Mitchell Cohen - Looking for the Magic

Looking for the Magic is 2022 Mitchell Cohen.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 979-8-9856589-0-3

Ill Be Your Mirror (Lou Reed) lyrics BMG Rights Management, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

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Published by Trouser Press Books June 2022

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To Gayle and Molly

Ill be the wind, the rain and the sunset

The light on your door to show that youre home

(Lou Reed)

Hesh: There is one constant in the music business

a hit is a hit. And this, my friend, is not a hit.

Christopher: Why?

Hesh: For reasons we couldnt comprehend or quantify.

The Sopranos, Season 1, Episode 10, A Hit Is a Hit,
written by Joe Bosso and Frank Renzulli

LOOKING FOR THE MAGIC IS ABOUT ARISTA, the independent record labeland about Bell Records, its immediate predecessorso the narrative ends with the conclusion of its indie era in the mid-80s, when it began being distributed by the RCA branch system. This isnt intended to be a comprehensive account of everything that happened at Arista Records. Some artists who did pretty well arent mentioned at all, others just in passing (the only place youll see the names Tycoon and Point Blank is inside these parentheses). It would be foolish to try to discuss everyone who ever recorded or worked for Arista, let alone the vast number of characters and songs that made appearances in Aristas pre-history, on the Bell-Amy-Mala labels and all the labels that company distributed.

Obviously, a good chunk of the labels history happened after the period covered here; Clive Daviss memoir, The Soundtrack of My Life, would be the place to pick up the story if youd like to know more about, say, The Bodyguard, Arista Nashville (which deserves a book of its own: Come on, Tim DuBois or Mike Dungan), LaFace Records, or, if you must, Milli Vanilli.

There is some foreshadowing, flashing forward and jumping backward when I think it makes thematic sense. Ive tried to make all that as non-confusing and non-jarring as possible. What Ive tried to get across is the shape of things: how different genres evolved at the label and what the tone of the times was like, through representative albums and artists. Arista has a reputation as a pop label, and theres no shame in that: Its pop success was pretty extraordinary. But thats like calling Hachette a romance book publishing company because they put out Nicholas Sparkss novels: true but incomplete, since they also publish Malcolm Gladwell and David Sedaris. The film production company StudioCanal, in the first decade of the 2000s, released Love Actually, but also Shaun of the Dead and Mulholland Drive. So think of Barry Manilow as Love Actually.

Arista released Horses, Street Hassle and Squeezing Out Sparks; signed Gil Scott-Heron, Anthony Braxton and Iggy Pop; reinvigorated the Kinks and Aretha Franklin; distributed albums by Ian Dury and the Blockheads and the Contortions. Having successful records is always a good thing; thats how the industry keeps score. But often the character of a record label comes into focus on the projects that didnt, in the end, strongly connect outside the companys walls, the ones everyone at the label believed in and fought for in vain. Some of the artists who make appearances in Looking for the Magic, like David Forman, Quazars Glenn Goins, Linda Lewis, and Willie Nile, and some of the albums that came out on the Freedom and Novus labels, are less familiar than they should be. And so much of the pop and soul music that was on Bell Records in the decade between 1965 and 1974 is way too overlooked. This is partially an attempt to fill in those gaps and paint a more expansive picture.

Looking for the Magic. Thats a music business job description. You hear a couple of minutes of a demo or catch a few songs of a new artists live set, and once in a very great while youre struck with what feels like inevitability. And you want everyone everywhere to know about it. This is what Hesh on The Sopranos meant when he told Christopher, A hit is a hit. Looking for the Magic is also an object lesson on the capriciousness of the record industry. It was the title of the third and final single released from the Arista debut of the Dwight Twilley Band. The band seemed to have it all: hooky songs, star presence, critical acclaim. But all the labels efforts didnt make one bit of difference. The record flopped. This book is about both sides of the search for magic, the times everything clicked into place, and the times nothing did.

I worked at Arista for a good chunk of the time covered in the book, so I was an observer and/or a participant during some of the events described here. Ive kept my personal experiences out of the narrative, but if a sentence reads something like a number of Arista people, I might be among those people. Not always, though.

Working at 6 West 57th in the late 70s did feel like being part of a New York City cultural renaissance. Not to over-romanticize, or to claim any exclusivity; I know my friends who were at Elektra, Sire, and Island felt the same way, that it was an exciting time to be out in the street, going to CBGB, the Bottom Line, Seventh Avenue South, the Lone Star, JPs, Hurrah, or across the Hudson River to Maxwells in Hoboken. There was so much going on: no wave, Latin jazz, disco, punk, cabaret. There was a collective feeling that Manhattan was exactly the right place to be, in all its pre-Giuliani seediness and despite its financial travails. (You know the HBO series Vinyl? It was nothing like that. People in film and television attempting to capture the NYC music biz get that era wrong all the time.) On the cover of its March 29, 1976 issue, The New Yorker ran the famous Saul Steinberg illustration View of the World from 9th Avenue, where the whole country west of Manhattan is condensed into a small strip of land adjacent to the Pacific Ocean. It was funny because it felt true.

THE SEA GODDESS, A CRUISE SHIP RUN BY THE CUNARD LINE, had a capacity of 112 passengers on three decks, and for five days in December 1988 every cabin was occupied by employees of Arista Records. It departed from St. Thomas and sailed around the Caribbean. If you see photographs from that tripa dozen people, male and female, carousing in a hot tub for post-midnight departmental meetings; passengers, slathered with sunblock, sprawled in lounge chairs out on the deck and around the pool, in swimming trunks and bikinisyou might wonder what business got done, whether this convention was just an excuse to get out of town, soak up some sun, and run up a record-setting tab for alcohol. (At one point, the ship ran out and had to make a stop to restock.) One Arista promotion executive says, I know there were some wives that were, like, Youre going on a Caribbean cruise??Billboard headlined its reportage of the event Arista Hosts Buoyant Meet, and the mood on board was certainly celebratory because, as the song lyric goes, it was a very good year.

Clive Daviss record company, which had just turned fourteen years old, was racking up some formidable statistics. Early in 1988, Whitney Houston broke a record by landing her seventh consecutive single at number-one. (That was cause for another party, as the Arista staff met up at the Cadillac Bar in Chelsea in Manhattan, where circulating serverscalled shooterspoured tequila shots (slammers) down the throats of revelers, some of whom did one shot for each of Houstons chart-toppers.) Her second album was on its way to sales of over twenty million worldwide. The year before, Aretha Franklin solidified her stunning comeback with a number-one pop hither first since Respectwith I Knew You Were Waiting (for Me), a duet with George Michael, and had a number-one gospel album with