Part One: Leading the Camel to Water, 1974-1975[17 August 2009]

By Christian John WikanePopMatters Contributing Editor

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.)

Fanny

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.

Angel debut album, 1975

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.

Part Two: Painting the Building, 1975-1977[18 August 2009]

By Christian John WikanePopMatters Contributing Editor

Executive Assistant? Hardly. The buck stopped at Randee Goldman. Between 1974-1978, she was a veritable third arm of Neil Bogart. If you wanted to speak to Neil Bogart, you spoke first to Randee Goldman. “Right before everything happened”, she remembers, “Casablanca was almost bankrupt. Neil’s whole philosophy was, paint the building, give everybody a raise, make everybody think that we’re doing fantastic and worry about it later”, she laughs.

However, Neil Bogart’s optimism worked. Within the 12 months that Casablanca severed ties with Warner Bros. and became an independent company, the neon lights of its logo changed from bright to incandescent. The label earned its first major commercial success when Alive, the fourth release by KISS, reached the Top 10 of the album charts. Fueled by an explosive live version of “Rock and Roll All Nite”, the double-album captured what The KISS Army already knew: KISS was a phenomenal live act.

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The Mothership Lands

Meanwhile, the George Clinton-led Parliament gained traction on R&B stations and in record stores. “After their first album, Up for the Down Stroke (1974), they started to get a buzz”, recalls Cecil Holmes, who knew Clinton years earlier from his days as a staff writer at Motown. “It was an R&B hit. We got a lot of airplay and people started talking about them. When they had the second album, Chocolate City (1975) – boom, it exploded”. What had begun as a funky, freaky reincarnation of Clinton’s group, the Parliaments, became a force all its own when the Mothership descended upon Casablanca.

Cecil Holmes (Partner/Senior Vice President): George Clinton came to Neil and asked Neil if they would advance him the money for a spaceship. Neil right away said, “Okay”. They were so hot. Records were selling so basically it was their money anyway but somebody had to advance that money and take a chance on it. We went ahead. I can’t

remember how much it cost but it was quite a bit. Of course, that was a big success – the spaceship coming out of the sky and George coming out in smoke.

Ruben Rodriguez (National Promotion and Marketing Director): For me, going to a Parliament-Funkadelic concert was as exciting as going to see Hendrix. It was on that plane. It was like a religious experience. It was something else. George Clinton had that command of the audience. George could have run for president. He had that kind of magnetism about him.

Ray D’Ariano (Director of East Coast Artist Relations): You’re sitting in Madison Square Garden and this spaceship lands and George Clinton gets out. His bass player, or whoever, is wearing a diaper and it’s this very bizarre, strange-looking band, but if you just close your eyes they are putting out some incredible music. Everything was in there – African music, jazz, James Brown. He took all this stuff and made a brand-new big stew out of it. His music is phenomenal, maybe the funky Zappa. They were something to be dealt with. Just like KISS, it was huge. Cecil Holmes had a lot to do with it.

Artie Wayne: Cecil Holmes was the first person to turn me onto Parliament. He had some masters in his office that they had just recorded. They were checking to see what should be put out. He played me “Tear the Roof Off” and I freaked out. He said, “We’re going to get black music played where black music isn’t ordinarily played” and he did because they were able to go pop with stuff like that and become a big arena act.

Bob Perry (Independent Promotion, Southeast): WQAM out of Miami was one of the first stations on “Tear the Roof Off”. That was the first big one. You get records in the discos that were so big they’d cross over to urban to black and then from black you’d go to Top 40. It’d happen in weeks if it was in the grooves.

Tom Moulton: “We want the funk”, God do I love that song! I must have been black in another life. I like Parliament-Funkadelic only because it’s right-to-the ground soul. You can’t get any funkier and “street-ier” than that. You may not like it but man it’s going to make those bones move. If you walk away from it, you’re going to walk in time. It’s amazing how that music controls your bones and your movement. It does something that you’re not aware of.

Bernie Worrell (Parliament-Funkadelic): I was a bad mother-(laughs). I don’t usually talk about myself, I’m the humble type, but I was the musical director. I was the child prodigy. I was the one that went to college and had all that knowledge so I could tell them when their instruments were flat or when their singing was flat. I did most of the arranging, including using real horns and strings. George and I wrote a bunch of stuff together. All he’d do was sing the melody and I’d put the chord changes to it and arrange it. We’d go into the studio and I’d teach the lines or the licks to whoever was playing that session. I was classically trained so there was order…but I needed help! P-Funk was wild, man. Bootsy Collins was coming from James Brown and James ran a strict show. George is loose. I had to crack the whip, but they’d listen. George needed that because he couldn’t control all the stuff that was going on.

D’Ariano: In a way, George Clinton is like Willie Nelson. In other words, Willie was the straight country singer with the suit and short hair and then he freaked out. He became “outlaw” Willie Nelson, and became huge. The same thing happened with Clinton. I don’t know how it happened, but somehow he got enlightened.

Phyllis Chotin (Vice President, Creative Services): George spoke a different language and he used to come to my office so I could interpret for Neil. Here I was this white chick and George would walk into my office…He was, and probably still is, a brilliant guy but yet he had a real difficulty at that time communicating with all the basically straight white folks at the label (who weren’t so straight, but you know what I mean).

Nellie Prestwood (Publicity): George is one of the most intellectual and brilliant men. The thing about Parliament-Funkadelic is that it’s an intellectual environment as well as a wild environment, which is kind of like two things that you’d never put together. You would never expect in a billion years to find these two things together. They’re so talented, witty, and quick.

Worthy Patterson (Vice President Sales and Promotion): George was George. You never knew what the hell he was going to do! We had a birthday party reception for him and he didn’t even show up. He was only a few blocks away.

Stephen Lumel (Designer): George Clinton was a pretty cool guy. You’re in a photo studio waiting for him and he walks in. You expect him to look like what he looks like on the album or onstage but he walks in a three-piece suit with a briefcase. He looked like a lawyer. He had his own artists that did stuff for them but sometimes they would need me to do some things.

Worrell: People would make a lot of stuff for us, not just for me but for all of P-Funk. I got scarves from all over the world. People would give me hats. I always had a little bit of hair. I always wanted dreadlocks but I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t grow an afro, so I got into hats. When I’d go into my jazz style, people would say I reminded them of Thelonious Monk. He was known for wearing his hats.

Chotin: I did several of their album covers too. The one that we had the most fun on was The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein (1976). It was just a fun day shooting that. I so loved their music

Perry: I used to pick them up at the airport and take them to the show, wherever they were playing. They were wonderful. They’re saying, “Look at this honky, he knows his shit!” so I got along good with them. They were wild guys, Clinton and Bootsy and Bernie Woo!

Worrell: This new product came out called the Minimoog. Keith Emerson had the original. It was huge. I got one and it had knobs on it so I didn’t have to use patch chords. I just loved the sound. God bless Bob Moog. I just started hittin’ it. “Flash Light”, we weren’t about trying to write a hit. We were just doing it because of the blessing of having a studio and being able to play, work. After that was a big hit, I was playing Mini Moog bass on almost everything. “One Nation Under a Groove” (Funkadelic), that’s me playing the bassline. “Aqua Boogie”, that’s me.

Rodriguez: Parliament-Funkadelic is like the equivalent of the Grateful Dead. Parliament-Funkadelic had the deadheads of R&B and funk. To this day, it’s a movement. That’s very powerful. George Clinton was ahead of his time. He was so visual. He had all these characters. It was one thing after the other. When I first met Chuck D. of Public Enemy, who I consider to be brilliant as well, I said, “You know who you remind me of? George Clinton”. I say that not from the standpoint of music. I say that from the standpoint of a marketer. George Clinton was a marketing genius.

D’Ariano: As successful as George is, I don’t know that he gets the credit.  Musically, Parliament-Funkadelic is as good as any group that ever recorded: Rolling Stones, Miles Davis, James Brown, whoever you want to put in there. If he didn’t create funk, he brought it to a whole new level. He made funk bust wide open. Clinton brought it to totally new heights. Their music will live on.

Parliament-Funkadelic - “Tear the Roof Off the Sucker” (1976)

Summer Fever

Summer Fever

Parallel to the spike in popularity of Parliament and KISS was the growing currency of a new style of music that was born from the rhythms of Latin and R&B. It was the soundtrack to gay, black, and Hispanic nightclubs. It created a new DJ art form of slip-cueing records in one uninterrupted sequence. It was called “disco”.

Ironically, the man who was about to stoke the flames of the disco inferno initially had reservations about its commercial viability. Tom Moulton, who originated the 12” mix and would later sign with Casablanca as a producer, first met Neil Bogart at Buddah during the early days of disco. “I was trying to get records to play because I was making tapes at a place called the Sandpiper (Fire Island)”, he explains. “Neil said, ‘That disco crap is never going to happen’. It’s so funny now when I think about it. He was not a believer in it”, Moulton laughs.  In less than two years, Neil Bogart was not only converted, he became the genre’s leading proselytizer. While KISS and Parliament set precedents in the concert arena, Munich-based producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte were about to catapult disco from the underground to the mainstream with a former rock band vocalist and stage star of Germany and Austria—Donna Summer.

Leroy Gomez (Santa Esmeralda: I remember in ‘68 was the first time I heard about disco. I was working with Tavares in Boston and I was dating a Jamaican girl that was from a rather wealthy family that was going to school in Switzerland. In those days, the band would play and everybody would dance. Then when the disc jockey would get up, everybody would sit down, and then they would serve drinks. This girl told me that in Europe, there are no bands. The disc jockey plays the records and everybody dances to the records. We all chuckled and said, “Are you kidding me?”

Eddie Drennon: I was playing in clubs in New York with Orquesta Novel. We played in discos really before they were known as discos. “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” (1972) was sort of the beginning of disco. That’s where I got my background in it. I was trying to an album with TR (Tito Rodriguez) Records but I wanted to do a Latin-jazz album. I brought some tapes up to Phil DeCarlo, who was the president of TR. Phil DeCarlo was Tito Rodriguez’s son in law. Just about that time, it must have been ‘74 or ‘75, he read an article about hustle music in the clubs in New York. People were doing this new dance called the hustle. He said, “You think you could do something addressed to the Latin hustle?” To make it a Latin hustle, I just sort of combined some of the Afro-Cuban beats with the disco beat, which was pretty simple to do because the music fell into a Latin flow anyway. I just added the little extra Latin percussion and the handclapping, but the rest of it was just straight R&B of that time. That’s how “Let’s Do The Latin Hustle” came about. Tom Moulton did a mix and that made the record even bigger because it came out on a 12”, which was new. The grooves were so far apart so you could put more bass on a 12”. You could make it longer. A 45 could only go maybe four minutes and then you were squeezing it and you couldn’t get any bottom.

Holmes: We were still on Sherbourne Drive. Neil had received some records from Giorgio Moroder for distribution. There were three different records. I remember Neil playing the records for me. The only one that really stuck out was Donna Summer.

Worrell: We like to say we raised Donna Summer because she used to come to the shows at the Sugar Shack in Boston. It’s deep, man. Donna, she was a young thing. She’s a Capricorn. I remember people’s signs.

Marc Nathan (National and Regional Promotion): I remember this very vividly. Neil and Buck Reingold (Vice President, Promotion) had the promotion staff on a conference call. They said, “You’re getting three albums from this label called Oasis. Your number one priority is Schloss. Your number two priority is Einzelganger, which was kind of like Kraftwerk but not as good. Then there’s this third record that’s coming out and it’s by a woman named Donna Summer. It’s called ‘Love to Love You Baby’. All we want you to do is take it to the discotheques and get it played because there’s a 17-minute song on one side of the record”.

Holmes: We put out “Love to Love You Baby” and we started to get some response to it. At that time, the gay community was really starting to show their muscle. They were getting into it. The gay clubs were playing it.

Moulton: When I first heard it, I thought, how interesting, they’ve taken the bassline to (The O’Jays’) “For the Love of Money” and created a whole song.

Gomez: “Love to Love You Baby” was 16 minutes, which was unheard of. It brought a whole new aspect to the dance scene. Even my track (with Santa Esmeralda), “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”, was 17 or 18 minutes and that was done because of what Giorgio and Donna did.

Holmes: The R&B stations started to play it. In those days, you’d have to go out and do promotion. We’d go to the radio stations and hang out with the guys all around the country. I’ll never forget it. I was in Baltimore at this radio station. This guy’s name was Keith “Chop-Chop” Fisher. He’d say that at night that he had to go to the bathroom. I said, “Hey Keith, when you’re getting ready to go to the bathroom” – because in those days it was only him all night – “why don’t you take one of these long cuts to play? Why don’t you play Donna Summer’s cut?” I would tell that to all the night disc jockeys around the country, about playing it while they go to the bathroom! That’s how they were able to play the extended version. Of course, we had the regular version.

Nathan: I was on the road and I was in Roswell, New Mexico. I was at a radio station called KBCQ and the program director was a guy named Bill St. James. Bill and I were friends on the phone for years and this was my first trip to Roswell. We were going to go out to dinner so it was maybe 4:00 p.m. and I played him some records. I played him this Donna Summer song and he took the record and gave it to the disc jockey who was going on the air at 6:00 p.m. He said, “I want you to put this one while we go out to dinner”. Bill and I went out to dinner and we came back to the station at about 7:30 p.m., quarter to eight. The disc jockey said, “You’re not going to believe this but we’ve gotten 100 phone calls about this song, 96 of them telling us to take it off the air and never play it again”. Bill put it into rotation and played it every three or four hours because, as he explained to me, he’d been working at that radio station for two years and in two years he had never gotten 100 phone calls. Period. In one hour, one record had eclipsed all of the reaction he gotten to any record over the entire time he was at the station. I remember the record went hit-bound to 17 to four to one on his survey. Of course, by the time it was number one, even though it was just Roswell New Mexico, we were able to get the word out and the record started to spread and obviously we had a very big hit record with it, one that was not without that same kind of reaction in a number of markets.

Holmes: Eventually, Frankie Crocker in New York started playing the extended version at prime time. The record was so big he would say, “We’re going to play the Donna Summer record at 6:00 p.m.”. The record just became huge.

Dennis Wheeler (Promotions Manager, Special Projects): The song was Bogart’s love. It was something he had to do. He wanted this to happen and he wanted to be part of this new movement. It was a conscious decision to have someone like a Donna Summer.

Donna Summer: Neil and Joyce (Bogart-Trabulus) came to Europe to meet me at Thanksgiving. That’s when I think I first met them. I was doing a show in Holland at a hotel for some people. I had already signed on for it and I couldn’t get out of it. Roberta Kelly and I were doing that. They came to see me and work with me. I had that show to do and when we got there, the people didn’t have anybody to do the lighting or work on the sound. Joyce and Neil jumped right in. We had a family Thanksgiving dinner in my suite. It was a great moment for me. My daughter Mimi was there. Joyce was running back and forth doing lights. Neil was working on the sound. I got through it and I think they got a chance to see that I was actually able to sing more than they thought! “Love to Love You Baby” was sort of a fluke but I came out of musical theater and I was used to belting. Before that, I was really in a rock and roll band. I didn’t really come so much out of R&B music. They didn’t really know who I was until they met me. Then they were like, “I think this is going to be better than we thought!” They flipped out because they realized that I was actually much more savvy in music than they had thought. They didn’t know what to expect.

Randee Goldman (Executive Assistant): I remember being in the office with Neil and him saying, “Oh my God! She can really sing!” It was like he was shocked.

Summer: I flew into New York to do the press junket that they had put together for me. I went to all the major cities across the United States, which was a rapid thing. I had never done anything like that, which was get on the plane, go to these discotheques, pump up everything, have parties. Then we were on a plane going to the next stop.

Arnie Smith (National Director of Disco Promotion): We called some DJs around the country and had Donna say hello to them and they flipped out. It was a hard song to play because it was not something you’d play at the height of the evening and it was so long. It was just a joy for these DJs to even talk to her. Some men refused to believe it was her.

Summer: Sometimes, there was no time to sleep so we would sleep on the plane. One of my biggest beefs with them was that they had to plan sleep and food and bathroom time into anything they planned. At one point, we were in L.A., they had booked 14 personal interviews in one day. Each one was a half an hour, forty-five minutes, and an hour, different lengths. By the time I got done, I had no voice. I started in the morning and ended over twelve hours later. I was exhausted. That was it. I told them I would never do that again!

Holmes: She came out to Beverly Hills. She had a bungalow. She had a limousine service 24 hours a day. She had a mink coat that they rented for her. We would travel around the country doing promotion. It was my and Susan Munao’s (Director of Publicity who became Summer’s manager) responsibility to be with Donna, to make sure that all the disc jockeys met her. The whole gamut of promotion was done. Neil was the primary owner of the company and that’s what he wanted. One time when we were in New York at this party, and we were going to go out together that night after the show. I didn’t necessarily want to hang out all night but Neil said, “Hey man, you’re going to do this because I want everybody to see us with Donna and let them know that we’re behind her 100%”. Neil did things with Donna that the average record person wouldn’t do. Whatever it took for Donna to be successful, he would do. She was our superstar.

Donna Summer - “Love to Love You Baby” (1976)

Casablanca's First Solo Success

In Donna Summer, Casablanca found its first solo success.Love to Love You Baby (1975) went gold, the single reached #2 on the pop charts, and Donna Summer was just about everywhere: Soul Train, The Mike Douglas Show, American Bandstand, even singing a line of her hit single in German on the latter program. Neil Bogart created a larger-than-life persona for Summer, who relocated from Germany to the United States after a lengthy hiatus from her home country. Susan Munao, Joyce Bogart-Trabulus and Cecil Holmes supported Summer on the road and behind the scenes as she adjusted—quickly—to stardom and her new role as “The First Lady of Love”. While not entirely comfortable with the image foisted upon her, Summer nevertheless was the consummate professional and pointedly incorporated more songs into her act that revealed her exceptional range.

The Moroder-Bellotte-Summer triumvirate merged the worlds of pop, R&B, and disco and created an appealing and accessible new sound for the dance floor. Casablanca distributed a handful of albums on Moroder’s Oasis imprint, including Trouble Maker (1976) by Roberta Kelly and Moroder’s own Knights in White Satin(1976), which contained the infectious “I Wanna Funk with You Tonite”. When Summer’s follow-up albums A Love Trilogy (1976) and Four Seasons of Love (1976) were awarded gold albums, Neil Bogart wasted no time in capitalizing on the sound behind

Summer’s success. He enlisted a team devoted strictly to promoting records in the clubs. What other label with groups like KISS and Parliament was doing that in 1976?

Nancy Sain (National Pop Promotion: Along with my regular work, I started promoting the clubs. Neil didn’t have anybody doing it but I was out and about. I loved to dance. That’s how I met Marc Paul Simon. I introduced Marc to Neil. Of course there are probably eight people that say the same thing. He was just blown away by Neil and Neil really appreciated how Marc worked hard and really added a lot to the company. I know Marc got hired after I left. I remember him being a contractor along with Michele Hart. They were a phenomenal marketing team.

Michele Hart-Winer (Director of Special Projects):  Marc was my best friend. We had grown up together. I started at Provocative Promotions. That was his company. Provocative Promotions was probably—now this is my perspective—it was the first promotion company to do promotion through the clubs that really did it professionally. We worked with the record pools of all the various cities in the country and with the key DJs.

Holmes: Marc ended up being VP of Special Projects and took care of the clubs. Our success in the gay community really came from what Marc did. A lot of it had to do with the relationships Marc set up.

Hart-Winer: My department at Casablanca was called Special Projects because Marc didn’t want to say “Disco Promotions”. We took the artists on the road and we set up the promotions that they did in cities. It wasn’t just getting the music played. We worked the artists too.

