Casablanca Records Part One: Leading the Camel to Water, 1974-1975

Everyone knew Neil Bogart. His zest for business, promotional acumen, and bottomless reservoir of energy were renowned in the music industry well before he established Casablanca. Rob Gold, a former Director of Marketing at Casablanca, makes an appropriate analogy. “The record business is very much like professional sports — you’re always keeping an eye on the players”, he says. “It was really difficult to miss Neil because he was a showman and he would make sure that his name was in print and radio. He always seemed to be there”.

By the time Casablanca debuted in 1974, the Brooklyn-born Bogart had already reinvented himself a number of times: first as 18-year old crooner “Neil Scott”, earning a minor hit in 1961 with “Bobby”, and then as an ad salesman for industry trade magazine, Cash Box. Shortly thereafter, Bogart worked promotion at MGM Records, then moved onto Cameo-Parkway and, later, Buddah (sic) Records as a top executive. During his ascension, he was crowned “King of Bubblegum” for his success with acts like the Lemon Pipers, 1910 Fruitgum Company, and Ohio Express.

However, the “King of Bubblegum” moniker dwarfed Bogart’s true talent of spinning gold from emerging talent and nurturing established artists alike. While Bogart presided at Buddah, Curtis Mayfield (Curtom), Bill Withers (Sussex), the Isley Brothers (T-Neck), and Holland-Dozier-Holland (Hot Wax/Invictus) found a new home at the label through distribution deals and hit songs like “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)” by Melanie, the Five Stairsteps’ “Ooh Child”, and the Grammy-winning “Oh Happy Day” by the Edwin Hawkins Singers further expanded the label’s profile.

Despite earning millions of dollars for Buddah, Bogart’s greatest career achievements were still years ahead. After Long Island, New York-owned Viewlex bought Buddah in 1973, Bogart reinvented himself yet again and decided to do what he had long desired and was certainly qualified to do — create his own record label. Enlisting a team of partners that included Larry Harris and Cecil Holmes (his close friend and colleague from Cameo-Parkway and Buddah), Neil Bogart introduced the world to his unique vision of all that a record company could be — a trans-continental crossroads where one could find Fanny, Peter Noone, and Hugh Masekela with equal probability. Drawing inspiration from both Rick’s Café and the exotic landscape of Northeast Africa, he called it “Casablanca”.

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Cecil Holmes (Partner/Senior Vice President): We were driving in to Buddah one day and Neil says to me, “Cecil, I think this is the time to form our own company. Would you be interested in going now?” I said, “Whatever you want to do”, because I really loved the guy. He was so talented and my career was really set up by him. He gave me the opportunity to really flourish when we were together. I would have followed him to the end of the world. That’s when we decided that we would make a move.

Bill Aucoin (Manager, KISS): I got to know Neil Bogart through this television show I was writing and producing, a show called Flipside. It was kind of this young show that was supposed to keep younger audiences attracted to the network. One of the people I invited to come to the show was Neil Bogart and to discuss what it’s like for the artists and the company and so forth, which he did. We kind of built a rapport. By the time I’d finished the first 13 weeks of the show, I decided the music industry was much more exciting. One of the artists that wrote to me every week, these little handwritten notes, was KISS, especially Gene Simmons.

Holmes: Neil had talked with Warner Bros. about distributing the label and Warner Bros. was interested. Originally, the first name of the company was supposed to be “Emerald City”. The only thing was we couldn’t get the clearance on the name so that’s when Neil decided on “Casablanca”. I knew that he was a Humphrey Bogart fan and I feel that had something to do with it. Warner Bros. owned Casablanca (1942), the movie, so we didn’t have any problems with the clearances and all of that.

David Edward Byrd (Artist): Neil had become aware of me through the Fillmore East and some of my early Broadway posters. His office at Buddah wasn’t far from the Winter Garden where Follies opened so he’d seen the poster everyday. Neil saw a portrait of himself as the Humphrey Bogart character, Rick. I did a little sketch of Neil. Then I did a painting of that and it was included on the original label.

Holmes: We moved out to California and we started our label. We were on Sherbourne Drive in West Hollywood. We wanted to have a balanced label. We admired A&M Records’ Jerry Moss and Herb Alpert. We admired Jerry Wexler and Atlantic. We kind of wanted to have our company like that, an all-facets type of company. Atlantic had more of an R&B feel at the beginning and then developed to becoming a major company.

