and and the smaller regional labels. I mean, those artists never got paid. You know, Decca Records was sued by Peggy Lee 40 years later to get money that she never got. So it was a cruel, ugly business. These were not Harvard MBA is the were street music meant guys who love music. The legend is that Ahmet and Jerry sold their first records out of the trunk of their car on Forty Second Street, and it was called race music in those days. And it was sold to black people and it was black artists to black people. It was the evolution of rock and roll where Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino crossed over into white radio and got hit records with white kids.
Speaker That that was the basis of rock and roll as emergence, which there was no template for. There was no way for white artists to fit into an existing system to create personal appearance careers that had to be invented. And it was originally invented by Dick Clark, who had Dick Clark Caravan of Stars, and they would put a boy singer. Maybe eight or 10 of them, a couple of girls and a backup band on one bus and send it around the country, and it was emulating the country music system, but it was going to hold new audiences. And in those days, promoters didn’t have a clue what they were doing.
Speaker I remember putting Chad and Jeremy on a show in San Diego and the P.A. was the kind of play that a teacher would talk to a classroom through one voice. I mean, they just didn’t know how to do it. And so that’s where we all learned. We learned by trial and error, like, OK, you got to make sure the P.A. has this wattage and this volume capability and so forth. And then slowly but surely we started to evolve.
Speaker Whether he is her manager played something of a creative role in helping her refine her image, define it, create the Laura Nyro.
Speaker OK, it may or may not be true. We know it is true. It is trying to talk to Charlie.
Speaker And I’m very he’s the guy he brought in to produce Alan. Right. And I think that’s I think he had a really good sense of how to do that. But I don’t want to give him credit for things he didn’t do.
Speaker So I’m curious in my opinion.
Speaker You cannot underestimate the value of a true personal manager to an artist’s life and career. David grew up in the New York theater and he was very conscious of theatrical devices. He was constantly conscious of image style, what worked in the media, how to manipulate the media and how to posture an artist to be a real performer.
Speaker And so no artist knows these things instinctively. Someone has to say through it this way, don’t do that, make this happen.
Speaker What you’re trying to achieve is a certain charismatic image and you’re trying to evolve a cathartic effect. And so David was very aware of these ingredients in the production of any show. And that’s why his skills went way beyond just music. I mean, theatrical film, the other things that he’s become noted for, these were all seated in his days and he got into the theaters for free because I think it was his uncle was in the biz and he used to get David into the musicals and to the plays for, you know, charge. So he would go all the time. And so he was he was he knew show business and show business was a mysterious place to the layman. But when he got a hold of Laura and she was not beautiful in the traditional sense, what I call 10 in the face, you know, she she was beautiful in her soul and her voice. But here you’re dealing with an unusual element, a not very attractive woman succeeding in an industry where beauty was a product. So what he sculpted out of her as a performer was what we call in the in the management game direction. You’re directing, just as a movie director would direct a cast through a script. You’re directing them on the activities that go on, not just on the stage, but on the street and where these things blend and how you are in front of the media and so forth. So I think David’s contribution to her success was overwhelmingly important. I do not think that if if he hadn’t endorsed her and hadn’t demanded respect for her and demanded attention. That that she would not have been.
Speaker The star she became, she would have been a very important songwriter.
Speaker As important as anybody ever was in songwriting and Leiber and Stoller, I don’t care, you know, whoever, whomever, but because he was able to.
Speaker Chip away what wasn’t a star, she emerged as a person who could demonstrate her own material in a fashion that was found to be totally acceptable by an audience that might have been less caring.
Speaker If she didn’t have those things, he contributed.
Speaker So interesting, I mean, I fell in love with Laura Nyro the minute I heard her, but, um, because I thought I’d never heard rhythms like this and I mean, I just thought songs were extraordinary. And in preparation for this film, I’ve actually been listening to her again. And I actually emailed David in the middle of, like, having spent a day listening to her again.
Speaker And I thought she is the raw power of that of that music.
Speaker And her presentation of that music was extraordinary. I’m not sure she’d go down today, actually. I really I’m not sure about that.
Speaker I think I think I think today it would be much easier for the public to accept her and and what might not have happened without David than might happen today if an artist came along with that kind of talent, because there was a lot of talent emerging at that time. Jimi, I’ve once said to me, you know, Herman, what’s wrong with music today? I say, what do you mean? He says.
Speaker Not enough drugs.
Speaker And that doesn’t just mean the creative process of a drug induced songwriter, but the drug induced audience and they were meeting on a higher plane. You do get high.
Speaker That’s why they call it getting high. And there is a deeper access to the collective subconscious, as Young calls it, where if Einstein is correct and there is no time space continuum, it’s all a fabric and takes place only in the present. Then all songs ever possible exist right now, and if an artist can have access to the collective subconscious and pull those songs out, then they’re going to be great. Well, back then, via psychedelic drugs. More hours had more access deeper into the one mind than they have today, when drugs are just say no doesn’t mean everybody just says no. But they disappeared like cocaine used to be in everybody’s pocket. I never liked it myself. I’m speedy enough. I don’t need help. But it was there all the time. And then there were all these other drugs that were part of the subculture, part of the if if you did drugs, you were fighting the war.
Speaker So everybody did. And what we learned in 1969 was, well, this stuff is bigger than us. And when Janis fell and Jimmy fell and and Morrison fell, you know, that was a wake up call of a serious nature. And people started to say, well, you better slow down here, you know, because before that, it was your job to do the next drug that came along and they got pretty out there.
Speaker But then again, David was not part of the drug scene. How much do you think that affected his relationship with? Artists, his artists and others, because it was one that has seen it all.
Speaker David David’s abstinence from drug as a fuel. Probably. Gave him.
Speaker A much more grounded opinion where people everybody doing drugs knew there was something that you gave up in order to participate, and there was a certain respect, maybe even admiration, that would accrue to David from the artist because he abstained and didn’t make that part of his M.O..
Speaker I always phrased it like drugs as a tool was OK when drugs became the fuel, it was not OK. And the net result was that. David. I wouldn’t want to say even experimented with drugs. David. Tasted. Like you would a fine wine, some drugs. But he never embraced them as part of his M.O., I think he did.
Speaker I think, in essence, by the first time he did it, Laura.
Speaker Yeah, I know he did. I said at least once.
Speaker And I remember once I got a somebody gave me a sealed vial of Mallinckrodt cocaine, which was in a little glass bottle, that you broke the top off and it came up and I didn’t do much cocaine only in specific social situations with clients where it was a put down to them. If you did, it was never part of my I never had it in my of my own.
Speaker I didn’t carry it or buy it or have it. But someone gave me this little vial because it was so unique, pharmaceutical cocaine. And David wanted that. And so I gave it to and I don’t know if he did it or just held it there, kept it or probably knowing David on some ultra. Sophisticated moment revealed that to some superhigh person, like Honest and maybe was the star of that occasion because he had this incredibly rare thing.
Speaker And fascinating, but it kind of brings us to. Talk to Elliot, Elliot and Jane and this partnership, and they couldn’t have been more different. Why did it work? How were they different both in terms of the drugs, but also in the way they relate to the artists? And it seems that it seems that David was always a little bit outside of. The inner circle with the artist and Elliott was right in the middle of it. Is that a fair description?
Speaker I think I think it’s fair to say that, Elliot.
Speaker And David met on an intellectual plane. These are extremely intelligent men. They also shared a background of poor boys from Brooklyn. Elliott’s power. Was in his sense of humor. And there was no.
Speaker Imaginable that Eliot couldn’t diffuse with a with the right joke, the right one liner, the right zinger attached to the moment, and David didn’t have that and.
Speaker There’s an earthiness about Elliot that. If if Crosby’s earthy. Elliotts more.
Speaker All right, we are out of time. Oh, we’re talking about L’Italia.
Speaker What’s the question?
Speaker Well, it’s just the relationship, the differences, so work the symbiotic relationship between David and Elliot was in a Daoist sense.
Speaker Enhanced by. ElÃas, Yang and yin and what the other lacks.
Speaker Each had and there was this amazingly wonderful report, Eliot had a certain kind of ability to. Call a spade a spade, David and I were the kind of guys who would romance around it to some degree with a fabulous dialogue about how to get the same thing that Hollywood gave us. And now we’re doing it this way because. And so when they came together.