Smith: Everything in life is about creating relationships. I always did my best to create a relationship with anybody I had to call. First of all, I was in a power position and it became increasingly moreso because you were somebody that could give them something, so I created my relationships and most of the time I didn’t have to do anything because the music spoke for itself. The calls were always, “So where on your list is this song going to be this week?” I would ask them, “Well what’s above it?” I would have real conversations, cajoling, begging, pleading, threatening—“You need to move it to another position!” That’s what promotion people do. In those days, you could buy your way into anything. With disco DJs it was tougher because they were autonomous but they were dependent in certain ways.

Hart-Winer: It was most rewarding when I would get the numbers that I wanted on the charts for the records that I really thought should be there or getting numbers for records that I personally didn’t like but I had to work and we did it. I had great relationships with the DJs. They didn’t know how to take me at first because I was the first woman doing it.

Wheeler: As people on the road for that company, we weren’t expected to rent cars and drive around and try to find clubs. The focus was get in there, do your job, get it done, get out, get to the next city. So many times we had drivers to take us. We would route our trips and do 18 stops in a night, from record stores all day to clubs all night until four in the morning. We’d be jumping on the six, seven o’clock plane the next day to the next city and this was just to get the records out there. It was pre-street promotion. I would call it what “touch marketing” is today: get them in the hands. I think that era of time really was very in the forefront of what mass-touch marketing is considered today, which is what Starbucks uses. If you can’t taste the coffee, you can’t sell the product. It’s the same thing with Casablanca: if your people aren’t out there in the clubs making this happen, we can’t sell our music. Campaigns were eight to 12 weeks. It was very short-lived. We’d go out with one main record and maybe have a couple of little white labels or an acetate of something that was coming that you would give to a couple of specialpeople, like five or six in the country and let them make everyone else want it. It was a true street campaign.

Summer: In the beginning, when it was contained and everybody was in the main building, it was really like being in a family and everybody was on fire. They were on fire with the love of what they were doing and the hope of success. They were on fire with the knowledge that they were doing something that might last longer than just a few weeks. Everybody just poured themselves into what was going on. They kind of didn’t want to leave each other because they felt like if they left, the magic would go.

The Knights of Chocolate City

The Knights of Chocolate City

The success of Donna Summer, coupled with the addition of Moroder’s acts on the Oasis label, fulfilled Neil Bogart’s desire to have a record company specializing in a number of styles. In 1976, one could find just about anything at Casablanca: hard rock (Angel), comedy (Lenny Bruce), blues-folk (Long John Baldry), jazz (Hugh Masekela), and pop (Larry Santos). Marc Nathan remembers, “We had a Buddy Miles record called ‘Rockin’ and Rollin’ on the Streets of Hollywood’. We had a group called The Group with No Name. The single was ‘Baby Love’. One of my favorite singles on Casablanca back in that era was a song called ‘The Phone’s Been Jumping All Day’ by Jeannie Reynolds. It was never attached to an album. She was a tremendous, singer”.

Reynolds, who tragically committed suicide in 1980, was among the label’s numerous R&B acts. With the success of Parliament, Neil Bogart had a proposition for Cecil Holmes. “Neil came to me”, Holmes recalls, “and he said, ‘Cecil, why don’t we start a label under your name, and we can distribute it. You’ll be responsible for that label but you still got to work the Casablanca stuff. A lot of the R&B stuff would be on the label’. At that time, Parliament’s Chocolate City album was very popular, so we got the name from that”. Holmes’ Chocolate City Records debuted with three acts: Smoke, Brenda & the Tabulations, and a group from New York City called Cameo.

Founded by Larry Blackmon, Cameo arrived at Casablanca in 1975 via “Find My Way”, a rollicking disco tune written by Broadway tunesmith Johnny Melfi. Cameo originally recorded the song when audiences on the east coast knew the band as “The New York City Players”. Attorney Sandy Smith brought the song to Neil Bogart, who instantly fell in love with tune’s gliding harmonies and galloping rhythms. “Find My Way” eventually appeared on three albums, including the Thank God It’s Friday (1978) soundtrack, but not before it was selected as the single to introduce the Chocolate City label.

Gregory Johnson (Cameo): “Find My Way” was supposed to be this big disco hit. Neil Bogart just loved this song. It was okay. The song was a little corny. It was our way of getting in the door with the record deal. 

Larry Blackmon (Cameo): After that song bombed, some time later – maybe a year later, maybe less – I called Casablanca and asked to speak to Cecil Holmes. I asked if he would listen to some of our original material that we wrote because, obviously, we wanted to have a relationship with the record company. We took no further songs from Johnny Melfi but we asked Cecil to come into New York and we rented a rehearsal space at S.I.R. on 52nd St. Cecil came to the rehearsal studio and we played the original material: “Rigor Mortis”, “Funk Funk”, “Post Mortem”, songs that were on the first album. Cecil listened and then at the end I asked him, “So what do you think Cecil? Do you think we could do something?” He said, “Absolutely”.

Holmes: I can remember meeting Larry at the hotel in New York, because I used to stay at the Park Lane, and he came up to meet me one time and he said, “I’m glad you guys are giving me a shot. I got so many great ideas”. When Chocolate City started, we brought them out to California and bingo!

Blackmon: We came self-contained. I guess their philosophy was if it wasn’t broke, there’s no need to fix it.

Rodriguez: I account the success of Cameo and Larry Blackmon to artist development. That was a true artist development story. Every year they only got better to the point that they were just amazing. They had a great agent at the time. This guy didn’t have a lot of acts, he had very few, but what he had, he worked them like there was no tomorrow. Urban radio really broke them. It took time. This did not happen overnight. It took them a couple of albums. By their second album, We All Know Who We Are (1977), is when they really started blowing up. You have to give credit to the people who got the music to the people, which is radio and retail. At the same time, you have to give credit to the people who signed them, Cecil Holmes, for really sticking with the group.

Johnson: Ruben Rodriguez, Jheryl Busby, Sheila Eldridge—they booked the interviews, we had to be there. You got to remember we didn’t know nothing about nothing. Cecil was very down to earth. He was very laid back. Cecil was cool. He did everything that he could. He put promotion on the single. I remember seeing Cameo on the back of the buses in New York City. He did all of the right things. He supported us on the tours, got us equipment, costumes. It was his baby.

Tomi Jenkins Cameo: Cecil was also a music guy. He was like our father back then. He was so cool just letting us go and do what we do. It was blessing to have that kind of support from the label.

Blackmon: Cecil was a sweetheart. He was always a mild-mannered guy. Cecil always took the path of least resistance. He wasn’t as much of a chance-taker as Neil was but Neil ran the company and Cecil was fortunate to have been a part of the evolution of it. They had nothing to do with anything in the way of selection of the material or anything like that. They would give their opinions on singles, of course, and would persuade us but we had a pretty decent working relationship. What made Cameo unique was, at the time, we pretty much thought we knew what people wanted or we felt the advent of a certain style would come about.

Jenkins: We were able to go in and do whatever we wanted. I remember it was so free because we all came up with different ideas. What was good about the time then was that there was less control by record labels to try to make an artist do a certain song. We were new. We didn’t even have a sound. We were formulating our own thing. It was new and exciting to experience music that went beyond the three-minute format. It took you on a journey. The whole advent of FM and the clubs becoming a viable source to discover and promote new music made it possible for bands to record six-minute, seven-minute songs and to know that the record label would be able to support it. We had another song in Thank God It’s Friday (1978), “It’s Serious”, which was more “Cameo-sounding” disco. That was a record you could dance to. It was long and it was great. It was just a part of the eclectic mix of songs that we had.

Cameo - “Shake Your Pants” (1980)

The Casbah Goes Hollywood

The Casbah Goes Hollywood

In 1977, Casablanca released Get Down and Boogie (1977), a two-sided compilation that featured a variety of artists from the label, including the newly formed Chocolate City imprint and the distributed Oasis label. Billed as “38 Minutes and 47 Seconds of Continuous Play”, the album simulated the experience of hearing the songs segued together in a club. The set emphasized the dance-driven side of the roster: Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, Roberta Kelly, Blacksmoke (formerly Smoke), Parliament, Jeannie Reynolds, and South African singer, Margaret Singana.

The sleeve holding the record indicated a new development in Casablanca’s business ventures. Scrawled across the top of the album cover, which featured an enlarged version of the company’s desert scene logo, in blazing red lettering: “Casablanca Record & Filmworks”. Neil Bogart brought Casablanca into the Hollywood game. After building a massively successful independent music company from the ground up in a short span of time, Bogart transferred his talent to another industry. “Neil wanted to get into film”, Cecil Holmes explains. “He was friendly with Peter Guber. Peter, at that time, was heading up Columbia Pictures. He had some big job there and then he went independent. Him and Neil put together the deal for Casablanca Record and Filmworks”.

By the spring of 1977, Casablanca Record & Filmworks announced its first project, timed for the then recent phenomenon of the summer blockbuster: The Deep, a thriller starring Nick Nolte, Jacqueline Bisset, and Louis Gossett, Jr. The accompanying soundtrack featured the theme, “Down, Deep Inside” sung by Donna Summer and co-written by Summer with legendary conductor, John Barry. “I went to his house several days and we sat down and came up with a lyric and then we went in and recorded it”, Summer remembers fondly. “John Barry was wonderful to me. He was very mentoring”.

The Deepsoundtrack, which also featured “Disco Calypso” (recorded by Beckett and also released on his own album of the same name) was among the first releases to sport the elaborate new label design. The Casablanca Record and Filmworks logo, replete with a purple horizon, towering Moroccan architecture, film crew, and camels, was arguably the most striking label of the 1970s. Its vibrant colors and fantastical backdrop are just as alluring now as 30 years ago.  It remains a colorful memento of a time when thought, care, and creativity were encouraged in label design and artwork, a time sadly rendered obsolete with the advent of the digital music listening experience.

Robert Rodriguez Remembers… Painting the Casablanca Record and Filmworks Logo

Henry Vizcarra worked for Gribbitt, a company that art directed and designed all of Casablanca’s album covers with the exception of KISS. He recalls commissioning Los Angeles-based illustrator Robert Rodriguez to paint the new Filmworks logo. “His use of rich color and light was exactly what I wanted the art to feel like”, he explains. “The idea came from the original letterhead where one only saw the palm trees and the buildings. Then the film company came along and we simply pulled back from the scene a little more, and now you saw the lights, the crew, and everything. Done”. Rodriguez shares his recollections about the process of adding cameras amongst the camels:

I knew Henry Vizcarra personally from just being friends before he called me to do the Casablanca logo. I had just gotten back from a trip to Europe and Morocco. I spent a month and a half in Morocco and I took tons of photographs. I also drove out to a place called Vasquez Rocks. There’s this Moroccan fort where they filmed Gunga Din (1939) with Cary Grant and it’s still there. I went out there and I took pictures of that. I used all of the references. I was real inspired and I wanted to do some stuff because the city (on the label) was kind of plain and I would have to exaggerate stuff and make it more like what I had seen in Morocco. I couldn’t change that very much. I do remember that there was something about keeping the general silhouette of the town. It was one of those things like, “We have to relate to the old logo but let’s jazz it up a little bit”.

Because it was the changeover to Filmworks they wanted to show that they were doing film as well as what they had been doing. (It was like they were filming Casablanca!) There’s no recording in there…but there’s a microphone! The funny thing, though, was there was nothing going on in the scene, which I always thought was kind of strange. There were the people filming but there’s nothing there inside the gate.

I think in the beginning there was talk of putting something inside the gate, but that was taken out of the equation so I wound up with a design that focused you on the archway, with no payoff. That was what bothered me so much about the empty courtyard of the city. I think originally they were going to have a movie crew outside and a band inside. Then decided that they didn’t want it to be identified with any particular act, so they left it out.

It’s painted in acrylics and colored pencils. A lot of it is airbrushed but with acrylic paint. I wanted more texture on it. I didn’t want it to look like a slick airbrushed painting so that’s why the city and the people are mostly acrylics with Prismacolor pencils on top of them. The purple shadows are acrylic.

The way I used to do it is I would paint everything in acrylic and then I’d go on top with the Prismacolor and sort of smooth it out a little bit more because the acrylics tended to be a little rougher. At that time, I would do the drawing on a piece of illustration board. It’s kind of a textured board. I know the sky was airbrushed. I always airbrushed the skies because they were so big. The painting itself was probably about 20x30 because that’s the size board comes in. I might have done that. There was a lot of sky so with an airbrush it can cover all that area quickly. I’d spray in the colors and spray in the sand. For the sand, I probably took a sponge and did sort of a sand-texture and then smoothed it out with paint on top of that. Knowing how long things used to take in those days, it was probably a total of about three weeks.

I’d call my style back then “stylized realism”. Basically it was realistic but there was always some style to the way it was done. It wasn’t photographic realism. I used to get a lot of work, probably still do, because people would say, “The client wants to use photography but we really don’t want to do that so your stuff is realistic enough yet there’s some style to it”.

I like that I was part of such an important record company!

Part Three: Pushing the Envelope, 1977-1978[19 August 2009]

By Christian John WikanePopMatters Contributing Editor

It all changed in 1977. Casablanca Record and Filmworks, as it was now called, expanded into film while KISS, Parliament, and Donna Summer, the label’s headline acts, had amassed enough gold singles and albums to paper four walls. Casablanca also sealed a lucrative partnership with PolyGram, a German conglomerate whose portfolio comprised a number of U.S.-based labels, including Mercury, MGM, Verve, and RSO, in addition to its own label, Polydor. With a 50% interest in Casablanca, PolyGram streamlined Casablanca’s distribution system. It also made Casablanca flush with cash, affording the label the means to build its roster to major label heights.

The sleeve inside many of Casablanca’s album jackets also listed the labels Casablanca distributed through its own brand. The Douglas imprint carried jazz titles by the Charlie Rouse Band, The Last Poets, and a five-volume series entitled The New York Loft Jazz Sessions (1977). Russ Regan, who was known by many at Casablanca from his established reputation in the business, helmed Parachute Records, which concentrated more on pop/rock and R&B. It debuted in 1977 with albums by Lalomie Washburn (who wrote Rufus & Chaka Khan’s “At Midnight”) and singer-songwriter David Castle.

“Parachute Records was supposed to be a launching pad for all kinds of different artists”, Castle explains, “not only mainstream pop but pop-rock and R&B. Russ is truly one of the nicest people in the industry. He’s just a real, real nice guy and took a great interest in my career, very selflessly and with great consciousness promoted my career”. While Parachute never spawned a smash hit on par with its parent company, it contributed a number of artists that were truly great musicians, writers, and performers to Casablanca’s rich musical legacy. In addition to Castle and Washburn, Parachute also signed acts that, to this day, have yet to receive their full due: 7th Wonder and Randy Brown. When Parachute folded in 1979, both acts, who were R&B-based, migrated over to Chocolate City.

Neil Bogart also negotiated a distribution deal with Jimmy Ienner’s New York-based Millennium label. The company was home to a motley crew of artists including pop-soul east coast export Brooklyn Dreams, Lori Lieberman (who wrote “Killing Me Softly”), soul chanteuse Ruby Winters, Bruce Foster, and a hard rock band, Godz. Most crucially, though, Casablanca also landed its first number one single through Millennium: a disco rendition of John Williams’ Star Wars score performed by Meco (“Star Wars/Cantina Band”). In 1977, every style of music was fair game at the Casbah.

Six Archetypes Walk Into a Record Label…One of the most crucial signings of 1977, indeed in Casablanca’s entire history, came courtesy of a French producer, Jacques Morali. With his partner Henri Belolo, Morali was a tenacious presence along the eastern corridor of the dance music community. Through the help of Philadelphia-based Sigma Sound arranger Richie Rome, Morali had created and produced the Ritchie Family, who charted in 1975 with “Brazil” on 20th Century Records. With no

defined image at first, the group became a trio and released a series of thematic albums, including Arabian Nights (1976) and African Queens (1977). (Morali brought the Ritchie Family to Casablanca in 1979. He also produced Josephine Superstar for the label, an album recorded by Phylicia Allen—a.k.a. Phylicia Rashad—that told the story of Josephine Baker using a male chorus and a disco beat.) However, Morali’s greatest creation, and one of Casablanca’s most commercially successful acts, came from an unlikely source… insofar as platinum-selling groups are concerned.

+ + +

Tom Moulton: Jacques wanted to create a group for gay people. He had put an ad in The Village Voice about finding these singers to be in this group. When somebody showed me the ad in the paper I said, “You got to be kidding. What the hell is he doing?” He had this sort of kooky idea, the caricatures of people that are in (NYC’s Greenwich) Village: the motorcycle guy, the cowboy, the drag of the Village with the construction shoes and the helmet. Jacques wanted to be loved by the gay community. That’s exactly what he wanted.

David Hodo (Village People “Construction Worker”): I became a member of the Village People by answering an ad in the showbusiness trade papers. I had to get one week’s employment to file for an unemployment claim and sit back on it through the Christmas season. I really didn’t intend to keep the job for longer than a week, but we were having so much fun creating the group that I sort of took it a week at a time. (I’m still taking it a week at a time!) When I auditioned for Jacques, he cast me as the Construction Worker. The look of the group came out of the gay clubs, where “role playing” seemed to be part of the club experience. You could go home, take off your suit, put your jeans on with a t-shirt and construction boots with a hard hat and you could be something completely different from what you had to be all day. I never understood the costume part of going out but plenty of people did.

Alex Briley (Village People “GI”):  My costume came about at the suggestion of the Construction Worker.  Our wardrobe person at the time visited the army/navy outlets and Brooklyn Navy Yard and created the armed forces attire.

Michele Hart-Winer (Director of Special Projects): We were so happy to get the Village People. The first album, Village People (1977), was one that was played everywhere. It was a perfect album. I loved the album but then they moved into the pop world after that.

Ruben Rodriguez (National Promotion and Marketing Director): Village People were a big challenge because they were so different. There was a TV station that was based out of New York called Soul Alive and my good friend Gerry Bledsoe was the MC. They had great ratings in New York. I’ll never forget trying to get the producer to agree to have Village People perform on TV. That was actually their first TV gig. I said to him, “Man give it a shot. You’re going to be really surprised how well this audience is going to receive them”. That became their highest rated show. That TV show, during that time, had been on for a couple of years in New York City. That was the very first TV show Village People did in the States.

Moulton: When it took off, I think Jacques and Henri Belolo were shocked.  They never dreamed in a million years that everybody would go for it.

 

Rodriguez: I’ll never forget going to Cherry Hill, New Jersey. There was a club called Valentino’s, or something like that. It was pouring rain and there were lines and lines of kids dressed up with their umbrellas trying to get in to see

Village People.  You’ve got to give credit to the club scene. From a radio standpoint, one guy I’m going to give credit to, who actually broke Village People on the radio, was Hal Jackson of WBLS in New York.

Bobbi Cowan (Director of Publicity):  The guys from Village People were in our office whenever they were in town and we loved them. They were so sweet. They were great. We knew they were going to be a very big act. Their records were fabulous and they could actually perform.

Arnie Smith (National Director of Disco Promotion): They were so easygoing. They would do whatever they had to do, wherever you needed them to be, there were no prima donnas, nothing. They were so excited and happy about what they were doing.

Rob Gold (Director of Marketing): The Village People were really a phenomenon. THAT was a fun bunch of guys. They certainly were more humble in the earlier part of their career and there was some infighting and drama. They were wonderfully warm individuals. It’s always a pleasure when you’re working for somebody who appreciates the hard work that you do and they loved seeing their images all over the place.

Moulton: Years ago, I did an interview on Biography on Village People. This is long after Jacques had died. I was so offended when Biography asked me questions like, “Well Jacques was gay…” and I go, “What does that have to do with the price of bananas? Nothing”. They said, “Well they were a gay act” and I said, “No they were a pop phenomenon”. You have to call it what it is. They had that virile look. You could see all the young girls. They thought, “Oh wow! Would I like to be trapped with them for a week!”

