And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records by Larry Harris, Curt Gooch, Jeff Suhs Read Free Book Online

genius for delivering the antidrug message through songs like “Freddie’s Dead” and “Super Fly,” and now he was doing an entire ounce of blow.
    As Christmas 1972 approached, we all anticipated a great present from Marv Stuart and Curtis for the effort we had put into helping the Super Fly soundtrack become a hit. When Marv showed up with little jars of jam for the staff, Joe Fields went ballistic and ran down the hall yelling at Marv for being such a cheapskate. Considering the rest of us didn’t have the balls to say anything to Marv, we all loved Joe for doing it for us.
    I spent many evenings with Joe going to see artists perform—those on our labels and others. Joe would always take the train from his home in Long Island, and since I had a car and was heading back in the same direction, I would take him home late at night when the trains were not running so frequently. Just hanging out with Joe during these outings, I received the best education I could have had in music business history and theory. Joe would later start his own jazz label (jazz was his true love). From what I understand, he then sold it and bought it back several times, making a great deal of money in the process.
    One of the many lessons he taught me was that what people want you to perceive is not necessarily the way things are. Before my first trip to Boston to visit the very influential radio station WBCN-FM, Joe gave me a primer on what to expect. He told me that the people I would meet there would like me to believe that the sales guy, Kenny Greenblatt, was the music director. This was to prevent the DJs from being pressured by record people. The station would also use this as a tactic to get advertising from the labels: you would drop off a dozen albums (one for each DJ), and if they decided to play the record, Greenblatt would call to say he could get it played but would need some advertising to show the label supported it. This was all a ruse. Joe explained that the real deal was the program director, Norm Winer, who (in my opinion) ran the station in too democratic a fashion. All of the on-air people, including the newspeople, had a vote in what music was played. Knowing this on my first visit to WBCN, with the new Super Fly album in hand, I made it a point to deal only with Norm.
    I became very close to WBCN’s staff, and Boston grew to be one of my favorite destinations. I rarely stayed in a hotel there, opting instead to stay in the house that Norm shared with three DJs: John Brody, Tommy Hadges, and Joe Rogers, who went by the appellation Mississippi Joe. I usually slept on an uncomfortable couch in the living room, but it was more fun hanging with them than being in a hotel by myself. It’s not like I was able to get a lot of sleep when visiting Boston anyway. We would stay up into the wee hours getting high and talking about life. I was to view many a Boston sunrise.
    WBCN was the station that helped introduce Monty Python to American audiences. A few of the WBCN people were already Python fans because they’d read about the comedy troupe in Melody Maker, the popular English music and culture magazine, and the person most into Python was Mississippi Joe. So we set up a showing of the Python movie And Now for Something Completely Different for the WBCN audience in a local movie theater. The film was not much more than a series of highlights from the troupe’s BBC show Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but the event was a big success. Everyone in attendance was thrilled at the reception the movie received, and the screening helped make the Boston PBS television station aware of the potential of broadcasting Monty Python’s Flying Circus to American audiences.
    On one occasion, I invited a few of the on-air people out to lunch. One of them asked me if some of the staff could join us. I agreed, and, to my surprise, there were about twenty people waiting for us when we got to the restaurant. The entire staff was there, including