HOW I NEARLY MADE A MILLION DOLLARS IN THE ROCK AND ROLL
BUSINESS
THE MYDDLE CLASS: FROM LEFT,
DANNY MANSOLINO, DAVE PALMER,
RICK PHILP, CHARLIE LARKEY, MYKE ROSA
[I
found the following undated manuscript in my files. I must have written it in
the latter half of the ‘60s. It’s certainly not the best thing I’ve ever
written and I at first thought I’d rewrite it for you. But on second
thought, I decided to let it stand as it was as a document of my past.]
If ever there were to be a
definitive textbook on how to become a successful rock and roll manager, it
would have had to be written by Ché Guevera.I’m not bitter, mind you, about having lost my life savings, my
suburban ranch-type house, my American Express card, my wife’s equanimity, my
English sports car, a portion of my sanity and such odds and ends as my charge
account at the local Dairy Queen---all in a gamble on five 18-year –old kids
from New Jersey’s white suburbs who dared to have me name them The Myddle
Class.
It doesn’t even bother me
any more that one of those 18-year-olds stole into my office and filed the
dollar sign off my typewriter keyboard in a gesture as meaningless, perhaps, as
my bank account.Of course, I
don’t use a typewriter any more, but what did bother me was the need to report
that even when you succeed in signing a contract with a record company, very
often it turns out to be not a contract at all, but a declaration of war.
“Men,” I once had to
tell the teenage members of The Myddle Class, “they’ve cut our
communications.”
This was after I had run up
a $960 bill with the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company.
“Men,” I once had to
say to them, “we’ve got to regroup our forces.”
This was after The Myddle
Class had been fired from three New York discoteques for playing too loud.
“Men,” I said at
another time, “we’ve got to try to continue living in the manner to which
we’re accustomed.”
This was when I was feeding
my wife, my three children, the entire Myddle Class and their rotating 10-man
road crew on the dollar or so a day that poured in through the mail from kids
wanting to join our fan club.
At one point, we even
started filming a 16 millimeter movie to document our rise to success, at a
personal cost to me of several thousand dollars.We filmed it in New Jersey’s Passaic Valley swampland, with
everybody wearing battle dress.
I have been accused of
going into the rock and roll business for no better reasons than a desire for
fame, fortune, glory and the chance to get my picture published in 16, ateenage fan magazine to which my nine-year-old daughter subscribes with more
loyalty than she has ever displayed for me.Frankly, I could think of no better reasons.At the time I was, as New York’s Village Voice
described me, “a fairly well-known magazine writer,” with a large enough
backlog of assignments to keep me as busy as a Beatle, if at somewhat less a
price.One of the first things I
discovered after I started managing The Myddle Class was a cobweb placed over my
typewriter by the drummer of the group.
The cobweb was still there
when, two years later, I announced that I was returning to the writing business.With the same consummate skill that he used to drive through puddles to
splash old ladies waiting at bus stops, the drummer had lifted the cobweb, filed
off the dollar sign, and then replaced the cobweb so that it appeared
undisturbed.I guess he though I’d no longer have any need for the
dollar sign.
I’m not bitter, mind you.I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy the rock and roll business any more
then Joseph Heller can’t say that he didn’t enjoy the Air Force.Of course, I wasn’t drafted into it.I was, rather, tempted into it.For
years I had been writing success stories about either people, mostly in the
music business, and I was curious to find out how it would sound if someone had
to write a success story about me.When
my baby-sitter told me that a group, known at that time as the King Bees, had
caused a riot during a variety show at Governor Livingston Regional High School
near my house in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, I thought tomyself, “Well, this sounds like a natural beginning.”
I had no idea my success
story would turn out to be a humor column.My wife says it’s as humorous as All Quiet on the Western Front.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” she asked me
at the time.
“A wife is supposed to be
an inspiration to her husband,” I answered.
“I would hate to think I
ever inspired you to do this,” she said.
I immediately asked my
baby-sitter where I could find this group and when I learned that they were
playing at a dance that very next week, I disguised my beard and balding
forehead in a pair of levis and a sweater and went down to take a look at them.Later on I learned that they at first thought I was just some dirty old
man.
They had been playing
together for about a year with the exception of the bass guitarist, one Charlie
Larkey, the scion of a men’s clothing store chain, whose only qualification
for membership in the band had been his conviction that he was destined to
become a pop star.Charlie had been
one of the higher-ups in Mountainside, New Jersey’s only teenage mob, an
organization called The Organisation, but when he learned the King Bees needed a
bass guitar player, he promptly went out and bought a bass guitar.