Speaker It was you know, Eliot had Neil and Joni. And David had just taken on Crosby, Stills and Nash, so there was a need for David to have an apparatus to on the West Coast because he was new here and he had worked at an agency, which I think at the time was called International Famous and became part of ICM. I think International Famous merged with CMA to become ICM. And I remember going over to David’s office, whatever this was called. And I remember that was the day I met Gary Byrd. Gary was sitting in David’s office and he introduced us. And it was out of that office that David found Jackson Browne because a tape had come in and David through the tape away without listening to it. And his secretary dug out the tape. And just out of curiosity, because the picture of Jackson was stunningly gorgeous. And so she took it home and listened to it and came back and said, well, check this out. And of course, again, it didn’t take a genius to recognize genius. And Jackson popped up that Dave and David was immediately hooked and. The whole founding of of asylum records was about getting a record company for Jackson, and then the dream grew from there and we acquired a series of artists. That was around the time that David and I ran into each other at the Troubadour, and I had been out of touch with him for several years.
Speaker And what happened was in those years, I was living out here in Topanga.
Speaker I don’t think I was doing anything but taking drugs and having fun and. A television producer named Jackie Barnett, who I had sold access to when I was at William Morris, phoned me up and he wanted I was managing canned heat and and. He said, I want that bear guy, the lead singer of Cat, he’s a 300 pound guy named the Bear. I want to host a TV show and the Bear was the classic disc jockey. He had 10000, 78000 steel reinforced orange crates piled up in his in his house. And my partner, Skip Taylor, who still manages canned heat today. Well, his father had been a singer and Charlie Barnett’s big band, and he had never heard his father sing, and we’re pitching the bear one night on some job we wanted to do at his house up here in the area which burned down. And the bear said, oh, your father was in that band. Hmm.
Speaker Now, he was looking at a wall of acetates and he walked over and he picked out a record.
Speaker Didn’t check any file, didn’t check any, you know, catalog, pulled out a record, put it on the turntable, played the record. Now in those days you get a lot of big band music and a little singer in the middle and then more big band music.
Speaker So we’re listening and he’s pointing out, oh, that’s Benny Goodman as a sideman, you know, this is so-and-so. And then this little kind of squeaky voice comes on singing a verse in the middle of this record, and he turns to skip and says, that’s your father who had never heard his father sing.
Speaker And he knew exactly where it was out of 10000 records.
Speaker He was telling that that could well be Charlie Barnett was one of the most important big bands of the era. So anyway, this guy, Jackie Barnett, says, I want that bear guy to host the show.
Speaker So I went in to L.A. to take Charlie Barnett to a gig in San Bernardino where at what they call the swing auditorium in San Bernardino to see can he perform. And I remember that night clearly because we were all smoking a joint in the bathroom. And as I was walking out, a cop walked in and they arrested the lead singer from Heat who ate the joint in front of the cop.
Speaker And then they tried to get him to confess and he wouldn’t. And then he came down. If you don’t put on your show, these kids are going to riot and everything.
Speaker And so ultimately the show went on. And and now I was in L.A. and I had no car. And so. I remember. There was a party that my ex partner from the kaleidoscopes, Kip, was one of my partners, another wonderful guy named Gary ASOT, who’s deceased, and and I remember we we the next I slept at their house overnight.
Speaker And next morning I’m walking down the street and and this car honks and this band, I used to imagine that called Limón Sebel and the leader of the band Wainer when is in this car. And he says, hey, what are you doing? Well, we’re moving into a little house. This is a miniature house in the backyard of another house down on Fairfax. And so I went over to their house and I remember we watched Help The Beatles help on TV that night. And by morning, I was the manager of the band and we were going to do the Beatle thing on this band and go forward. I don’t know. I got off on that that story. But we’re back to Elliott.
Speaker OK, let’s go back to L.A. Let’s go back to kind of you know, Elliott is the one I think you called David. He’d been out here and he said, you have no idea what’s happening here. Bands are growing up left and right to. And me, you got to come out here. This is a scene and. I think it would be fair to say that without David and Elliot and largely David, who really I think from a business standpoint made it work. They changed music history.
Speaker I mean, this whole 70s wouldn’t have happened for perhaps I sort of been there. How did he make it? Kind of a movement.
Speaker And I was I was out of the loop when. When Crosby, Stills Nash first album came out, I was by then a fan, basically loved the record. I think the greatest musical sound possible is the blending of three human voices. And if you look at the acts I managed, that’s what attracted me Pocho America, Crosby, Stills, Nash, Peter, Paul and Mary. These were the great three part harmonies of all time. And at one time I managed all those acts simultaneously, so I know what I liked. And so as a one night, I was in the Troubadour Bar. On a Monday night, which was open house to the music industry. Every Monday and I was in there just hanging out and David walked up to me. And he says, hey, how you doing, the replies of Craig, how are you? And he said, Neal’s here. And I and I and I and he started, he said, I’ll get them, and I started to find there’s no way they’re I’ll get it. And he went into the room and he came back with Neil. And Neil knew that I had risk bet I bet my career on Buffalo Springfield that William Morris I parlayed the success I had with Chad and Jeremy, the success I had with Sonny and Cher.
Speaker And I said to the William Morris Agency in writing. To all agents coast, New York, Chicago, regarding Buffalo Springfield. Please be advised that they are the next thing to happen to the world, but don’t worry, they’re in our herd. And it was signed, Hartman, Taylor, Goldie Taylor being the guy who made record deals, Golden being the guy who booked gigs, I being the TV guy.
Speaker And the thing that made that memo unique was that Skipp Taylor and I spent all afternoon going through books in a bookstore to find a little tiny buffalo on a map of North Dakota that we traced on to.
Speaker We got the girls in the video room to give us the stencil and we traced this buffalo on the header of this memo. And we took this little tiny William Morris logo that what we call the triple cross. Which was really four and we for Xs and we it was they gave it to us to put on Christmas cards and we stamped it on the rump of that buffalo. So when when it said in our herd, it was brand it, we must. Now, the hardest thing to do within an agency is to get all the agents on the case because everybody has stuff more to do than it can be done. They have their own clients they’re worried about. And a new act is a pain in the butt because it’s hard to sell. No one knows what it is. That memo rocked the Morris office. I mean, they came back saying, what is it? What do I have to do? I’m in now. Phil Weltman, the DCI of the young agents that William Morris was on vacation in Palm Springs. And I got a phone call from him and he read me the riot act. How dare you violate the sacred communication system of the William Morris Agency with diagrams and jokes. And what he didn’t know was that the whole of a company, because he was out of town, had flipped over it. And Sam Weisbord, the president, called me down to his office and he showed me missed the last Fogel’s copy of the memo on which was written as W.. This is the most fantastic thing I have ever seen, L.. And so it had been a gigantic success.
Speaker Now Weltman says to me, don’t you ever do anything like that again? Yes, sir.
Speaker The problem being I had already done it again and this one went out with the with the buffalo and their logo and Red Rock and roll one, a summer examination answered, true or false and a community created. And it communicated the terms of a deal I just made with Nick Van off the producer of the Hollywood Palace to put the Buffalo Springfield on the Hollywood palace, which was going to be the first time a rock act had ever done that show. And the genesis of the deal was in that. Betty Hutton, moment year a year prior, when I saved the day because every dime of overtime went out of Nick Xenophon Bill Hardbacks pocket. Right. And I knew he owed me one. And the nature of the business was, if I owe you one, I’ll pay you.
Speaker And I did what I call a Babe Ruth when Babe said, I’m going to hit the home run for the kid in the hospital. And he did, that was the biggest homerun of his career. I called up Charlie Green, the manager of Buffalo Springfield, and I said, I’m going to book Buffalo Springfield on the Hollywood Palace. Never played rock’n’roll act in there. Like I said, I’m telling you, I’m making the booking. He says, go for it. I called him Nirvana and I said, I need a meeting. He says, Come on up. I walked into his office. I was five minutes into a 40 minute pitch. And he says, What do you want? And I said, I want five guest shots for the Buffalo Springfield on the Hollywood palace.
