CHAPTER 2

The Rhino Label Part One

The Independent Years

We’re on a mission from God.

—Elwood Blues, the Blues Brothers

Because Richard, Jeff, and I had Wild Man’s album, he felt accepted—and loved—when he visited the Rhino store. In appreciation, he made up a song about us, “Go to Rhino Records”:

Go to Rhino Records on Westwood Boulevard

They have nice people there

They’ll show you where the records are

Where are the records?

They’re over there, they’re all over the place

Go to Rhino Records on Westwood Boulevard

You can get Herb Alpert and Jackie Lomax for 40¢*

Da doot, da dooo!

I called up Jeff Gold and told him to get to the store with his hand-held cassette recorder. We captured two takes of Wild Man bellowing his song in the back room. We gave Jeff “producer” credit. Richard and I decided to release it as a single. Because I had done this before with my band, I showed Richard the procedure.

But first we needed a “B” side. We wrote “Rhino, The Place to Go” with lyrics that celebrated how much our store was better than our competitors. For the recording, I sang, Richard played bass, Steve Rosen played guitar, and his brother Mick played drums. The other stores, rather than being offended, were amused that they were mentioned on a record, as amateurish as the performance was. We pressed 500 singles and gave them away to our customers as a gift in 1975.

I told Bill Stout about our release, and he offered to design a Rhino Records logo. It was a 1950s greaser-looking man-rhino with a pimply, teenage complexion and a record around his horn. I loved it. I designed the label to look like the well-organized one used by A&M Records, and we chose yellow: it was the best color as a background for black text, it was Richard’s favorite color, and it was the color of the coolest US label, Epic Records (for whom the Yardbirds, Hollies, Dave Clark Five, Jeff Beck Group, and Donovan had recorded in the 1960s).

Our single found its way to England where BBC DJ John Peel took a fancy to it and played it on his radio show. That’s when we pressed up an additional thousand to sell. It was so well liked and so novel that his listeners voted it into his Festive Fifty for 1976, placing it at #48. Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” topped the list.

This first single, which could be described as “novelty,” set the tone for many of Rhino’s early releases. Richard and I related to the fun and outrageousness of rock ’n’ roll, from cartoonish characters like Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, to the humor of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. The comedy we heard on the radio and on records greatly influenced us. Among the pleasures of listening to Top 40 radio in the 1950s and 1960s were the novelty records—as they were called—that became hits. David Seville, an actor who changed his name from Ross Bagdasarian, topped the charts with “Witch Doctor” in 1958. Its appeal was the unique sound of voices that were sped up in the recording. He used a similar approach, this time with harmonies, for Alvin and the Chipmunks. Decades before their animated cartoon shows of the early 1960s and 1980s, and the smash hit movies of the last few years, Seville achieved success with two top ten Chipmunk hits over a six-month period in the late 1950s.

Also in the ’50s we liked Sheb Wooley’s “The Purple People Eater” and Homer & Jethro’s “The Battle of Kookamunga,” which parodied Johnny Horton’s serious “Battle of New Orleans” into a teenage, summer camp setting. There were hits in the ’60s as well, like Napoleon XIV’s “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” which made it to number three. It featured a hysterical vocalist and manic effects in a comedic reflection of the country’s newfound interest in psychology. Radio playlists constricted in the 1970s, however, and subsequently deprived listeners the joy of hearing novelty records as part of the Top 40.

The early 1960s also saw a reaction to post-World War II conservatism with more self-expression proliferating in big-selling comedy albums, mostly recorded performances in clubs by Bill Cosby, Bob Newhart, Woody Allen, Jose Jimenez (a character of Bill Dana’s), and Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks with their 2000 Year Old Man. Lenny Bruce made a big impact on me, but not until his recordings were reissued in the early 1970s. This evolved into more produced, studio recorded albums by the Firesign Theatre and others.

Over the next year we experimented with various types of singles, testing this new market for independently pressed records. In 1976 we established a new label, Big 7 Inch Records, inspired by Bull Moose Jackson’s double-entendre song “Big Ten Inch Record.” Ten inches was the diameter of a 78 rpm record; seven inches, 45 rpm. We thought that competing record stores would not stock a record that would remind buyers of the Rhino store. We realized the Rhino imprint was not a problem when Bomp Records distributed our first two singles to Tower Records.

We released an intended comeback effort by Roky Erickson. Roky, Rhino’s second artist to have spent time in a mental institution, was leader of the 1960s psychedelic band the Thirteenth Floor Elevators. They never had a Top 40 hit, but were familiar from the track “You’re Gonna Miss Me” on Elektra’s Nuggets compilation album. Two Rhino customers, Greg Turner and Steve Besser, contacted Jeff Gold and the three of them ventured north to San Anselmo, near San Francisco, to help with the process. (Greg became a member of the Angry Samoans, whose 1982 album, Back from Samoa, was graded an “A” by noted critic Robert Christgau—and later, a college math professor.)