“If you want to learn how
to play bad enough,” the drummer, Myke Rosa, told him, “then you can teach
yourself how to play bad enough.”
Charlie would lock himself
in his room and play the bass along with a pile of records, sometimes with Myke
Rosa singing the bass line into his ear.Myke,
of course, was the only one of the group who couldn’t sing.On the first night that I saw the King Bees, he was pounding the drums so
hard that he kept breaking his drumsticks, throwing the pieces out into the
audience.He also had a
'Pardon
me,
but your neighbor's
house is on fire'
habit of throwing up during
the course of each performance.Myke
had nearly died of rheumatic fever when he was 12, and he had the further habit
of passing out after every show.As
for the other members of the group, there was Danny Mansolino, the organist, who
used to read physics textbooks for leisure when he wasn’t playing Hell’s
Angel on a motorcycle.When I asked
him how he became an organist, he answered:
“The guys said they were
forming a group and they needed an organ player, so I said, ‘OK, I’ll get an
organ.’”
The lead singer was Dave
Palmer, whom I found kneeling on the bandstand with the microphone in his hand,
shouting into it with all the delta bottomland soul of a New Jersey choirboy.
“Dave,” his mother
later told me, “has always had an extraordinary voice.”
What she meant was that
Dave used to scream louder than all the other kids.
“Save his baby
pictures,” I told her.“He’s
going to be famous.”
The leader of the group was
Rick Philp, who started playing the guitar when has was nine.Rick always wore a jacket and a tie and sometimes carried an umbrella and
he was hard to get to know.I
didn’t really discover his character until much later, when, one day, he
walked into my house, excused himself and politely asked my wife if she had a
fire extinguisher.
“Yes,” she said, “I
think so, but why do you want it?”
“Well,” said Rick,
“because the house next door is on fire.”
Rick never lost his cool.On the night that I met him, he laughed at me when I told him I was going
to turn him into a star.I soon
learned that the King Bees had taken their name from a song by the Rolling
Stones.They also had taken
everything else from the Rolling Stones that they could possibly get away with.
“What showmanship!”I said to myself.“With my genius at promotion, I’ll turn them into a
sensation.”
I also liked their musical
equipment.But in the music
business, as I found out, you have to be equipped for mechanical warfare.
In the beginning, they
didn’t even bother to learn my name.They
called me Redbeard.Then I talked
Gerry Goffin and Carole King, a husband-and-wife songwriting team, into
producing their records.
“And what are you going
to try to sell us next,” Carole asked me some $15,000 later, “the Brooklyn
Bridge?”
When the Berkeley Heights Independent
Press, a weekly newspaper, printed a picture story about the group, grammar
school kids started coming up to my door to ask for the King Bees’ autographs.In the three New Jersey towns of Berkeley Heights, New Providence and
Summit, we had become famous overnight.
“You’d better start
learning how to handle it right now,” I told the boys.
I began to bill the King
Bees as the loudest group in town.The
next thing that happened was that my neighbors served me with a zoning violation
for allowing the group to practice in my house.
In the end, it seems, my
house became a hideout for all the teenage rebels of North Central Jersey.From miles around, whenever a boy would be kickedout of school and told to get a haircut, he’d come to my house instead.Naturally, he’d be hungry.I
began to lose, in addition to my money, my professional standing as an adult
member of the community.Once, the
group was asked to play a dance at the Berkeley Heights Community Pool.But when I showed up, I was kicked off the premises and offered an escort
home by the Berkeley Heights Police Department.
Another time, in Allentown,
Pennsylvania, the YMCA refused to allow the group to finish a performance
because Danny Mansolino’s shirttails were hanging out.I showed them!I tore
up the check for fifty dollars they paid us.It had only cost us about seventy-five dollars to make the trip to
Allentown, but we were trying to build a legend. The springs of my wife’s
brand new station wagon began to sag.Dents
started appearing in its fenders.
“I thought you bought
that car for me,”my wife
said.
“Just think like it got
commandeered in some military campaign,” I told her.
From one end of the Middle
Atlantic States to the other, my wife’s station wagon became famous, groaning
under the weight of five heavy amplifiers and a big electric organ.My wife herself began to drink three cocktails before dinner instead of
one.Then, just as our first record
was about to be released, our producer, Gerry Goffin, checked into a hospital.A short time later, Dave, the lead singer and Rick, the guitarist, were
ordered into college by their parents.
“If you try to dissuade
them otherwise,” my attorney, a New Jersey state senator, advised me, “then
you would be liable to criminal charges of impairing the morals of a minor.”