Speaker I want him to start at twenty five hundred dollars. And I went five hundred dollars. He says, you got it. What else? So the terms of that deal were communicated in this true and false memo that Phil Weltman was about to get a day late. And by then he had heard that this act had broken within the company overnight. And I never heard a word about it, but that was how we started Buffalo Springfield’s career.
Speaker And that got Jerry Brant to put them on the opening of the Rolling Stones at the Hollywood Bowl as the opening act. The TV exposure itself was enormously valuable. Then I put them as the opening act on Chad and Jeremy’s tour and I really, really contributed to their launching.
Speaker Now, Stephen Stills had no idea of that, but David had told Neil Young. So when Neil Young comes up to me in the bar of the Troubadour that night, it’s like hugs and kisses.
Speaker And then he’ll be in a very dramatic scene after the greeting and the intimate moment. And every I know now it’s Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young now. And, you know, deja vu, a huge success. Neil walks 10 feet away and every eyes on him and he turns back to me and as sincerely as could be read, he said, Thank you, man.
Speaker And David saw that moment.
Speaker And Neil’s his toughest case, and that’s when he said, I want to talk to you.
Speaker And then he invited me up to his house that he got in the Beverly Hills mountains in his deal for Johnny Rivers when he sold Socity Records to a major record company. And his commission was Johnny Rivers House. And so David Stern invited me up to lunch and I had this wonderful car at the time.
Speaker It was a totally restored Austin Healey 3000. And David would drive. We would drive around the car and he took I remember he took me up to Barbra Streisand’s house and he for some reason was at war with Ryan O’Neal at the time. And Ryan’s car was there, so he didn’t want to go in. So he said, honk, honk, honk. And Barbra comes out gorgeous in a negligee across this rolling lawn. And I remember the line. She looks down and he introduces me and I said, hi. And she says, Is that your car?
Speaker I said, Yeah, she’s nice car and I thank you.
Speaker And that was the only time I met Streisand. But anyway, so David said, you got to come and work for me. Elliott had had some kind of shoulder injury and surgery and he was staying at the ranch and someone had to manage these artists.
Speaker And so he recruited me to come and be the manager. I said, Dave, I said, I don’t want a job. You know, I, I, you know, if you if you’re getting me, you’re going to have to give me a piece. And so he said, well, man, you don’t know what you’re asking for. I mean, we’re huge. I said, I know, but I don’t do job. And so he said, look, you come with me and you know, if you do the job, I’ll give you a piece. And so. I took the deal well, first I had to meet Elliot, and Elliot came down from the ranch to the office on Sunset for the purpose of meeting me, and I found him to be so charming and so dear that and he treated me so royally, he said. Hartmann, you’re a legend, you know, and so I took the gig. Now I’ve been used to living out here in the hills. Is it rolling, Bob? Isn’t that what Johnny Cash said? Is it rolling, Bob?
Speaker It is my favorite artist of all time.
Speaker I mean, to so the question is, was cool is very cool. Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash was cool. If he be alive today, he’d be right up there with Willie and. Who’s the other one? Well, Miles is no longer around. Oh, Miles, we’re talking living here. He was one of them for sure, the second album I ever bought and the fourth album because it was stolen out of my room at college along with the Weavers at Carnegie Hall.
Speaker Did you circusy your.
Speaker No. No, I love fish. I don’t buy it. Oh, I love her. She’ll be that’ll be on the 14th.
Speaker That will send me all your stuff or I’ll find something to show in my class and sell you some DVD. You can do the entire to come and speak. You could come and talk.
Speaker I love it when we have guests the way I don’t have to babble too much.
Speaker OK, so we’re talking here about David’s interior, David, his longings, the disappointment and why, in terms of relationships, David had a kind of angelic mission that.
Speaker We all looked up to him and revered him in a certain way, and there was a naiveté about him in some ways socially. That he. Eclipse with the power of his intellect. The reason that he wasn’t as intimate with all of the artists was because the bonding influence was smoking.
Speaker That’s what tied us all together, and he did not. Does it I mean, he and I once in a while, I’m sure he and Elliot occasionally, but in very intimate moments and very out of the realm of others, whereas for Elliot and I and all the clients, it was a fuel. And we smoked right in the office at our desk pretty much at will all day, every day. And there was a moment in the growth of asylum where payola. Reared its ugly head and we were guilty, we I remember Paula Hearn, our first promotion man, coming in and saying, I need I need to buy an ounce of coke so I can go out and get these radio guys on the case. And we were given the money and.
Speaker So this became something the government was investigating and and if it was under the scrutiny of the feds and he would come in to our offices and say, no, don’t smoke in here, you guys don’t care about me.
Speaker You know, you’re not looking out for my best interests.
Speaker And I have to answer these people on the phones or whatever, and we would laugh and smoke on, you know, because Eliot wasn’t about to quit. And as long as Eliot was doing it, it was OK for me to do it. And if it was OK for me, it was OK for the clients. And and so, you know, like I remember in the early days of the egos, these guys were broke. I remember hanging of Don Henley, five dollars for lunch, you know, Glenn Frey, five dollars, you know, Bernie and Randy. And and we all hung out Monday night at the Troubadour. And I would take them next door to Dan Tana’s and buy him dinner, you know, on my expense account. I mean, you know, they’re starving artists on a certain level. And so. So David’s. Lack of intimacy with the artist was tied to that difference in lifestyle, and so there’s something about smoking pot with somebody where, you know, the barriers drop and the common denominators kind of act.
Speaker Didn’t it also, as you eloquently written about or talked about? Because I read it, you know, there was a point at which it really seriously got in the way and he became somewhat intolerant of that, I suspect. I’m thinking about Crosby, Stills Nash tour.
Speaker For example, I never thought of it as in the way I tell you the truth, you know, David certainly did. And in in terms of while I was there, Crosby, Stills and Nash was not actually a working entity.
Speaker They had Stevenson was a hard guy to get along with.
Speaker And there was some breakdown there, what we represented was Crosby and Nash. And that was one of my first assignments, and I and I remember David invited me up to his house at Johnny Rivers’s house to meet Graham one day and we had lunch.
Speaker And then Graham and I sat in the dining room.
Speaker I could still see him on the floor up against the wall.
Speaker And we talked and I.
Speaker Used a familiarity. With Graham. That I had picked up from being around that family and talking about them, but technically was not entitled to use this term. And I saw in Graham’s face, and that was his intimate Joni David Elliott. Called him Willy. And I referred to him as Willy to his face and I saw. The light go, not you and I learned what I was dealing with, now I say that with as a person who loves Graham Nash like a brother today. And I dare say he loves me as a brother. But I had to earn that.
Speaker And I never called him Willy again, even when I became his manager as part of Devin Roberts and when I left there, there was a part of Steven’s animosity was related to David personally.
Speaker When the day David Geffen personally, when I left David and started my own company with my assistant, Harlan Goodman, who I made my partner.
Speaker We I did it because on that occasion.
Speaker We had just lost Pocho as a client because Pocho.
Speaker Became aware in my office that day on what became known as the Let’s Take the Bull by the Horns speech, that it was David’s intention to take Ritchey fury and combine him with Chris Hillman from The Byrds and J.D. Souder to create Savage Hilman and Fury.
Speaker And we had to tell them. And the meeting went down in my office on Sunset and Elliot and David and Harlan Goodman.
Speaker And the band were in the room and no one would bring it up, it was too awful.
Speaker When you say the band, you mean, you know, Pocho Puckett and we were going. The purpose of the meeting was to tell Pocho that Richie was leaving the band. And no one would address the issue. And I finally said, OK, let’s take the bull by the horns. This guy leaving the bad.
Speaker And it was awful.
Speaker He founded the band when he left Buffalo Springfield. They were the first real country rock band, The Flying Burrito Brothers were pretty much a pure country act, but this was the first band to call itself Country Rock. And Rusty Young, a founding member, was furious and there was a bit of a whirlwind for a moment, and then they got up and walked out.
Speaker Around this time.
Speaker I had been in a very serious auto accident and demolished that US and Healy, 3000, I had no seatbelt on at the time. It was a drug induced experience.
Speaker Fell asleep at the wheel behind Quaaludes and champagne, had a head on with a pickup truck, was pretty smashed up.
Speaker I have a scar that goes around his arm, it’s dangling. My knee is shattered, my face is smashed. My hand is broken.