It was a harrowing experience. Jeff called the store frantically on more than one occasion. It seemed that the trio’s main purpose was to keep Roky occupied while his band recorded the instrumental backing, and then deliver him to the studio later to perform his vocals. They took him to an International House of Pancakes, and tipped the waitress generously to make sure the meal lasted at least four hours. Roky was a big fan of obscure horror movies and talked endlessly about such films as They Saved Hitler’s Brain. In their company, Roky felt comfortable enough to admit that he was really an alien, and that aliens were going to take over the world. Then the situation degenerated when Roky smeared blueberry syrup over his face. The next day they chose another restaurant, one that attracted an older, conservative crowd. Roky stood up and commenced to sing a song he made up on the spot: “President Ford is a square queen!”

The two songs turned out well, but the record sold only 2,000 copies when it was released in early 1977. While manning the counter one afternoon, I received a call from London. Virgin Records wanted to license our recording for Europe. We were familiar with Virgin because we sold import copies of their stable of progressive rock artists like Mike Oldfield, Tangerine Dream, and Gong. I couldn’t understand how Erickson’s record would fit in, but I made the deal. It was our first international license.

I should point out that the number we used for Roky’s single, RNOR 002, had been used previously. Richard had devised a “Become a Rock Star” promotion at the store in which the winner would be able to record a song and have it released on the budding Rhino label. Richard produced the single by Chris & the Contraband. Although it sounded amateurish, I thought he did a good job. Chris sounded like pop singer Linda Ronstadt. We pressed up the record, but Chris didn’t like the result and had us destroy them. The record is Rhino’s rarest, and only a few people know of its existence.

It was fun making singles, but they didn’t sell that well. I thought we needed to step up and release our first album, by Wild Man Fischer. At that time Wild Man was attending Dodgers games, sitting in the left-field pavilion. He had a built-in audience and sang between innings, which is where we recorded him for part of the album. It was hard to believe, but young kids stood in line to have him sign a baseball. We titled it Wildmania, borrowing the term from Beatlemania, which was concocted to describe the frenzy of Beatles fans in the 1960s.

With the release of Wildmania in January 1978, we formalized the label as 50/50 partners. It was only right that Richard should be the president because he started the store and was the oldest, if only by a year. What was I going to be titled? “Vice president” would only have put me in a lesser position. From my London visits, I learned that the head of an English company was usually the managing director, as they didn’t have presidents. For example, Mickie Most headed up Rak Records, the label he owned, and his title was “Managing Director.” If it worked for him, it could work for me. Although it was unheard of for a company to have both, nobody ever asked me about the competing titles.

There were three labels that most inspired me in wanting to form a company. The Beatles’ Apple Records paved the way for artists owning labels. In their initial advertising campaign they implied that an artist could come in off the street and be heard, possibly be signed by Apple, and have hits. I liked that open policy, and I even made a deal with someone who came in off the street. Frank Zappa—along with his manager Herb Cohen—formed another artist-owned label, Bizarre Records. By signing Wild Man Fischer, Captain Beefheart, and the GTOs, he showed us that a label could embrace unconventional, if not outright bizarre, talent. Jac Holzman created Elektra where artistry was prioritized over commercial potential. His acts included the Doors, Love, Tim Buckley, Judy Collins, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Whether or not we could follow in these labels’ footprints was beside the point. They forged our aspirations.

In October we released an EP (Extended Play, fewer songs than an LP, or album) by the Turtles, the 1960s rock group best known for “Happy Together.” We wanted to take advantage of the picture disc craze. Picture discs pressed clear vinyl on top of a photo. Because of the layered process, the sound wasn’t as good as on standard pressings. The appeal was the visual—it almost didn’t matter what was recorded on the disc. Our Turtles EP was comprised of a popular album track, “Surfer Dan,” and three psychedelic recordings that were deemed too extreme to have been releasable. Even though the songs were mostly new—albeit ten years old—it was our first release of older masters.

Our sales totaled $90,000 in our first year of releasing albums, and Richard was sufficiently encouraged—and bored with retail—for us to grow the label in its own location. We had benefitted from radio play on a limited number of stations, including KROQ in Los Angeles, that resulted in some impressive sales within our first year. It was even more of an accomplishment as it was the last big sales year before a recession hit the industry, and we couldn’t get records manufactured for a month because the major labels—with their own plants at capacity—monopolized the independent presses. Paul Rappaport estimated that if our Temple City Kazoo Orchestra EP hadn’t been back ordered when it was most in demand, we would have sold more than 100,000 instead of only 14,000.

In January 1979 Richard sold the store and we moved to a warehouse space on Pico Boulevard east of Barrington Avenue next to a massage parlor. It had previously been a youth gym and had a dilapidated, mosquito-ridden pool behind it. My friend Todd Schneider and his brother, David, had rented it and named it Changes with designs of opening a nightclub, but they only used it as a rehearsal space.

The previous year I had auditioned Martha Davies there. The original Motels had broken up and I wanted to take her into the studio to record a single. I changed “All the Wrong Girls Like Me,” which Mark Leviton and I had written to be Peter Noone’s comeback hit—but which he rejected—to suit her gender. I also had her sing “Strange Movies,” an obscure Troggs’ single sung from the point of view of someone watching a porno movie. Having seen her perform with the first group of Motels at the Whisky, during which she provocatively swayed in a short skirt and fishnet stockings, I thought it fit her sexual image. With a small nose and rosebud mouth, she looked like a beautiful, silent-screen vamp, like Clara Bow or Theda Bara.

