Part Four: Dancing on the Pinnacle: 1978-1979

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.

+ + +

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.

+ + +

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.

+ + +

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”.

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!