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

bizarre garb flying over the audience. It was a major success. The number of ads (the industry term for a radio station adding a song or artist to its playlist) were too numerous to count. Only Mark Parenteau, as I recall, left the building unimpressed.
    A few days after the event, I was smugly sitting in my office feeling oh so impressed with myself—I’d pretty much made Genesis in the US, by my own reckoning—when in walks Buddah comptroller Eric Steinmetz, who was angrily pointing to a bill from the Americana showing a case of champagne charged to Parenteau’s room. Mark had taken the entire case home and charged it to Buddah. I called and bitched him out for a good fifteen minutes, but we wound up laughing about it, and I didn’t press the issue; I knew I would have an IOU with his name on it in my pocket for the foreseeable future. Neil could not possibly have cared less, as he knew it was money well spent. Eric, with his bean-counter mentality, was a pain in the ass about it for weeks, until Neil finally told him to back off and leave me alone.
    As 1972 gave way to 1973, Neil, Cecil, and I, along with the Buddah Group, were plowing ahead. We had big hits with Barbara Mason’s “Give Me Your Love” and Stories’s “Brother Louie.” I was getting to spend quite a bit of time with Sha Na Na and their manager, Ed Goodgold. He was a very funny and likeable guy (his quick wit had earned him the nickname “the Rabbi”), and he had one of the most difficult managing gigs in the business. Sha Na Na was comprised of twelve guys, all of whom had equal say in the direction of the band. I always enjoyed seeing them in concert. They put on a great show, and the crowd was always part of the pageantry, dressing in 1950s garb. Before one show, in Detroit, I arrived at the hotel early, so I took a few ’ludes and headed out to the pool. Trying to impress some sweet young thing in a bikini, I dove nonchalantly into the water, not realizing I was at the shallow end. I surfaced with a gash on my forehead and a slight concussion as reward for the stunt. Leaving the tour, I flew home and spent a few days in the hospital in traction.
    When I returned to the office, Neil had big news for me. He’d had his eye on acquiring Gladys Knight & the Pips, whose contract with Motown Records was about to expire. Gladys wanted to branch out into gospel, blues, and country, but Berry Gordy, Motown’s founder and driving force, wasn’t keen on that career path. Neil had called a meeting and announced that he had secretly signed Gladys to a deal. She was currently working with songwriter Jim Weatherly on her next album, Imagination, her first for Buddah. As if the clandestine signing wasn’t interesting enough, Neil also told me that he wanted us to work Gladys’s final Motown single, “Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye).” Pushing another label’s song is tricky work, but we managed to promote the single very quietly, and it eventually sold over a million copies, peaking at No. 2 on the charts. Once the song had peaked, Neil released Imagination, which spawned the biggest single of the group’s career: “Midnight Train to Georgia.” The song would top the charts and go on to win a Grammy.
    Business was also going well for Bill Aucoin and Joyce Biawitz’s production company, Direction Plus, which by the summer of 1973 was producing a thirteen-episode rock-music-based TV series for national syndication called Flip Side. Each half-hour episode would focus on one or two acts performing in a recording studio, and it was usually hosted by either the president of their record label or their A & R rep. For the Curtis Mayfield/Sha Na Na episode, Neil was the MC, dressed in black leather (in keeping with Sha Na Na’s outfits). I was in the recording studio with him as he videotaped his segments. The program was broadcast in New York on December 22, and I couldn’t help but think it was odd to see the president of a