She sang both songs well and said she wanted to proceed, but she failed to attend the next two practices, so I abandoned the project. I thought she might have felt uncomfortable with “Strange Movies,” although she didn’t express it. Much later she told me that it was probably her alcoholism that explained her behavior, even though I saw no symptoms. She even showed up to the audition with her two young daughters in tow. As a consolation, I was able to license “Counting” for our 1978 LA bands compilation, Saturday Night Pogo, marking the Motels debut on vinyl.

Richard had the only enclosed office, beneath the stairs, with poor lighting and threadbare carpet. I had no such luxury. My office was on the second floor landing, partially separated from the adjoining cubicles. The second floor lacked air-conditioning, ventilation, and airflow, and got extremely hot in the summer. There was one stereo in the whole building, on the first floor. Anytime anyone wanted us to hear a demo tape, we had to listen to it amidst the activity in the shipping department. Much as I thought it would be cool to be the only record company that had a pool (we could invite visitors to “bring your swimsuit”), we needed the space for parking and filled it in.

Until business grew to the point where we could take salaries, I was paid from Richard’s small wholesale business, which was independent of the label. We also benefitted from a warehouse employee to stock and ship our records. For a paging system we used the microphone and bass amp from my band days. When we had our warehouse sales I made announcements in a voice impersonating TV show host Ed Sullivan.

One day, our first label employee Chaz Austin’s humor turned to exasperation when he paged Richard after fielding another phone call from one of his friends: “Hey Richard, don’t your friends have normal names?” Their nicknames seemed straight out of a Dick Tracy comic strip: Bowl (Pete Parks), Circles (John Robinson), Fark (John Farkash), Menk (Ron Kahn), Eppy (Alan Epstein), Fox (Richard Weinstein).

My attitude was always to do whatever it takes. I thought the lavatory was disgusting: the urinals and toilets that we, and our guests, used. My parents didn’t have a maid or use a cleaning woman; my mom did all her own cleaning. Not having had that experience, it didn’t occur to me that we could have hired a cleaning crew to solve the problem. When even Chaz refused to clean, I did it myself. In a similar situation, Richard was cleverer than I. When our regular trash collectors stopped coming—they said we owed them money, Richard said we were paid up—Richard boxed up our trash and sent it to them by UPS.

One evening when I visited Mike Chapman in the recording studio, he floated a concept that I had never considered before. During a lull, he postulated, “I could have been anything I wanted to be. I could have been a doctor or a lawyer, but I chose to be a record producer.” It dawned on me that I could do that, too. I could be anything I wanted to be. Richard and I never had a boss telling us that we couldn’t do something or that we weren’t experienced or smart enough. As we divvied up the functions required by a record company, Chapman’s belief had taken root. As our shoestring budget couldn’t provide for much in the way of support staff, I never thought that I couldn’t apply at least some competency to a task.

Among all the functions of a record company, we each took the ones that were most natural to us. Richard: manufacturing, dealing with the distributors; Harold: publicity, royalties accounting, cover design. We both initiated ideas for projects and produced them in the studio. I did radio promotion, then Richard tried it, and then it was back to me. Richard initially did the bookkeeping, and then I took over. For accounting royalties, I wrote down the amounts from our sales invoices on graph paper, and then added up the totals manually. I did each record twice. If I got the same number, I went on to the next one. If I didn’t, I added it again until I arrived at the same number a second time. I tallied royalties in this manner for our first seven years. From time to time a recipient had a question, but I was never challenged.

While we did hire designers for our album covers, not every project could justify the expense, so I designed many. I hadn’t taken design classes, but I knew what looked good. Quite often I adapted a design from another album cover. I opted for simple designs, often using a large photo for the front cover similar to British albums in the sixties, and copy a layout for the reverse. I penciled it out and took it to the graphics house a few blocks away. I tried to use Bill Stout more, but few of our releases could merit his fee. At times he was commissioned to design artwork for a project that wasn’t selected, which he allowed us to use at a cut-rate. A typical example was the illustration he created for a poster for the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which we used for one of our The History of Surf Music volumes. Even though our funds were limited, we produced attractive covers. Budget label Pickwick International, a much better financed company, bought high school student art for fifty dollars for their covers.

We were unaware of it at the time, but this was a great experience in learning about all the different areas of a record company. In my discussions with a product manager, A&R manager, or publicist at a major label, they were very knowledgeable in their fields, but considerably less so in others. Because the late 1970s saw such a major boon to record sales, the massive profits hid the excesses of the time—some fueled by the popularity of cocaine use in the music industry—and perpetuated indulgent practices. Because neither of us had worked full time for a label, we never acquired those habits. In a few cases where we hired an employee who had worked at a major label, we noticed a lack of self-restraint.

The most difficult area for us was radio. Record sales were generated when listeners heard a record with enough frequency to determine they liked it and wanted to buy it. In a utopian world, radio stations would play the best music for their formats and not play what they deemed substandard. I think most listeners think that a station makes up its playlist from what its listeners like by tallying requests on its phone lines. Many stations also based their selections on illegal payments filtered to them by the labels, a practice often referred to as payola. Ethically we would not have participated, but we couldn’t compete against the other labels that were much better funded than we were. Even when we could get friendly programmers to talk to us on the phone, they often told us they liked our records but then wouldn’t play them. College radio was more open, but didn’t seem to generate enough sales for us to see a difference.