Speaker And I came to under the bumper of my car, and the first thing I saw was a long haired hippie bearded guy in my face saying, Are you all right, man? And my instinct as a drug abuser was I got two joints right here.
Speaker He took an.
Speaker And so, OK, I got him, he left Frame Next faces a highway patrol officer. Are you OK, man?
Speaker If I’ve been caught with the two Joynes, I’d still be in jail, but.
Speaker I was rescued.
Speaker So an angel, I believe so, yeah, I do, too.
Speaker And so I was recovering from this. And I was on painkillers, I was eager to get back to the office and I came in on crutches, in Carson bandages and whatever, and I had met this beautiful woman in Chicago. On the road with America.
Speaker And 30 days later, she was I was living with Ellie at the time, we had a big house in Bel Air and.
Speaker I had invited this girl to come and live with me.
Speaker And I didn’t Eliot and I had a maid and we were both sleeping with the maid.
Speaker It was a fabulous time, but I didn’t want to bring this sweet young thing into this environment.
Speaker So I got my a condo on the beach in Malibu and and.
Speaker The night she she she quit her job, packed everything she owned in a car and drove here and that night. I said, OK, I have to. Here’s here’s condo on the beach, I have to go to Europe with Eagles and I’ll be back in two weeks. And she said, What? Are you kidding me? You’re not going anywhere without me? And I went, Oh, OK, you got a passport call.
Speaker And so we took off for your. And had a wonderful adventure and ended up proposing and one month of the date I met her were married. And David, I remember going, he was like, I didn’t tell him. I don’t know, you know, he was busy and I was busy and it wasn’t a secret. But he found out I got married and he was shocked in it. And I think it was a little pissed off. And it turned out, you know, I had two beautiful children with that woman and he was pissed off because he was hurt.
Speaker You had told him.
Speaker I I assume that’s that, you know, how can you be my close friend, ally and partner and not tell me you’re getting married? You know, like he was shocked.
Speaker Explain that. Why did you have to tell him?
Speaker I think it was only logistics. You know, like kind of it was a month to the day it happened so fast. And two of those weeks I was in Europe with her and run touring with the Eagles.
Speaker Their first tour of Europe and. I think it just I didn’t see him. It just slipped my mind. The wedding was at the courthouse in Malibu and the only guys there I ran was Gary Burden. And I think maybe Henry Diltz and some Eagles and that, you know, and then I turned up here and I David was not happy about that. I could tell by his reaction at the time.
Speaker Was any of this around the time that there were troubles brewing equals? And.
Speaker Well, the trouble with the Eagles and this was this was where Dave and I broke down.
Speaker That’s why I’m asking. Yeah.
Speaker And what happened was the Eagles were put together by John Boylan as part of Linda Ronstadt backup band.
Speaker And we were invited down on a Monday night. The Troubadour maybe was the Monday night, but it was at the Troubadour where Linda was performing to see she was going to give them the four Eagles, a piece of her show in order to show us them. And so in the middle of her set, she they sang three songs. She left the stage and the rest of the band left the stage and they sang three songs. And we were again, it did not take genius to recognize that genius.
Speaker And so we were like, wow, listen to that sound. And the next day we went out to a little rehearsal hall at Kohanga and Bahram. It was a it was a music school. And we watched the Eagles play some more songs. And I remember that Ellie and Dave and I were on one side of this giant mound of cardboard boxes, and the Eagles were set up on news that we had to watch them through the boxes. And again, we were in we committed we’re going to sign, you’re going to manager, you’re going to be on asylum records. It’s going to be fabulous. And so I immediately wanted to get them away from L.A. because in the sense of what we would call today, that 10000 hours of rehearsal it takes to become great that Malcolm Gladwell writes about in Outliers, I wanted them to get that time to tighten this thing up and develop their thing. So I booked him in a club in Aspen, Colorado, called Prologis for a two week run. And they went in there, they had to play four sets a night. And they only had one set, so they had to play that said over and over again, the first that they had 25 people, the second that they had 50 people, the third that they had 100, the force that was sold out and every other set was sold out for the rest of the run.
Speaker I’m going to stop you there.
Speaker But that doesn’t mean that Jim Martin, we that’s an hour.
Speaker So, no, we we’re talking about Elliot and David and why David was different from Elliot.
Speaker And I said that they had this symbiotic relationship that you were talking about. Oh, yes.
Speaker Oh, so the Eagles, after the two week run, the Eagles come back to L.A. and there was a remarkable, totally noticeable difference in just their physiognomy. There was a glow about them. And I’m sure part of it was the high altitude and the clean living, the clean air. But there was also an air of confidence like this experience of selling out these clubs every night and being brought over was really, really huge. And it inspired them to recognize that thing that we all saw in themselves. And from then on, they were stars, you know, not necessarily in their ego, but they recognized that they were going to be big. And so I immediately sent them back to Aspen for another couple of weeks. And by then now we were so certain that they were going to be a huge act that. We hadn’t seen them. To govern and Roberts or asylum records or a publishing deal, all of which was part of the verbal understanding.
Speaker So David and I flew up to Aspen with a set of contracts for records in publishing, and we were so new at the game, it didn’t really occur to us, like, gee, shouldn’t they have lawyers? And we got up there and John Boylan had continued to mentor them and apparently had said, well, don’t sign anything. But a lawyer doesn’t look at and David and I went to the gig. It was incredible. We had a meeting with them and we had gotten them a condo to stay. And and so we had a meeting and we presented these contracts for signature and and they balked. And David was not happy. I’ve been giving you all this money and so forth, and you’re not going to sign and they said, well, we just want, you know, to have some legal advice on it and so forth, and that, you know, they were right and it made sense. And so we. We had to leave town with our tails between our legs to a certain degree, and the problem was that we went to the airport and there was a blizzard coming in and. They said, we’re not flying out of here tonight, you know, it’s suicide. And David wanted to get out of town.
Speaker And so he said, well, then we’re going to rent a car and we’re getting out of this town. And that meant I’m driving. And there was this other guy in the airport who really wanted to get out. So we rented a car and this guy sat in the back seat and never said a word.
Speaker And I must have been praying the whole entire time because the blizzard hit. And so here we are. I’m driving across the great divide on hairpin turns in a snowstorm like I had never seen. And I lived in Canada and I lived in Maine and I had never seen this much snow in my life. And fortunately, I had learned to drive in the snow. So I knew how to slide around a curve and use the, you know, the momentum to get going. And then it was just hairpins like that.
Speaker And we’re looking at 500 foot drops, you know, and it was it was a miracle. We made it out alive. But we got to Denver and got on a plane and came home.
Speaker And then they came back after the run and got with a lawyer and the papers all got signed and so forth and.
Speaker Boyland continued to mentor the band.
Speaker But I was closest to them because I was spending all my time with them and.
Speaker There was a point in their success where it became.
Speaker Obvious to them that.
Speaker It really wasn’t.
Speaker Fair, that their manager signed them to their label and got half their publishing.
Speaker And this was the classic conflict of interest story, and they started to rebel. And this is after I’ve had this accident and. I had.
Speaker Run into David Blue and Joni Mitchell in the office sitting together one day and.
Speaker I had married this woman. Lexi Pressel. Beautiful, brilliant young lady. Maybe 10 years, my junior. And.
Speaker Blue made some wisecrack about her. And I reacted as a result of being on codine for the pain of the accident with a kind of venomous statement and I said.
Speaker He said, I want to tell him about her because I manage him, too. And he said, I don’t want to hear about your latest donut.
Speaker And I went.
Speaker Well, you know, she’s more sensitive than anyone you’ve ever known.
Speaker Sitting next to Joni Mitchell, a very sensitive person, and. As things do in a small little group that got around, I’m sure got back today, but maybe Joanny told him, I don’t care. I’m not sure. That didn’t sit well with David, that Joanny would see me and as this angry person. And this is my assumption, because Dave and I never discussed this, but. Simultaneously, one night down at the Troubadour Bar, I took the Eagles to dinner a Dan Tana’s. And we got pretty drunk. And in the course of the conversation, the Eagles said that they were going to leave Gaffin and Robert’s management. But preserve the recording publishing deal. And they asked me if I would leave and be their manager and I said in the course of it all, yes, I would. The next day. I went into the office and unbeknownst to me, hennelly and I must have called David and told him this. And to me, it was a product of drinking and smoking and whatever, and David came into my office and said, You’re leaving with the Eagles.