Smith: If I had to analyze the group’s success, I would say that there were several elements. One was, it was the music of the time, which had to be the most powerful force in the whole equation. Two, the uniqueness of who they were in the costumes. It was like a party. Halloween everyday! Third, it was just the talent and the ability to put on a great show. Isn’t that what everybody wants at the end? They did it brilliantly.

Dennis Wheeler (Promotions Manager, Special Projects): Village People were a creation of the time. They were trendsetters in that field. I would want to say “novelty” but at the same time, they truly have classics that define that era.

Hart-Winer: I think of Jacques sometimes. If he could see the bar mitzvah crowd, would he die? (laughs) Could you imagine? It’s absolutely hysterical.

Hodo: We were something that no one had ever seen before, along with the kitschy, danceable music and the unusual look - what’s not to love?

Village People - “Y.M.C.A.” (1978)

Signing Spree

Tom Moulton

Signing SpreeWith disco moving well beyond its underground roots and beginning to saturate radio, television, advertising, and film, Casablanca directed much of its focus towards signing producers and developing artists who could satiate the

public’s appetite for the 4/4 beat. The company’s stable of disco auteurs churned out a cavalcade of projects under their own names, through studio aliases, soundtrack scores and, of course, with the label’s key artists.

Tom Moulton, who mixed and produced a number of the era’s most timeless tracks (“Disco Inferno” by the Trammps, “More, More, More” by Andrea True Connection, and most of the Salsoul label’s output, to name a very few), remembers the stipulations of his contract. “I had to put an album out with my name on it. I couldn’t really work for anybody else. The Trammps and Grace Jones were the only two outside acts I could keep. I signed exclusively because Neil Bogart didn’t want me working for anybody else. I regretted it after I did it because I could only do three albums a year and by April, I had all the albums done”. He teamed up with People’s Choice (he mixed their “Do It Anyway You Wanna” in 1975 for PIR) for their self-titled release in 1980 while releasing a pair of heralded LPs in 1979 for the group Loose Change and his own TJM album (featuring Ron Tyson of the Salsoul act, Love Committee).

In contrast to Moulton’s orientation towards R&B-based dance music, Bob Esty scored a number of the label’s more pop-based disco productions. He was introduced to Casablanca through his friend Paul Jabara. Esty helped orchestrate and conduct Jabara’s irreverent version of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and co-wrote much of Jabara’s Casablanca debut, Shut Out (1977). In the summer of 1977, Esty collaborated with Jabara on arranging and writing (though he is not credited) “Last Dance” for Donna Summer, a year before the song appeared in the movie Thank God It’s Friday (1978), where two more of Esty’s collaborations with Jabara were featured (“Trapped in a Stairway” and “Disco Queen”). Giorgio Moroder then enlisted Esty to arrange three-fourths of Summer’s Once Upon a Time (1977) album before granting him co-production on Roberta Kelly’s “gospel-disco” album, Gettin’ the Spirit (1978). Later that year, Neil Bogart teamed Esty with D.C. LaRue, Brooklyn Dreams, and Cher in the studio.

Romeo and Juliet by Alec R. Costandinos

Meanwhile, the European side of the Casablanca roster multiplied when producer Alec R. Costandinos brought his orchestral-disco projects to the label. Prior to Casablanca, Costandinos wrote “Love in C Minor” by Cerrone, foreshadowing his repertoire of side-long epics. He billed his first project for Casablanca as Love & Kisses (1977), with the infamous cover photo of a woman’s shirt being ripped to shreds. The album’s pair of mini-masterpieces, “Accidental Lover” and “I Found Love (Now That I Found You)”, introduced his signature sound: staccato strings, marathon explorations of love, a choir of female songbirds intoning the rather uncomplicated lyrics, and a male voice (sometimes Costandinos himself) taking the lead. His output for Casablanca included more than a dozen releases, among the most notable Romeo & Juliet (1978), a trio of Love & Kisses albums (including the theme to Thank God It’s Friday), and Sphinx (1977), which recounted the crucifixion of Christ.

Between Costandinos and Giorgio Moroder, who continued working with Munich Machine and Donna Summer after releasing his groundbreaking From Here to Eternity (1977) album within months of Love & Kisses, Casablanca cornered the market on Eurodisco.

+ + +

Moulton: Alec’s claim to fame was producing all the Demis Roussos records. I was with Billboard too so I met him when I’d go to MIDEM. He was just getting involved with Love & Kisses. He did it at Trident Studio. I went over to Paris a couple of times to visit him. It was wonderful. He’s such an incredibly nice man, very talented. That’s where I met a fellow named Raymond Donnez. He’s a Frenchman who did a lot of arrangements for Alec. When he came out with his album, he switched his name around and called himself “Don Ray”.

Leroy Gomez (Santa Esmeralda): Alec goes back to the disco days in Paris. Alec Costandinos, Don Ray, it was a community in the studio. We were all in and out of the studio together. I’d worked on another project with Alec before the disco heyday. We’ve been friends ever since.

Smith: Alec R. Costandinos was just this handsome man and his wife was wonderful. When you meet gentle souls, they stay in your heart and your mind forever. He was one of them. He was just most beautiful human being you’d want to meet and I’m a bitch, so for me to say those kinds of things about people, you got to believe it’s true.

Gomez: He’s an all-around talent. He doesn’t only write, he can produce, he plays the piano. He’s more of a producer-artist than a performing artist: writing words and melodies, going into the studio to find the right people to get the sound in those days. He was very good at doing that.

Smith: His music was journey music. Dramatic journey music: “I’m going to take you some place and I’m going to give you a beginning, middle and an end and you are never going to forget this”.

Wheeler: He was the king of journeys. You could go on a journey with an album. He’s one of my favorite producers of that time. I actually got to work with him on a couple of records. He was just a genuine man, a lovely person. There’s a little special place in my heart for Latin music and it probably came out of that. He pulled in all these amazing Latin sounds to dance music and created some of, in my opinion, the most wonderful songs. He could really take you somewhere, from one song to the other. Giorgio Moroder was very much the same in that respect, just the continuous flow.

Behind the Munich Machine

Behind the Munich Machine

Chris Bennett (Munich Machine): Giorgio might not like me saying it, but he was a brilliant producer. He really had his pulse on what the public liked.  He really did revolutionize recording and film music. Pete Bellotte was brilliant. He always stayed under the radar but he was very much a partner to Giorgio in those days.

Gomez: I went to the Greek Theater to see Donna Summer play one night and this was when I was in the process of seeing who I was going to take for arrangers and all of that. I bumped into Giorgio Moroder. He goes, “Leroy, here’s my card. Call me in the beginning of the week. I’d really like to talk to you”. I take the card and give it to my management and they go, “No you don’t want to go with Giorgio. We’re going to do it this way”. Now talk about stumbling.

Bennett: Giorgio was notorious for calling you at 9:30 p.m., when your bed was starting to look good, and say, “Now I need you to come in! We’re going to do like a whole album tonight”. I was young and frisky and it was the best experience you could have.

Frank DiMino (Angel): Giorgio’s willing to take chances. He makes it comfortable enough where you don’t feel pressure.

Bennett: We did Munich Machine and we did his only duet album. Love’s In You, Love’s in Me (1978). It’s got a couple of cool tracks on it. We had some fun doing it and the photo session was with Harry Langdon. Some of the stuff I have a little trouble listening to because I sound like I’m about 12. Giorgio had his formula and it worked and he had his muse in Donna. She was just such a huge talent. It was her time. I was young and I don’t think really ready for what was put in my lap. It was wonderful. Now, I’ve pretty much found my niche as a jazz singer but I look back at that as such an incredible experience.

Donna Summer: Giorgio’s strength was his music. That was his absolute strength and his vision. We had great regard for each other’s talent. Something that people don’t know about Giorgio is that he has an incredible arsenal of songs that no one has probably ever heard that are brilliant. He has chosen to use what he considers the most commercial of the commercial stuff. Giorgio is and remains a very brilliant composer and he doesn’t take himself too seriously although he’s qualified to do anything. He’s Italian and he has joie de vivre – to use a French expression – he knows how to live.  More than even his music, his art of living is wonderful. He’s an artist at living.

Bennett: He’s from that little part of the world where they speak German, Italian, and Swiss. He’s a really good observer of people. He’s almost a voyeur and I mean that in the kindest way. That’s what made him a great producer because he really could see what was happening and what people wanted to hear. I’d see him very intensely just go into the studio—synthesizers were new then—and he had that four on the floor thing going. Nobody had done that before.

Giorgio Moroder - In the Studio/Interview (1979)

Casablanca continued its signing spree with two American acts that gave a face to disco in contrast to studio outfits whose members shifted with each project.  D.C. LaRue and Pattie Brooks were already established in the industry by the time they got to Casablanca. LaRue had released two albums on Pyramid Records that were conceptual masterworks about the social mores of clubland, Cathedrals (1976) and The Tea Dance (1977) while Brooks was an in-demand session vocalist who’d worked with Diana Ross, Donna Summer, and Ann-Margaret.

D.C. LaRue: Morris Levy owned my record company, Pyramid. He called me up to his office and said, “I’m not going to head a record company anymore. It’s going to be a production company”. He said, “Where do you want to go?” I was friendly with Ray Caviano at T.K. and I was friendly with Marc Simon who worked at Casablanca. They loved my music after two albums. I said, “I’ll be with Casablanca”. It went exactly like this: Morris picked up the phone and called Neil Bogart that minute. He said, “Neil I’m sitting here with D.C. LaRue. We’re turning Pyramid Records into a production company. He just told me he’d love to be on Casablanca”. Neil Bogart said, “Send him out. We’ll put him on the soundtrack to Thank God It’s Friday”. That was on a Tuesday and that Thursday I was on an airplane to work with Bob Esty to put two songs in Thank God It’s Friday.

Hart-Winer: Neil wanted a male artist really bad. He had the female and he had the band but he needed a white male artist. He wanted like a Leo Sayer and he thought D.C. was it but it just didn’t click. At that time, Bob was kind of a golden haired boy at Casablanca so Neil trusted him.

Bob Esty: They teamed me up with D.C. LaRue right after I came back from Germany and I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know his songs because I didn’t hang out in discos really. I heard Cathedrals and I thought it was interesting. I loved his being a conceptualist. The oddness of his albums is very interesting to me. They’re not straight ahead commercial. I don’t know how ultimately successful we were together but I was kind of inspired – not by his singing – but by his concept of what the song was about. We looked pretty much alike at the time. We could have been brothers but we had such a different energy.

LaRue: I had a New York City mystique that nobody could figure out. Nobody told me what to do or how to do it except Esty. He was very difficult but the label never A&R’d me or told me how much money to spend. It was just an ideal situation. I went into record Forces of the Night (1979) and I didn’t have a budget. It was like spend whatever you want to spend. I’d never heard of that.

Pattie Brooks: I didn’t know anything about disco. That was completely foreign to me because in L.A., I was doing Top Ten R&B, pop and jazz. A disco record? I said, “Well what’s that?” All the guys that danced with Ann-Margaret knew about the discos. I was still trying to grapple with that whole thing of what it was. I got signed, they put “After Dark” out and it began to go crazy up the dance charts. I went to my first disco club and I had no idea what I was getting myself into. They had me up on a catwalk and the guy said, “Just lip-synch to the song. When we point to you, the spotlight will hit you”. There were tons of guys there, just all over the place. They were just in heaven and so I went, “So this is disco” (laughs). It was so much fun.

Rodriguez: Pattie Brooks was a dear friend. I love Pattie. Everybody in the company loved her. They loved to see her win. They’d go out of their way for Pattie.

Hart-Winer: Marc Simon took on Pattie Brooks as a project with our department. He almost took a managerial interest in her. He had Paul Jabara put together this show for her at The Backlot. Simon Soussan and Marc did the music. Paul Jabara wrote a special song for her for that. They got costumers in. It was an amazing night.

Brooks: Marc Simon really took me under his wing because they kind of gave him carte blanche with the disco scene. He began to create the act and we went to New York. My sets were flown there and I did a show at Flamingos. I was taken into Studio 54. I didn’t know I was going to be apart of history.

Hart-Winer: When the soundtrack for Thank God It’s Friday first came out, the one that was moving up the disco charts was Pattie’s song. That was just not greeted warmly by the powers that be. Donna was the star. I think that

they could have broken Pattie but not on the same package as Donna. If she’d had another vehicle at a different time, I don’t think it would have been an issue but it was the same vehicle and we just couldn’t do that.

Brooks: They had Bunny Sigler produce Party Girl (1979). They were trying to funk it up a little. They were trying to take me in a different direction and they didn’t know really what they were doing. They weren’t letting me have a free hand in choosing the right producers and the writers for me. That’s what made it hard for my career—not having any control. They didn’t get to know the artist to see all they could do. I also had written some songs and one was recorded on one of my albums, “Come Fly With Me Let’s Do It Again”.

Wheeler: Pattie Brooks—what a talented, talented woman and a lovely person. She had a huge record and then from there, where did it go? In hindsight, they weren’t working her. We tried. We worked hard on it. I don’t know what it was. The music business is funny, some people make it and some people don’t. There’s no reason why.

The Gribbitt Touch

The Gribbitt Touch

Irrespective of any one act’s ultimate record sales, Casablanca always committed to giving its artists the best in album cover design and the presentation of the music. Renowned fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo created iconic images of Donna Summer while Shusei Nagaoka, known for his stunning paintings of science-fiction landscapes, turned albums by Space and Munich Machine into futuristic extensions of the music. Neil Bogart hired Chris Whorf and his design studio, Gribbiit, to handle art direction and design for all Casablanca artists (except KISS), creating a brand of consistent excellence in album covers. Daring, provocative, glamorous – Casablanca fed imaginations.

Hart-Winer: Neil believed in the visual art. That’s why that department got a lot of attention. He did not mind spending money at all. He just didn’t know how to think small, which was marvelous. He had the inability to do that and that really helped all of us think a little larger.

Phyllis Chotin (Vice President, Creative Services): Little by little, I just wanted to start designing because it would end up going through me and my office, as head of Creative Services anyway. I would art direct and I would work with the artists. I didn’t do all of them but a lot I did and would just deliver the photos to Gribbitt to do.

Tom Nikosey (Designer): Gribbitt was a design studio that had art directors designing album covers, mostly, and they needed specialists to do certain things. They would hire out photographers, hire out lettering and logo artists, and hire out illustrators because they really didn’t work in-house. It was too much of a burden on them to hire people who did that for a living so they hired us out on a free-lance basis.

Robert Rodriguez (Illustrator: Gribbitt was great to work for and I think I only worked for maybe three different art directors there. They were so exciting. They did such cool stuff. Everyone was doing good stuff in those days.

Stephen Lumel (Designer): The procedure was sometimes you would handle the whole project, sometimes they’d give you photos and say make an album out of it. Sometimes you’d get a photo and you’d have to get retouching done and clean things up. For Donna Summer, all of her photos were made into 20x24 dye-transfer prints, which was real high-end in those days. They would make five or six prints of different photos and then decide which one they wanted to use. Chris Whorf probably art directed it because she had some famous photographers working with

her. She had wonderful pictures but depending on how it was laid out, you had to retouch the pictures accordingly. Henry Vizcarra (Art Director): Most of the time, all we had was the artist’s name and the title. Sometimes the label would bring in a really expensive photographer and we’d get a glamour shot of the artist. Sometimes they’d hire an illustrator. We’d choose the best image and design the lettering. I had a great time designing the logos for each act.

Nikosey: Henry was great. He was one of my favorite art directors during that time. He’s a very sensitive art director and he gave you a lot of freedom. He gave you good direction but he was just a terrific art director. He’s still in the business, still very highly respected. He has his own company.

Vizcarra: For Village People, we were sent two black and white photos: “This is a group. They’re called the Village People. Design the album cover”.

Lumel: In Donna Summer’s case, I think you had to respect the photography and the feel for who the person was. If it was based strictly on the photographic images that we were using (e.g. Bad Girls), you tried to tie it all together so it all worked together. You can’t add that lettering on the front with the theme and the title being foreign to everything else. We’d do the sketch and then we’d send it to that person to do the final inking and clean it all up but a lot of times I did the lettering by myself because I just liked doing it.

Nikosey: I would always insist on listening to a tape or something while I was working to kind of get the energy of the music and that would influence the style of the design that I’d be doing. I was always trying to create an image with the name or the lettering that would stand on its own, that would have its own sort of brand – nobody said the word “branding” in those days, but that’s basically what it was. I wanted the design, when it was by itself, to stand for whatever it’s representing, so people would remember it and want to wear it on a T-shirt. I was trying to create an image that was sort of a signature piece for the artist or band.

Chotin: The album cover has to reflect what’s inside, as well as the personality of the artist. You got to try and make it mesh. Usually, I’d get tracks and then I’d listen. I’d start feeling ideas. I’d find out what the single was or what the artist had in mind for the album title and then we’d meet and go over ideas, what their ideas were and what mine were.

LaRue: When I would have my meeting for my album covers, it would be with Phyllis and Chris. In my humble opinion, because I’m a graphic designer, art director and photographer as well, Casablanca put out the best looking recordings in the country for five or six years, on every level.—on the rock level, on the R&B level, on the disco level. Chris Whorf and that art department at Gribbitt, and Phyllis Chotin, they were brilliant. They just excelled. Even the bomb albums, when they were starting to put out four or five or six albums a week, and those disposable disco albums by the studio aggregations that nobody ever heard of, look at those album covers!

Chotin: It’s so much easier today than back in those days when you had to do mechanicals and dye transfers. If there was a typo and you had to cut into a word…it was really difficult. There was a lot of work that went into it back then. I traveled with Robin Williams from San Francisco to New York to shoot his album cover!

Lumel: I was with Phyllis.  I was asked to go as the art director for Gribbitt representing Casablanca because I had worked on a lot of Casablanca stuff and they wanted somebody to go and they asked me if I wanted to go. It was a fun thing to do because the Lincoln Town Car picked you up at your house to take you to the airport, The plane is all arranged for you. You land in New York. You don’t know where the hell you are and there’s a guy standing there with a sign with your name on it. He puts you in the Lincoln Town Car and takes you into the city. I stayed at the Park Lane Hotel. We had a big limo each day to go to the shoots. I had no idea what was going to transpire as far as concept. In the case of Robin Williams, because he was so unusual and different—he wasn’t a rock and roller—he put on his costumes for about eight or ten different characters and we shot each character.

Briley: Shooting one of the album covers (Cruisin’, 1978) took us to the Mojave Desert.  What a day!

Hodo: At the time we shot the album cover it was supposed to be the most expensive cover ever photographed, which was part of the Barnum-esque approach that Neil added to everything. I won’t get into it but if you look at the cover, consider how much it took to get all of that set up to the Mojave Desert, plus the helicopter filming the whole thing from over head. My clearest memory of that shoot is that it was in July and I was sick to death with the flu. Anytime I am handed that album to sign, all I can think of is how sick I was in the desert sun on top of a bulldozer, trying to look like I was having a good time. Neil had it all filmed in order to make a short for TV on the shooting of the album. He didn’t miss a trick.

Gomez: One thing Casablanca didn’t like was the European cover of Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood (1977). That was the last shot we took on the shoot that we did for the European cover. The sun was going down. They didn’t have the lighting correct. It was really dark. Neil, being a perfectionist, said, “You guys have to go in and shoot

another cover for the States”. Neil, with his art department, came up with what I thought was a good idea having just Santa Esmeralda with a rose because “Leroy Gomez” was basically out of the picture at that point! By that time Neil was in full swing with me, he didn’t even know that the producer was trying to cut me out of being the lead vocalist in the group.

Nikosey: As far as risqué covers, there were a number of them. Now, it’s sort of no big deal but a lot of people were pushing the envelope. Disco was very sex-driven, obviously.