Aucoin: I called Neil and I’m telling him about this group KISS and he said, “You know Bill, I’ve just been asked by Warner Bros. to start a label out on the west coast and this sounds very exciting. Maybe they would be good for my new label”. He played the tracks for some of his A&R people and they said, “Yeah this sounds like a rock and roll band. We should have rock and roll on the label, Neil. Why don’t we do this?” Neil said okay, we’re going to do it. He didn’t really know KISS that well. He was taking a shot.

Byrd: Neil called me and said, “I’ve signed this group, KISS. He wanted me to come up to 57th St. to this photo studio because they were doing the photo shoot for their first album. I went up there and I met these four characters who were doing all this make-up. I helped Peter Criss with his cat nose. I really didn’t get it because at the time, the trend was towards the “new elegant” — I had just done a lot of stuff for the launch of Polo by Ralph Lauren and also the Fitzgerald movie was out with Robert Redford — and these guys were not it. I thought, “Oh Boy Neil’s going to lose his shirt”. (Needless to say, I was quite wrong.)

Jean Millington (Fanny): With glam-rock happening at that time, we had put together a rock and roll show with masks and capes and it was like a rock opera. There was excitement at the time with the show — the costume changes, there were a lot of light changes. It was definitely geared towards being a theatrical piece. I think our management thought that maybe a new, smaller record company could be possibly more attentive to what the different direction was.

Brett Hudson (The Hudson Brothers): We were on Rocket Records, which was Elton John’s record company. We had just cut an album called Totally Out of Control (1974) and we got into a creative difference, not with Bernie Taupin who was our producer and not with Elton, but with the other powers that be that were running the label. We basically parted ways and we didn’t re-sign with them. Then we got a television show. Then everybody, typical of show business, came out of the woodwork: “We’ll sign you!” Ed Leffler, who ended up managing Van Halen, managed us at the time. Ed was talking to an Australian gentleman by the name of David Joseph. He said, “I’ll tell you what’s perfect for the boys is Neil Bogart’s label, Casablanca”. Ed set up a meeting. My brothers and I went in. We talked to Neil and we told him where our heads were. He said, “Well did you bring anything?” We played him a demo tape that had about 20 songs on it that ended up being our first album (Hollywood Situation, 1974).

Holmes: I had known George Clinton for years from back in the early days in New Jersey. George was a writer for Jobete Music, which was Motown’s publishing company. I had a relationship with him. The Parliaments had some success with “I Wanna Testify”. Then came the Jimi Hendrix era and they changed their music. They went to Europe. When they came back, they had this new group called Parliament-Funkadelic. When we went to get them, they had already made a deal with Westbound for Funkadelic. Parliament was still available so we signed Parliament.

Bernie Worrell (Parliament-Funkadelic): As everyone knows, George is shrewd, so what he couldn’t get released on one label, he came up with the brilliant idea of using the same people but on another label. That helped because we could do one genre of music on one label and another genre on another label but that would still encompass a bunch of material.

Holmes: In some kind of way, Neil had gotten a relationship with Barry White through his management. Barry said that he had this girl, Gloria Scott, and he produced this record. We heard the record, liked the record, and that was that. What Am I Gonna Do (1974) was one of the first records we had.

Casablanca and Warner Bros.: “That’s All Folks!”

Casablanca and Warner Bros.: “That’s All Folks!”

Aucoin: KISS went to L.A. to play a big opening night for Casablanca. Neil had rented the ballroom at the Century Plaza and put on this big, spectacular evening.

Holmes: We had the decoration of Casablanca. We had gambling. We had this guy at the front playing the piano in a white suit from Casablanca. All of the employees were dressed in the Casablanca gear. Neil actually wore Bogart’s jacket. We were all dressed up as people out of the movie. We were able to do that because Warner Bros. owned Casablanca and they had all the props that we could use, all the clothes and stuff that we wore were from wardrobe for Casablanca.

Nancy Sain (National Pop Promotion): I actually ended up going to the debut party at Century Plaza and that was before I went to work for Neil. That was the first time I saw KISS. I loved it. I wanted to go work for Casablanca. I thought it was fabulous. It wasn’t their audience or their venue but it wasn’t meant to be. It was about debuting the label.

Aucoin: When KISS played…first of all they were nervous, they really weren’t up to doing something like that at that moment in their lives. They were still developing, basically. It didn’t come across very well. Plus, it was way too loud. It wasn’t a great night, let’s put it that way.

