ROLLING THE DICE
At the end of 1988, I left Elektra. It was an issue of money. I felt I should’ve been earning a lot more, but Bob disagreed.
I wound up at UNI Records, which was a label started by MCA in 1966, but had been closed down by 1972. Then, in 1988, a few senior executives at MCA decided they wanted to revive the UNI label and make it into a niche record company.
Although I was intrigued and fired up to do something great with UNI—I never felt completely comfortable there.
The first band I signed was Swans. Swans was a much respected, experimental rock band from New York who were absolutely brutal. The band was formed by Michael Gira, their singer and principal songwriter.
Over the years their music continued to evolve, but it still had that savage beauty at its core. By the time I got involved with them, I felt like I was in church when I listened to their majestic, hypnotic, and transcendent sound.
Swans had become very popular on the college circuit. Their rebellious lyrics were sometimes shouted, almost chanted, although Michael had a strong baritone vocal sound that came out in other songs. Attending a Swans performance, you could be assured it would be the loudest experience of your concert life. When other bands turned it up to 10, Swans usually turned it up to 12. They did this for at least two hours at every performance.
Because of their rising popularity, I became interested in them and offered them a record deal with UNI. We ended up recording the album with producer/bass player Bill Laswell from the band Material. It turned out to be extremely different than anything Swans had recorded before.
The album was called The Burning World—a moody, somewhat bleak, and arresting record. It was a seismic shift from what Swans previously did and were known for. The band was in agreement to record this subdued, understated record and I had a very large influence on the direction of how I heard The Burning World being recorded. Michael and the band agreed to do a cover of Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home,” which I thought worked very well within the context of the other nine songs.
I then presented the band with the image of a delicious yellow Calla Lily by Mapplethorpe, which I felt reflected the overall tone of the recording and would be perfect for the front cover of the vinyl record and the CD.
Elegant, surprisingly tender . . . Burning World redefines all its precedents in The Swans Discography. Earlier celebrations of mutilation and anguish, too disturbing, too hopeless to endure at length, now suggest that only by passing through so many frames of darkness could the Swans approach pure light.1
Many years later, I look upon The Burning World as somewhat of a personal success. Nonetheless, Gira had always been very specific about Swans and in the end, he wasn’t happy about the record at all. I think he felt he was being bullied by both the producer, Bill Laswell (a force of nature himself) and me. Michael wasn’t pleased with the way his voice was recorded and the overall feeling of the production. I think he felt like he was not in control and that was very uncomfortable for him.
In my opinion, The Burning World is a small masterpiece. But when it was released, UNI did not do a lot to promote it. I think they were getting pressure from the powers-that-be at MCA—who were not feeling the vibe of the UNI label after all.
The record did well on the college radio charts because of the previous history of Swans, and reviews of The Burning World were mostly terrific. However, the album did not perform well overall and Swans were dropped. MCA then closed the UNI label and Michael went on to start his own, Young God Records.
While The Burning World was out of print, it continued to generate a lot of interest, so in 2000, a small independent label called No Limits Records picked it up and redistributed it.
The Burning World is a blueprint for what Swans did later. By the end of the ’90s, that album made sense. At the time, people were like, “What the hell were they doing?” But as much as Michael might hate it, it’s the root of what they subsequently did.2
After the demise of UNI, I ended up at Geffen Records. Geffen had originally interviewed me back in 1983 but now, after six years at Elektra and two years at UNI, I think they recognized me as a sought-after A&R executive. They offered me a job in their satellite office in New York City.
The first band that was brought to me was by my dear friend, song-writer and producer Daniel Rey. He was scouting a lot of New York’s East Village bands and had been working with Circus of Power and Raging Slab as well as White Zombie, whom he particularly liked. He had shopped all these bands around and ended up getting Circus and Raging signed to RCA but had no success with White Zombie. So he called me and suggested I go see them live.
I went over to a little, dingy bar on Lafayette Street under a restaurant called Indochine. The space was open for musicians to play there, though it was just a dank, dark box. When I got there, White Zombie was playing on a small stage in the farthest corner of the room. It was very, very loud. I don’t remember any real songs but I liked the noise radiating from the stage, and their lead singer, Rob Zombie, exuded real charisma.