Chotin: I did an interview and I got berated (for Love & Kisses). It was one of those TV magazine shows. I think my answer was something like it’s not violence against women, it’s more about keeping your thumb on the pulse of America and this is kind of what America was allowing and going for at the time. It didn’t have, to me, much to do with violence against women. The times were different then. Now, I would be offended but then it was like, “Let’s sell some records! Let’s grab some attention!”, because that was the purpose of album graphics then.

Lumel: There may be some things in general that, because of the strength of women’s rights and violence against women and just domestic violence in general, would be inappropriate so you probably wouldn’t do it today. There are some people who don’t care and they just try to get away with whatever they can. When we had photo sessions and you were just a shooting a model to use on the cover, you couldn’t have that nipple showing. You had to conceal it. There was some of that censorship being practiced. I didn’t want any backlash for anything that we photographed. If you do it tastefully, it’s good but it’s those that don’t think about that when they do it that creates problems for everyone else. The morals of this country compared to the rest of the world are a little different. There are things that are totally acceptable in Europe that aren’t acceptable here in public media.

Bennett: I’m a farm girl from Illinois and my parents were very conservative. They were Democrats, but still. When Giorgio had the concept for A Whiter Shade of Pale (1978), I went in for a meeting with Neil Bogart. I was so nervous. He said, “Well we’ve got this idea. It’s going to be like machines and you’re going to look like you’re naked but you’re not really going to be because you’re going to be in fog and have goggles”. I said, “Well that sounds cool. I’m up for that”. We get there for the photo shoot and it’s a major photographer. They start plying me with a little wine, a little smoke. Before I know it, I’m dancing topless thinking nobody’s gong to see anything because I’m going to be covered in smoke. A few weeks later—this is the days before digital, remember—there I am stark naked on the front cover and they’ve enhanced my boobs! I looked good but I began to weep, I said, “My father is going to kill me”(laughs). I think Neil felt so bad for me, he ended up putting it on the back cover and me with the goggles on the front cover. Now I’m proud of it but in those days…My parents were so proud that I had done my first album that they’d take it to places for people but they wouldn’t take the cover because this was a little Methodist town. It’s tame, now.

Cultural Relativism

Cultural Relativism

In retrospect, Casablanca’s album covers served as something of a barometer of socio-cultural norms. If the imagery and music conveyed a heightened sexuality, it simply reflected the zeitgeist.

While the 1970s cultivated an environment where sexual expression and exploration was encouraged—a Halston and Gucci-dressed translation of the “free love” ethos born during the late ‘60s—it also created a non-judgmental climate of recreational drug use. Brett Hudson explains, “You got to remember the time that was. There were a lot

of drugs, a lot of women. It was a different era, completely”. Or, as Arnie Smith says more directly, “They weren’t the days of wine and roses, they were the days of Quaaludes and cocaine”.

It is perhaps challenging for younger generations to truly grasp the innocence of the era, especially since many written accounts documenting the 1970s crassly and mistakenly moralize a unique set of social codes specific to a time and place long passed. Drug use at record labels, or anywhere for that matter, then was certainly not the inflammatory issue it is today. Regrettably, those writing about this era in the music industry often use Casablanca as a lightning rod for all the excesses. “They target Casablanca because of our success”, Cecil Holmes says. The issue about how drugs figured prominently into an environment where business was conducted and music was created must be examined through a lens of cultural relativism. Equally as important to understand is the fact that not everyone partook, even the most successful acts and executives.

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Chotin: I think it was a part of the whole culture and the industry back then, and music and musicians. There was excess but there was also a lot of creativity.

Randee Goldman (Executive Assistant): Throughout whatever perceptions there were of drugs and rock and roll and all of that, it didn’t matter because the job always got done. It wasn’t like drugs stopped anything from happening.

Bob Perry (Independent Promotion, Southeast: Whatever your preferences,—you wanted to drink, you wanted to smoke, you wanted to snort—it was there. You had a job to do. You get the work done and if you wanted to party, you party. It’s one of those unwritten rules.

Cecil Holmes (Partner/Senior Vice President): I never was involved with drugs at all. Never at all. Ask anybody who knows me up there and they’ll say to you that Cecil was never into that. I heard stories and you would see different things going around but I never put myself into a position to be involved.

Bennett: Depending on who the act was, there might be a little pot in the studio, some artists liked their coke. The truth of the matter is, it’s hard work in the studio. I’m not saying I’ve never smoked a joint or done a line before I did a background part a long time ago, but to really do a performance, you can’t do that stuff. If I was doing a show at a club, I’d always know I had to have a gram of coke for the drummer, and then probably one more gram for the rest of the band. You just kind of figured that into the budget. It was just too early in the game to see that people were going really to blow out their nose and get paranoid.

Gold: I’ll tell you how square I was. I went to a Parliament show and I almost felt like I was in a Woody Allen movie because someone from management asked me, “Want coke?”, and I said, “No, thanks” holding up a can of Pepsi. Then I saw what he was talking about laying there in lines on his briefcase. He didn’t know whether I was kidding or not.

Bernie Worrell (Parliament-Funkadelic): We was hittin’ it man, I was hittin’ it. Had the energy…and stuff to help me have the energy. That’s part of it. There’s a lot of it. That’s grinding. We worked. The energy we put out, (sighs), we needed a little help.

Gold: If you have been on the road with performers you could understand how they could easily be susceptible because they sometimes needed a little something to go to sleep. They need “medicine” to wake up. Traveling is not always good for your stomach and there was something for that, too. And it was hard not to want to unwind and celebrate after a successful show. However, when I was on the road with Donna I never saw her or her back-up singers ever use or abuse anything! She wanted to be at her best every night and she was.

Moulton: A lot of these clubs I went to once. The music was so loud and I was not into drugs. I saw all those drugs and I wanted to get out of there. I just didn’t like to blame drugs for what I was doing because drugs had nothing to do with it. I was high on the music. I didn’t need drugs to stimulate it, believe me.

Gomez: I was a homebody! When I was in a club it was because I was doing a promotion. I was a young happily married old man. I wasn’t interested going out there watching everyone bop around. The club thing, I didn’t get caught up in that.

Bruce Sudano (Brooklyn Dreams): I was somewhat grounded but I think out of any point in my life, that was the most out I was in that period. I started smoking pot when I was a teenager and I kind of came up in that whole late ‘60s kind of thing and it culminated into the excesses of the ‘70s into the early ‘80s when I put the brakes on in terms of that kind of stuff. When I look back now and I look at all the things that I’ve done and lived through, there was so many instances that anything could have gone wrong and anything could have happened. I think essentially there was always a core in myself…I knew right from wrong so I was only going to go so far and when other people

were going over the edge, I was like, “No I won’t go there”. There was a governor on my gas peddle, even though I was braking the speed limit.

Joe Klein Remembers…How "Stars Wars/Cantina Band" got to Number One

Joe Klein Remembers…How “Stars Wars/Cantina Band” got to Number One

Joe Klein gave Casablanca its identity on radio. Through his friendship with Casablanca artist and renowned songwriter Artie Wayne, Klein developed a relationship with Scott Shannon, one of Casablanca’s many promotion stars. Shannon tapped Klein for producing a radio spot to promote David Castle’s debut. Neil Bogart liked what he heard and solicited Klein for Meco’s Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk (1977) album. Artie Wayne explains how Klein got the gig, “Joe was an incredible engineer and he loved the movie, so he made a mini movie out of that Star Wars spot. Neil bought $30-$40,000 worth of radio time and had that spot played and it took it to number one. Joe did successful campaigns from thereon”. Klein, who produced countless radio and television commercials for Casablanca, remembers how his radio spot spawned a chart-topping hit:

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Neil Bogart said, “Look, I need you to pull out every trick in the hat. I want you to produce the best commercial for a record album that’s ever been produced”. I said, “Well that should probably be pretty simple, Neil, because nobody’s been really spending much time and effort and money in this area”. He goes, “Well that’s about to end”.

He said, “This is what I want. I want only one song in this commercial. I’m going to buy so much goddamn airtime on this commercial that that’s the way we’re going to get this record played. You’ve only got one minute so you got to cut this thing down and I want you to make me a masterpiece, Joe Klein”. I said, “Well I’ll give it my best shot Mr. Bogart. I think I really could do this for you”.

I got the copy of the master tape and I got the script and I remember the script was very simple. The script said, “There’s a lot of Star Wars albums to choose from but there’s only one that counts”. Then the next line was “Meco: Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk”. Then we played the music and then at the end the announcer just says, “Meco: Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk from Casablanca Record and Filmworks”.

These disco records were all very heavy 4/4 beat productions so it was an editor’s dream come true because it was so easy to cut this stuff down because everything was based on a heavy 4/4 beat. There’d be little breaks. I must say, to this day, it’s probably one of the best editing jobs I’ve ever accomplished.

I bring the spot into Neil’s office. He had a huge sound system in his office. He had a rack full of real high-end audio gear made by a company called SAE, which interestingly enough I used in my own studio. He had these little red LED lights blinking. I bring him the master of the commercial and he’s got a two-track tape machine. He says, “Let me see what you got”. He’s on the phone, he’s walking around. I thread the thing up and I play the spot and I crank it up a little bit. He freezes. He just stops what he’s doing. He was kind of preoccupied. He hears the thing and he just freezes. He had a phone receiver in his hand and he dropped it. He hears the commercial and it stops and he picks the receiver up – I don’t know who he was talking to – and he says, “I got to call you back”.

He says, “Play that motherfucker again…and turn it up louder”. I play it again and he hears the thing and now he gets on his desk and starts dancing. He’s dancing along with it. It comes to end and he jumps off the desk onto the floor and he says, “That’s the best fucking goddman radio commercial I’ve ever heard in my whole fucking life”. He says, “That’s incredible. What’s your name again?” I said to him, “Joe Klein”. He says, “Well Joe Klein, you know something? I hope you don’t have much else going on in your career right now because you got a new career with me. I’m going to have you so busy you’re just not going to believe it. I think you and I have just discovered a new way to start selling records”.

That story has a happy ending because the record rocketed up the charts. That commercial really had a major role in making that record a hit. The music that was on that commercial was so good and so listenable.  Ernie Anderson was such a revered announcer that all the DJs and the program directors loved this guy so they paid even more attention. Ernie Anderson had the voice that every DJ wished he had. That started a succession of ads. Over the next year or two, and I didn’t find out until much later, apparently DJs and music directors and program directors and production directors from radio stations all over the county were calling the label on a regular basis saying these ads are just unbelievable, who does your ads? Of course, they didn’t want to lose me. The label presented me with a platinum single, a gold album, and a platinum album for Meco.

The radio spots became a totally integral part of the marketing of their stuff. The combination of Ernie Anderson’s voice and these really driving heavy 4/4 kick drum spots, they didn’t sound like any other commercials ever made. The radio guys absolutely loved them. It started a great run for me.

Part Four: Dancing on the Pinnacle: 1978-1979[20 August 2009]

By Christian John WikanePopMatters Contributing Editor

KISS x4

In only four short years, Casablanca had become a blockbuster record company due in no small part to KISS, arguably the most sensational live act in rock music at the time.  Ray D’Ariano, who was based in Casablanca’s New York office, notes, “The disco thing was so huge and at the same time, we had this phenomenon going on with KISS. Totally nothing to do with disco, totally nothing to do with anything”. The team behind KISS was instrumental in the innovative marketing of the group. Bill Aucoin, who managed KISS through his own Rock Steady management company, and Joyce Bogart-Trabulus, who co-managed the group with Aucoin, ensured that KISS was constantly breaking new ground. Aucoin even copyrighted the band’s make-up in the Library of Congress. 1978 brought a rock music “first” to fruition when each member of KISS released a solo album simultaneously.

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Bill Aucoin (Manger, KISS): Everything we did was new and exciting, every piece of merchandise, every brand new video. A lot of the pyrotechnics we developed everyone uses now. We spent an awful lot of time marketing the group with merchandise. Other people were saying, “Oh it looks like a kiddie group”. We kind of had to fight that off as well. Don’t forget we got away with an awful lot because our marketing ideas, many times, had never been done before. People were always against us, “They shouldn’t have made it, They’re not that good”, so forth and so on. I think most people thought it was a flash in the pan that wouldn’t last.

Brett Hudson (The Hudson Brothers): Neil Bogart loved how smart Gene was and he loved how passionate Paul Stanley was.

Phyllis Chotin (Vice President, Creative Services): I think the best act was always KISS because those guys, particularly Gene Simmons, were brilliant! He’s such a smart guy. They got it. They knew the importance of marketing. If I had to pick who was the most talented, as far as understanding the business, it would be them.

Bob Esty: Gene Simmons would sit outside the control room at Cher’s recording session out of make up. He was looking at all the magazines and all the publications about merchandising to find out if they’re paying him. He was a major, mean businessman. A great guy but he didn’t let anybody get away with anything. He’s a genius.

Jim Watson (National Promotions Coordinator): Gene was a real gentleman and would give you the shirt off of his back.

Larry Blackmon (Cameo): It’s phenomenal to see Gene Simmons on TV with that crazy-ass show. We knew them when they were doing the New York Dolls look, before they went into the cartoon characters. They were dressing like the New York Dolls with the lipstick and the earrings. They were lookin’ like bitches (laughs), ugly bitches at that. Then we wind up on the same record label – that was fuckin’ phenomenal.

Randee Goldman (Executive Assistant): Katie Segal used to date Gene Simmons. I will never forget them coming over to my house. I lived on the beach, and I had a piano and we were jamming. She was singing and he was singing. The ice cream truck came and Gene didn’t have his make-up on, obviously. He had on his shoes. I lived on the marina peninsula, which is a nice area. I was on the corner of the speedway.  The limousine was outside and so everybody wanted to know what was going on. The ice cream truck comes up and he takes a scarf or something and he’s waving it out the window saying, “Hold on, hold on. Just wait a minute”. He takes Katie’s purse and puts it over his arm and starts to walk down the stairs. He says, “Who wants some popsicles?” He was buying popsicles for everybody.

Ray D’Ariano (Director of East Coast Artist Relations): I had come from MCA and I had been out on the road with the Who and Lynyrd Skynyrd and Golden Earring. Elton John was a rocker back then. He was a modern Jerry Lee Lewis. When I came over to Casablanca, to be honest with you, personally I wasn’t that impressed with KISS. I didn’t think they were musically as talented as some of the other groups that I had been working with. I’m working there about a month and KISS’ management said KISS are rehearsing for their next tour and why don’t you come see the rehearsal and you’ll get to say hello and meet them. It turns out they’re two hours from Manhattan at Stewart Air Force Base in Newburgh, NY. I drive up there and they were in an airplane hanger. Going in, I expected KISS to do two or three songs and to meet the guys and then split. It didn’t go that way. When I go inside the hanger, the same huge stage that they would perform on every night of the tour – like the same one that they’d use at Madison Square Garden – is all set up in this airplane hanger with this giant KISS logo. The crew is there and the rehearsal turns out to be the entire show from beginning to end! The drums levitate, Gene spits fire… the entire show. They weren’t wearing the make up in the rehearsal but they were wearing the huge platform boots. Gene, I think, had

these gigantic dragon boots. I said to a roadie or somebody, “What’s with the boots?” They said, “They got to get used to walking around in them”. I walked out of that place, I still wasn’t going to rush home and throw on a KISS album for my own enjoyment, but I had a totally new respect for KISS because I saw how professional and dedicated they were. When I went to see the show live, and I saw all the kids going crazy, they gave them—whatever the cost of the ticket—they gave them 50 times more in the value of a show.  They worked hard for their fans.

Aucoin: The greatest thing about KISS is they really worked their butts off. They worked and worked. They never argued about things. They obviously had good ideas about rock and roll and what they felt rock and roll was about and what they wanted to do. I think the best thing that I can tell you about the group is that they never went against anything I brought up or any of my staff brought up. They would come up with good ideas that we’d look into and see whether or not we could pull them off. It was a great family. It was a great business to be in at that moment in time, when the industry was exploding. You could almost do anything you wanted as long as you were willing to fight for it and come up with the idea to make it work.

Rob Gold (Director of Marketing): With Casablanca distributor, PolyGram’s, help to announce a new KISS album, we hired an army tank decorated for the KISS Army, the name of their fan club and drove it up Sunset Boulevard to Wherehouse Records causing traffic jams and unruly crowds on a Friday night. We had hired police escorts and had media coverage. Surprisingly, Neil became angry when he learned of this while in NY. Neil was the ultimate showman but I was told he was pissed because we did not tip him off that we were doing it.

Worthy Patterson (Vice President Sales and Promotion): We decided with KISS, we were going to do a “KISS-a-Thon”. They picked four or five cities. We got hotel space. People had to register. It started at noontime on Friday and they had to be lip-locked for 50 minutes out of the 60. They got ten minutes off every hour. This went on for days. This is the kind of promotion that went on.

David Edward Byrd Artist: I did a bunch of stuff when they did those four solo albums. I had three days to do this interlocking mural and…oh, it was ridiculous! You never got enough time with him to do anything.

Aucoin: Initially, the solo albums were meant to kind of give them a break. They didn’t have to be together. They could go in and do the music they wanted to do. Initially, Neil wanted to put out one at a time, and I said, “Oh Neil that’s not going to work. If you put one out at a time then we’re going to have three unhappy members of KISS”. He said, “Okay we’ll put out all four”. As we started to get them ready, the sales department was finding that everyone wanted to have large amounts of records. They figured, “Hey if we’re selling a million units of KISS, we’ll sell four million (of the solo albums)”. When it was announced that we were doing that, distributors called Casablanca and ordered a million units. Well, that was just unheard of. One distributor ordering a million units of four albums? That was unbelievable, so Neil then decided to print more up.

D’Ariano: Think about this. There were a couple of years there where KISS, in popularity, was as big as The Beatles. Imagine if John, George, Paul, and Ringo all put out a solo album on the same day.

Gold: After an hour long conference call including virtually all our field and national sales and promo staff hyping the sale of one million units each of the four solo KISS members records, Bogart came into my office and asked me, “Rob can we really do this?”

Aucoin: We got carried away with it. The old word on the street was when they finally were out there was they were sent out gold and came back platinum. You just looked at every store and nothing was ever being sold. You’d walk in and there were piles of KISS albums. Eventually, they all did go platinum. It took awhile and we certainly paid the price in between with people saying, “They’re not selling. There’s tons of them left”. We had to ride that out as well.

D’Ariano: As hard working as KISS were and are—they’re one of the hardest working acts in show business—I don’t think KISS could have made it without Neil Bogart behind them and putting the money up and promotion and sticking with them through a couple of albums where nothing happened. If the disco thing had happened first, and then KISS came along, I don’t know…they might not have even been signed. If they were, and they had the same history with the first couple of albums that didn’t really happen, I don’t know if they would have gotten that attention. Something was all lined up for them. They just exploded.

The Ringmaster

The Ringmaster

Neil Bogart’s investment in the career of KISS and many of Casablanca’s acts extended far beyond marketing dollars. He gave time and attention to his artists and producers, whereas many label presidents may not have even shown up to the office. He listened to ideas and suggested many more in return. As ringmaster of a show-stopping roster of acts, he also facilitated some of the most memorable shows of the 1970s when Parliament, KISS, Cameo, Angel, and Donna Summer went on the road.

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Aucoin: Anytime I walked into the building or KISS walked into the building, the whole building stopped. I think Neil had an unwritten law that if I walked in or KISS walked in, they had to call upstairs to his office immediately and let him know so he’d be prepared no matter what.

Donna Summer: Anybody that worked with Neil had the potential to go into his office. He wasn’t a person that was totally exclusive to anybody in the building. If you had an idea and you thought it would help the company and you thought it would do something, he’d listen. He was a listener. He was someone that could take your idea to the next 700 levels in about 40 seconds.

