The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [26]
Many of them embraced end-of-the-day-bring-to-the-table-ese; others fooled themselves into insouciant contempt for the bosses signing their enormous paychecks. They signed band upon band upon band.
The story of Nirvana—the band that wrought the cultural sea change—was perceived like this: Nirvana was friends with Sonic Youth, asked them which label was best, and Sonic Youth said, “Our label!” Bands were signed because they might be friends with other bands, or they carried a whiff of prestige that might attract more profitable acts. Some bands were pursued as trophies by the labels, pelted with cash in bidding wars, and shrugged off nonchalantly when their CDs tanked.
Nobody worried. They were tax write-offs for companies with much tax to write off. Plus, who knows what this stuff is, what it means? Any of these bands could fluke into a hit.
A hit! What major labels did, above all else, was seek a hit; a song that gets played on the radio, and then, once MTV was assured by radio of its hit-ness (MTV’s reputation as a tastemaker being altogether undeserved) on cable TV. The fanzine-bred label people didn’t know what hits were, or how to get bands to make them; many of them were unaware that hits were the heart of the enterprise at all. Eventually the bands-that-were-friends-with-bands, the bands-with-artistic-merit—and, alas, that new guard of A&R people, who couldn’t just go play in bars and thus had to find other ways to make a living—discovered that they had wandered into a car dealership and sniffily announced they were shopping for boats.
Corpulent, delicate Stanley Ray used to work in the stockroom at his label but was promoted to A&R when another guy quit. He got the job because he went out to clubs every night, compulsively (if he spent a night at home he’d jabber neurotically about how he must be missing out on something). He was bald on top, with two dirty-blond dreadlocks tied into a ponytail.
He met with us in the revolving restaurant atop the Marriott in Times Square and charmed us comprehensively. He hinted at stories about bands getting fucked by labels, said, “No, I should stop, I can’t tell you that story.” We begged, and with a theatrical sigh, he said, “I shouldn’t tell you this,” then told the sordid tales, with names coyly omitted.
His boss was an ex-football player who’d fluked into putting out singles by L.A. punk rock bands in the ’70s. He was a grey-haired man in big glasses—sort of Harry Caray–looking—who liked to wear a sport jacket over cutoff jeans. He flew out to New York, met us at a Japanese restaurant, sketched out a diagram on a napkin of how his label meshed with its major label parent, Warner Bros. Then he told us, at length, about how he was going to leave the record business and build a house, in a cave, powered entirely by turbine engines.
(This guy told a story about once having signed James Brown, incongruously, to his then-minuscule punk rock label. He said that James’s contract specified that he be given three Cadillacs; one went to a woman in Kentucky, another to a woman in Ohio, and one was for James. The sessions were wretched. Having given up on finishing a usable tune, the guy told James, sarcastically, “Why don’t you try something New Wave on the chorus?” When the chorus came around, James shrieked, “New WAVE! New WAVE! New WAVE!”)
Stanley Ray had a pattern: he’d fall in love with a singer, pursue his band, sign them, then hate him. His charm was powerful. The other side of it was a whining, griping passive-aggressiveness that snarled out if a singer expressed some measure of positive self-regard. His stories invariably went back to how———from ———had once been so rad and they’d been close and he’d told Stanley Ray all his secret hopes, but then suddenly the singer had changed, had only hard-hearted interest