The best example of this practice was Los Angeles radio play for Pink Floyd’s The Wall. The double album was released in December 1979 and was an immediate success, but three of the key radio stations failed to add the single, “Another Brick in the Wall Part II.” After a few weeks, Columbia Records provided money to the independent promotion men it hired to make the payments to the stations. Not surprisingly, they all added the single to their playlists in the same week.

As a Los Angeles-based company, I thought it was important for us to support the local music scene. I was greatly disappointed that even those bands with large followings—who made good records—were not added to the playlists of the local stations who felt no similar need to support local talent. As a consequence, most lost money for us, making it difficult to continue recording bands such as the Pop, Weirdos, and the Naughty Sweeties. Freddy Moore, the lead singer and guitarist with the Nu Kats, came to the office for meetings accompanied by his teenage fiancé, who was dressed like a Southern belle in a frilly skirt and petticoat. Demi Moore—need I say it, the popular actress—cowrote the best song on the EP with Freddy, and made her acting debut on our low-budget promotional video.

We were just winging it. There was no strategy. Our releases in the second year mirrored those in the first. We felt they would do better because we allocated our profits to improve the production, and we had more distributors carrying our line. In the short time that had passed, radio playlists became more restricted and programmers were less inclined to play our product.

A case in point was the money and effort we lavished on the follow-up to our biggest selling record of the previous year by the Temple City Kazoo Orchestra. The Kazoos Brothers’ Some Kazoos—the Rolling Stones’ latest album was titled Some Girls—was our ploy to take advantage of the newfound popularity of the Blues Brothers, characters created by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd on Saturday Night Live. This time we recorded in an actual studio—albeit a low-budget one—and spent time trying to get it right: breaking down the songs we covered, like Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man,” to transpose the instruments to kazoo—a real learning experience in understanding musical arrangement—and recording parts by slowing down or speeding up the tape, as need be (e.g., a kazoo recorded when the tape had been sped up more approximates the lower range of a bass guitar when played at normal speed). We splurged for a color photo session and a cover designer. Among our subtle jokes, the back cover listed the recording sessions as having taken place February 28 through 30.

We were asked to appear on The Dinah Shore Show—for no money. I didn’t have a star complex, but compared with our appearance on The Mike Douglas Show—also for no money—we were on poverty row. For Douglas, we were placed in a large waiting room stocked with drinks and a crudités platter. Across the hall was vocal group Tavares—nice guys who expressed a curiosity in our kazoos. Tom Knapp, who worked at City One-Stop and was enlisted to flesh out our orchestra, didn’t let the prospect that he was to blow on a kazoo instead of playing a real instrument stop him from stepping into the shoes of a real rock star like Keith Richards by swigging from his own pint of whisky, to the embarrassment of the rest of us. Gary Myrick and David Dennard, who made a real case for rock legitimacy as members of the recently signed Figures, joined us for the taping and had no trouble behaving civilly.

For Dinah, we were relegated to a small room that was more like a hastily constructed lean-to without enough seats for our slimmed-down combo, and no amenities. On camera, Richard commented to Dinah about how impressed he was at how well her studio audience had played the kazoos we furnished them with to accompany our musical entrance: “I don’t recall seeing any of them at our kazoo school,” he feigned. Neither our appearance on Dinah’s show nor the success of The Blues Brothers feature film months later moved records. The Kazoos Brothers EP sold about 25 percent of what the Temple City Kazoo Orchestra’s had, losing money in the process.

By mid-year 1979, our business was so anemic I wasn’t sure the company would be able to survive. I asked Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn, independently of each other, if they would hire me to be the A&R (Artists & Repertoire) person at their new company, Dreamland Records. Fortunately, they declined, saying they would do it themselves. Despite Chapman’s momentum as America’s hottest record producer, Dreamland failed, losing millions of dollars, and was gone two years later.

From the money we had banked from our first year, we had some funds to license recordings from the major labels. One desire we had in forming our company was to reissue the out-of-print records we had loved growing up. The majors were letting a great deal of these recordings languish in their vaults as they focused on big selling titles by contemporary acts like Fleetwood Mac. My ex-editor at the Daily Bruin (and bass player on my band’s first two singles) Jim Bickhart worked at Warner Special Products (WSP) and licensed us a Best of Allan Sherman. We paid WSP a $3,000 advance against future royalties earned from sales. As Allan Sherman records had been out of print for years, Warner Brothers looked at the income generated from Rhino’s compilation as extra profits.

Sherman was an anomaly for a pop singer. He looked like a cross between a swarthy Venice gondolier and an over-sized curb sitter bellowing for handouts from an outdoor meat market, and possessed a voice as moving as a deadpan teamster trainee’s. As a young comedy writer, he created the long-running TV show I’ve Got a Secret. He sang his parody songs at Hollywood parties for fun until TV show host Steve Allen pushed him to record them. Unlike the romantic pop songs of the early sixties, Sherman’s uniquely reflected the suburban growth and petty materialism of the flexing middle class. Sherman only had one big hit. The melody for “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah!” was from Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours”—which was familiar from its use in Walt Disney’s Fantasia—and the lyrics that of a kid’s diary of summer camp. More importantly, Sherman popularized the concept of replacing the lyrics of well-known songs with humorous, incongruous ones. He was a big influence on both of us. We later recorded modern day equivalents like “Walk on the Kosher Side,” which took Lou Reed’s song of transexuality, “Walk On the Wild Side,” into a commentary on Jewish assimilation. “Weird Al” Yankovic carries Sherman’s banner today.