Bob Perry (Independent Promotion, Southeast): Neil’s thing was, “Bob, whatever it takes”. You could be creative. If you had an idea about getting the program directors, the music people, to the right place at the right time whether it was backstage or a meet and greet type thing or renting a bus and taking them up to a show, you could make things happen!

David Castle: I’ll never forget going into his office when he asked me to write some songs for Midnight Express (1978). He actually had a little button behind his desk and he’d push the button and his office door would close behind you as you came in to sit in his office. His office was totally done in the Casablanca style from the movie. He was a fun guy. He could be serious but most of the time he had a lightness about him, at least when I met with him.

Bob Esty: I would go into Neil’s office and play a D.C. LaRue album and he’d listen to the whole fucking thing and he would just dance all around his office, on the phone. He’d blast it loud with these big huge speakers. No other president of a record label does that. He got into it. He loved it. I don’t think I ever heard anything from him about changing anything. He was just very supportive.

Bobbi Cowan (Director of Publicity): Neil was always great at finding songs for people. Once he had a really good song, he could make a hit record. He knew commercial.

Artie Wayne: By learning what Neil liked, I was very conscious of, let’s say, the beats, the feel of something. I would listen to records that Neil would turn me on to and really figure out why they were hits and why people responded to them. He had an incredible sense of the market because he listened.

Tomi Jenkins (Cameo): Guys like Neil Bogart and Cecil Holmes were music guys, not lawyers. When you have that type of musicality coming from people who ran the label, they let you do what you wanted. They said, “I’m trusting your instincts to come up with some hits and I’m going to give you some time to do it. Your first album may not go gold”.  (Luckily, we had several gold albums in row.)

Bruce Sudano (Brooklyn Dreams): Marketing sense—I think that’s the thing Casablanca and Neil brought to things. That was probably the one area he never really found with Brooklyn Dreams. Donna had a specific image and Susan Munao was very involved with that. When Casablanca got an act, they really tried to create a unique image for that

act. Obviously they accomplished it with Donna and KISS, which is why they are still household names. That was a very important aspect of Neil’s philosophy, whereas a lot of labels, at the time, didn’t do that.

Joe “Bean” Esposito (Brooklyn Dreams): Neil Bogart had to have a little hook, like KISS – they had the fire, they had the make-up. Brooklyn Dreams wasn’t a specialty act. We were good songwriters with good singing. We were R&B guys, so to him it was like, “We got to come up with something for you guys”. I remember Neil Bogart making comments saying, “Your album is good but it’s probably not going to make it. I need a disco record from you guys”. When I heard that, in the back of my mind – I was so excited about what was going on I didn’t want to be negative about it – I thought, “Uh-oh. Now we were in uncharted territory”.

Sudano: We started leaning more towards pop-disco just because of our affiliation with Donna. That’s how we slipped into doing the second record with Bob Esty. The third Brooklyn Dreams album we did with Juergen Koppers, who was Donna’s engineer, and by that time we were on the Casablanca treadmill where it was like, “You gotta have product now!”  We were writing songs as quickly as we could write them.

Frank DiMino (Angel): We had ideas and Neil was the kind of guy where you could sit down and have discussions. It was never like, “I think you guys you should do this”. It was never that kind of thing with what you usually get with a record company. It was always discussions, throwing ideas around, seeing what you think worked, what you felt comfortable with, what you didn’t think would work.

Aucoin: Neil felt that, “If we had so much success with KISS, I think maybe I could do the same with Angel. We’ll just take this mold and see if it works on the other side”. I don’t think anything is ever that easy. It never quite worked. It wasn’t the same type of group. Unfortunately, I think what happened was a lot of things got pushed on Angel that probably shouldn’t have been.

DiMino: Personally I think it’s a myth. I never got that translation from Neil. Maybe he might have in his head, maybe he thought of that, I don’t know. All I can tell you is from our discussions of putting a show together, what we wanted to do and his input, I never felt like it was something based off of good and bad or good and evil. We were basing our whole stuff on ideas that we had when were in that club in D.C.  Sometimes I ask people, “What were our ideas back then because you seem to know better than I do”. There’s so many different things that you hear that went on with that whole Angel/KISS thing and Casablanca. Everyone’s got a different story.

D’Ariano: Angel was a great group. Going along with the Casablanca live philosophy, they were a great live show. Unfortunately for Angel, and this is just a point of view, KISS was on the label. They were too similar. They may have fared better somewhere else. To this day they have cult following. Trigger was lost on the shuffle too. They were a really good rock group. We had such a heavy, heavy disco image and I really think that hurt the rock groups. This is strictly my opinion, and it wasn’t my job, but I think there was resentment against Casablanca from FM AOR stations, so if you’re an Angel or a Trigger, there was a credibility problem. It’s almost like, “You’re on Casablanca. Why don’t you make a disco record? You’ll have a much better shot”. Meanwhile, Love & Kisses are being played at every club in town.

DiMino: Obviously, you always wanted a little bit more promotion, what all of us were looking for. What can you do? It is what it is. As far as making our decision of going with Casablanca, I would never change that. I wish things went a little bit differently but all in all I would rather have been with Neil than anyone else.

Summer: When I was onstage and I was first starting out, Neil would go to every show. He would watch my performances, he would walk the entire theater and pace, and wherever I saw him, he wanted me to work that end of the stage. I had to look for him in the audience. He would be smiling. He would walk it while I was onstage so if I could see him, I’d know what to do. I think he probably, in some ways, single-handedly – him and along with the expertise of Michael Peters, who was my dear friend and choreographer in the beginning—just prepared me for my life onstage. I had been in theater performing most of my late-teens into mid-twenties so I was savvy in terms of being onstage and audiences. I wasn’t afraid of audiences or anything like that. I was very used to holding my own in that context but I wasn’t used to performing alone for a whole hour and a half and maintaining a person’s focus all that time.

David Hodo (Village People “Construction Worker”): We always prided ourselves in not needing special effects. We considered ourselves our only special effect although on our national tour we did have a full-blown battleship on stage complete with sailors and cannons that shot confetti at the audience. Other that that I think the only special effect we ever used was a strobe light.

Alex Briley (Village People “GI”): Picture a construction worker kicking the door open of a portosan, the biker/leatherman on a Harley, a Native American coming out of a teepee, cowboy coming through saloon doors with guns blazing, cop on a motorcycle and so on. It’s been said we’re a three-ring circus.

Jenkins: Oh, man. You’d see some craziness there. Craziness. Seriously. We toured for a year with Parliament-Funkadelic. That was our first tour. We opened the show with a casket being rolled out. You know the song “Funk Funk”. We had guys that came out with black robes with the hoods like the grim reaper and pushed a coffin that was encased with glass that glittered. The lights bounced off of it. We also had dry ice through it so there was fog covering the whole stage. There was fog inside the coffin. They wheeled it out, pushed to the front of the stage, and hyrdolics lifted the coffin up. Gregory Johnson was inside the coffin. During “Funk Funk”, he’d open the door and come out and…it was ridiculous. We had that and there was another point where Nathan Leftenant, because he was our showman, he came out onstage during the intro with a fake joint and it was overtly large so everybody could see it from way in the back. Of course it wasn’t a joint. He lit that and the crowd went absolutely crazy. Those were the types of openings and shows. It was totally non-stop energy, just pure entertainment. It was like 25 guys onstage going crazy.

Bernie Worrell(Parliament-Funkadelic): It was a circus. I was always trying to get George to cut it down, you don’t need all that personnel. Sometimes I’d get a little irate. I know that I could get the same big sound out of four people. It was a waste of money. He could pay his musicians a little more with less people. No man, George liked all that confusion.

DiMino: If you saw an Angel show, it was a great show. An 11-foot logo would rise and talk to the audience. We started off with the 20 tubes on the stage and the narration. Three guys that were on the crew came out all dressed in black jumpsuits and as the narration started, they would take four tubes and build a tower with it. Then they would plug it in, chaser lights would go around the tower, and the narration would announce the first guy, Greg Giuffria, and lights go on inside the tower and magically Greg is in there and he walks out. They start to build the next tower so you get five chances to try and figure out how we’re doing this. It was great because you see everyone in front looking at each one going, “I’m going to get it now, how are they doing this one?” It was always a great thing to listen to everyone at the end of the show – “I know how you did that, I was watching”. At the end of the show, whatever album cover it was at the time, would come down, we would go into the album cover, the album cover would rise and explode, and open and we were gone.

Angel - “The Tower”

Inside the Casbah

Inside the Casbah

The flamboyance of Casablanca’s stage acts were matched only by the Casablanca offices. There was no such thing as 9-5 once you stepped inside. The work got done, however, and whenever it needed to get done. Employees could be called on to do just about anything, from taking over security at Studio 54 to reserving two first-class seats on an airplane to ship a lifesize cake of Donna Summer from Los Angeles to New York. Employees worked as hard as they played. Few who walked through 8255 Sunset Blvd. ever forgot it…especially the stuffed camel.

+ + +Michele Hart-Winer (Director of Special Projects): The office was Moroccan. There were tiles, pavers, rugs, ceiling fans. It was fabulous. There were three buildings and I was in the third building. 

Goldman: It was like a mansion. It was all in the taste of Casablanca. There was a stuffed camel in Neil’s office. They built me a desk to my specification and I remember in my office there was a rug. They’d gotten it at an antique store. It was like a ridiculous amount of money. The company was doing very well and there was no reason why it shouldn’t have been represented in the offices. It was a fun place to work.

Dennis Wheeler (Promotion Manager, Special Projects): Casablanca was on Sunset Boulevard and it was three apartment buildings that were turned into their offices. I was in the third building, which was the old Fatty Arbuckle estate. We’d invite all the stores and the DJ’s and on Fridays have margaritas and Spanish food sent over from the restaurant across the street. Our phones had long chords and we used to drop them down from the office on the second floor down to the pool, because we had the actual Fatty Arbuckle pool outside our office. We used to all sit by the pool and have record release parties right in our office. We had a live DJ booth there and DJ’s used to come over and play. It was a networking place more than just an office. Casablanca became a networking place for music and musicians and artists and singers. It was fun.

Ruben Rodriguez (National Promotion and Marketing Director): I actually started my career at Motown. Motown was one hell of a school and Casablanca was an incredible adventure. That’s the best way I can put it. It was an adventure because, quite frankly, there was nothing like us at the time. When I went to Casablanca, I’ll never forget because it was a drastic change of music. I came in at the beginning of Village People and Santa Esmeralda, and all the big Parliament-Funkadelic hits. I literally locked myself in my house for the entire weekend – at that time I was living with my ex-wife – and all I did was listen to Casablanca music. I listened and listened until Monday morning came around, and I walked out that door, I got it. I totally got it. I was totally psyched and totally pumped to be part of the Casablanca family. We were breaking artists left and right.

Cecil Holmes (Partner/Senior Vice President): It was my responsibility with the black acts to make sure they got their fair share, that they were taken care of, that everything was cool. I would go out on the major tours and we would have parties in every major city and a lot of the pop promotion guys, they would take care of the pop guys but my R&B guys, they would complain that they weren’t getting the same response. I would make sure that those guys were always taken care of. Susan Munao, who was Donna’s manager, and I were very close. She knew how I felt about that and she would make sure that when we were at a show, that the R&B guys would get good seats and, if they were coming backstage to meet Donna, that she would make sure that they would get a chance to meet her.

Nancy Sain (National Pop Promotion): There was no color at Casablanca. You were not discriminated because you were female, gay, black, or Jewish. Whatever you were, you were fine. It was, you have a job, you have a purpose, are you doing it the best you can?

Nellie Prestwood (Publicity): It was really an over-the-top environment but, in a way, there weren’t any rules. There was a freedom there and that’s what I really liked about it, although you knew you had a job to do but you didn’t feel confined. You didn’t feel pressure of being held back. The main reason I really liked it was because it was a place where you could flow and express yourself in any shape, form, or fashion. You had the freedom to come up with things that you wanted to do and explore things that you thought might be good for something that you were working.

Holmes: One thing that Neil did and I love him for, I’ll never forget, he told me one time, he said, “Cecil, whatever I do you’re entitled to have the same privileges”. He never backed down on that. I could travel wherever I wanted to travel. I could travel first-class. Whatever it took. We used to lease automobiles. I always would get the best automobile. I had a Mercedes. Everything was done first class. He always treated me first class. I love him for it.

Marc Nathan (National and Regional Promotion): We were always making a big splash at conventions. As it’s been documented in so many other places, Neil always believed in spending money, I don’t know how profitable Casablanca ever was but by all outward appearances, it was an extremely successful label. There were two types of class, first and none. We did do everything first class and it was an awful lot of fun. We really put an exclamation point after everything we did.

Chotin: A lot of people wanted to work there and Neil paid us well. We worked hard, long hours. I remember having to get something out for a presentation and I might be in the studio all night long or over a weekend. It was fun to go to work. You didn’t only do one little thing. You really got to grow and do as much as you wanted and were capable of doing.

Goldman: I was one of those kinds of people that did whatever it took and didn’t watch a clock. I didn’t take my lunch hour because I wanted to make myself something in the industry.

Gold: Casablanca was unique and wild but for me it was also an intimidating place because there were a lot of very bright, daring and extraordinarily energetic men and women there. I made lifelong friends there. New deals were being made daily. I was a little wet behind the ears even though I had worked at WEA, (the distributor for Warner Bros. Elektra and Atlantic Records). I was a bit more conservative (and naïve) having worked for a distributor as opposed to a record label. Casablanca had a new distributor and Neil thought I would be a good conduit I think.

Goldman: When Neil wanted something done, when I worked for him, it was like, “I don’t want to hear the excuses, just get it done”, and that’s the way you did it with other people and people listened. Neil was as kind as he was curt. He was tough but he got things done and people around him got things done.

Nathan: There were frustrations at times because there were some unreasonable demands as far as, “We need to get these records played”. For every KISS and Donna Summer, there were five Steve Sawyer’s and Simon Stokes’. All kinds of crazy singles.

Rodriguez: It was not easy getting Parliament-Funkadelic on radio. It was not easy getting Village People on radio. Guess what? We had one incredible marketing and promotion team and we did it. We weren’t just people that promoted radio, we were marketers. We marketed our artists to radio. We had to think outside of the box because a lot of times radio, they just weren’t going to jump on it right away. What I learned at Casablanca was the appreciation of artists that dared to be different and unique. I understood the benefits of that. There are certain people who get kind of freaked out with things that may fit into that little grey area, but to me I don’t look at grey as grey, if the shit is banging, I look at it as opportunity. I know that with it, you had to work your butt off. It was tough

Joe Klein(Freelance Producer, Radio and Television Commercials): Casablanca’s efforts at promotion and marketing were, at that point, virtually unparalleled in the business. This goes back to Neil Bogart’s P.T. Barnum attitude and trying stuff that nobody else would try, even if it might have been considered unsound from a business standpoint.

Goldman: I used to write this thing called “From the Casbah”, the newsletter that we used to write. I wrote the front page that Neil used to write and then I just started writing it for him. I used to write some of the descriptions of the albums and really the style – the dots, the dashes, the exclamation points – I still use. I really believe that even when he wasn’t trying, he really impacted many people’s lives informing what they would do in the future, whether it was relative to the record business or some other area, he was just that kind of person. It was infectious.

Klein: Casablanca had, I believe at the peak, four or five full-time writers on staff just to write bios, trade ads, the radio spots I produced, and other promotional materials. That was unheard of at the time. He had Ellen Wolff as a supervisor of that department. This department later became known with other labels. That is what they would call Creative Services Department. That was the department at record companies that would write trade ads and bios

and press kits an,d later on, commercials when they became important marketing tools. Neil had a Creative Services department that’s never been equaled.

D’Ariano: Roberta Skopp was fantastic. Roberta was perfect for Casablanca. Roberta was fabulous. She came from Record World magazine, which was a big trade magazine. She became the New York – I don’t know the exact title – Publicity Director. She worked out for the woman out in California but she ran New York. Between her and Worthy and I we would put together all these promotional parties and events. Neil would always be calling and he’d want somebody to get into Studio 54 or this or that. I never knew what was going to happen everyday. It wasn’t a defined job. We were all kind of making it up as we went along.

Worthy Patterson (Vice President, Sales and Promotion): I don’t think in the whole time I was there anybody asked what anything cost. They didn’t have to have any meetings either. I’d call up my boss and say to Dick Sherman, ” I’m going to do this” and he’d say, “Okay, terrific”. We just broke acts.

Sain: The budgets were amazing. You weren’t told “no”, you were just asked how much is it going to cost? Neil would say okay. I think Neil was extremely unique. I think he understood marketing more than anything. He understood what it took so it was an easy conversation. You didn’t have to go in and convince him of a concept or any of that, maybe for doing new music, yes. It was just a decision over dollars – does this make sense?

Arnie Smith (National Director of Disco Promotion): At the first Billboard convention in New York, Neil spared no expense. They hired buses and took everybody rollerdisco skating to a rink in Brooklyn. All of the DJ’s, anybody that was registered that wanted to come. Can you imagine the money that Neil threw at his label?

Wheeler: We once threw at a party in New York at a small club. We had sand on the sidewalk and a live camel out front. That’s the thing about Casablanca, which has continued through my life and probably through most people that worked there, is we were trained to do events. We were trained well on how to present yourself, how to create an event from the bottom up and how to actually hit the streets with it and create something. That’s something that never left after all the years that I worked in the music business.

D’Ariano: Thank God It’s Friday (1978) had its premiere in New York because New York was the center of the disco universe. Neil was all about fun so he decides to have the party after the premiere at Studio 54 – the hot spot in the world. Nobody could get in unless they let you in. It was the place everybody was trying to go to. We take over Studio 54. Neil decides he wants Worthy, Roberta, and myself to work the door. There were only two ways you could get in: if you have an invitation you’re on one line and you went through the door and Worthy saw your invitation and you were in. The second way was a little more hectic because Roberta was outside with me and she had a guest list. If you’re on the guest list you can get in but if not, see you later. The system was working out fine. Once in awhile some jerk who wasn’t on the list would act out but then the crew would have a little chat with him and they’d split. The funniest thing was one guy couldn’t get in and he had a fit. He didn’t have an invite, he wasn’t on the list. There was a famous bouncer in those days. I just knew him as Big George. He was a huge African American guy. It seemed like everybody hired him when you had a party because he knew everybody. This guy’s freaking out and George says, “Maybe you got to make an exception for that guy because he’s one of the owners of Studio 54 – Ian Schrager”. I go over to him and say, “Hey listen we’re really sorry, it’s hectic here, we didn’t know who you were, go ahead in”. He’s livid. He’s cursing me out. He storms in the invitation-only door. A couple of seconds later, the door swings open, he gets thrown out again. He didn’t have an invite so Worthy threw him out! Eventually he got in. The night Casablanca took over Studio 54, the owner couldn’t get in. I think Roberta, Worthy, and I were banned from there after that!

Casablanca Goes to the Oscars

Casablanca Goes to the Oscars

While not a critical success, Thank God It’s Friday (1978) spawned a Top Ten gold soundtrack and earned Donna Summer, who starred in the movie, a Top Five gold hit when “Last Dance” landed at number three on the pop charts. Casablanca’s other film property of 1978, Midnight Express, was directed by Alan Parker (and written for the screen by Oliver Stone) and garnered favorable reviews from critics while Giorgio Moroder’s accompanying soundtrack was as bracing as the film. Chris Bennett wrote the lyrics for the vocal version of the theme and David Castle contributed a number of songs to the project, but it was Moroder’s “Chase”, a pulsating, claustrophobic composition, that was extracted for single release and hit the Top 40. The movie was the first of many successful and memorable film scores Moroder would compose throughout his career.

+ + +

Giorgio Moroder: Neil Bogart and Peter Guber co-financed Midnight Express. They presented the song “I Feel Love”, with Donna Summer, to Alan Parker, who liked the idea of having a synthesizer soundtrack for the movie.