Speaker And I said, no, not you know, you know, what are you talking about? And he said, you told them you were last night in downtown. I said we were drunk out of our minds. And, you know, who knows what that all meant? And I called in. I remember I called in the road manager, Richard Fernandez, who I had stolen from Rod Stewart to become the Eagles road manager on the promise that they would be his. And I said, you were there, you know, did I say I was leaving with the Eagles and Richard loyal to me, said no.
Speaker He lied and David was furious.
Speaker And. He left.
Speaker And by then, he had moved the office over to. Elektra Records, which he was now running as well, having proven himself as a formidable record man. And he called Elliott now over their. And he proceeded to tell me in no uncertain terms that I was a dismal failure as a manager, that the clients hated me and that.
Speaker You know. I was through. And I couldn’t believe.
Speaker And much like the day that I had the tirade with Jewelled Shah back at William Morris many years previous, I let David have it and I scream and yell at him until I was exhausted.
Speaker And then I’m sure he anticipated that. And he said, Are you through? And I said, Yeah. And he said, OK, meeting’s over. And I walked out in the hall and I knew that that wasn’t true. I knew those clients loved me and that whatever this was about, it wasn’t that. And I said earlier, I said, what was that all about? And he said greed.
Speaker And I was owed a considerable amount of money from my partnership in what became G.R. management as a new entity that I owned 25 percent and.
Speaker I said he said, don’t haven’t you heard of greed? And I went, Oh yeah, I heard about greed.
Speaker He says, Well, that’s what it was. So, OK.
Speaker Within days, I was packing up my. Belongings and called up my yoga teacher who had a truck to come and get my stuff, and I was flat broke and found in my Boston College drinking mug, a roll of dimes. And this was within 24 hours of the Pokot dismissal.
Speaker And I remember I took my assistant, I said, come with me, I’m going to make you my partner and we’re going. And we went down to the corner of Sunset and Doheny, where there was used to be a phone booth and called up Pocho and said, we want to be your manager.
Speaker And.
Speaker They were delighted because here’s a band that just lost its lead singer and their former manager still wanted to be their manager. And by sundown, Harlan Goodman and I had a business and we worked on it. By then, I was living with my. Children’s mother in the Doheny Towers, and I remember we had no furniture. And we had this one big table my mother had made for me or had had made for me for my first wedding some years prior, and it was this high and we sat on the floor, on the phone in an empty apartment, and we started our business.
Speaker And that year, Harlan and I both made more money than we’ve ever made in our lives and more than David was paying me to run his management company.
Speaker And and that success led to.
Speaker America, who I was also met before we go, I got to go back here.
Speaker We kind of jumped sort of ahead when this all happened.
Speaker And I get my time a little bit confused because some months between interviews, but they he was managing Jeff and Roberts were managing eagles and they were also on asylum.
Speaker And there was they perceive what I mean, he he did nurture them along with you, of course.
Speaker But then he paid to get their teeth fixed and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker Yeah. Glenn, Glenn Frey had orange it.
Speaker OK, we got to kind of tell that story then. OK, I know each one, what they what they felt about the conflict of interest and why did it go so wrong and.
Speaker Well, what it turned out, we were hearing the squeaking of the chair. What you’re doing is fine. Just don’t you like this phone thing. That’s the thing we hear is not OK.
Speaker All these events are unraveling within a two or three days of each other. The Pokot dismissal forming itself outcome. And if you read the incident with Blue and Joan and the meeting at and dinner at Tana’s.
Speaker And the rebellion of the Eagles. Was something that I was not privy to, but was probably the motivating factor in this whole. Reversal of my relationship with David because he thought I was mentoring them to.
Speaker Rebel and that I had paved the way for myself to walk with them, which was entirely not true. John Boylan was mentoring them about their rights, conflict of interest. Your manager shouldn’t own your publishing and you shouldn’t be signed to your management record company, because the true nature of the game is that the manager is the adversary of the record company and fights them on your behalf. And you don’t have that Hartmans not going to fight Geffen on your behalf. Elliot’s not going to fight Geffen on your behalf. And Geffen had removed himself technically from the management scenario. Geffen, the Geffen Robert’s company, signed the Eagles.
Speaker When I got my partnership, it was a new entity called G.R. Management. And so David was no longer involved. He was officially out. So he was able to say, I’m not your manager, Hartmans, your manager and Elliot. And so but David didn’t know that Boylen was the one coaching them and when they brought up this management believe in be manager thing at the antennas that night, I was shocked and amazed and hadn’t as the first I ever heard of it and.
Speaker David, when when Glenn and Dawn, I assume it was them maybe was one of them the next day, called him and said is going to be our manager and he’s leaving G.R..
Speaker I’m sure that David said to them, and you can ask him, but if I were, what I’d have said was if you leave with him, I’ll bury you. And I own your record contract and I own your publishing and don’t leave with him because what he valued most was loyalty.
Speaker And had I been clear headed and actually believed that this management relationship with the Eagles was going to happen. I called him first.
Speaker But I was inebriated and I wasn’t sure in the morning that what I heard was even true, but. They said, look, you can go talk to them and see if that’s what they want, and I remember sitting in Glenn and Don’s room, you know, saying, well, are we doing this? And I can see we’re not doing this. So whatever he said to them killed that deal. But it also killed my relationship with David. And as long as we’re telling the story and if he doesn’t want this to be included, that’s fine with me. He doesn’t have any say over that. Oh, maybe I shouldn’t tell this. I’m not going with David. OK, then I’ll tell you this story. If you if I don’t like it, you’ll pull it this part.
Speaker OK, ok. OK. Thank you for asking to hear that.
Speaker So David.
Speaker As he avenged the Clivia.
Speaker Sought vengeance against me.
Speaker And what he did was he said, we had one act, PUCA, which we had rebuilt into a quartet once, which he left and it was doing great.
Speaker And he sent Elliot to New York to tell premier talent to whom I had signed all Geffen Robert’s act. To tell them to drop Pocho. Because there was a conflict of interest.
Speaker And.
Speaker He couldn’t find Frank Barcelona, but he found Frank’s partner, Barbara skiddle, with whom I did all the Dienel activity on behalf of all these artists. She was my dear, dear, dear friend. She’s currently senior vice president of music for William Morris because they bought Premiere eventually and.
Speaker I said, David sent me here to get you to drop Pocho. Where’s Frank? Frank’s off somewhere and Eliot, you know, don’t say that, you know, just go home and tell David to calm down. Everything will be OK. And he went back to the coast as legend has it.
Speaker And David said, you go back to New York and you find Frank and you tell him that we’re pulling all our acts if they don’t drop her.
Speaker Now, Frank, Barcelona. A legend in his own right and a gentleman beyond belief and Sicilian to boot is not someone that you say that to. And he laughed and he said, Aliette. You go tell David that Pocho is my favorite band. And that if he has a problem with that, to pull the axe.
Speaker And within a year, every act was pulled by Pocho had every date they ever needed at the price through seven albums that we managed until they eventually broke huge and had to number one records out of that album legend that my brother Phil painted that horse for the cover up and they still use that logo to that and.
Speaker That showed me the character of Frank.
Speaker Not many people alive would give up the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Neil Young. All these artists to save one little country rock band for two little managers in the biz. So that showed me something about Frank and Barbara, and it showed me something about David that I had seen before.
Speaker And I didn’t think that would ever land on me, but it did.
Speaker And at that moment. I said to my partner, Harlan, I said, look.
Speaker Half the town hates David, half the town loves her. We’re going to have to go with the other half, but we’ll make it and then the success of Pocho accrued to.
Speaker The next big move in my personal Hartman and Goodman career, when one day we ran into Jerry Beckley, who was the leader of America and he was blue, and I’d managed this kid from high school and I knew there was something wrong. I said, Jerry, what’s wrong? He says, George Martin just produced our next album and it came out and lost its bullet at 50.
Speaker And Elliot’s busy with Jonie and you and whatever.
Speaker I said, Jerry, come with me.
Speaker And by sundown that day, we had pulled the act from Elliot. And then we had to do something huge.