Rob had all of these dreadlocks flying everywhere and I loved all the sweat pouring off of him. After the show, I chatted with them and I thought they were the loveliest people I had ever met. Then I spoke to Rob, and we took an instant liking to each other. He said to me: “I think we’re going to be big, and I’m going to direct movies, so take a chance on us.” I believed him.
“Let’s do some demos before we do the deal,” I said.
There was a producer I was interested in named Jim Thirlwell, who was a bit of a character. He was an artist who created a lot of inventive noise, and he went under the name “Foetus.” Most of the records he recorded at the time used the word “Foetus” in it: “You’ve Got Foetus on Your Breath,” “Foetus Uber Alles,” “Foetus Under Glass.” I thought he was a very cool guy and that he was perfect to record the White Zombie demos.
He produced the demos for Geffen, and we loved them. Unfortunately, though, egos collided, and as a result of that, Jim did not wind up producing the album.
We ended up hiring Andy Wallace, because we loved his production work on Slayer’s Seasons in the Abyss. While we were getting ready to record, Rob got the idea to try and get Vincent Price to appear on their debut album, because we loved his spoken word on Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
The person who contacted Price for us was Toni Quirk. Toni was one of the best things to happen to me at Geffen when I hired her to be my executive assistant. She was super smart and literally dropped down from heaven.
Toni took the helm to contact Price and was relentless with his manager to get him to agree to be on the album, but he kept saying no. Then one day after her thirtieth phone call to his manager, Vincent Price called Toni himself:
“I decided to call you myself because you are so persistent. I just can’t do it because I had such a bad experience on Thriller that I decided after that I would never do anything like it again.”
Toni assured him the experience with White Zombie would be very different and, finally, Price agreed. Unfortunately, he was suffering from emphysema and Parkinson’s disease, and was never able to make the recording.
Rob brought in another one of his outrageous ideas and that was to contact Charles Manson. So, Toni called Corcoran State Prison where Manson was incarcerated. She somehow maneuvered to get a note passed to Manson to see if he would allow his voice on the White Zombie album. She said she was so scared when she made the call, she gave a phony name. Manson never answered the note.
The band also wanted to use a sample from underground filmmaker, Russ Meyer’s 1965 movie Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! The line in the movie was “Get up and kill!” I called Mr. Meyer at his home office one morning to see if this was possible. He asked me who I was and why I was calling him, because he was sitting there with a double hernia and did not want to be bothered. I was taken aback but I let him know that I worked for Geffen Records, and that I had signed a new band who wanted to use the sample that I mentioned in my fax. Upon saying yes, he said he wanted to get paid immediately. The fee was $1,000. I faxed him a simple one-page financial document for the use. He signed it, returned it immediately, and was paid within seventy-two hours.
When the album, which was titled La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Volume One, was released, everyone was really excited. There was a buzz in the underground hard rock community about White Zombie, so Geffen expected massive sales.
But a few months later, it stalled. It hadn’t gotten anywhere near the million mark we had expected.
Then two cartoon characters on MTV, Beavis and Butt-Head—socially inept teenage delinquents—decided White Zombie was their favorite band. Mike Judge, their creator, ended up playing White Zombie’s first single “Thunder Kiss ’65,” morning, noon, and night. In 1993, Beavis and Butt-Head were huge, as was MTV, and within a very short time, they catapulted La Sexorcisto to a million units in sales.
Eventually, White Zombie recorded one more album for Geffen called Astro Creep 2000. However, between Rob’s overwhelming ego and his desire to go solo, he ended up breaking up the band.
One day, when I was at Geffen in Los Angeles, I was called up to David’s office and he said to me:
“Call Bill Graham.”
“Do you know what it’s about?” I asked him.
“No. Call Bill Graham!”
I went to the conference room and I called him.
“Is Mr. Graham available?” I asked the person who answered the phone.
“Is this Michael Alago?”
“Uh, yes,” I said.
“It’s Toni! Toni Isabella!
“Oh, hi, Toni!” I said.
“Hi! Bill wants to speak to you,” and she transferred the call to his office.
“Hi, Mr. Graham—?”
“Bill,” he insisted.
I swallowed hard, feeling like I couldn’t be that familiar on our first phone call, so I just said: “Good Morning! What’s happening?”
“Can you come to Jacksonville over the weekend?”
“Ooooh—I’m finishing up a project right now, but I’d be happy to do that on Monday or Tuesday of next week.”