In addition, we discovered
that we had neglected to register the King Bee name.RCA Victor, obviously capitalizing on my genius at promotion,
came out with a record by another group called the King Bees.Since the drummer’s father was a disc jockey, it immediately went on
the radio.People started calling
us up to congratulate us.
“We’ll sue ‘em!” I
said. “Every penny that record
earns belongs to us.”When the
record flopped, we changed our name to The Myddle Class.
Otherwise, under my
command, the group made steady progress.With
Gerry Goffin in the hospital, I decided to smuggle copies of our unpublished
demonstration records to a Long Island radio station, a master stratagem which,
I later found out, could have cost us our copyrights.
“Let them steal from
us,” I said.“It’ll only show
everybody how rich we are.”
When we agreed to play free
at a benefit at the Smithtown, Long Island, Tercentenary celebration, the
authorities expected a crowd of 400.With
our demonstration records on the radio, the crowd of 400 turned out to be a
screaming mob of 4,000.When the
mob advanced on us in a shopping center parking lot, the six cops on duty calmly
walked out of the mob’s path, leaving us unprotected on the bandstand, our
clothes torn, our hair pulled, our instruments wrecked.In the ensuing riot, five teenyboppers were arrested and four were
injured, two of them badly enough to be taken to a hospital.Those were the days when riots were like applause meters in the rock and
roll business, and we went home happy, even though the bill for the trip was
going to run into the hundreds.
When the next riot started
I was ready for it.We were booked
into Kingston, N.Y., a town where they shot pennies at you with slingshots, and
I brought along a photographer to document the event.Unfortunately, he was Brian Hamill of the famous Brooklyn
Hamills.The riot started as the
show was ending and the fighting moved out into the back yard of the auditorium,
where a blizzard was already in progress.I
went to look for Brian Hamill to make sure he was getting pictures of the riot,
but what the Brooklyn Hamills are famous for is never standing idly by when
there’s a good fight to be won.
“Here, Al,” Brian said,
handing me his camera, “hold this for me a minute,” and he ran out into the
back yard and started punching the first guy he could find who was twice his
size.We had big
I
drove my wife
to the laundromat
in a borrowed Cadillac
riots, small riots, loud
riots and quiet riots.I was amazed
at our success.I began to day
dream about buying a new fortress for my troops, a Scottish castle that had been
transplanted stone by stone to the hills of Watchung, New Jersey, and that was
then occupied by a German scientist rumored to have a laboratory in his cellar.
Meanwhile, the washing
machine and dryer broke down in my cellar and we didn’t have enough
money to hire a repairman.I had to
start accompanying my wife to the local Laundromat.When she complained that we were making a spectacle of our
poverty using the independent Laundromat, I borrowed Gerry Goffin’s Cadillac
to take her there.Then I decided
to boost our finances by promoting our own concert in the nearby town of Summit.All 1,000 seats were sold out three weeks in advance mostly by volunteer
high school ticket salesmen, but their days off from school had affected their
arithmetic.When it came time for
them to turn in the money, nothing added up.After the concert, I found that somebody also had stolen my $300 tape
recorder.Someone else told me the
opening act had stolen it. The opening act was The Velvet Underground.
We had to turn away about
500 fans at the door of the auditorium and later that night they all seemed to
show up at my house to raid the refrigerator.It had become a tradition that, after any Myddle Class performance, the
group and its entourage would end up at 2:30a.m. in my front living room,
playing Bob Dylan, the Beatles, John Coltrane or Stravinsky on my hi-fi, reputed
to be the best in Berkeley Heights, and certainly the loudest.Invariably, the cops would arrive with a noise complaint.In that first summer of our campaign, I booked The Myddle Class into
Greenwich Village’s Café Bizarre on West Third Street. By the next summer,
they were playing at the Night Owl, also on West Third Street.In one year, I had advanced The Myddle Class exactly one-half city block.
At college, Dave and Rick
began growing their hair long and, by the end of the first semester, both of
them had quit.As for Danny
Mansolino, who had started out as a pre-med student at Seton Hall, his
confrontation with formal education was ended by an upperclassman who came up to
him on campus and asked why he wasn’t wearing his freshman beanie.Danny’s answer was an immediate punch in the
upperclassman’s face.In the
meantime, Carole King and Gerry Goffin had signed a distribution deal with
Atlantic, then one of the most successful of the large independent record
companies and now the No. 2 largest in the business.I don’t know how they made it without us.
When our first single, Free
as the Wind, was finally released, it started skyrocketing up toward No. 1
on the local pop charts in Albany, New York, an event which prompted me to apply
in several places for a loan.At
Atlantic, however, the sales force was singularly unimpressed.