Speaker And what we did was we sent an engraved invitation to every single employee of Warner Brothers Records from Moe to the janitor and set up on a soundstage at Warner Brothers Pictures, which was directly across the street from the old Warner record building. And we decorated the entire soundstage with Italian garden, red, white and green ladders, vines, grapes, full stage.
Speaker We have two. She’s tougher than I am sorry. We have to move on because this is not a Bette Davis. OK, we have to go back anyway.
Speaker We the actor turned the album around, got the bullets back, had two hit singles out of it and never looked back and had five albums with hits and every one of them that I don’t want a long story, but a couple of days before we go back to that.
Speaker OK, so you have to go back to that. Well, I don’t want to always trying to understand.
Speaker I guess it’s hard to do, but. In a normal relationship where you’ve got a management company and they’ve done all these things for you, if you’re unhappy and you’ve got a problem and there’s a relationship as an artist, yeah, you go and talk to that person.
Speaker Why did the Eagles not go and talk to David? Why did they why did all this happen? Why did David not have that kind of relationship with a lot of these artists? You know, Laura doesn’t sign with them. Johnny’s furious ultimately with him. He’s got the big fallout with Stephen. This happens with the gate. What is this all about, you think, besides the fact that it’s locked up?
Speaker Personality, I mean, David could be the most charming person in the world if there was a good reason, but he could also be venomous.
Speaker He could be cruel. He.
Speaker Left, that’s on a family, and that’s what we all thought we had, we went to his house every weekend, got naked, hung out around the pool and were together. And there wasn’t one moment of sexuality in the whole thing, but it went on and on and that’s what we thought we had. And in truth, David was seduced.
Speaker And lured by his 50 year goal and lost his rapport. With artists at a certain point, the reporter that got him, the client and that nurtured the development.
Speaker Got left in the basement when he went to the penthouse and we all felt he had abandoned the family, and that’s why the Eagles.
Speaker Looked at the business side of it, they didn’t have a rapport with him anymore. He was the mogul in the penthouse and.
Speaker And I think he penthouse out on a lot of people and and they resented it.
Speaker Yeah, this is really interesting because you have to ask him know I mean, we’ve talked about it a little bit.
Speaker I mean, but what’s interesting is, you know, I mean, asylum records lasted, what, two years? I mean, maybe three.
Speaker Well, lasted for many years before he before he said, oh, well, yeah, he had asthma was his partner.
Speaker What happened was and this is part of why I think that he wanted me out, because I own 25 percent of this management company and that management company was making good money on a lot of acts that were being successful. And when Eliot said to me it was about greed. I once calculated what I thought I was owed at that point, and I and I estimated I could be wrong, but I estimated to be somewhere around 250000, which is like a million today.
Speaker And. I think.
Speaker When when David sold asylum to the other half, to Armitt, there were two major pieces of the transaction and he could tell you the numbers. One was stock in WIA and one was cash.
Speaker Elliott took the cash.
Speaker I think was seven million dollars, which were miniscule money compared to what the company ultimately became worth, you know, seven seventy million would have been more appropriate considering where it all went.
Speaker And David took this we winestock.
Speaker And there was a slump. In the music industry, around 72 ish, and that stock value plummeted. And what David perceived as this big a millionaire, suddenly became this big a millionaire, and this is a syndrome that happens to stalk wealthy people I call paper millionaires. And so in that lost, there was a tremendous grief for a guy who was bent on being a billionaire. So. He and this is like the perspective I got from Elliot, didn’t want to give me that money and so generated this whole activity around, they don’t like you and the Eagles moment, whatever that was. And the. Whatever Joni said about me being cruel to Blue or whatever it was, it was mostly about this money. I think that’s Elliot’s opinion because that’s where I picked up the idea. So what I realized was that I was out and I was going to be the anvil of his wrath. And I took it and I became part of his enemy group.
Speaker And.
Speaker It was just proven that the clients didn’t like me when they came with me, America and then Crosby enough, and that got me Peter, Paul and Mary. So there was a whole succession of dominoes that I mentioned at the beginning.
Speaker Let’s go back. And I’m sorry, but I just want to make sure we get all this stuff.
Speaker What happened?
Speaker What happened with Stephen Stills and.
Speaker I don’t know. I don’t know.
Speaker I know that when I got there. Stills was not part of the team. It was not the client and there was no way that he was going to do Crosby, Stills and Nash as long as David was involved the day I got Crosby and Nash. I called Michael John Bowen, Stevens manager, and said, guess what we’ve got, and he said, what? And I said, Crosby, Stills and Nash. He said, You got the guys. I said, I got them. He said. I said, Are you coming to L.A.? And he was in my office the next afternoon. And we put together the whole deal to.
Speaker Put Crosby, Stills, Nash on the road, and this is after, of course, they’ve done a whole bunch of records.
Speaker Yeah, they were already Crosby, Stills, Nash, they split up over all kinds of things and just don’t mean that.
Speaker And ah, yeah, this is after they had split up and then they were, you know, because of the tour and the drugs.
Speaker I will say this at my house. Steven.
Speaker And this is my kind of description of Stephen is a very irascible character who even back in the Buffalo Springfield days, was fairly angry about stuff, and he has a vivid.
Speaker Imaginary life, and he was a heavy Coke abuser.
Speaker And he was very hard to get along with, and I saved his life one day on a plane when he was having a seizure and he still I don’t know if he’s going to be nice to me or not if I run into him and frankly, I don’t go back, you know, so I didn’t go to their concert at the Greek this round, you know, because I don’t know how embarrassing it could be. And I really don’t want my dear little Wyvill, you know, to to see me being abused by somebody, you know, where I should be valued for my contribution. So I don’t know why David and Steven broke up, but I would imagine that it would come down to with or with with or not with Neil. Because Steven and Neil. Broke out the Buffalo Springfield. It was there, the disintegration of that report that caused the demise of that act and their very last L.A. appearance was at my club, the CLOSE-CROPPED, which was originally conceived as a home for them, and subsequently that accrued to canned heat. So it’s probably Neil and Stephen. And they sided with Neil, of course.
Speaker And, you know, I mean, at one point we had Stephen had these bumper stickers made up.
Speaker Who is David Geffen and why is he saying these terrible things about me?
Speaker Should he say that just in the clear just yet? Say that in the clear.
Speaker Steven created a bumper sticker and I was with David when he first saw that bumper sticker and it read, Who is David Geffen and why is he saying those terrible things about me that was part of their little warfare and how they would react.
Speaker He treated it as if it was funny.
Speaker At the time, I’m sure it stung to some degree, but you’ll have to ask him what he really felt. But I remember I remember him being a little shocked at that moment, but he.
Speaker When I say it was a seduction, it was Armitt seducing David to come under his umbrella and create stars, which he had a proven ability to do, and so on that own half and he put up the original money.
Speaker And David Nelia, you don’t have and. David, up until that point was not a record man, he was a manager and the rapport between a manager and his artist is a warm and fuzzy place. The rapport of a record company mogul who’s supposed to deliver hits and this is not always possible isn’t a completely different sort of relationship. So the and I was the one who insisted that we manage all the artists on the label. I had the Motown mart in mind. And so David had actually given one of our artist, Judy, sell to Garland. Maury, his buddy was Gallin and more. He was Gown’s partner and Sandy Gallin. And I said, no, no, can’t give these people away, I mean, we’ve got to keep this in the family and we want to manage everybody on the label. And he said, OK, and he went to Gallant’s look, I need her back because we’re going to keep it all in-house. And so he said, fine, and.
Speaker So there very much was this idea that it was going to be this small little group of people, that we were going to manage these artists and run this little record company ourselves. And Elliott had healed and was back. And, you know, we were having a great time. And I remember like when I first went there and I and I had not been in a working environment for a long time, and I remember white knuckling it. It was hard to sit in a little room and get on the phone and and do this job.
Speaker But bit by bit, I acclimated to it. And we were doing a brilliant job. We were keeping these artists happy. We were building their careers. There was real progression going down and the label was getting his eagles out of the box. Now, the joke was that David had all the records in his garage, but really they sold because were to hit singles there. And so. Like like the Eagles second album, Desperado, those cowboys, I’m one of those cowboys on the back, and that was like the most fun probably that anybody ever had.
Speaker We got to get real costumes, real guns, fake live or not real ammo, but blank ammo. We rented Paramount Ranch. We got horses and we played cowboys.