“Okay, call my office and let me know what day works for you. I’ll pick you up at the airport in Jacksonville. I want you to hear some music.”
“Cool! Would you like to tell me who it is?”
“No.” he replied.
“Okay,” I said, feeling a little weird, but I wasn’t about to argue with Bill Graham.
The following week, I flew to Jacksonville, and Bill Graham picked me up at the airport with his chauffeur. They were both sitting in the front seat, and I was in the back. Bill turned to me and without any prompting, started talking to me about Jimmy Page and Janis Joplin—amazing stories—pearls coming out of his mouth that were awe-inspiring. I just sat there listening and thinking to myself, “Bill Graham picked me up at the airport and I’m sitting in the car with him and his chauffeur and he’s regaling me with these stories.” I loved it!
We finally got to a location outside the city, and it turned out to be an empty shopping mall. I was thinking as I looked at that desolate place: “This is so Night of the Living Dead!”
We went into the building and all the lights were on, but it felt very strange because it appeared as if it had been vacant for some time. All of the store fronts were empty and boarded up. Scattered around the place were large green plastic plants with water fountains gushing out from the middle of each one.
We started walking down the hall. Suddenly, I was hearing music in the distance and I thought: “Wait a minute—there are some artists who are so recognizable that when you hear the first few chords of a song, you absolutely know who it is. What I heard could only be the Allman Brothers or Lynyrd Skynyrd.
We got to the end of the hall and opened the door from where I heard the music playing and there they were—Lynyrd Skynyrd! I was immediately transported back to a starstruck, music-loving, fourteen-year-old in Brooklyn.
As I entered the room, I was greeted by Gary Rossington, lead guitarist and founding member of the band. He approached me and said, “Hey Michael, great to have you here, but we need five minutes.”
“Absolutely!” I said. Then, Artimus Pyle, their drummer, came out of the rehearsal space. He welcomed me and offered me a beer. Then he asked, “Would you like to see my scrapbook?”
“Sure!” I said.
We opened it and the first picture was of Artimus in the hospital after the plane crash with his leg up in a brace and hundreds of pins in it.
[I]n 1977 . . . during a flight from Greenville, South Carolina, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s tour plane crashed in a heavily wooded area of southeastern Mississippi during a failed emergency landing attempt, killing band-members Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines, and Cassie Gaines, as well as the band’s assistant road manager and the plane’s pilot and co-pilot. Twenty others survived the crash.3
The entire scrapbook was made up of clippings from the plane crash; it was heartbreaking. I was very respectful while he showed it to me and said how grateful I was for those in the band who had survived, and that I could never imagine how overwhelming that experience had been for them.
It had been nearly fifteen years since the crash when their brothers were killed, and it was still at the forefront of their lives—it was the tie that forever bonded them.
After the accident, Johnny Van Zant took over on lead vocals. His voice blended with the band perfectly, and it was equally as badass as his brother Ronnie’s.
Upon entering the rehearsal room, I introduced myself to everybody. Johnny handed me a CD of their new demos and said, “We would love to be on Geffen Records and we’re now going to play you some of the songs.”
So there I was standing in the room—a teenager all over again—with Skynyrd performing only for me—it blew me the fuck away.
When the songs ended, I thanked the entire band. Gary invited me to dinner later that evening, and then they asked me if there was anything else I would like them to play.
“Hell, yeah!” I said.
They started counting down and the next thing I knew they were playing “Free Bird.” Not expecting them to play that, I raised my hand into the air and shouted: “Wait a minute, guys!”
They looked at me with disbelief. No one had probably ever told them not to play “Free Bird.”
“Can you just play “That Smell?”
They looked at me again. Gary did the countdown, and they went right into “That Smell”—my favorite song. I was now sitting on the floor, like a kid, in front of Billy Powell’s Hammond B3 and like I said, when you hear that very specific sound from the Hammond B3, it could only be the Allman Brothers or Lynyrd Skynyrd.
We didn’t end up signing them because they just weren’t the right fit for the Geffen roster at that time, but Atlantic Records picked them up for their next two album releases, Lynyrd Skynyrd 1991 and The Last Rebel.
