Sonic Boom by Peter Ames Carlin

Author:Peter Ames Carlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

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Former Artist Development executive Carl Scott comes to the door in a monk’s habit. He is over six feet tall and also wide, like an eight-hundred-year-old redwood is wide. Scott is in his eighties now, and significantly slimmed down following a scary few years of being way, way too heavy for even his build. A few health crises set him on a different course, and now Scott, who carries a walking stick as big as the trunk of the redwood’s adolescent son, keeps his appetites in check.

But as a guy who spent the bulk of his life pushing the buttons, pulling the strings, and kicking the asses necessary to bring pop musicians to the world’s attention, he still can’t resist the temptation to make things happen for folks. I can be your rabbi on this, he said after we’d talked about the book I wanted to write. I know what a rabbi is, of course, but I didn’t know the term’s significance at Warner/Reprise. The building was full of rabbis, but Scott was one of the best: a great ally and an enemy you really didn’t want to have. When another executive wouldn’t stop badgering him for tour support for an artist Scott had already written off, he slammed his office door on him with enough force to send the mounted posters and photographs on his walls crashing to the floor. “That was Carl sending a message,” the guy said. It had been thirty years, and the blam of Scott’s door still echoed in his ears. “He’s really a lovely guy, but just don’t piss him off.”

Scott grew up in a small Pennsylvania town focusing his brain and energies on training his purebred Afghan show dog. Scott did particularly well at the Bucks County Kennel Club match show in 1955, where Tom Donahue, the star disc jockey at WIBG-AM in Philadelphia, served as a celebrity judge. Impressed by the kid’s poise and similarly oversize build, Donahue introduced himself, and the pair hit it off. When the disc jockey moved to San Francisco, Scott followed, taking a job Donahue helped him get in a record warehouse. And as Donahue’s kingdom expanded, so did Scott’s horizons. He became a key part of the disc jockey’s team as Donahue started producing rock ’n’ roll package shows. And when Donahue and his radio partner, Bob Mitchell, launched Autumn Records, Scott joined in. Soon, he moved into managing Autumn artists, specifically the Beau Brummels and the Tikis (later Harpers Bizarre), which put him into the Warner/Reprise orbit. After the Beau Brummels broke up, Lenny Waronker steered Scott to Warner’s Artist Relations Office, which eased the way for artists to come perform or record in Los Angeles.

Scott began to notice how Warner/Reprise’s younger acts were handicapped by their similarly young and offbeat managers. Many of them had no idea how to get their groups, crew, and gear from one city to the next. And even if they could do that, they had no idea

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