Speaker There was so much smoke from the gunfire that the fire trucks came. They thought we were burning down Paramount Ranch. So, you know, it was that kind of environment.
Speaker Glenn Frey used to come in and he wore these tattered old jeans that were patched and everything and and hung out in my office and just was a sponge for anything about the bills. And and I would, you know, answer his questions and acknowledge, you know, his value and so forth. And and all these guys are in and out of my office all day long. And it was it was enormous fun.
Speaker You know, we were getting high. We were doing great work and making it all happen. And David was like cream rising to the top and pretty soon on it. And his ultimate wisdom provoked the merger of Asylum and Elektra Records. And David moved down on La Cienega to the Electra office and was no longer in our building and that.
Speaker Took him away from this reporter that was going down every day where we were all comingling and it was a very small group and I remember the first time I noticed that it was decaying because I got a call from a guy to be put on the list for a Neagle show. And I think it was at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.
Speaker It was their first big show, their sell out. Awesome.
Speaker And I didn’t know who this guy was. And he said, well, I work for asylum records, what you work for asylum records, what’s your name again?
Speaker And I’d never seen the guy, I never heard of the guy.
Speaker But suddenly I realized that something was going on, that Elliot and I didn’t really we weren’t in this circle and David was climbing out of the family toward the penthouse.
Speaker And that’s where.
Speaker This family group that was the original idea and the original intent broke down, now the early does really well.
Speaker That was my friend of the BPP said, hey, but let’s go back to because I want to get on the plus side there when it all started. It was wonderful. It was a home for everybody. Be having a great time in and out a date in the early days of Gaffin Roberts and your story here.
Speaker Well, I remember I had a little upstairs office next to the John. It was narrower than this room and not as long and.
Speaker Elliott devoted his energies to Neil and Joni and as needed anybody else but J.D. Salver, the Eagles, Ned Doheny, David Bloom, Judy SEAL, all these people were in and out of my office all day long. And I loved them and they loved me.
Speaker And I felt that. And I love the rapport they were coming with their demos or their record or whatever the current thing was.
Speaker And we would listen eventually as my position there grew. I got a huge office downstairs and and I put in voice of the theater speakers huge and most powerful system you could have, and they would all come and want to hear their records on the big speakers.
Speaker It wasn’t David in the early days, wasn’t he there every day on the phone.
Speaker He was there every day. Definitely. He was a part of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was there. Right. Dave Davies on the phone, of course.
Speaker You know, when when everybody’s busy, you don’t get a lot of time to hang. Elliott had his office. David had his they were they were adjoined. I was downstairs already. Mogel had an office there, signpost records. There was other people around who had jobs. Paul Aherne was the promo guy, you know, so so, you know, there’s so much action. We had 14 artists that we were managing.
Speaker Now, fourteen artists means 14 crews, 14 bands, you know, probably upwards of 100 people at a certain point. Well, how do you deal with all of that and have time to hang out? You know, like, I don’t.
Speaker You know, I drifted away from David’s presence and was totally engulfed in just doing my job, which was basically to create tours and to do any integration with the record company, which, of course, was a one way street because it was our record company and there was no debate. You know, what David said was going to happen, happened and I wasn’t going to argue with him about it, and nor was Elliot. Elliot said to me the day I took the job, he said, I want you to know one thing.
Speaker I may be David’s partner.
Speaker But I want you to know I work for him.
Speaker And that was like the most wonderful jewel of honesty that anybody ever gifted me. And it set. My ability to understand all the other things that happen and the day David and I made up, we were at the No Nukes concert at Madison Square Garden and Bruce Springsteen was on the stage. My band, Pocho, we finally made it had played Crosby, Stills and Nash had played. So I had two acts on that show. And I was probably at that point, if not the preeminent personal manager in music, damn close because I had three headliners, Peter Paul and Mary Crosby, Stills, Nash, America and Pocho coming up hard. And David and I were standing on one side and the other, Lee Phillips, the legendary attorney who had been my attorney during the kaleidoscope and my attorney during my Guffin Roberts era and David’s full time attorney always at least up to that point. And I realized that Geffen, who was not my enemy, was standing on the other side of Lee. And I was down here and he saw me and I saw him and it was tense and it could have turned into fist fighting, spitting, swearing, kicking, it could have turned into anything.
Speaker And I decided to turn it back. And.
Speaker When Bruce finished the set, we drifted to the backstage Gaffin first.
Speaker Then Lee and then me following Lee and I did an end run around, Lee and I got in front of Guffin and I took him in my arms.
Speaker And I told him sorry.
Speaker And.
Speaker He said, OK, and we stood there for half an hour in front of everybody, arm in arm. This Gigha guy and this straight guy and.
Speaker We fixed it.
Speaker And that night.
Speaker I went back to his apartment at the pier and we hung out, I talked and shared and glorified and.
Speaker I remember he wanted to do something. And he went to his closet and he he got two shirts, if I don’t like.
Speaker And he gave.
Speaker And they were shirts I wasn’t even where they were flannel shirts, plaid like Neil would wear, Eliot would wear.
Speaker And. It was pretty cool. And we did like the night in the bar and we talked about real stuff.
Speaker And we buried the hatchet.
Speaker And we understood. But we’d each done I knew I had been disloyal by saying I’d go with the Eagles and he knew he had been mean and cruel, trying to kill Pocho. Which was really trying to kill me in Harlan Harlan for not staying with him, which he was invited to do. And for obvious reasons, and it was really great, and it was it was building, it fixed the bridge, the bridge was rebuilt.
Speaker And the next day the next day, there’s there’s one there’s a punch.
Speaker The very end there was a punch line up because the next day he phoned me up and invited me over for breakfast and back to his house. And we had eggs and whatever his cock was making and cemented that it wasn’t just because of that moment, but that it was real. And, you know, he’s been my friend ever since. And not many people go through that stuff. And walk away from it.
Speaker You know, I love the guy, you know, I almost wish this would be worth it.
Speaker That’s I was going to ask you said Barbara, I’m going to go there later because I don’t feel like I should have.
Speaker I think the pressure had to be emotional.
Speaker Yeah. So just really quickly, it doesn’t have to be long. One or two specific stories would be great.
Speaker But during those heyday, Gaffin Roberts, beginning of the whole thing with you, you know, it was also simultaneous with that with the Troubadour in this scene and Laurel Canyon being the right kind of part and parcel of a moment, if you can capture that moment, go through it, mention the tribute or eventual canyon, and all these people are all living together and we kind of give us a portrait of that.
Speaker Well, Laurel came to take a drink, and I just give you a little sense of, OK, well, when I was being successful as an agent at William Morris, Laurel Canyon was the low budget place to live.
Speaker So all the musicians lived there. The Byrds, Springfield. Zappa, you name it, they were buried in those hills someplace, and I remember I would pass Gene Clark on the hill, we lived on Willow Glen and he was in this maroon Porsche and I was in my gold table.
Speaker And we would have to pass each other on this very narrow road. And we all both drove like maniacs.
Speaker So it was almost a death, a death ride every time. And we always had our music on super loud. And I had I knew him. And so we waved and whatever. And so, you know, Laurel Canyon was a magical place. And it’s really well documented in the book, Laurel Canyon Rock’s Legendary Neighborhood and.
Speaker There was the the country store where people would run into one another and there was a there was an identity in the musical community.
Speaker This was a major thing happening in L.A. and it wasn’t just in the canyon Sunset Strip, which is this little piece of land that is county land in the middle of L.A. And the reason it was county land was so that in the heyday, the golden era of Hollywood, that they could have strip joints for the movie stars to go to at night because there’s no stripping in the city of L.A. So somehow the powers that be got this from Doheny to Crescent Heights, from Sunset to Santa Monica, that strip of land is county land and therefore has different laws. And so all the nightclubs were there and there were 20 venues on the strip where you could see a live rock band every night. And so everybody migrated up and down the strip depending on what you were seeing and why. So we’re all part of that.