Chris Bennett: Giorgio comes into town. I happened to be in America. He calls and says, “I’m doing this music for this film about this guy smuggling drugs and I need a lyric by tomorrow”. I thought, “Could you be a little more specific?” (laughs) I know I didn’t really ever get a script, or, I may have gotten a little more of the story out of him. I co-wrote the theme song.

Castle: I felt from the beginning that it was going to be a big picture. The script was fabulous. I really enjoyed reading it. I wrote several songs but I read into the romanticism between Billy Hayes and his girlfriend Susan and what was going down. I didn’t realize that they were shooting it in a very realistic way. I believe that’s why they used “Istanbul Blues” because some of my other songs were more romantic and it wasn’t that kind of movie. It’s difficult when you just have the script to go by, even though I figured it was going to be very realistic. I’m a romanticist at heart so I just read that into it. I was very grateful and flattered that Neil Bogart chose my song. The lyric was actually in the script and I figured, “Well the guy that it happened to wrote the script. How can I outdo that?” I just went with that lyrics and put a blues melody to it and they used it. Neil asked me to sing it on the soundtrack.

Summer: Never in my life have I heard a soundtrack be so unbelievably attached to the movie in just about every moment of the movie where the music comes up. It is so part of the movie that it’s not incidental. It really makes your body almost part of the movie. When I watching the movie, I had no idea that Giorgio had done the soundtrack and I was sitting in the movie and I kept saying to Bruce (Sudano) – I think I went to see the movie with Paul Jabara and Brad Davis, who was in the movie – “This music blows my mind. Who did the music?” We wait until the end of the movie and I see Giorgio’s name go up. I kept talking about the movie and the music the whole time. It’s a powerful movie. They should re-make that movie today because it’s very pertinent and relevant especially with all that’s going on in the world. Just the whole concept of that movie is really scary. Terrifying, actually. It would work today.

Bennett: It was 1978 but that still holds up. It was such a classic score and I still hear it played.

Castle: I was invited to a special screening of Midnight Express. My manager and I, and I believe the promotion guy for Parachute Records, were there. He sat with us. The funny thing is we watched the picture then after the credits rolled we got up and we turned around. The guy that played Hamidou (Paul L. Smith), the real mean guy, was standing behind us. My manager went, “Oh my God, you’re the bad guy!” We all walked out to our cars together. He told us that it took him a week of taking those two little twin boys that played his sons in the movie out for ice cream after the shooting to get them to believe he was a nice guy and that he was just play-acting. Afterwards, we just laughed. He’s really a nice man.

Echoing the kind of variety Casablanca had with its music repertoire, Midnight Express and Thank God It’s Friday couldn’t have been more different. The former was a gritty translation of a real-life account about Billy Hayes’ imprisonment in Turkey for smuggling drugs, the latter was a PG-rated extravaganza documenting one night at a Los Angeles discotheque. Yet, when the nominees for the 1978 Academy Awards were announced, both films were represented: Paul Jabara for “Best Original Song” (“Last Dance”) and Giorgio Moroder for “Best Original Score” (Midnight Express). Both won the award.

Moroder: Winning the Oscar for Midnight Express was one of the most incredible days of my life. Not only had I never dreamed of winning one but then it almost came too fast. 

Summer: I remember that I was standing in the back. I was supposed to be in Vegas at that time and they pushed the show back so that I could do the Oscars, but I had to still go and do the show. It was tedious. Everything had to be precise because I was on a private jet going back and I had to be dressed. From that show, I was going right onstage so I didn’t even have time to get dressed. I was backstage and I was standing there with Melissa Manchester and Olivia Newton-John. Lee Marvin was sitting over at the bar. Paul Jabara was sitting either beside me or behind me and at some point Paul and I looked at each other. They hadn’t announced who had won yet but they were standing there getting ready to announce it. I just could not take it another second, I just screamed out loud. I couldn’t take it. At the end of the scream, they said “Last Dance” and we just freaked out. I just started screaming. We didn’t know we would win. We were running around in a circle, acting crazy.

Hart-Winer: That Oscar…we were over the moon.

Chotin: I just remember us at the company were all like, “Do you believe it? We have an Oscar! We’re a record company and we have an Oscar”.

D’Ariano: Paul Jabara won an Oscar! How did that happen? The song was in this movie that Bogart put together. I’m taking nothing away from Paul’s talent or Donna’s talent but part of Neil’s talent was his ear and finding these talented artists. Once he had them, he knew how to take them to levels and heights that nobody else could.

Summer Fever, Part II

Summer Fever, Part II

Within weeks of Paul Jabara winning an Academy Award, Donna Summer won her first Grammy: Best R&B Vocal Performance, “Last Dance”. Months earlier, she landed her first number one pop single when she reinvented Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park”. The album it appeared on, Live and More (1978), also landed on the top of the album charts, the first of three consecutive number one, double albums that Summer would earn for Casablanca. As a singer, songwriter, and actress, she was a complete artist. A 1978 Rolling Stone cover story about Summer queried, “Is There Life After Disco?” For Donna Summer, the answer was a resounding, “Yes”.

+ + +

Prestwood: I started doing PR for Donna. I had two covers that I did for her. One was Ebony—that was in our own community—but the other one was Rolling Stone. It wasn’t easy to get black people on the cover of the Rolling Stone. When I got to their office, I said, “Okay this is the story. This is what’s happening in her life. This is what the records have been. This is why I think she’s interesting enough. She speaks fluent German! She lived in Germany for all these years. You’re not just talking about a regular black solo artist. She has a lot going for her”. Finally, I did sell the story. I was thrilled about that.

Goldman: I never looked at Donna as an R&B artist. She was like a Barbra Streisand. She just had a magnificent voice. If I had to choose somebody on the label that I felt the most affinity to, it was her. I just loved her as a person. I still do. 

Chotin: Donna and I lived, basically, in this north wing of this estate off of Sunset Boulevard, Benedict Canyon. It was a three-story north wing and I had the middle floor. Donna lived on top and her manager Susan Munao was on

the other floor. We really became quite friendly and I was friends with Bruce. I just loved Donna. She was a wonderful person and real.

Smith: Susan Munao managed her with an iron fist. Donna had to do as little or as much as she wanted to. She was the golden goose. Was Neil not going to protect her at any cost? She was so protected and Donna had security around her from the very beginning, at home, everywhere. I laugh about it because she was at the opposite end of the spectrum of Pattie Brooks. Pattie was always out and about and would go anywhere and do anything with no one watching her.

Pattie Brooks: I remember Donna coming up into the office and she said, “I want you to hear something”. I ran up there with her and we sat down. She put it on and I went, “Oh my God. You finally get to be heard”. She said, “Yeah! Do you believe this?” It was “MacArthur Park”. Marc Paul Simon walked in and said, “Oh yeah, I wanted you to hear this”. I said, “It’s fabulous. People are going to go, “Is this her voice?” because “Love to Love You Baby” was not a real vocal showcasing her voice. Everything was very light and candy, like when we did I Remember Yesterday (1977).

Smith: I would have to say that my favorite is the “MacArthur Park Suite”. It goes through so many transitions.  I so vividly recollect dancing to it at Studio One and watching people trying to dance on beat and clap off beat all at the same time. There was so much going on in that song, the ups, the downs, the slow, the fast. It’s just an amazing piece of music combined.

Tom Moulton: I love Four Seasons of Love (1976), “Spring Affair”.  I love the beauty and getting lost in the clouds of the music. The music was so overwhelmingly beautiful, the orchestrations. It was really wonderful music. There’s so many happy moments that people have with so much of that music.

Summer: I have this philosophy about writing. Writing is natural and kind of supernatural all at the same time. It’s sort of like, if you have a book of matches, and you add enough heat, it will ignite. It’s not the matches, it’s the matches plus. When you have a song to write, you put the matches out but the universe, or whatever else we pull to that, ignites it into a song. Those elements have to come together to create something that, when other people hear it, they get that same impression. For me, I think being an actress has helped me, even though no one thinks of me as an actress, I would consider myself much more of an actress in some ways, than a singer because I think that each song is a little mini-movie. I’m singing it as a mini-movie. It’s all about storylines and probabilities. I wrote “Dim All the Lights” for Rod Stewart. I loved Rod Stewart’s voice. It was at a point where I wanted to write for other people. I had spent the day with Kenny Loggins but we hadn’t come up with anything because his wife was sick and in the hospital. He kept his commitment to come but he was distracted and I was distracted and we didn’t come up with anything. After he left, I was just plucking away and I tried to get into Rod Stewart’s state of mind and thought he would probably use that rusty kind of sound. I just tried to put myself in his position and tried to see myself as him being with a woman he wanted to seduce. A song is eloquent enough to write itself. If you can present the right environment for a song, it will fall out of the atmosphere. You don’t have to break your butt to write. It will come to you.

Gold: As Director of Marketing, when our major star Donna Summer went on tour, I hired somebody to go on the road to make sure the market was primed for Donna’s appearance …to maximize the opportunity to sell records with all the PR and radio promotions in town about the show. This advance person was to make sure a lot of records were in the store before she got into town, to make sure displays were up, so on and so forth. Well, evidently, the young lady who I had hired was having a little bit too much fun and word had gotten back to top management. So they wanted me to go out instead. I understood why…because it was fun! I especially enjoyed being around Donna Summer, who is such a class act. Besides being beautiful and talented, she’s very intelligent and kind. I really felt part of a little family, very quickly. I’m referring to the family of back-up singers, the band, and the crew whom all traveled together and I often joined the pre-show prayer circle as we held hands gave thanks and prayed for a good performance. I remember Donna really working hard night after night. Every performance seemed to be fresh and brand new. After a performance in Cleveland I told Donna that we have some VIPs from Camelot Records (which was a big record chain in the Midwest based out of Canton, Ohio) who would like to say hi. I said we have the president, Paul David and vice president of purchasing, Jim Bonk waiting outside. She says, “I am exhausted and just did two encores. Do I have to?” I told her that these guys were very important to us and they were very nice people besides. She frowned but the second they walked into the dressing room she turned it on and she didn’t show anybody how exhausted she really was. She was as gracious and hospitable as you could ask a performer to be. She was always one of my favorites not just because I love her music but because she was really a pro who never acted the diva role to me.

Summer: My tendency at this juncture in my life, after having years of reflection and the ability to really discern what I did receive from Casablanca and what those years meant to me… it was like being an only child with loving parents. Everybody that was there, was there for me. It doesn’t mean that they weren’t there for other people.

Donna Summer - “Last Dance” (1978)

Disco: From Billions to Backlash

Disco: From Billions to Backlash

Donna Summer was the top selling female artist in the U.S. in 1979. Bad Girls shot to number one while both the title track and “Hot Stuff” (which would furnish a second Grammy for Summer) held the top spot on the singles chart and “Dim All the Lights” followed close behind at number two. Later in the year, Summer’s duet with Barbra Streisand, “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)” became her fourth number one single in 12 months while On the Radio: Greatest Hits Vols. I & II earned her a third consecutive, number one, double album.

Elsewhere, Casablanca was doing good business with Village People, Cher, KISS, Parliament, Cameo, a Robin Williams comedy album (Reality…What a Concept), and recent signings like the Sylvers, Tony Orlando, and Captain & Tennille. “Things were popping then”, Chris Bennett says. “People were buying records in those days! It was really the golden age of the record business”.

Indeed, the music industry reached its zenith between 1977-1979 and disco accounted for many industry milestones: the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever (1977) on RSO sold nearly 30 million units worldwide in 1978 and became the top-selling soundtrack ever, “Y.M.C.A” by Village People became the biggest-selling single in the history of PolyGram when it moved 12 million units around the world, “Le Freak” by Chic achieved a similar feat for Atlantic Records when it sold four million units in the U.S., while singles by Rod Stewart (“Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?”) and the Rolling Stones (“Miss You”) generated even more untold millions for the WEA company.

In short, disco constituted an eight billion dollar a year industry. From records to sound equipment to fashion to club memberships, it was a cultural phenomenon. While the labels that helped usher disco into the clubs years earlier – Casablanca, T.K., Salsoul, West End – continued to churn out stacks of singles, major labels jumped on the bandwagon, creating disco subsidiaries and signing more dance-oriented acts.

However, by the middle of 1979, the word “disco” became a liability. A surplus of disco music yielded too much lackluster product and a massive backlash engineered by the media and advertising agencies ultimately forced disco back to its underground roots. Remarkably, Casablanca would score a number one pop hit with a disco song even after the supposed death of disco.

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Byrd: The land of disco was very exotic. It was like you were going into another magical world fueled by drugs, outlandish costumes, and people using fans. It was just nutty. You had to take your disco nap to get ready. You would look young and desirable as you were fan-dancing your way to oblivion.

Wheeler: There’s a slightly older generation in the disco world from New York. There was an entirely different scene on the west coast. San Francisco was very popular. It was probably the number two market for dance music. Chicago was big in dance music. Miami, of course. Boston was huge. Coming from the west coast and being young and experiencing dance music from there for the first time was a slightly different adventure than the New York people had. It wasn’t because the music didn’t get there. The hub of dance music, the original dance form of what ended up being called disco, did come out of New York. Salsoul was one of the first disco labels. It was just a forerunner in the whole scene.

Smith: Salsoul’s music was exactly that—salsa soul. It had a Latin groove to it and it was heavily orchestrated. It was different from things that came off of the west coast. When we would talk to DJs in NYC, their lists would always be so different from everybody else’s in the country

Hart-Winer: New York always saw themselves as a little more innovative and creative than the west coast DJs. If you wanted to get down and grungy and funky it wouldn’t be to a lot of our stuff. We were more pop.

Wheeler: Casablanca created their own sound much like what Salsoul did. The only difference is that Salsoul maybe was a little bit earlier and Salsoul product didn’t necessarily always cross pop whereas the machine of Casablanca was created to take it mainstream. They did it very well. When Donna Summer hit, no one could

compete with Casablanca. We didn’t really work on KISS because of the fact that they didn’t really have danceable music but we worked basically anything that was danceable, remixed, R&B-soulful, anything like that. Pre-house, DJ’s played everything.

Rodriguez: We had such a brand that the consumer would buy a record just based on the fact that it was on Casablanca. Even if they hadn’t heard about the artist, they knew that it was on Casablanca and that if it was on Casablanca, it had to be good. That was special. We built one hell of a brand for creativity and for innovative music, unique, but at the same time, quality. Our artists were not just disco artists, they were artists.

Gold: I remember a conference call where Neil said that, “Disco is not just music to dance to. It is a culture. It’s a way of life—fashion, products and more. It will go beyond media as we know it today”.

Disc Jockey Steve Dahl in 1979

Leroy Gomez(Santa Esmeralda): Everybody just got caught up in the disco movement. If you wanted to work you had to ride the wave. What was so great about disco was that it had that rhythm and blues roots. So many people could just jump on it because it wasn’t really foreign. It brought us out of the hippie era of the ‘60s. Really things hadn’t changed because we still had that notion of togetherness, love, peace, and all of that. When I got involved with disco, it was almost like you got caught in a whirlwind. No matter what type of music you liked, you always ended up evolving towards the disco sound.

Sudano: Disco was very musical. It got dissed by the rock world because of the four on the floor but musically, the playing was excellent and the string arrangements were excellent. There was a musicality to it beyond three-chord rock and roll that was going on there that people choose to ignore.

Cowan: The hard-core press that we would have liked to have had on our side at Casablanca – The New York Times and all the rest of it – they already hated everything disco. They didn’t pay any attention to what I called them about or stuff that we put out.  I didn’t understand how it could engender such venom and hatred from the music critics. It wasn’t that bad. For what it was, it was very well done. All you had to do was just let yourself get into it and it did take you over. You didn’t really have to be on drugs to enjoy it.

D’Ariano: I wasn’t in the “Disco Sucks” crowd at all. I love the excitement of pop music/rock music. If it was 1964, I was too young but, I would have loved to be working with The Beatles or the Rolling Stones in the capacity of what I do, promotion or marketing or whatever. It was very much a thrill ten years later, after The Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, to be working with Elton John because he was The Beatles, phenomenon-wise. I was with the most exciting top guy. Now it’s ‘77-‘79, the biggest, most exciting, wildest phenomenon in the music industry is disco. I was thrilled to be involved. I loved the razzle dazzle and the excitement of it all. Taking nothing away from them but the Bee Gees kind of hijacked it and it became something else. Anything that’s anything starts out with the underground and then it grows. By the time everybody in the country’s into it, there’s nothing to do with the way it was three years earlier.

Brooks: All the labels were trying to jump on the bandwagon. At first it was like, “Oh no”. Then, when they saw what was happening, then they were scuffling to try to find who was going to be their disco department.

Moulton: Let’s face it, when you’re successful, everybody jumps on it. They want a piece of the pie.

Castle: At that point in time, it was determined that what Casablanca promoted best was disco so I was asked to do a disco album (laughs). Russ Regan and I had some discussion about it and Russ won the battle. I went in and cut sort of a pseudo-disco pop thing. I don’t think he liked it very much (laughs). I actually had written two more albums worth of music and cut one of those but I think out of shear desperation and commitment to making the charts, Russ wanted to do what he thought was the best thing to do at the time.

D.C. LaRue: I can remember Marc Simon was just told get as much stuff out there as you can. I can remember Kenny Friedman in New York City – because I was back and forth – he was the head of Disco Promotion. I went into his office one time and he had so many 12” records to work, he just started throwing them across the fucking office against the wall. He said, “D.C. What do they want from me? Look at this. Ten 12” records in five days! They’re garbage!” He’s screaming and throwing them across the room, like Frisbees. 

Wheeler: The whole disco era dying, or the press campaign that moved out of Chicago with the burning of dance records, these were all things because of an oversaturation of music, when everybody jumped on the bandwagon. Originally, in the early days of Casablanca, it was such a pure form of music. There was only a handful of labels that were actually putting out dance music and then, once it just started getting jumped on by advertising agencies, it became the absolute mass marketing purge of club music until it was hard to swallow. The death of disco was really a press move. It had nothing to do with anything more than advertisers needed to move into another direction with music and their campaigns because there was some backlash happening. It was a giant press move.

Rodriguez: Even when people in the industry were talking about disco is dead, here we come at Casablanca Records all over again with “Funkytown” and it shoots all the way to number one while everybody was saying that disco was dead!

Santa Esmeralda featuring Leroy Gomez - “Don’ Let Me Be Misunderstood” (1978)

Bob Esty Remembers... Producing Cher

Bob Esty Remembers… Producing Cher

One of the hallmarks of the disco era was the shear number of acts who jumped on the disco bandwagon hoping to reignite their career. From Frankie Avalon to Ethel Merman, nearly every major musical personality flirted with the 4/4 beat, often to less-than-stellar results. Among the few actually notable exceptions was Cher. After a few years of poor-selling albums on Warner Bros., Cher signed with Casablanca. Naturally, Neil Bogart decided a disco album would help bring her back to the charts…and it did just that. With producer Bob Esty, Cher landed a Top Ten gold single with “Take Me Home”, laying the foundation 20 years early for the most successful single of her career (“Believe”). Bob Esty recalls how Cher came to Casablanca:

Neil Bogart says to me, “How’d you like to produce Cher?” I thought, “Why? I’m doing disco stuff for the label and you have KISS on the other side. Where are you putting her?” She had not had a hit for years and no was really buying her albums. I knew she was more into rock, and she did her standards and show tunes, but basically her heart was in rock and roll where she started. She had divorced Greg Allman by that point. I just thought, “Do I want to be involved in that because that’s going to be a lot of drama”. That was partly because I was completely intimidated by the idea. It’s one of those things where you try to find all the reasons you shouldn’t do it because maybe you can’t, maybe it won’t work out or you won’t get along.

Neil said, “I want you to write a song like ‘Last Dance’”. Michele Aller and I got together and we wrote “Take Me Home” based on Cher’s personality—the fact that she would ask, and it was from a strong woman’s point of view. It was romantic and it was done in a way that had a melody.