Our first proper rock reissue was done for perverse reasons. The Barbarians were a run-of-the-mill garage band from Boston whose name was kept alive from having a track on the Nuggets compilation. They hold the distinction of being the only unknown band in the 1964 concert film T.A.M.I. Show—alongside the Rolling Stones, James Brown, Chuck Berry, and other stars. They were memorable because their drummer, Moulty, played with a hook on his left arm. Producer Doug Morris, later the head of Atlantic Records, took a common phrase addressed to young men who sported Beatles-styled hair, “Are You A Boy Or Are You A Girl,” and wrote a song with his brother that became a regional hit for the Barbarians.

Following a Rolling Stones tour in 1979, group members Ron Wood and Keith Richards took to the road again to play twenty dates fronting the New Barbarians. As the group didn’t have a record out, we thought that a reissue of the 1960s Barbarians would confuse fans, resulting in sales. Did we really believe that? No, or course not, but we were hopeful. Mostly, we took pleasure in the absurdity of our intention. As the Barbarians album was long out of print, I called Laurie Records and made a deal for Rhino to reissue it. Laurie was beyond its hit years, but had enjoyed a nice run with the Chiffons, Dion and the Belmonts, and Gerry and the Pacemakers.

I concocted a Barbarians’ Fan Club headquartered in Luxembourg. I called world traveler Peter Noone to have him make up a name that sounded like someone who lived there. I wrote the liner notes as Joe Doissy, in the mode of a foreign fan who misunderstood the merits of the American group. If the tone of the liner notes wasn’t a tip off, the unnecessary diagram that we included identifying the four band members would have been. Rather than a numerical sequence of 1, 2, 3, 4, we used 2, 3b, 5a, 6c. To give the album even more importance, I came up with the pretentious sounding Golden Archive Series so this could be presented as part of an ongoing very important series. Our ploy didn’t work. We sold only 5,000 copies, but the album was profitable.

In September “Weird Al” came to see me. He had recorded a parody of the Knack’s hit “My Sharona” in a lavatory at his school, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where he was an architecture major. “My Bologna” was a popular track on Dr. Demento’s radio show. I told Al I was interested, and suggested issuing the record to look like a package of bologna, with the record a lunchmeat picture disc. I never heard back from him. As Capitol Records issued the Knack’s records and was a “major label,” he made his deal with them. It would have been a priority for us. Capitol released it to placate the Knack. The record never charted.

In conjunction with KROQ and DJ Jed the Fish, we issued an album of the winners of the station’s Devotees contest. KROQ received over 400 tapes from people playing in Devo’s style, but the finalists were so marginal, Richard went into the studio and recorded a cover of Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” as the Bakersfield Boogie Boys, to bolster the quality of the album. That track proved so popular that Richard and I produced an EP with the fabricated group—to few sales.

I made a deal with the Firesign Theatre to issue an EP from the five segments they produced for a proposed radio series based on their popular private eye character Nick Danger. Our sales in 1979 were $130,000, but our expenses vastly increased. We were headed for a loss, but 10,000 Firesign Theatre EPs and 8,000 Devotees LPs were enough to bring us close to breaking even. We realized that we were likely to have few records selling 10,000, so we had to release more albums, with the assumption that most would be profitable and that the aggregate would help us build the business. In our first two years, we averaged nine releases. In the following two, we upped it to eighteen.

Our coffers were also bolstered by the few thousand dollars we received for the rights to issue the Temple City Kazoo Orchestra and Gefilte Joe & the Fish in Germany. Peter Schimmelfennig’s formula to success was signing East German rock bands to his Pool Records label and selling them to West Germans. Handsome, strapping, charming, and German, it made no sense to us how he could appreciate the humor of the early Rhino novelty releases. He and his cohorts wined and dined Richard and me at Dar Maghreb, a Moroccan restaurant in Hollywood. How could we resist? We were happy to take his money, but saner heads prevailed and he never issued our product. I ran into Peter again in October 1990 at a reception at UCLA’s Royce Hall after the screening of a restored Metropolis. He was shepherding the (German) DEFA Symphony Orchestra that provided the film’s live soundtrack on its tour of America.

Dr. Demento (Barry Hansen) had a long-running, syndicated radio show composed of comedy and novelty recordings. He encouraged listeners to submit their own recordings and played the more interesting ones on the show. He even played my band’s first record, “Nose Job.” His biggest discovery was “Weird Al” Yankovic. Because Richard and I loved novelty records, and because Circus Royale, the sequel to our second album, Rhino Royale, only sold a disappointing 5,000 records, we thought we’d see how many more sales Demento could attract with his audience. Dementia Royale (see, we even kept the theme), released in February 1980, moved 14,000 albums in its first two years.