Holmes: The reaction was kind of skeptical because they were different. The younger kids loved them. They grew up into being the fans.

Bobbi Cowan (Director of Publicity): Before joining Casablanca, I worked for Gibson and Stromberg. We handled the party Neil gave to launch KISS. The press hated the band. Everybody was having such a good time but the bottom line was Neil really hoped that they would just take off for the moon and it didn’t quite happen that way. Joyce (Bogart-Trabulus) worked her ass off with Bill Aucoin and Neil spent money like water. He bought all the ads and he made it look like they were an amazing smash hit of an act whether they were or they weren’t. That was his philosophy. Spend money like it’s happening and people will believe it.

Aucoin: At this point, we had already recorded the album, KISS (1974). It was ready to go and a secret memo gets distributed at Warners saying, “We really believe in Neil Bogart but we don’t think KISS is the type of artist that will make it so let’s just let this go by the wayside and we’ll certainly work on some of the other artists that Neil will sign”. Neil, who was a great schmoozer (you couldn’t help but love him, he had that kind of personality), had gotten to meet as many people as he could at Warners and someone slipped him the memo. Well, that was the beginning of the end.

Holmes: I guess we were a year into the deal. It just wasn’t working. Neil was a very aggressive guy. We would go to Warner Bros. and we’d say, “Here’s our product and we’re putting it out next week”. That’s how we were used to doing things at Buddah because we were independent. It didn’t go that way at Warner Bros. They’d say, “We love it. That’s terrific. We have to put it into our release schedule”. At the time, Warner Bros. was a big company so if we came with something in June, we might not be in the release schedule until September. That just wasn’t working. Neil would argue with everybody about the product.

Sain: Warners went into the deal with him because he had such a good reputation of being able to pick hits. That was good. Neil didn’t have any problems with the guys at the top. They were all on the same playing field. What became a problem was that this was his life and he had to go at corporate speed through the Warner machine. That did not work for him on many levels, cashflow-wise, etc. Warner Bros. was a corporation and there was a corporate attitude. They were not self-starters as a rule and they did what they were told.

Holmes: Mo Ostin, who’s a wonderful guy, gave us the deal. I bump into him every now and then and we always talk about this, about how Neil had come to him and said this is not working. Mo was saying that the executives at the company were having a fit. Neil had talked about possibly getting out of the deal. Mo had advanced us a lot of money to come out to Los Angeles and we owed them this money. They worked out a deal where Neil would pay them back “x” amount of dollars a month until the debt was paid.

Aucoin: Neil left Warners, basically wondering what he was going to do. He mortgaged his house. He went to independent distributors, which he knew very well when he was at Buddha, and they all agreed to put money up. That’s how the company survived. Otherwise it would have ended right there.

Randee Goldman (Executive Assistant): I remember thinking, I just got this great job and now I’m going to lose it!

The Sheik Leads the Camel to Water

The Sheik Leads the Camel to Water

Holmes: We had gone back to independent distribution, where we were very successful at Buddah, basically using the same independent distributors. At that time, independent distributors were looking for labels because they weren’t really doing that well. They had a few, like Motown, but everybody was going to the major labels. They were happy to have us. They would advance us “x” amount of dollars to have the right to distribute the label. That’s how we raised the money and Neil was able to pay Warner Bros. back their money.

Hudson: Neil got a car and drove with his Visa card and went from city to city in the east, from Cleveland to upstate New York, all over that whole section in the northeast, going to individual distributors state by state, and signing direct deals with them. That was unheard of at the time. He was a really smart guy and he was in the right place at the right time with the right acts. That’s the truth.

Marc Nathan (National and Regional Promotion): Neil was very singles-oriented. We were just shoveling out 45’s on a weekly basis. You wanted to create the illusion that you were a major label and labels like Warner Bros. and Columbia were always in the game with a lot of records. If you were an independent label that only put out a record every three or four weeks, it was very difficult to gain traction at radio.

Sain: I wasn’t just calling radio stations. I had a network with retail. I spoke to my retailers. I had a list of all the stores, the addresses and phone numbers that reported to each radio station. I always told my radio stations, once they added the record, “Okay, I’m sending five free records to these stores so that we can find out if we’ve got a record or not” so that the store didn’t have to buy-in something that they didn’t know from a company that they didn’t know. Forget about getting to buy half a dozen records through Warner Bros. distribution — that salesman wants to take an order for 100. Panama City, that’s a small market. They don’t want to buy 100 records. They may not sell 100 records if it’s a number one record. You got to remember those numbers and remember what those towns were like 30-something years ago. Neil understood that I got it.