Speaker And the extreme southwest corner of the strip is where the troubadours and every Monday night without fail, this musical force would converge on that venue not to see somebody unless there was a specific reason, but to hang in the bar and hang in the street. There were more people in the street than there were in the bar. And it was like clockwork Monday night every time. And that’s because it was hoot night and and you could sign up and perform two or three songs and everybody who was part of this same thing had started there. So there was a home vibe. And Doug Westin, you know, had presented Joni and her earliest days and many of the other artists. So it was it was a really nurturing place. It was it was where we belonged. And we showed up and we stood there and and we did business and we caught up. I might not see David all day in the office, but I saw him on Monday night and we would hang their line on parking meters and and discuss what was going on and what we had to do to to fix what was broken and what was blossoming and working well and his his separation.
Speaker Became evident when he no longer. Came there on Monday night.
Speaker It was going to step. We’ll have to ask him. I don’t know, but probably through the Beverly Hills with Ormat, you know, or Warren or Warren or you know, he was now a star. And in a sense, when you become a star executive, you are way, way more important than a star on screen or TV because everybody knows that it’s the executives that make this business go.
Speaker This is show business shows easy, business is tough. And so when you become a star in business, you are more powerful, you are more revered, and you are often or more often than not more wealthy than the guy who’s on the screen.
Speaker Whatever size, so as David’s empire grew as.
Speaker More strangers came into the family, artists joined asylum records who weren’t part of the family when another one was when when Linda came, which was a huge coup to pull her from capital at the height of her career was Major Peter Asher was her manager and he. We were no longer managing the artists, we were no longer one unit, there was assets and there were other things, and these were David’s personal business and they were not and they were part of his WIA experience, which was the source of his growth and empire.
Speaker And we were we were not part of it. It was like our. Brother, maybe even our father figure had left home. And gone somewhere else, and we knew it would be sort of like going into the war or something, that he was off doing this amazing thing, but he wasn’t.
Speaker Family to us anymore.
Speaker And so it all started to decay because he was the force that did bond us together, it grew out of those naked by the pool sauna days with everybody who was actually in the family hanging out and just sharing.
Speaker I can’t call it a struggle because it wasn’t a struggle, it was smooth, it was fast, it was great and it was growing in leaps and bounds and it became pretty obvious that nothing was going to stop it when when Jackson started to break and the Eagles had broken and Linda was huge. You know, it became something else, and I’m not going to say that it was less because it was way more, but it wasn’t our thing anymore. It was David’s thing. And I had moved on and I was successful. So whatever we went through to get there, as I said at the very beginning of this interview. I realize that everything I have and who I am is a result of my friendship with him and like marriage.
Speaker And it all roses. But love, yes, and it doesn’t go away, so we have 20 minutes.
Speaker OK, so in the last year, I think would you mind if I think I need to go on.
Speaker We will go on, but I think we can finish this in ten minutes. So you are now not managing the Eagles, but Irving Azoff.
Speaker Oh, so when when Harlan and I left G.R. Management, we went to Irving and we said, Irving, let’s join a company together. And we flirted with that idea. And I think Elliott and David got the same idea at the same time. If I’m leaving, somebody has to come in and manage these people. And Irving was particularly poised in the right place at the right time.
Speaker And he declined our offer and he went in and essentially replaced me, a Guffin Roberts or the G.R. management was called at that time and it was fortuitous for Irving because he was smart, too. And he also had that.
Speaker Family energy, he he joined, he didn’t dominate, manipulate, and he cemented his rapport with the Eagles.
Speaker Because they were on tour and he was with them, and the legend, as I heard it, is that Irving, they took a break down to NASA for a few days in the middle of the tour. And when they got there. The captain of the customs said, OK, all you guys in this room. And Irving jumps up and says, what’s that all about? Why are we going in here? And everybody else is going on vacation? And and the guy said, well, I’m going to search all you guys.
Speaker And services for what? Well, look at the drugs and he says, oh, well, listen, Captain, can I talk to you?
Speaker And he takes him aside.
Speaker He says, look, this man is on the verge of being the biggest man in America. And if you search them. You’re going to find what you’re looking for. And a lot of kids are going to think that what you’re looking for is OK because they do it. And please don’t search this guy.
Speaker And Kansas, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, I’m going to go in that room and I’m going to search everybody except you. And so, Irving. Says, Give me what you got, and he stood there loaded with felonies and the captain came in with his crew and they searched everybody and it got to Irving and the guy says, you know, I searched him.
Speaker And Irving earned.
Speaker The role as manager of Eagles and he shortly left with them, sued Guffin for the publishing and delivered.
Speaker Ever since and of course, they broke up for 14 years, but when they came back together, they came back together with Irving and Glenn Frey, address my class at Alemu, and he said that they would never break up again, you know, that they might do solo this or solo that or any other thing. But there will always be an Eagles.
Speaker And I hope that’s true because I think they are among my best work.
Speaker And I love those guys and they’re classic.
Speaker That’s terrific.
Speaker So just a couple of cleanup questions here, if you had to if you had to say it in a couple of words.
Speaker What would you say David’s impact on the music business was?
Speaker I would say that David Geffen’s impact on the music industry. Was monumental.
Speaker Creative.
Speaker And better for him. Than anyone else.
Speaker Interesting. Amplified.
Speaker Because I think that it was better for him.
Speaker Because. If you look at. Business and leave art aside. He walked with the most.
Speaker And.
Speaker I’m not sure. That. That happens. Because you were. Family. That happens because you were me. And.
Speaker I started out on the same plane and even in the moments, there were moments where I was higher in the.
Speaker Spectrum of success than he was. And. I am not a billionaire. But all my former clients still love me. So I got what I wanted and David got what he wanted.
Speaker Interesting do. Did he ever love the music?
Speaker Yeah, I believe that David, you know, totally love music and probably was more musical than I, I always said that it’s not the music that fascinates me, it’s the careers I teach today, bands how to build a career.
Speaker And it was the evolution of a career. The the thing I saw the colonel do, the nurturing of the various ingredients so that when they came together, they fit as one thing that fascinated me. Now there is some music I loved. I love the Eagles music. I love John David Souder’s music. And I still listen to it today and I still listen to the Eagles today. That’s that’s what I listen to.
Speaker And I loved PUCA.
Speaker One story, sorry, go to David, ever say to you, God, I love this music for this reason, here’s why I love this. This takes me to a place I can’t get enough of this.
Speaker Give us a moment of David talking about the music.
Speaker The only.
Speaker Times I can recall David waxing on about the quality and the value of the music was in reference to Laura.
Speaker Which. Dissolved when she met with Clive and Joanie. David loved Joni’s music.
Speaker One of her songs is about him.
Speaker Freeman in Paris. Monumental and he.
Speaker He loved Joanny and he loved her music more, and I think other than that, it was all, you know, music, it was he could recognize the value of what the Eagles did. But I don’t think he loved one Eagles song ever. He loved Jackson Browne’s music.
Speaker And that first time he heard Crosby Stills. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the first time he heard, he was like, yeah.
Speaker As I said when we first talked about the Eagles music, it did not take a genius to recognize their genius.
Speaker And of course, we all thought that was brilliant and it was more about the sound than the songs at that stage with Crosby, Stills, Nash.
Speaker I believe everyone who could hear love that music as soon as it was heard, and I remember I didn’t listen to anything else but Crosby, Stills and Nash for probably the better part of a year. That one album. And then they drove for another year because there’s that wonderful thing about music. When it’s good, it’s very, very good. And it’s so rare, so hard to find.
Speaker And it’s the sound of human voices well blended in. And when you take David and Graham and you put those voices together, there’s a symbiotic relationship that I only heard once, maybe twice before. Once was the Everly Brothers, who had an organic blend and once was Chad and Jeremy, who had a blend that, well, Paul and Artie definitely.
Speaker So sometimes everything from the Everly Brothers. Yeah, well, that’s what I send my clients to. Now, go listen to the Everly Brothers, learn what harmony is. Nash had this distinct ability to find the place in and around Crosby’s angelic voice that made that Everly Brothers syndrome evident. And then you took this husky, raspy voice of Stephen Stills and you integrated that into it and you had.
Speaker A wedding cake, not a doughnut on the stage.
Speaker Just one more question. Well, what do you think David would think was his proudest achievement?
Speaker I don’t know. I don’t know.
Speaker I would probably think as he has matured and risen above the need for more. And this is my opinion. I think his greatest achievement. Is building that hospital at UCLA. I think David gave back. More. Of what he valued most.
Speaker And balanced out. What he took.