I met Paul Almond when he was an attorney on staff at Warner Brothers Records, through my friend David Berson. Paul left Warner Brothers to get into the film business, working for Roger Corman at New World Pictures. The first deal we did together was for the soundtrack to The Brood, a horror movie directed by David Cronenberg. Because composer Howard Shore had conducted the orchestra in Canada—it was cheaper than doing so in the United States—I thought we wouldn’t be subject to American musicians’ union reuse payments. What that meant was, for example, if New World paid the orchestra members a total of $10,000 for the recording for the movie, Rhino would have to pay the same amount again—even though no new recording was made—solely because the music was being used for a second purpose, in this case a soundtrack album. The reuse payment made it too expensive for our limited budget, so we passed. Reuse payments were not a problem with Battle Beyond the Stars, which became Rhino’s first soundtrack release, in September 1980. The film and score were derivative of Star Wars, although it has the distinction of being composer James Horner’s first soundtrack album. Horner soon became a major composer and conductor, with the two highest grossing films of all time, Titanic and Avatar, among his credits.

We soon discovered that it wasn’t cost effective to pay a lawyer to negotiate contracts for the small amount of records we sold, so I took that over. The “standard” licensing agreements from the major labels usually contained unreasonable or inapplicable clauses that I had to scrutinize and change or delete. It was a game; the label used those who signed off on these as leverage to its advantage later. Paul pointed out that lawyers are paid to construct contracts—which will produce potential profits—but rarely paid to edit them, or make them easier to read, because that activity will not lead to the potential profit of a deal. The one he created for New World Pictures was well written and succinct, and there was nothing devious about it. More than anything else, it gave me respect for Paul and his integrity and furthered our friendship. More practically, I took his form, retyped it with a few changes, and used it as Rhino’s standard contract for many years.

Seymour Stein, President of Sire Records, came to see me on the third Monday of November 1980, wanting to license “Fish Heads” by Barnes & Barnes, a top-rated request on Dr. Demento’s radio show. It was an unusually hot day as Seymour joined me upstairs in my windowless cubical. He was wearing a wool suit, but had dispensed with his tie. With his profuse sweating and unsuccessful attempts at blotting with a hankie, it was clear he was uncomfortable.

I had been looking forward to meeting Seymour because he was a music guy. More than anybody else in the States, he promoted new wave with his signings of the Ramones, Talking Heads, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Sire had even reissued Elektra’s Nuggets album. As Rhino was a small label, I could identify with his stinginess. The first Ramones album cost only $6,400 to record. His artists didn’t sell that well and Sire wasn’t considered a success, but as a Warner-distributed label it was much better funded than Rhino.

As Seymour attempted to charm me with his stuttering speech, I was almost insulted that he wasn’t offering any advance against royalties to license “Fish Heads.” We certainly could have used the money, if he had. On his way out he noticed a couple of albums on the shelf among our non-Rhino wholesale stock. There were two volumes of recordings from Buddy Holly’s appearances on radio shows. Seymour asked for two sets and promised to send us some Sire albums in exchange. Months later I called Seymour’s office a couple of times to remind him, but didn’t receive a check or records for the Holly LPs.

A few months into 1981, I noticed that Richard wasn’t around much. I was doing all of the work on most of our releases. One day when Richard was in, I asked him why. He told me that he and Chuck Rose—a friend whose family owned the 35-store Rose Records chain based in Chicago—had started up Sounds Good, a one-stop in Chatsworth. It felt to me like he was giving up on our label by withdrawing into another business. I would have felt differently about it if he had been upfront in telling me about his intentions. I don’t know whether he wanted to avoid the confrontation or whether he was just neglectful. As partners in the record label, a reasonable expectation was that the workload would be split fairly evenly. I didn’t like it, but I carried on. Richard had nothing to do with the majority of the eighteen records we released that year, the major exception being the Richie Valens box set that we worked on together.

Having built a strong following where he was referred to as “The Little Richard of the San Fernando Valley,” Richie Valens is best known for his hits “La Bamba” and “Donna,” and for perishing in the same plane crash that claimed Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper in February 1959. While at the store, I took note of the box sets that were beginning to be issued from Europe on rock pioneers like Holly and Gene Vincent. Our History of Richie Valens was the first retrospective box released in the United States. For the booklet, Richard went to Pacoima Jr. High School and copied a yearbook photo of Valens (actually Richard Valenzuela). We also included an unpublished photo from the crash site. One of the three discs, Live at Pacoima Jr. High, was then going for $100 on the collectors market. Live recordings of rock ’n’ roll performers were rare in the 1950s, and this primitive one was accomplished with a Dictaphone, a device commonly used in an office to aid with dictation. To promote it, I had Louis Barron construct a twelve-inch single that combined “La Bamba” with “C’mon Let’s Go”—speeding up the former and slowing down the later—to attempt to get play in dance clubs. Barron and his wife were responsible for the first electronic film score, 1956’s Forbidden Planet.

Not too long after Danny Sugerman published his coauthored biography on the Doors’ Jim Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive, he brought to us two new artist projects. The Zippers was a band from the South Bay produced by the Doors’ keyboardist Ray Manzarek, whom Danny managed. Bebe Buell, a Cover Girl model, was known for her relationship with Todd Rundgren, for having been a Playboy centerfold, and much later as the mom and manager of actress Liv Tyler. She was passionate about rock and collected famous musicians for boyfriends as others would their records: Steven Tyler, Elvis Costello, Rod Stewart. For her EP, she solicited help from members of the Cars and Rick Derringer’s band. Despite the talent, an inspired selection of cover songs, and the first wrap-around poster cover issued in the United States, sales were less than 5,000. Danny was one of the few people who could foresee our potential. He recommended that Manzarek invest in Rhino. Other than giving up a portion of ownership of our company, I was so unsophisticated I couldn’t think of a way we could have spent the money, so I declined.

