Looking for the Magic by Mitchell Cohen

Author:Mitchell Cohen [Cohen, Mitchell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Music, Business Aspects, History & Criticism
ISBN: 9798985658903
Google: 3DktzwEACAAJ
Publisher: Trouser Press
Published: 2022-06-10T20:39:44+00:00

SOME LIKE IT HOT

THE SUMMER OF 1977 IN NEW YORK CITY was especially brutal, with oppressive heat, a citywide power blackout, Son of Sam on a tabloid-obsessed murder spree, and the Mets on a path to losing nearly a hundred games. In late August, the Arista staff did what all sweltering New Yorkers were tempted to do: go to the beach. That year’s convention was held at the landmark Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego, a Victorian beach resort that had stood on that spot since 1888, and during Hollywood’s first golden era was a getaway for cinema luminaries like Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, and Charlie Chaplin. The Coronado stood in for Miami Beach in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot. It was on those sands that Tony Curtis extended his leg and sent a never-more-desirable Marilyn Monroe into a romance-spurring pratfall. Arista’s gathering would be, like the clash between the menacing “Friends of Italian Opera” and Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators, a combination of music and mayhem.

Arista had quite a bit to celebrate, and Clive Davis made certain that all of the label’s priorities were touched upon over the four-day event. Davis had gone on something of a buying binge: He signed the Kinks, who had come off a sales decline at RCA after a string of conceptual albums; the Grateful Dead, persuaded to hitch up with a record label when their attempt to go out on their own proved too administratively cumbersome; and the Alan Parsons Project, which wasn’t a band, but a musical laboratory where Parsons brought together vocalists and musicians to perform the works that he and collaborator Eric Woolfson concocted. So far, all of those acquisitions were paying off. The Kinks’ Sleepwalker, the Dead’s Terrapin Station, and the Alan Parsons Project’s I Robot were all giving Arista a solid presence in the rock world, and each act would be at the core of the label’s roster through the next decade.

There were other new signings, including Donovan (an artist Davis had shepherded at Epic), Dickey Betts from the Allman Brothers Band, and the Dwight Twilley Band. It had been a toss-up whether Arista would draft Twilley or Tom Petty from Shelter Records; after consulting with his team, Davis decided to put Arista’s chips on Twilley and his bandmate Phil Seymour. In hindsight, that doesn’t look so good, but at the time, the Twilley Band was coming off a semi-hit single, “I’m on Fire,” and their album Sincerely had been cheered by the rock press as a refreshing brand of rockabilly-tinged power pop.

And there was an entire subset of Arista rock albums that could loosely be called “progressive,” an area that Davis and his A&R staff pursued with varying degrees of enthusiasm. According to Happy the Man’s Frank Wyatt’s website, Davis came up to them after a set and said, “Wow, I don’t really understand this music. It’s way above my head, but my head of A&R, Rick Chertoff, says you guys are incredible, and we should sign you.

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