I had broken my leg tripping on a subway grate and not realizing it’s serious. I ended up in the hospital for eleven days with knee surgery. I arrived to play this song idea in crutches and full-leg cast and had to prop my right leg up on the keyboard to play the song. It was sort of a cool thing—“Hi I’m Cher”. Charles Koppelman was over in the corner smoking a cigar, being obnoxious. It was decided that I’ll do the record and we’ll record “Take Me Home” and we’ll write more songs. Meanwhile, they had already done a whole album, Charles Koppelman and Ron Dante. That’s one of the reasons I was leery, because I knew Ron. We were associate friends and I thought, “This means they’re going to throw his album out and I’m going to do it”. I felt like a traitor. What I decided to do was keep some of Ron’s cuts on Side Two.

We went in to record “Take Me Home” and, generally, by that time I was doing the guide vocal for most things. I did the guide vocal and we did the track. I would do the guide vocals as her and she would get so annoyed! She went out and had a vocal session with me. I probably was too obnoxious or too controlling. I think just out of, “What am I going to do?” I tried to direct her, which I’d done with every act I’d worked with. I don’t think she had been directed, except by Sonny. At the time, it didn’t occur to me. I just wanted to get the vocal done. She was very obviously upset, distant. She would come into the studio, sit in the corner of the control room, and never say a word. We decided it was too high so we transposed it. We had another session with all the musicians and the rhythm section in a whole new key. It was better. We got it down. We had a rapport and that worked out good. We got through the album. It was a great experience for me because I actually liked her and I think she like me at the time.

We did another album a year later, which was a disaster because that was when Casablanca was being sold to PolyGram and disco had just been burned at the stadiums of the world, big bonfires. She was not into it. Our original concept of it was it was going to be called Mirror Image and it was about having a picture of her in her bed surrounded by all the Enquirers and all those magazines and sitting there just looking like, “What did I do?” Then we’d have a glamour side and so you’d see her mirror image. We wrote a song called that. She decided to bring in Toto, which was the band she used when she went out on the road with Sonny. David Paich wrote a song called “You’re My Prisoner”. She loved it. She was a rock and roller and sang the hell out of it. Then the album became Prisoner (1979) with this photo of her in chains against a pillar. A beautiful photo.

Take Me Home created a whole persona for the rest of her career. “Believe”, and everything else from then on, is based on the Take Me Home experience, the same audience. She still does the song live!

Part Five: Defining the Legacy[21 August 2009]

By Christian John WikanePopMatters Contributing Editor

Closing up the Casbah

It all seemed to come undone at once. Neil Bogart sold the remaining 50 percent of Casablanca to PolyGram. While it was a lucrative deal, Bogart relinquished the kind of creativity that he’d used to build a wholly unique and successful record company. After his relationship with PolyGram became strained, he left in February 1980 and started a new label, Boardwalk.

PolyGram dissolved Casablanca’s staff and many artists either fled from the new regime or were dropped altogether. Following number one hits by Lipps, Inc. (“Funkytown”) and Captain & Tennille (“Do That to Me One More Time”), a few more singles by the Four Tops, Pure Prairie League, and Dr. Hook kept the Casablanca imprint in circulation through 1982. Russ Regan, who had helmed the Casablanca-distributed Parachute label between 1977-1979, later led Casablanca back to the top of the charts with the blockbuster Flashdance (1983) soundtrack before

the label ceased releasing original product in 1986 (Animotion, Strange Behavior). Despite intermittent success, Casablanca was never the same without Neil Bogart.

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Cecil Holmes (Partner/Senior Vice President): When you get these companies, they always tell you, “You’ll be able to run this and you’ll be able to do exactly what you please.” Those were suits. Our success was that we were able to do what we wanted to do. All they knew was the bottom line. No way would they have let us spend the money on Donna Summer and KISS. They would see the figures and say, “This guy spends too much money,” but then there was one guy who would always say, “Yeah but we’ll get him or we’ll control him.” Eventually, they figured that we were spending too much money and they weren’t making the money that they wanted to make. When it was just us, we didn’t care if we had a lot of money in the bank as long as everybody was taken care of at the company. Believe me, we were. I was paid very well. All the top executives were paid very well with very big bonuses. The money always went back into the company. It wasn’t until we got older and that we started to think, “Maybe we should start thinking about our future”.

Bill Aucoin (Manager, KISS): It was a payday for everyone and we understood that. PolyGram didn’t have much of a choice. They had to negotiate with us. We made an incredible deal with PolyGram for KISS. From that point of view, it was good for KISS. It was right after Dynasty (1979). We made a terrific contract with PolyGram. Donna decided not to and she kind of fought to get off the label and she did.

Donna Summer: I was one of the people that were selling mega-records at the time but I wasn’t being compensated for them. Let’s put it like this, my original contract was not up to par and so there was a deficiency in what I should have been making. I was making the money for them, millions of dollars, which I wasn’t seeing. At some point, I got a lawyer and started to investigate what was going on and it wasn’t pretty.

Holmes: It just got to a point where Neil felt uncomfortable being with PolyGram. He wasn’t able to do the things he wanted to do. Casablanca was his company but PolyGram owned it. They started to put restraints on him, moreso financially whereas with Warner Bros. the main issue was we were just too aggressive.

Frank DiMino (Angel): I remember our last meeting with Neil, which was a good healthy meeting. He apologized for a lot of the stuff that he didn’t do that he knew he should have done but couldn’t and explained to us a lot of the reasons. It was a really good conversation and we felt like everything was going to get back on track. Unfortunately it didn’t.

Bob Esty: When Casablanca was sold to PolyGram and Neil left the label, I just figured what’s the point? I didn’t like their business and I knew that there was a big backlash going on.

Dennis Wheeler (Promotion Manager, Special Projects): The music changed. The company was swallowed up. If it wasn’t sold it could have gone on and on for years. PolyGram bought it for the catalog… and then it was dismantled. A lot of people were let go, I happened to be one of the last. The reason for that was because “Funkytown” by Lipps, Inc. was being promoted at the time and basically we were told that, “Your job is safe. Keep working it.” The second week that it went number one, and crossed to the Top 40 chart, I got my pink slip like an hour after the charts came in.

Michele Hart-Winer (Director of Special Projects): Bruce Bird (who replaced Neil as President) and Larry Harris (Senior Vice President/Managing Director) were still there. I had been working with them. They wanted me to stay. I stayed but I couldn’t do disco anymore. I was in radio. That was awful. I did not like radio. We had “Funkytown” with my buddy Steve Greenberg and that crossed-over but that’s when they were starting to bury disco. They were putting trucks over disco records. There was that huge backlash. Neil already had Boardwalk going. They kept me because I was a good promotion person, if I do say so myself, and I had good rapport but radio was a world I didn’t know very well, honestly. They knew that I didn’t know what I was doing and it was really uncomfortable. When I just kept at it and started to talk to these people, I said, “I can’t do this everyday. It’s awful.”

Worthy Patterson (Vice President, Sales and Promotion): PolyGram started putting PolyGram people in. They turned a very successful record label into a logo. Forget it. It was a waste of time after that. That’s the attitude of those people—they think they can do anything. Little did they know that the name of the game is relationships. We were able to do what we needed to do to break records. No one ever, ever in the whole time I was in business there, ever asked you what the price of anything was. We were mavericks, which is why they kicked us out.

D.C. LaRue: PolyGram ripped everything out from the bare walls and painted everything white with Formica tables and chrome legs. I walked into Neil Bogart’s office and what was an enchanting step into the past, into a movie set (you expected Ingrid Bergman to walk out of the office), it was a white room and Bruce Bird sitting behind a desk and nobody there. The offices were totally empty.

Phyllis Chotin (Vice President, Creative Services): PolyGram came out and was inventorying everything. I remember being around for when the cars all got picked up, all the leased cars. When everybody was gone, I was still there and one of my staff was still there. I remember they offered me a job to stay. My assistant at the time was a single mother and I asked them, “If I leave, will you put her in that job?” They said yes so that’s when I left. I think it was March of ‘81. I started my own thing then.

Pattie Brooks: All of the artists, I can’t even tell you how many have gone through that where they were dropped in the middle of their project because of changeover. It was a mess.

David Castle: When a deal like that ends, so does the money so I had to really quickly rearrange my life. When you go from an experience like being with Casablanca and touring and being on TV shows and being on the charts and then falling off into the black hole of space, it’s a whole other reality so it took me some time to adjust everything that I had experienced.

Bruce Sudano (Brooklyn Dreams): I think that we had a three-album deal for Casablanca and we did those three albums. At the end of that time, the deal was over, Neil had left and Bruce Bird was running the company. It was not what it was. We kind of had our shot and never really broke out and it just dissolved.

DiMino: We owed one more album to Casablanca. We were looking for a producer. I had been talking to Jack Douglas. I knew Jack from Eddie Leonetti who did our White Hot (1977) and Sinful (1979) albums. PolyGram said, “We’re not going to pay that much for a producer,” but Jack Douglas is a name producer so it’s not going to be as cheap as someone who doesn’t have a name. Now we find ourselves negotiating on an album that we thought was the last thing that we would have to do. We said, “Why don’t you just let us out of the deal?” We thought we’ll get out of the deal and we can go to Neil at Boardwalk. They said, “No we’re not going to let you out of the deal. We want the record.” It was one of those classic stalemates going back and forth where the only one who suffers is the band. We’re in a state of limbo. Time passes. It’s one of those classic endings where neither side is giving in. The communication just wasn’t working. Every step along the way, it just wasn’t working. Why not just cut us loose? I can never figure out the deal with record companies. I guess they have some sort of idea of what they want to do but I never can figure it out.

Aucoin: KISS was burnt out. The Elder (1980) was a great moment of no one wanting to do anything. Ace didn’t want to be with them and Gene and Paul really didn’t feel like they wanted to go back into the studio and have to write an album when they really weren’t prepared. It wasn’t a very good time. It was an album that had to be delivered to the record label. It’s a good example of, “You gotta deliver an album, you’re gonna get paid so much, the record company wants it, you have to do it, you have to deliver it by a certain time.” In those days, we were bound by that. If I had my druthers and I could go back in time, I’d say, “I’m sorry but you’re not getting an album until they actually do a really good tune.” They were lucky that they had such a brilliant producer to make an album happen otherwise it wouldn’t have been an album at all. Of course PolyGram hated the album. When we had our meeting with PolyGram to play it, they said, “We’ll give you the money to do another album.” At that point, there was no way that was going to happen. We just said “no” and I knew there was no way they were going to get back into the studio. It was hard enough just to get through The Elder.

Chris Bennett: Keb’ Mo’, who has gone on to have a big career as a blues singer (he’s won several Grammys), we got to be friends and I produced his first album when he was Kevin Moore from Compton. Because of the publishing deal I had with Casablanca, I had some money and I took the demos I did of Keb’ Mo’ to this guy named Steve Badelli and he said, “Oh you should take it next door to Chocolate City.” I walked out of there with an $80,000 record deal, which was big money in those days. We produced a really beautiful album called Rainmaker (1980). My boyfriend at the time was this guy Brian Avnet, who used to manage Manhattan Transfer and now he manages Josh Groban and a bunch of other people. I had him help me and we went in with Kevin Moore. I’ll never forget Russ Regan said, “I don’t really hear any hits.” I remember looking over and seeing a big old crocodile tear run down Kevin’s face. They didn’t really do anything with it. Bless his heart, he just kept at it. He sold cars. He fixed computers. I’d call him once in awhile and say, “If I had your talent, I wouldn’t be fixing any damn cars.” He went down to New Orleans and learned the blues. He’s a full-blown blues singer. He’s still a great pop singer/songwriter. Rainmaker still had some classic songs on it. We got the top people in town on that. None of us made any money.

LaRue: The guy who had just taken over PolyGram in New York City came from a real rock/folk background and he hated disco. When I recorded Star, Baby (1981), I was trying to make a transition. There was no record company when that came out. I had one more recording to do and I was with Morris Levy. He called up this guy and we were on a speaker-phone. Morris said, “I’m sitting here with D.C. LaRue. He’s got one more album to do for Casablanca,” and the guy said, “Tell that faggot we don’t want him on the label anymore.” Morris said, “D.C. ‘s here. He can hear you.” The guy said, “I don’t give a fuck. Tell the faggot we don’t want him with the record company anymore. Disco’s over.” Nobody could get a deal. It was such a nightmare. All the fucking records I sold and nobody wanted to pick up the phone. It was so depressing. I don’t even know how I managed to live through it. I had to have been a very strong human being.

Dancing the Last Dance

Dancing the Last Dance

In the post-Neil Bogart phase of Casablanca, many artists and executives fell out of favor with PolyGram and were dropped, fired, or neglected. However, a far more insidious and terminal development was underway, something that would extinguish the carefree spirit of the ‘70s and claim the lives of many who danced to the beat of Casablanca: AIDS. Two of the label’s most beloved figures, Marc Paul Simon (VP of Special Projects) and Paul Jabara, were among the casualties.

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Wheeler: Unfortunately it was just something that blind-sided all of humanity. It wasn’t a pretty time. The people that you should be talking to on this interview aren’t here to tell the story.

Tom Moulton: I think when you’re a teenager and you’re only in your early 20s, it’s amazing how you feel indestructible. When all these kids started dying, it really started bothering me and that’s why I even stopped going to the clubs. I said, “I can’t stand this anymore.”

Joe Klein(Freelance Producer, Radio and Television Commercials): I saw Marc Simon in West Hollywood at the Mayfair Market on Santa Monica Blvd. It must have been months before he passed away. He looked like a skeleton. It was so bizarre. This was back in the days where unless you were directly involved with the scene, the whole term “AIDS” was just barely getting out there. That was like a jolt. It was really disconcerting. This is a guy that would get up on his marble table and just start dancing.

Bobbi Cowan (Director of Publicity): It’s a shame Marc Simon isn’t around. Marc Paul Simon was awesome in those days. We stayed friends until he died. He even came to Maui to visit me. Just a lovely guy. He was one of the first to get sick because he was so out there, in the life.

Ruben Rodriguez(National Promotion and Marketing Director): Had Marc lived, God knows what he would have done. He was just amazing.

Esty: Paul Jabara? What he was, was a Lebanese-American who could sell anything and he did. He was very tenacious.

Paul Jabara

Randee Goldman (Executive Assistant): Paul would do anything to get into Neil’s office. He was the funniest guy in the world. I thought he was going to tap dance outside the office. He probably did tap dance outside the office. I was very saddened by his passing and went to his funeral. I loved Paul. He was amazing. He was so funny.

Nellie Prestwood (Publicity): Paul was incredible! Paul was a riot. He was just a sweet, loving, caring soul. He was like a gift because he wasn’t bitter. He was just so talented. Paul had so much talent that I just didn’t think he had enough outlets! He was kind, generous, giving, loving.

Chotin: Paul was the greatest, most fun guy. He and I went away one long weekend to this spa in Ojai and we roomed together. We were just like girlfriends. He was so talented. I don’t think there was a bad thought in his head. I remember one time having Donna and Paul and Brooklyn Dreams over at my house. We were all just singing

and here’s all these great singers. We were taping it and there’s my reedy little voice! We were all drinking wine and having fun. Pauly was a delight.

Esty: We wrote a song called “Trapped in a Stairway”. Now, no one ever writes that song. It was all because Paul knew he was going to have a big number in Thank God It’s Friday while he was trapped in a stairway. The director said musical numbers in movies couldn’t last more than two minutes. As a result, he didn’t get a chance to do his number but it was played over the scene.

Hart-Winer: He just wanted to be Barbra Streisand. He just thought she was the best thing. He used to take her songs and go entertain for her people. He wanted to be a star. I think he was before his time, honestly. I think he could do it today. “One man ain’t enough.” God bless him.

Marc Nathan (National and Regional Promotion): We lost him far too early in the game. I thought Paul Jabara was a brilliant, brilliant talent. I got to tell ya, I danced to “Shut Out/Heaven Is a Disco” almost every night for about a year at the clubs here in LA. I have such great memories of that.

LaRue: He was very important with the label and everyone loved him. He was a very likable guy. Outrageous, likable, funny, and delightful to be with, a real party guy.  When I arrived out there, he considered me a tad of a threat, even though I wasn’t. I remember we had dinner at Roy’s and he cornered me in the men’s room and said, “What are you doing here?” It was like, “You just came in from New York City and you’re going to take over the label?” Of course it was not anything like that. We were never really close but we got along. I think after awhile he realized that I was never a threat to him.

Arnie Smith (National Director of Disco Promotion): I loved him to death, God rest his soul. One of my jobs, per Marc Simon, was to control Paul because he was a neurotic artist. I could tell Paul, “Shut the fuck up, Paul”, when nobody else could do that to him. He was just a majorly talented person. His talent was spread out so he never got the notoriety. Paul was just so talented and so neurotic. Whenever I was with him, it was like being with a three-year old, trying to keep them in check and in control. If I could have put one of those baby harnesses on him, I would have. Paul and I went back further than anybody else but I just loved him.

Paul Jabara

Moulton: He kept saying, “I hope you’re not wondering about me”. I said, “What is there to wonder?” He was just so flamboyant and out there. It was unbelievable. When I first met him, he said, “People are always staring at my crotch”. I said, “Why? Your face looks decent”. He thought I was being smart. I just didn’t get it. Then of course he proceeded to tell me. I never met anybody like that in my life (laughs). He was a damn good songwriter. The people who really knew him, loved him. They really did. I never met anybody who was so flamboyant. I still think of him once in awhile. He was really a piece of work. The thing I realized afterwards, that I liked about him, he was what he

was—“either you like me or you don’t but how you feel about me isn’t going to affect what I feel”. I think somebody like that gives a lot of people encouragement to push on, even though there are obstacles. Hey, push on anyway! I think a lot of people learned from him about that. I really believe that. He was just so outgoing. He would say anything any time. He was just an amazing character.

Brooks: He would do things that were so crazy I can’t even tell you. He was so obnoxious at times. We did American Bandstand and we did an old song called “Take Good Care of My Baby” and he did it disco. I did the duet with him. Paul was just as crazy as he could be! Sometimes when you get people who are just so full of creativity, they’re just out of their heads because they have so many things going on. They’re just zany. They get depressed. He was just all over the place but the energy was there and he could make you laugh. He was really talented.

Esty: Paul went to Puerto Rico and literally locked Donna in the bathroom and forced her to consider doing a demo for “Last Dance”. Of course he calls me and I go to his house and we work out the whole thing, top to bottom. I decided to do the ballad and then into the up-tempo and go back to the ballad. What we wanted to do in the song was have it played as the last song every night. We figured they’d like to announce last call during the ballad in the beginning and then they would say five minutes during the second ballad. We worked it all out. Neil Bogart thought it was a hit so he got me – this is before I signed with him – to do the whole thing on Paul Jabara’s recommendation. We went in first and did a piano-vocal demo with Donna where I played the whole thing top to bottom and she sang it top to bottom. Literally, the whole thing.

Summer: Paul was an absolute genius and a madman rolled into a very crazy body. He was a very funny human being with a hysterical sense of humor, a very complicated human being. He was like a big baby in a man’s body. He was probably older than me but I think he was always like my baby brother. He would call me at five in the morning and go, “Donn-yahhh”. Some lover had sparred him and he was ready to commit suicide. He was incredibly talented. I would say he poured a lot himself into me and into my life. He was in love with me as a performer and he wanted to write songs to fit me. He was very inspired. I would spend a lot of time with him and another friend of ours, Bruce Roberts, and we would hang out and play songs to each other and write. We had a breakfast club. Paul, Bruce, myself, and a couple of other friends of ours would meet for breakfast and we’d just shoot the breeze and then go off and write. We were very close. It was tough when he passed away. Paul was a dear friend and a brother and influenced – greatly—the outcome of my career.