I signed another artist to Geffen: Kane Roberts. He had been Alice Cooper’s lead guitarist. He was a big, attractive guy, who was very talented, and he knew a lot about writing catchy rock tunes. I had seen him live with Alice, and I knew about his work on MCA. He totally impressed me.
Right away, it was clear that we got along musically and that we had a similar sense of humor. I knew I wanted to make a commercial, hard rock top-forty record with him.
I contacted the hottest producer of the day, Desmond Child, to come work on Kane’s Geffen debut album, Saints And Sinners. Desmond was hot off the heels of Cher, Ricky Martin and Bon Jovi, among others. He was intensely busy but he wanted to make this album with Kane. However, he left it largely in the hands of his engineer, Sir Arthur Payson. At one point, Kane and I discussed the problem of Desmond rarely being in the studio, because it started to bother us.
Ultimately, though, we realized the songs were there, so we figured, let’s just move forward. We also decided to pull a song off of Cher’s album Heart of Stone, because we loved it so much. The song was called “Does Anybody Really Fall in Love?” and had been written by Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora, and Diane Warren—who, at the time, could do no wrong. Every song Diane wrote turned into gold. We recorded it, and it eventually became a semi-hit for Kane, peaking at #38 on the Billboard charts.
I was doing my best to keep the vibe of the record alive in the California Geffen offices, but they were not feeling it. At some point they stopped promoting the album, and Kane was dropped. Fast forward to 2018: I executive produced the new Kane Roberts Album, The New Normal on Frontiers Records, which was released in 2019.
Given everything that had happened at Geffen in the early nineties, though, I was very proud that I was able to sign two remarkable artists to the label during this first stint at Geffen. I wasn’t a happy camper working in the New York satellite office, though, so I left. I felt like I wanted to go home so I called Krasnow at Elektra and asked if I could come back. He was very gracious and welcoming and said, “Of course.”
With Bruce Springsteen, 1976. (Author Collection)
With Arturo Vega in my office at Geffen Records, 1989. (© Demetrius Constantinus)
Kissing Deborah Harry backstage at Max’s, 1977. (Author Collection)
At Blondie show, CBGB, 1978. (Author Collection)
With John Lydon at The Ritz, May, 1981. (Photo courtesy of Pat Kepic)
PiL snapshot, New York City, May, 1981. (© Michael Alago)
Jerry Brandt, The Ritz, 1981. (© Michael Alago)
Polaroid of Cliff Burton and Kirk Hammett, Elektra Records Office, 1984. (© Michael Alago)
With Lars Ulrich backstage, London, 1984. (Author Collection)
With James Hetfield backstage, New York, 2018. (Author Collection)
With Lars Ulrich, New York, 2018. (Author Collection)
Always fun with Metal Church: Kurdt Vanderhoof, Kirk Arrington, and hiding in the back, vocalist David Wayne (RIP), 1986. (Author Collection)
With Flotsam & Jetsam, New York City, 1986. (Author Collection)
With George Lynch of Dokken, Tokyo, 1988. (Author Collection)
“John and Barking Dog”, West Village Piers, New York City, 1981. (© Stanley Stellar)
Joseph Beuys “Postkarten” box, signed, 1984. (Author Collection)
“Jayson Sucks”, West Village Piers, New York City, 1981. (© Stanley Stellar)
Polaroid of Beuys’ artwork, signed, 1984. (Author Collection)
With Joseph Beuys, Dusseldorf, 1984. (Author Collection)
BJ Robinson, New Orleans, 1979. (Photo by George Dureau, courtesy of Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans)
Props used by George Dureau for photo sessions. I acquired these props at auction. (Photo courtesy of Crescent City Auction Gallery, New Orleans)
Raymond Hall, New Orleans, 1979. (Photo by George Dureau, courtesy of Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans)
With George Dureau at The Carrington House, New Orleans, 2013. (Author Collection)
With Kane Roberts, 2016. (Author Collection)
White Zombie ticket stub from the Marquee in London, UK, 1992. (Author Collection)
Pulling on Doyle’s “devil lock,” Misfits, 2013. (Author Collection)
Doyle backstage at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, 2017. (© Michael Alago)
With Liza on opening night of “Minnelli on Minnelli,” at The Palace Theatre, 1999. (Author Collection)
Swans The Burning World album cover, 1989. “Calla Lily” photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe. (Author Collection)
Frenzied journal writing, January, 1995. (Author Collection)