Bob Perry (Independent Record Promotion, Southeast): God, there were so many singles. I worked every thing from KISS to Hugh Masekela to James & Bobby Purify. Pretty much everything that came down the pike, I ran with.

Millington: At that time, I was kind of dating David Bowie. “Butter Boy” was kind of a tongue-in-cheek song about our relationship, all of that rock and roll stardom.

Perry: Larry Santos was a tough record. They were real high on that because he was a good writer but that doesn’t always translate. That was one of Neil’s pet projects, I remember. He really wanted that. I got airplay but it never really resulted in sales.

Sain: The first thing that I remember working on was a Simon Stokes record, “Captain Howdy”. It was one of Casablanca’s first. I concentrated on radio stations that reported to The Gavin Report (radio trade publication). My job always was to get the front page of The Gavin Report and to do that you have to focus on a piece of product so my job was usually to take the strongest thing we had. Neil did do a lot of product. The Hudson Brothers were pop, so that was a lot easier to get played.

Hudson: My brothers and I sold more records than people know. Reason being? Neil realized that our audience at the time was young girls from a Saturday morning show and a nighttime primetime show. Back then, Billboard, Cash Box, and Record World counted if you moved up the charts. Well, no one had put records into supermarkets. Neil figured moms will be there after school with their kids, and if our faces are on the counter in a rack, selling the 45 single for .99, we would sell them in bushels. We did. Unfortunately it wasn’t counted because the one-stops couldn’t report. The records were shipped directly to the supermarkets. We sold like 700,000 legitimately of “So You Are a Star”. If you add what went into the supermarket, I have no idea what that would be. They were pressing and shipping records out in gigantic boxes to all these supermarkets. In hindsight, I think that was really smart. I laughed when I read about the Wal-Mart deal that The Eagles made. It is exactly the same, except now it’s chartable and countable.

Tom Moulton: It was sort of like Neil was doing his Buddah thing all over again. Whatever sticks to the wall, we’ll jump on it.

Holmes: When we first went independent, Neil had this big idea about doing a Johnny Carson album, Magic Moments from The Tonight Show (1974). We figured that would be a big hit because of Johnny. We figured that was going to get us across the hump. The distributors were down with it. They bought up all these records. All of a sudden, the thing didn’t sell.

Sain: The whole idea was amazing. It was really, really good. If the marketing plan had been able to be executed the way it was planned, it would have made multi-million dollars immediately, which Neil was not wrong about. The plan was that Johnny would mention it and he would give it away as gifts to the people that came on who he was interviewing. I remember the first show or two that he mentioned it, we couldn’t handle all the phone calls. It was really a great reaction. It was exactly what we wanted and then NBC said, “Oh, no, no, no”. I can’t remember if they were owned by RCA, but I think there was a conflict and they told Johnny, “No, you can’t do that”. The records were pressed and ready to ship. Nowadays, it wouldn’t have been a problem. You’d throw up a website and video clips and off you go, but the media then was expensive and Neil was running out of money.

Perry: That cost him a fortune because he had to get clearances from Groucho Marx’s estate and Lenny Bruce’s estate. That thing shipped gold and came back platinum. What were people gonna say? “Hey come over and listen to my Johnny Carson record?” It ain’t Chocolate City! Distributors bought that in heavy. The incentive on that was crazy. Whatever you bought, Casablanca matched it. There were so much free goods on the streets. Let’s say you ordered 2,000 pieces, Casablanca would throw in like 1,000 or 500. You still see tons of those things everywhere you go. There were so many returns on that record.

Holmes: We couldn’t get it to sell and we were really starting to panic but the distributors were really cool. In those days they had return privileges and they could end up returning everything if they were in good shape with the company. If they returned everything right away, we would have been out of business but they decided not to return everything right away. They returned percentages of it at a time. I remember Neil saying the distributors had to help us because we owed them the money so they weren’t going to turn their backs on us. They were with us because they had this inventory that they’re sitting with and if we weren’t successful, they would end up eating all that stuff.