There were other labels I admired that started up around the same time as Rhino. In September 1981, Jay Clem at Ralph Records in San Francisco gave me a tour of his offices. Ralph primarily existed to release albums by the Residents, an avant-garde rock band whose members wore large eyeball masks to conceal their identities. In addition to the offices, the complex included a recording studio, a darkroom, and a basement area with sets to film promotional videos. The offices were messy, but I was impressed that so much was accommodated in-house. If it was up to me, and if Rhino had the budget, I would have copied their setup.

I liked a good number of the artists on England’s Stiff Records, including Nick Lowe, Wreckless Eric, Elvis Costello, and Rachel Sweet. I thought we were clever and funny, but Stiff had us beat, both in terms of graphics and image. Their wittiness started with their wry name, Stiff, which referred to a record that failed to chart well. It extended with the prefixes used to identify the numbers of their singles, BUY, and to slogans such as “Round Records for Square People” and “Where the Fun Never Sets.” Ten years later, after we licensed them an album by Phranc for which they never paid us, I came up with another slogan for them: “I got Stiffed by Stiff!” Soon after, they went out of business.

There wasn’t much of a lesson learned, more one observed. Be yourself and go with your strengths. Don’t try to be a Stiff or a Ralph. The difficulty we experienced in selling new artists and novelty records made us realize that we should focus on reissues. It was a great time for us as we were able to release best-of albums by a number of artists whose records we bought when we were growing up: the Turtles, Monkees, Box Tops, Troggs, and Spencer Davis Group. Some of our reissues sounded so good, it was like hearing them for the first time. In a couple of cases, as with the Beau Brummels and the Everly Brothers, we discovered that we were the first ones to use the first generation masters. Sitting in front of my stereo speakers, listening to the test pressings, left me enthralled.

It was difficult to produce a compilation composed of hits by various artists because one had to license from numerous labels. Local disc jockey Art Laboe introduced the format with Oldies But Goodies in 1959. He had been smooching with a girl on his living room couch when one of the 45s he had stacked on his record player kept repeating because the subsequent record failed to drop properly. His annoyed girlfriend said something like, “Art, why don’t you put all of those hits on an LP?” The first volume of Oldies But Goodies sold extremely well, staying on Billboard’s album chart for over three years, and more followed, all on Laboe’s Original Sound Records.

This perpetuated a culture where non-current hits were seen as passé. They were lumped together as Oldies but Goodies, with DJs and others playing on high school nostalgia with Do-you-remember-when reminiscences. Songwriter Paul Politi keyed off the success of LaBoe’s LP and wrote “Those Oldies But Goodies (Remind Me of You).” Vocal group Little Caesar & the Romans—whose visual gimmick was wearing togas during their performances—hit the top ten with it in 1961. They broke up a year later, in part because of an argument between two members who each considered himself Little Caesar.

I always thought music should be judged on its own merits, as a living, breathing thing. Music can be effective to a listener, no matter what era it was created in, as the work of Beethoven, Mozart, and others are considered today. During the Monkees revival in the mid-eighties, young kids were exposed to the music and bought the records because they enjoyed what they heard, even though it might have been created before they were born. When movie fans were moved by the song that played over the opening credits of Pulp Fiction, they were reacting to the visceral quality of the instrumental, rather than realizing or caring that Dick Dale’s “Miserlou” had been recorded thirty years previously. So my goal at Rhino was not only to make the hits available again to those who wanted to hear them, but to turn people on to the great music of the past that they may never have heard.

By contrast, the major labels that held the rights to older hits were focused on breaking new artists, with the successful ones bringing in large amounts of money to sustain their operations. Older recordings, if they were issued at all, were compiled into albums with the goal of spending the least amount of money possible to maximize the income from these slower-selling titles.

We were the first company to take the position that this music was important and deserved to be reissued with quality in mind—which was a standard I forged for Rhino. That meant trolling for rare photographs for the album jacket, writing fact-filled liner notes for the back cover, and in some cases, issuing a record that sounded better than the original release, as exemplified by our very first best-of albums by Allan Sherman and Love. I was able to get deals with top mastering studios—Artisan and Precision Lacquer—by utilizing time slots that hadn’t been booked by their more lucrative clients. Mastering is the process whereby the music as recorded on tape is transferred to another medium, such as an album lacquer from which a stamper is made to press the record.

Bob Marin was an eccentric who never used his kitchen at home because he didn’t want to get it dirty. With a bowl hairstyle—actually a wig—he looked like John Fogerty from Creedence Clearwater Revival. I first met him in the Rhino store days, when he pulled up to the back parking lot in his Plymouth Valiant. The trunk was full of Island Records promotional albums that Bob wanted to sell us. Although his car was conservative—not what one would think a music guy would drive—Marin kept it in pristine condition. Years later he splurged on a reproduction of a flamboyant Auburn Chord convertible.