Applauding the Ringmaster

Neil Bogart

Applauding the Ringmaster

Before Paul Jabara and Marc Paul Simon passed away, they suffered a great loss along with many of their friends and colleagues – the death of Neil Bogart. In 1982, 39-year-old Neil Bogart, a father and husband, lost his battle with cancer. For an individual with such vision and foresight about the marketing and making of music to die so young remains a tragic loss that cannot be adequately quantified. Simply, Neil Bogart believed in taking chances with new ideas and, in the process, introduced legendary musical acts to the world and made millions of lives a little more colorful.

His legacy lives on not only through the music of Casablanca but also through the Bogart Pediatric Cancer Research Program, a non-profit founded in 1984 by Joyce Bogart-Trabulus and songwriter Carole Bayer Sager. Based at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, the organization has helped fund a number of programs to support research for leukemia, cancer, and AIDS since its inception 25 years ago, giving children the same kind of hope and inspiration that guided Neil Bogart throughout his lifetime.

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Leroy Gomez (Santa Esmeralda): When Neil died, nobody could fill his shoes.

Brooks: When I saw him for the last time, he came up to me and gave me a hug. At the time, I was just signed to Bob and Jerry Greenberg over at Atlantic Records. He was telling them, “Oh you have a great artist here. Just keep with her”.

Brett Hudson (The Hudson Brothers): The last time I saw Neil, he invited my brothers and I to a party that he had. We sat for about 45 minutes or an hour, me and my two brothers, and we just talked and had a few drinks and laughs. We hugged goodbye and said let’s get together. That was the last time I saw him, at that party.

Hart-Winer: I bumped into him, I think at the Palm Restaurant, sometime before he passed away. He was kind of going there to make everybody know that he was still okay. The face of him was to make the world think everything was alright because he was keeping the label together so that it would be worth something.

Rodriguez: I loved that man dearly and I know that he loved and admired me. God bless him.

Summer: Neil’s passing was very painful. I sang at his funeral but it was an extremely difficult moment for me. He was my Clive Davis. I couldn’t see myself without him as part of my life because he was so in the making of it. It was a very tough time for me. Very tough, very lost.

Holmes: I never had a last conversation with him. It was really tough. I remember going to the wake, sitting there, and all of his kids, who adored me (I was their Uncle Cecil), they would come up to me and they would ask me about their dad. It was really a hard time. I really loved the guy. He was the one that really made my career. He gave me an opportunity where nobody else would. I always felt like he was a brother to me. We’d get up in the mornings and go run together. I was older than him but he felt like a big brother because he really looked out for me.

Klein: He was, without a doubt, the PT Barnum of the record business. He really was.

Aucoin: Neil would shake your hand and say yes to something and you knew it was written in stone. It wasn’t like the lawyers were going to come in and change it. There are very few people today, or even then, that you could say that about. Plus, he had a thirst for life, he loved people, he loved artists. He was there for every artist. He would go to shows. To get the president of a label out today, good luck. That was a time and place where we all enjoyed being together. We loved the artists. We loved what was going on in the industry.

Brooks: Well he was the boss! He was really like a risk taker. He’s a gambler. He went out there and he was on a roll.

Joe “Bean” Esposito (Brooklyn Dreams): He was a wound-up guy. Very animated. I could tell he was very smart. I know this guy was a real risk taker. I admired the guy because he put everything out there and he became very, very successful.

Prestwood; I was fascinated with Neil because he was such a talented man. He just had an ear for things that were amazing. He did something that was phenomenal.

Hart-Winer: He was just this cherub! He was adorable. He was so happy and smiling and he had so much energy. I thought he was really charming.

Gregory Johnson (Cameo): Neil Bogart was a very jovial guy. He was always laughing. He seemed pretty cool.

Goldman: Neil was the perpetual dreamer and he was also somebody that made things happen and made things come true. I don’t think that there’s anything like him that happened again. It was pretty awe-inspiring, that’s all I can say. After working for him, I didn’t want to work in the industry anymore. It wasn’t fun anymore. I really had fun going to work. I always had the most respect for this man and he was my mentor. I will say that until the day I die.

Summer: Neil was a maverick and he was very much a Renaissance Man. He was somebody who could take a lot of foreign objects and make them work together. He was like a magnetic comet moving through a sphere of space, attaching and drawing everything to himself that came near him. You didn’t want to leave him. He was just magnetic. You loved him. He was, for me, a mentor, he was a big brother, he was a protector, he was an educator, he was my parent when I needed him.

Larry Blackmon (Cameo): He was a maverick, a renegade. He was a solid ears music man in the business. I never got to go to his house and experience his little disco room but I had a great deal of respect for anyone that was able to have what it took during those days to build anything.

Tomi Jenkins (Cameo): I would say he was a maverick. He was one of the most innovative men. He was a music guy, just a guy who loved music, who was supportive of musicians and the music that they made. That was Neil, man

Bob Perry (Independent Promotion, Southeast): Neil was a brilliant record man. He had a great ear and he had lots of friends. I would promote his stuff when I was working for other labels because I just wanted to and I’d stay in touch with him. He was a great record man. He was a great guy who kept his word. In my little corner, when I was 27 years old getting ten grand from Neil, that was pretty damn amazing.

Rob Gold (Director of Marketing): When he interviewed me for the gig he paced back and forth behind his desk like a caged tiger. He was a genius but also, in my opinion, there’s a cycle of genius close to insane and he was some of both. If Neil were around today, believe me he’d been one of the first to tie in gaming and the Internet to whatever he was promoting. I am proud of my association with Casablanca and Neil Bogart.

Cowan: He was a genius. I always admired him. He was a very wise man. He was a philosopher. He once said to me at one of the first meetings that I had with him around the time that Casablanca opened thief first office across the street from my office at Gibson & Stromberg, “The most revolutionary thing a person can do is change their mind”. I never forgot that.

David Hodo(Village People “Construction Worker”): He was an extremely likeable person, enthusiastic nearly to a fault, but he was Casablanca. I studied him closely, as I do anyone I respect, and learned a lot from him.

Ray D’Ariano(Director of East Coast Artist Relations): Neil Bogart was Casablanca, in my opinion. He was a great human being and he was the record guy of all time, in my opinion. There was a magazine back in the day and on the cover they called him the “Sultan of Sell”. He was like Walt Disney, Vince McMahon, George Lucas, Ringling Brothers. The music business never saw anything like him before. His way of thinking and his way of doing things was beyond their comprehension. They didn’t know what he was doing. They would never sign KISS. They would never sign Parliament-Funkadelic. They would never hire a nighttime promotion staff to go to discos because they wouldn’t even know about the discos!

Nathan: He was a pioneer. He was a brilliant guy. He was the epitome of a snakeoil salesman. He could sell sand in a desert. He created illusion. He was an amazing character.

Hudson: What I learned from Neil Bogart was the art of the pitch and sell the sizzle not the steak. That’s what he did. Neil’s attitude was, “I’ll get you there but your talent has to sustain you.”

Moulton: I think Neil, God rest his soul, was the person that most people feel was the person or the label that really got behind disco, even though he had KISS and Cameo. He was the one that really brought it to the foreground, considering that a few years earlier he thought it sucked. I gave him credit because I knew how much he disliked it then.

Chotin: He had his hand on what was coming in the music scene. He was just ahead of the game. I think that’s what made it so special.

Artie Wayne: People, as we grow older, should let go of negative things in our lives. My relationship with Neil was for so long and so productive and at one point or another, lucrative, even though we ended up on bad terms. In retrospect, those 24 or 25 years that I dealt with the guy are more important than a half-hour.

DiMino: He was easy to deal with and you just felt that he understood what you were trying to do. He was one of those guys that brought stuff out in you as well. He was able to get into that discussion with you, be part of it, and bring up ideas as well.

Goldman: He was an amazing, creative entrepreneur in the greatest sense. He’d come up with ideas that would just blow me away. I remember just being enamored by him. He was my mentor.

Rodriguez: There was an amazing energy and excitement about Neil Bogart. Neil surrounded himself with the best. If he knew that there was a particular individual who was the best, then whatever cost it took to get that individual, he was going to get him or her. He assembled an incredible team of people.

Nancy Sain (National Pop Promotion): Neil had magic and he spread it around. It was contagious. Knowledge is power and Neil gave me knowledge.

Jean Millington (Fanny): He was quite personable and charismatic. He was always very pleasant and on the upside and very hopeful speaking about the band, what’s going to happen.

Sudano: My fondest memory of Neil is just a picture of him in the office standing up just excited. Neil’s vision and energy, passion and belief and can-do spirit are what I remember about Neil. He just didn’t see “no” and in spite of whatever the odds were, he just saw the finish line and the victory and had no fear. When he couldn’t make payroll, he still kept up appearances. It was all or nothing for Neil. We’ve missed that since he’s been gone, trying to find that somebody who believes that much.

Summer: To this day, Bruce and I will be doing something and we’ll look at each other, something will become difficult and we don’t know how to get around it, and we’ll look at each other and go, “What would Neil do?” We still do it at this age of our lives. I would say that Neil has left an incredible legacy in us that’s intrinsic that will stay with us for the rest of our lives.

What is the Legacy?

What is the Legacy?

Though Tommy Mottola resuscitated the Casablanca logo in recent years, and has released albums by Lindsey Lohan, Mika, and Ryan Leslie, the present-day Casablanca is related to the Neil Bogart-era in name only. The years 1974-1980, when Casablanca and its artists ascended to the world stage, are the soundtrack to Casablanca’s true legacy. What is that legacy? A maverick company? Landmark music? Bigger than life? All of the above and so much more.

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Holmes: The legacy? It’s hard for me to put that in words. I wish I could. It was a wonderful company and a wonderful place to be. It will live on. The lore of it will always be around.

Jenkins: I would say that Casablanca’s legacy, to me, will be forever rooted in a label that took a chance on diverse music and was run by a guy who took chances. It was reflected in the whole way the label was run. There’ll never be another Casablanca Records. That, to me, that’s the legacy. They did things their own way. It was run by music people.  It was the perfect label. I can’t think of any label that could have been better for us to be at during that time in our career where we needed a label that was just like us, that was different, that took chances, that was eclectic, that was out there. It was unique for its time and times were unique even back then. It was perfect, man, it was perfect.

Millington: Even the name Casablanca, what does it conjure up? Nightclubs and intrigue!

Gomez: Casablanca gave you the freedom to be you. They let a lot of people do things that a lot of record companies wouldn’t do. I don’t think on another label the Village People would have had the success that they had. There were no barriers. Neil would actually try out all of his stuff with his entourage. He would have a party and then throw things on. If he thought it was taking off with his entourage, he knew that he was in the right direction. His entourage had their fingers on the pulse of the music.

Hodo: My fondest memory about our years with Casablanca was the circus of characters that Neil Bogart had turned into the top label of its time. We loved everyone in the company.  I think Casablanca’s legacy is one that will never be repeated. That is unless another Neil Bogart comes along. It was the label of its time.

Aucoin: It was the kind of company that always glorified the artist, really cared about the artist. It wasn’t just craziness all the time. It was a lot of work but a lot of good people.

Esposito: It shows me that when you believe in something, no matter what anybody says, you got to follow your beliefs because they did things that everybody thought wasn’t possible. They had some great talent. They created something that no other record company had. It was a great time. I wouldn’t trade that for anything. I’m glad I was there to be part of it.

Blackmon: Casablanca was left of center, for sure. All I know is that you can count on half of one hand the companies at that time that had that the courage to do what Neil Bogart did.

Summer: I think Casablanca’s greatest legacy may not be one that the world recognizes. I think its emotional legacy lives on in the people that were on Casablanca.

Prestwood: I think that Casablanca will be known for being one of the most creative environments as well as having talented people that worked in the industry. I really do believe that. I believe that Casablanca was a record company where we built talent. The amazing thing about it is that we passed it on. We didn’t just do things for ourselves there, we gave back to others. It was so full of love. That’s one of the main things that I would say about it. It was a company that was so full of love, where everyone respected one another and we were all on equal footing. There was none of the stuff you would find in other environments. It’s one of the most talented and creative companies that ever existed. Along with all the other things that they may say about it… it was basically just a place where you walked through the door and you felt something special in that place. When you came into that place, you were in a whole other environment, a whole other dimension. It had a dimension of its own. The talent and the people that it brought together were just phenomenal.

Jim Watson (National Promotions Coordinator): The people I worked with were the best and we pretty much all cared very much for each other. I wish those days had never ended. We were a family. When you bring good people together with a man at the helm with the vision and drive all of those that are lucky enough to be in the boat make the vessel sail even without any wind.

Esty: It was like being thrown into another world and I had no fear. In the end, I just plowed on and did it. I had never taken an orchestration class or an engineering class or anything like that. I’d write these parts and then just play them. We had great musicians and singers.

Nathan: It was certainly a real pioneer in the area of dance music. KISS aside, and KISS had an amazing run, the legacy that Casablanca left on the dance floor certainly can’t be denied.

Bennett: With the advent of the Internet, I realize how many people really enjoyed that music more than I knew. I think people need to dance again. Human beings need to dance and sing. We just sit in front of our damn computers now. Everybody’s miserable and afraid. It’s this collective consciousness of fear. The music needs to get joyful again.

Tom Nikosey (Designer): I would say the legacy of Casablanca was maybe the intro of disco on a national and international scale. Disco took its roots from all kinds of things. I think it became an entity in itself in the music industry. Casablanca really did it or at least they started it big time. Disco didn’t last a whole long time. The true hard rock and rollers and the jazz artists, they were thumbs-down on disco because it was mass-produced music or manufactured music. Now it has its place in music history and it’s kind of cool. It’s fun. It harkens back to a better time, to be honest with you.

Patterson: It was one of a kind. It was loose and everybody was into getting it done.

Chotin: It was an opportunity to work for a man who had foresight and was really ahead of the time and would allow you to think outside the box. I know that’s kind of a cliché. It taught me to trust my instincts on things. It taught me how to integrate different skills, different aspects of business.

Castle: A lot of great music and a lot of great memories. A lot of really fine people who were executives and creative people that had a certain magic that they contributed to the industry at that point in time. The legacy is all the great music that came from the label, the art direction, the time itself-that era was what was captured. The art reflects the lifestyle of the time. I think that says a lot, a lot for Neil Bogart and a lot for Russ Regan, both great guys.

Perry: Casablanca was a family. It was a great family. We went out there, we did the job, I did the job. I never got called out because my expense account was too fucking high. We cared about each other. We took that label from nothing to the legacy it is now.

Hart-Winer: It was true entertainment. It was music, visual. It was this magical slice of time that produced so much happiness. It introduced everybody who worked there to think outside the norm and not in any perverse, weird way. Look at the possibilities. Look at what can be done. It doesn’t hurt to be outrageous sometimes.

Worrell: I used to get sick of hearing “Flash Light” because they’d play it all the time. I thank God for the hit but then every time you’d turn the radio on, there’s “Flash Light”. Even to this day, friends in Los Angeles, they’ll call and say, “Guess what’s on the radio? They’re playing ‘Flash Light’. They pumpin’ you up man.”

Brooks: People still call me and say, “‘After Dark’ is on!” They’re still playing it. We had a great run. All the artists I can say were really talented. Whether we got the chance to really grow was the question. It was such a happy time that will live forever. When anybody plays any of the material, from that time, it was a happy time and people were in love the music. They were in love with each other.

Sudano: The label defined that era in that moment in time. It was a great time because it was a lot of fun but at the same time it’s kind of like the shooting star that goes up so fast and it just blows up. There were a lot of people who went down—it was the same thing in the ‘60s—but we have the remnants of a great memory and great music.

Moroder: I’m thankful to Neil Bogart and the crew of Casablanca first, for giving me a chance to release my first product in the USA and then, sticking with me for a long time.

Hudson: They made some really good music, first and foremost, with a stable of unique – if you look at that roster, the talent was very diverse but there was a common thread in it and you know what it was? We were all natural performers, from Donna to KISS to Angel to my brothers and I to Parliament. The legacy is really good music and really good live performers. Neil was the utmost believer in getting your butt out there onstage. When Neil saw my brothers and I perform for the first time, he came backstage and he said, these are the kind of acts I should sign all the time. Whatever you did, blew me away. The legacy would be the music and the performers, when all is said and done, and Neil being a renegade. The guy broke the glass ceiling at the time.

LaRue: There’s a lot of fucking landmark music that came from Casablanca. It changed the music of the world. It simply did. Everything since has been affected by the music that was made at Casablanca during those four or five years.

Rodriguez: When I think about Casablanca, I think about all the creativity, I think about uniqueness. I think about thinking outside of the box. I think about the fun we had doing it. I also think about the fact that it prepared me. It continued to open my mind and open me up so that anything is possible. To be timeless, you have to be open. That experience of openness and dreaming and thinking of the possibilities, that really came from Casablanca.

D’Ariano: It’s the disco label of all time, of eternity. It was the apogee of disco. If that music is out of vogue at the moment, grab a hold of The Casablanca Records Story (1994) box set and throw that stuff on in your car and crank it up. It’s like listening to the Benny Goodman Band or the early Elvis records. It’s just classic music of an era. Neil was the greatest promoter in the history of the music business but if it wasn’t in the grooves, it wouldn’t have happened. It’s a combination of great music and the great promotion of it.

Wayne: The legacy is that there are people who know what the public wants, likes, and will buy. There aren’t that many people anymore because a lot of people who once had that power have either died or lost interest in continuing.

Klein: Casablanca Record and Filmworks was a one of a kind label thanks in such a major way to Neil Bogart and his P.T. Barnum ways. Advertising played a much bigger role in the marketing of their music than any other label’s marketing. All the other labels would rely on pay-for-play whereas Neil really integrated commercials. Neil used the commercials with this whole bigger than life sound that we got with Ernie Anderson to really make the label have a presence that was major. He was a combination of a huge record company, a television network, and a movie studio all in one. Neil really understood the importance of marketing and specifically using commercials to give his label the presence of a real major entertainment entity. He did it very successfully. I owe a big part of my career to him and to that label.

Wheeler: Casablanca was a time and place. I don’t think Casablanca will ever really work as a brand again. I think that’s one label that should have been put to bed when it was over. What happened during the times of Casablanca and through the dance music era, it taught many people from that era of time how to hear a hit and know when the public is just going to jump. What it taught you was to be so tuned into the streets that you could recognize a trend before it happened and you’ll find in the history of the music business that many people that came out of the disco era actually had very successful careers working street music, whatever trend was coming, you could feel it, you knew it.

Smith: Casablanca has left the worldwide public a legacy of music that will never ever again be matched or topped for what it represented, what it gave, the happiness and joy and yet there’s still so much of it that people don’t know about. People’s love and commitment will never be matched. They were absolutely glory days. I love music and there hasn’t been anything like it since.

Rodriguez: To me the legacy is the spirit of not being afraid to open up a new chapter in music. The legacy, we will talk about the music, we will talk about the artists, but also the legacy is in the people that were part of that movement – Neil Bogart, Bruce Bird, Jheryl Busby, Ruben Rodriguez, Larry Harris, Cecil Holmes. The legacy that the people involved with the music were just as creative as the artists. I think that was one hell of a combination. The artists were encouraged to do their thing. We always wanted to do something different and unique, like our artists. Look at the label – the way it was done, the colors. That’s classic. It’s a gorgeous piece of art. You go back even to

the days when radio spots were on Casablanca, Neil had one particular voice at the time where you would hear the voice of Casablanca. The imaging was a very key factor. To be special in the marketplace, to dare to be different, to be excited about it—that, to me, is the legacy. At Casablanca, we didn’t just come to work, we’d come to make a difference. The same thing held true for Casablanca, the label. It came to make a difference.

Goldman: It was a bevy of ideas that had no bottom and no ceiling. In terms of painting the building, Neil always made sure it was shocking pink.