Casablanca Comes ‘Alive’

Casablanca Comes Alive

Aucoin: I had put the last tour of KISS on my American Express card, wondering if I was ever going to be able to pay it. Neil actually produced Dressed to Kill (1975) himself because we couldn’t afford a producer. It really got to the point where we were at the end of our rope, financially. During that time we were even asked by other labels, “Well why don’t you just leave Casablanca and come with us, we can do this for you, we can do that”. In truth, we hadn’t gotten paid any royalties and I then went to Neil and said, “You gotta pay the royalties and you got to give us the royalty statements”, which he hadn’t done, “or we’re going to have to take some legal action”. Neil took that as an offense. It wasn’t supposed to be, it was protecting my management contract. Now we’re in a legal struggle. We’re fighting Neil, Neil’s pissed off at me. He even called the group and asked the group whether or not they’d leave me and go with him. It got a little ugly there. The truth of the matter is I never really wanted to leave. He had done way too much for us. No one else would have done what he did. There’s no way.

Sain: KISS became a “this must happen”, which was really intense. KISS was not the music that Top 40 radio wanted to play. What was going on was that Larry Harris (Senior Vice President/Managing Director) was usually out on the road during the week with KISS. Then, I would go out on the weekends and go to get my radio guys, take them to dinner, and then take them to the concert. They didn’t want to go and I said, “You’ve got to go. We’ve got to do this. We don’t have to stay but you have to go”. The point was that when we walked in I said, “This is your audience”. The audience was screaming and yelling and standing up on their feet the whole entire time. I said, “I know you don’t like this, you’re 30-something — neither do I necessarily — but this is your audience”. That was the way I approached it. I was educating the radio guys that you may not want to listen to KISS but your 18-24 year old males do. FM radio, that was their demographic. KISS got better. Each piece of product got better. They were not that fabulous to begin with. They were capable of it but like everything, it takes practice.

Perry: KISS had such a huge following — the KISS Army, man, they were shameless self-promoters. Radio was not keen on KISS. Back then, in the ’70s, you had progressive rock, and they weren’t jumping on the KISS bandwagon. It was cool to slam them but you just couldn’t ignore them.

Aucoin: Now we come to the next album. Neil said, “I don’t think we can afford to go into the studio, maybe we could just do a live album”. I said, “Can we do a double live album? If we’re going to do it, can we do it with a double face and the booklet and everything?” He said, “Alright, you can do that”.

Nathan: Being a live album, and coming off, essentially, three stiffs, it wasn’t as if the world was waiting for KISS Alive (1975). However, we got lucky because just a couple of months before we went after “Rock and Roll All Nite”, Warner Bros. had rather unprecedented success at Top 40 radio with Deep Purple and their live version of “Smoke on the Water”. There was a radio station in Pittsburgh called 13Q and it was an AM Top 40 station, as most Top 40 stations were back in 1975 (this was really before the proliferation of music on FM and the migration to FM for all music). 13Q had gone on the air and one of the statements it had made was that it broke “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple. This was in an era obviously before computers or Internet, so I literally sent a telegram via Western Union, which I still have a copy of in my files, and it was to Bill Tanner who was the program director of 13Q. All it said was, “As you did with ‘Smoke on the Water’ by Deep Purple, I suggest you check out ‘Rock and Roll All Nite’ by KISS”. He did. The same way 13Q broke Deep Purple, starting it at nighttime, it started playing “Rock and Roll All Nite”. Then, a number of other radio stations picked up on it pretty quickly. At that time, Bill Tanner and 13Q were extraordinary indicators. It was a different time in terms of the way you broke Top 40 records. There were certain programmers who were very well-respected. We caught that break and we were able to get it played. The fact is, it was a huge reaction record right from the very beginning.

Perry: “Rock and Roll All Nite” was a monster. We were still selling records but we sold a whole lot more after that.

Sain: That record for KISS was a hit record product. You can’t deny that. You can listen to it today and it’s a hit record. There’s just no two-ways about it. It wasn’t about Casablanca manipulating. It was about their product finally got the play it deserved and it sold. It was a genuine hit. That gave money. That’s the fuel to run a business.

Aucoin: We did the live album and it turned out to be a major success. In days when people were selling 800,000 units if they were lucky, all of a sudden we sold 3.5 million. It became a huge success and Casablanca had its first major success in the industry.

Goldman: Boy, was Warner Bros. licking their wounds after that one!

