Art vs. Business
Rethinking rock music history
The avarice of record labels and the stupidity of band managers are recurring themes in music history. Stories of artists trying to get out from under exploitive contracts are the stuff of rock and roll legend. Just a few examples:
John Fogerty stopped performing for years because he was so upset that Fantasy Records owned the master recordings of all of the songs he wrote for Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable glyph and wrote “slave” on his face to register his discontent with Warner Bros. Among other things, Prince was upset that the label wouldn’t let him release albums whenever the spirit moved him.
Tom Petty was a serial combatant, first declaring bankruptcy to get out of his original contract with Shelter Records and then waging a public fight against MCA in a successful effort to lower the price to consumers of his Hard Promises LP.
When the rights to Taylor Swift’s music were sold to a music executive she didn’t like, she responded by re-recording four of her albums in an attempt to diminish the value of the original records.
This art-vs-business narrative — the misunderstood savant beset by greedy vultures who care more about money than creative genius — arguably began with the first-ever rock star, Elvis Presley. The conventional wisdom is that Elvis’ career was forever changed for the worse by his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, who successfully turned a singer who shocked the bourgeoisie into a bankable movie star, but paid little attention to the quality of his records.
I have been absorbing stories like this for decades in the pages of music magazines as well as countless biographies and documentaries. All of which helps to explain why I found the recent Paul Simon documentary, In Restless Dreams, a little jarring.
The record scratch moment for me came as the film covered the early years of Simon’s career. I learned that Simon & Garfunkel’s first album, Wednesday Morning, 3A.M., was a flop, selling around 3,000 copies according Wikipedia. In the wake of the failure, the two singers went back to school and got on with their lives. Without any knowledge or input from either of them, their label, Columbia Records, decided to remix one of the acoustic tracks from their debut album, adding drums and electric guitar to make the song more palatable to rock audiences. The remixed version of “The Sound of Silence” ended up going all the way to #1. With this wind at their backs, Simon & Garfunkel would go on to sell 69 million albums over the course of their career. Without Columbia’s intervention, who knows what would have happened?
In truth, Simon & Garfunkel are hardly outliers. Indeed, I would wager that there are far more cases where artists owe their success to their labels and management than stories of victimization at the hands of money-hungry mercenaries. Take the Beatles. Would they have conquered the world if Brian Epstein hadn’t put them in matching suits and George Martin hadn’t told them to get rid of their original drummer?
Or look at Bruce Springsteen. As many reviewers have noted, the recent biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere is essentially a “bromance,” focusing on the intense connection between Springsteen and his manager/producer Jon Landau. If anything, the movie probably underplays the importance of Landau, who has been a key artistic influence, introducing Springsteen to numerous books and films in an effort to spark his creative output.
If only every artist had someone like Landau to help guide them. What if an A&R exec had been able to convince the Clash to whittle the bloated, self-indulgent triple album Sandinista! down to an all-killer-no-filler single LP? What if Lou Reed’s management company prevented him from releasing an instrumental album of guitar feedback, Metal Machine Music, which soured his relationship with fans and critics for decades? (Please spare me the revisionist history that Metal Machine Music is a masterpiece.) I’m sure Warner Bros. was not faultless in their dispute with Prince, but the label was clearly correct that his career would have been enhanced by a “less is more” approach to album releases.
The recent film Jay Kelly speaks to the complicated dynamic between artists and the businessmen who both aid them and profit off of them. In the film, an aging movie star, played by George Clooney, goes through a midlife crisis, engaging in increasingly erratic behavior. One by one, the various members of his entourage begin to abandon him until all that’s left is his eternally self-sacrificing manager, played by Adam Sandler.
Over the course of the film, Clooney does much to alienate and exasperate Sandler. Clooney is clear-eyed about the financial nature of their relationship; at the end of the day, Sandler isn’t a bosom buddy, he’s an employee — and one who receives a hefty 15 percent commission for his efforts.
But the film ultimately does not endorse this point of view. Instead, it seems to suggest that, far from an exploiter, the business manager is an essential helpmate to the artist. Sandler ends up staying by Clooney’s side to see him receive a career achievement award at the end of the film. “We did this together,” Sandler tells Clooney. That’s probably true for most of the important artists of our time — almost everyone needs help to make it to the top.