“We just want to make
sure you don’t happen to have a lot of maiden aunts in Albany,” one vice
president told us.When it became
apparent that nobody was going to spend any money promoting the record if we
didn’t do it ourselves, I started calling disc jockeys and distributors all
over the country.All I succeeded
in achieving was that $960 telephone bill.In the end, the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company shut off my service.
“At least now you don’t
have to worry about getting phone calls from angry creditors,” my wife said.
They came instead to knock
on my door.You have to understand
that record companies often sign up artists for no particular reason other than
the fact that they need what they call “product.”The theory is that if you put out enough records, one of them is bound to
be a hit.They call this the
shotgun method.Otherwise, no
record is going to be a hit unless you get it distributed into the stores, and
when fan club members started writing in to complain that they couldn’t find
our record anywhere, I decided to go into the distribution business.From Atlantic, I ordered 4,000 copies of Free as the Wind to be
charged against our future royalties.In
keeping with the title of the song, I ended up simply giving the 4,000 records
away.
My promotion techniques
were honest enough, too honest according to my armchair general friends who felt
that their magnanimity in sending me food packages entitled them to give me free
advice as well.Whenever anybody
asked the group why they called themselves The Myddle Class, the group would
answer, “Because we can’t spell.”To
my friends in the music business, I explained that if there had been a Surfing
Sound, a Nashville Sound, a Liverpool Sound and a Detroit Sound, then The Myddle
Class would go down in history as the originators of the Suburban Sound.Whenever the group played, I made them turn their amplifiers all the way
up until people complained that the volume was painful to the ears.“When The Myddle Class plays,” I would answer, “nobody talks,
everybody listens.”
Meanwhile, I kept grinding
out press releases in which I confidently predicted that The Myddle Class would
be “the biggest thing to come out of New Jersey since Woodrow Wilson.”(I didn’t want to offend Frank Sinatra.)I also started distributing, free copies of The Myddle Class
Newsletter, my own attemptat psychological warfare.It had headlines like, “LONG ISLAND DISC JOCKEY BREAKS RECORD---ONCE
OVER THE RADIO, TWICE OVER HIS KNEE.”Or,
“MANAGER INSISTS RECORD WILL BE TWO-SIDED HIT.”Some 70,000 copiesof The
Myddle Class Newsletter went out to fans, including one special 16-page
issue that was printed up in five different editions for various parts of the
country.
“I always wanted to own
my own newspaper,” I explained to my journalist colleagues.
Then the print shop asked me
to be paid.
One of my tactical problems
was to get Free as the Wind played on New York’s two Top 40 radio
stations, WABC and WMCA, which normally don’t play a record until it has
become a hit almost everywhere else in the country or unless they owe you a
pretty big favor.Lacking either
alternative, I merely called up WABC and asked how to request that a record be
played on the air.
“Just send us a post card,” the telephone operator at WABC
replied.
In all innocence, I put
this information into my Myddle Class Newsletter and offered a free post card to
any fan who wanted to send it to a radio station.From Long Island and New Jersey, some 40,000 post cards zipped into the
mailrooms at WABC and WMCA, which cheerfully sorted them out and threw them
into wastebaskets.
“That only makes the
radio stations mad at you,” a disc jockey friend later explained to me.“They don’t want to have to bother with all that junk mail.”
By this time, the gloom in
my house had reached a point where I couldn’t afford to replace the light
bulbs that burned out.Then, when I
learned the Free as the Wind had been named as a pick hit on a Milwaukee
radio station, I borrowed $100 to finance a promotion trip there by my
19-year-old assistant, Bruce DeForeest.
“The least you can do,”
I told him, “is to get The Myddle Class’ name on every men’s room wall
between New Jersey and Wisconsin.”
With two of his own
volunteer teenage assistants, DeForeest spent half the money to buy a car.By the time he arrived in Milwaukee, however, it had been three weeks
since Free as the Wind had last been played over the radio there.The local Atlantic distributor had never even heard of
When
the time came to surrender,
I couldn't find anyone
to accept my sword
the record and not a single
copy had been sold.DeForeest not
only had to suffer through a chilly reception, but Milwaukee was under siege by
its worst snowstorms in years.All
but trapped in an eight-dollar-a-day motel room for more than a week, he wrote
The Myddle Class’ name on a couple of men’s room walls, wired me a few times
for more money and started back East.The
car he had bought lasted just 50 miles short of the trip home to Berkeley
Heights.When it broke down at
last, he merely left it on the shoulder of the highway and hitchhiked the rest
of the way home.It took only
several months more and a second Myddle Class record for me to run out of not
only cash, but credit.