KISS “Strutter” (1975)

Frank DiMino Remembers…How Angel was Signed to Casablanca

Frank DiMino Remembers…How Angel was Signed to Casablanca

A look at Casablanca’s releases between 1974-1975 indicates a theatrically oriented roster. KISS, Parliament, Fanny, and T. Rex all had roots in glam-rock or were beginning to incorporate more dramatic elements into their stage shows at the time they were signed to Casablanca. The label found one of its most exciting live groups when Angel arrived at Casablanca in 1975. Lead singer Frank DiMino traces how the Washington, D.C.-based rock group found its home at the Casbah:

In D.C., at that time, there were two different clubs where all different bands played and there was kind of like a circle of bands that all knew each other. When we weren’t playing, we went down to see each other. When we put Angel together it was kind of like, we were from three different bands that were very prominent at that time, so to get all of us into one band, it was kind of a showcase for that area.

We knew all the club owners but this one club owner really wanted us to start at his club because he was just opening his club. He had run a couple of different clubs in the Georgetown area so he allowed us to rehearse upstairs and he said, “You rehearse there as long as you want and until you’re ready. When you’re ready I want to bring you guys down to the club”. We said okay. We rehearsed for a while and when we were ready, we put this show together. The place was called Bogie’s and for some reason there was a lot of word-of-mouth happening. We used to do two shows a night and we had another band opening the first show and opening the second show. A lot of people were coming down. Gordon Fletcher, who used to write for Circus and he did some stuff for Rolling Stone, came down a lot and became a real big fan. He used to bring down whatever bands he was covering that were playing at Largo or anywhere else in town.

Some labels came down. Nothing concrete, we were just talking to them and they were asking us questions. Sometimes, we didn’t even know who they were until after (laughs). We’re talking to them and Gordon would say, “Oh you know that’s so-and-so from Atlantic Records or Capitol”. Gordon was a great friend and a real help to us in those beginning days. He really was a fan of the band. He really enjoyed us.

At the time, we were at the point of wanting to get something together. We’d been playing there for a couple of months, the band was tight, we were writing all the time so we had a lot of material we working on. David Joseph came down and proposed a whole idea of what he wanted to do. We had a couple of meetings with him and we thought the way he wanted to do it was the way it would work for us. We were on the edge of maybe going with Leber and Krebs but we decided to go with David Joseph.

What happened after that was Gordon brought Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley down there and I think Ace Frehley came down there as well. We talked with them for awhile and they were talking about their management and coming to Casablanca. It was funny, I said, “We just signed a management deal with someone else” (laughs). We became friends with Gene and we went to a few of their shows.

We moved out to Los Angeles and we started the progression of rehearsing, tightening up the songs and then looking for a label. The first person that David called was Neil Bogart because he knew Neil was looking for acts at the time. Casablanca was new. KISS hadn’t broken yet. I think they were on the Dressed to Kill album at that time. A lot of people were telling David, “Don’t go with Casablanca because it doesn’t look like they’re going to make it. I don’t know if they’re really going to be able to pull through it, financially. They might go under”. There was something about Neil and I think all of us knew that when we first met Neil. He was easy to deal with and you just felt that he understood what you were trying to do.

We went ahead and David decided to think about it. I think David and Neil had a good relationship too because David knew exactly how much he could stretch Neil, as well. He said, “Let’s just check to see what we can do with other labels and we can always go back to Casablanca”. David was a good friend with Nesuhi Ertegun, so Nesuhi came down. What we ended up doing at that time was to lean towards going with Capitol. They had the bigger contract, more money and John Carter, I think, was the guy we were talking to at the time. We decided to go with Capitol but at that time David had made a big decision to say, “What we’re going to do is I’m going to finance the album so we can go into the studio and record it so we’re not tied with anyone. We’ll get the recording done. We’ll get a record deal”.

We did the first album. We brought it to Capitol and the meeting did not go so, so well. I don’t know what it was. It was one of those meetings where they started bringing up ideas of how they wanted us to change the stuff. This was my first lesson with record companies. We’re giving them a finished product and they’re telling us maybe you should go back and do this and that. We’re going, “This is the product. This is it”. I can remember walking out of the meeting being very disillusioned going, “What are they talking about?” Dave said, “You know what, maybe we should go back and talk to Neil one more time”.

We went back to talk to Neil and brought the album to him because he hadn’t heard the whole thing yet. He sits everyone down and calls people into the office. He’s got these big JBL monitors in his office. He got some food, had some wine, and we just sat down and we listened to the whole thing. After it was done he said, “You know guys? That was great and I would love to take this album and run with it”. You hear a guy say that and you go, “Wow”. That’s what you want to hear! You don’t really hear that from record company people or people in the business at that level. He knew how to do things. He was a one of a kind guy, the kind of guy who you always hoped to meet in the business.