“Easy come, easy go,” I
told my friends.
Eventually, The Myddle
Class did get to record some anonymous music tracks for a Monkees album that sold
almost 4,000 copies.And later, the
face, if not the name, of Charlie Larkey, The Myddle Class’ bass guitar
player, appeared in color on the cover of Esquire.Appropriately enough, he was wearing a battle helmet.
When the time finally came
for me to surrender, I couldn’t find anybody to accept my sword.Instead, a young entrepreneur named Neil Bogart heard the group and
signed them to Cameo-Parkway Records with a contract calling for a $10,000
advance.We only got $2,500 of it.A day later, $1,500 worth of Rick Philp’s guitars were stolen.By now, the mortgage company was about to foreclose on my house and The
Myddle Class road crew had to move me out in a rented van in the dead of night.We packed as if the enemy was at the gates.Looking back, I realize that’s exactly where the enemy was.But still The Myddle Class struggled on, capturing a foothold in Boston,
claiming a victory in Montreal and occupying New York’s Night Owl with such
effectiveness that the owner closed down and turned the place into a poster shop
when The Myddle Class finally moved out.Even
today, people come up to me and tell me how they’ve heard that The Myddle
Class was the best New York group never to make it.
“We couldn’t afford to
make it,” I tell them.
They say that success is as
much to be feared as failure.I
couldn’t really tell you.When
Neil Bogart showed up with his Cameo-Parkway record contract, I suddenly knew
how General Custer would have felt if, out of the skies, he suddenly had gotten
air support.The way things turned
out, Neil Bogart might as well have put General Custer’s name on the contract.While The Myddle Class went back into the studio, recording a third 45
r.p.m. called Don’t Look Back, another young entrepreneur named Allen
Klein was busy taking over control of Cameo-Parkway’s stock.Allen Klein is now better known as the new business manager of the
Beatles but in those days he was the villain of The Myddle Class.His very presence at Cameo-Parkway resulted in the stock going up and
Neil Bogart going out.The day that
Don’t Look Back was released was the same day that Bogart quit, along
with his entire staff of lieutenants. The record was left sitting on top of
empty desks, with no one to promote it.
When I tried to telephone
Allen Klein for further information, all I could learn was that he had an
English secretary.When the time
came for Cameo-Parkway to pay us the second installment of our $10,000 advance,
I discovered that all trading of Cameo-Parkway stock had been ordered suspended.Myke Rosa went to California to become a dishwasher in a Hollywood
luncheonette.
Danny Mansolino went back to his mother’s house in New Jersey to write cowboy
songs.Charlie Larkey got a job
playing bass guitar with the Fugs.Rick
Philp went to Boston and enrolled at Emerson College.Dave Palmer took up employment as a stock boy in a music publishing
house.Gerry Goffin and Carole King
filed for divorce.My wife went
back to work.
As for me, I returned to my
dollarless typewriter.I was, of
course, through with rock and roll, but rock and roll wasn’t through with me.Here I am still writing about it.I
couldn’t honestly say I’d rather be working as a building superintendent,
but then the record business is full of people who occupy themselves putting out
garbage.As my wife says, it’s not a funny story.Former fans sometimes speculate that maybe The Myddle Class will get
together again, but that’s impossible now.Rick Philp, who had devoted his young life to his guitar, giving up the
promising business career his father had laid out for him, was bludgeoned to
death by a berserk roommate in Boston last May.In his honor, Neil Bogart, now known as the king of bubblegum music, is
planning to put out a memorial album of collected Myddle Class tapes on Buddah
Records, his new label.Otherwise, you can still hear The Myddle Class by going up to
Albany and waiting for the local radio stations to play our golden oldies.
As Ché Guevera once said,
in the textbook he did write, called On Guerilla Warfare,
“ … war is subject to certain strategic laws… Those who violate these laws
will be defeated.”Anyone who
thinks he’d like to go into the rock and roll business ought to read Ché
Guevera’s book first.##
56 BRIARWOOD DRIVE WEST, BERKELEY HEIGHTS, NEW JERSEY
IN 1998:
I BOUGHT THAT HOUSE IN 1957 FOR $15,000 (Photo by Thom Lynch)
[The only recording by
The Myddle Class that I can find in this mountain of clutter atop of which I
live is an imperfect cassette copy of the Myddle Class album, ONE TIME ONLY.
However, for the donation of a $35 USPS money order, payable to THE
BLACKLISTED JOURNALIST at Box 964, Elizabeth, NJ 07208, I will be happy to dub
you a copy.]
sm