As with a lot of salesmen, he was engaging and friendly, but often lacking in knowledge of what he was selling. This came to light shortly before we dismissed him as our sales rep—he declined our offer to be an employee, preferring to remain independent so he could represent more companies—when he failed to realize that the titles and covers of our new band compilations were parodies: Saturday Night Pogo for Saturday Night Fever, the best-selling album of 1978, and L. A. IN for ALIEN, the hit movie of 1979.

Gary Stewart took over Marin’s sales tasks in August 1981 despite only having sold records to individual consumers in the store. Gary’s office was in an open area with asbestos bags—or some other insulation—hung precariously close to his head. He sat in a kitchen chair in front of a heavy, metal desk with one side bashed in and a drawer that wouldn’t open, and had meetings with guests on a moth-eaten sofa. Despite the impoverished surroundings, he was thrilled to be working for an actual record label.

Chuck Rose recommended Brian Schuman, who joined us shortly thereafter, and anchored our warehouse. As a further example of our penny-pinching (literally), Brian and Gary, with modest grumbles, walked to the office supply warehouse next door to use their Xerox machine for ten cents a copy.

My contract drafting was soon tested in small claims court. In 1971 John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat had sold a lot of records with their album Hooker ‘N Heat. Ten years later, Howard B. Wolf brought us an album he produced of Hooker and Heat performing at the local Fox Venice Theatre. He was a bit older than us and dressed in an expensive, hippie style: designer jeans, leather fedora, hand-tooled leather briefcase. He was smart and charming, and came across as a hippie capitalist. He had credibility for having been Jefferson Airplane’s publisher, and impressed us in revealing that his new girlfriend, Nancy Lee Andrews, was Ringo’s recently spurned ex-fiancé.

The album had barely been released when Wolf surprised us by suing us in small claims court. He thought he should have been paid royalties even though we were still recouping the advance we had paid him. As he told me, it was cheaper for him to file the suit than to have paid a lawyer to interpret the clause for him. As he had also filed a small claims action against a store for bedding he had purchased, he conveniently scheduled our case before his other one. I was steamed that Richard and I had to disrupt our day to travel all the way downtown to appear. As I had drafted the agreement, I represented our side to the judge. It was a music contract, it dealt with copyrights, it was out of his league. He postponed judgment until he could consult a judge who was more knowledgeable. As Richard and I left the courtroom, Wolf was hauling out his bedding from the plastic bags he brought. The judgment came in the mail two weeks later, in our favor. Wolf was so likable it was hard for me to stay angry with him. As a result of his impatience to get paid, I negotiated a royalty buyout. As the album eventually racked up more than 40,000 units, the additional profits we made more than compensated for our court appearance.

In January 1982 I was encouraged to attend the yearly record business convention in Cannes, known as MIDEM (Marche International du Disque et de l’Edition Musicale). Flying with Bob Marin, we got off to a rocky start. As we cleared customs in Paris, he shooed me away. He barely made the flight to Nice; he was shaking as he made his way to his seat. He had been detained because a customs agent had found a vial in his suitcase with traces of cocaine. How stupid could he have been! The first day of the convention I woke up late. Marin had already left our room and didn’t bother to wake me. I was jetlagged, but made my way to the Palais where the convention was held.

Unlike in previous years, there were few major labels. At this point, it was mostly publishers. Over the next few days I made the rounds and met with a number of labels, few of which were familiar with Rhino. They seemed more interested in selling their masters than in buying.

The highlights for me were taking in a couple of live performances with Toby Mamis. Alice Cooper wasn’t in the best vocal form when he ran through selections of his newest album, Special Forces, which included a cover of Love’s “Seven and Seven Is.” He did have a superb guitarist in his band, Mike Pinera, whom I had met when he was in the Iron Butterfly. A new act called Cheetah showcased two attractive, hard-rocking women in the mold of AC/DC—both acts produced by ex-Easybeats Harry Vanda and George Young. Toby and I went backstage afterwards, and I was thrilled to meet George Young—the Easybeats had been one of my favorite groups—and his brother George Alexander (Alexander Young), who had been a member of Grapefruit. I also reconnected with Tom Evans, the bass player from Badfinger, who had been hired to back up Cheetah. He seemed happy to see me and invited me to visit him in England.

One evening at the Carlton Hotel bar, I ran into Seymour Stein and needled him about owing us money. He glanced uncomfortably my way and then disappeared into the throng. I felt he was a music executive who could identify with our passion, who could have been an ally, with whom we could have made deals. But in revealing himself to be too cheap to even honor a fifteen dollar debt, it might have cost him more in the long run. Because Sire hadn’t performed that well, Warner Brothers took over full ownership. He received a half-point royalty on acts he signed to the label and then kvetched about it being too low after Madonna hit big. His kvetching was successful; his royalty was increased.

I met Martin Mills, the head of UK Beggars Banquet, who wanted to release Spirit’s Potatoland and a unique-to-the-UK Rhino sampler I titled Dr. Rhino and Mr. Hyde that paired one side of novelty with another of new artists. We concluded the deal in London, where he was nice enough to invite me to his house for dinner. I didn’t visit Tom Evans. Because of a strike the trains were running inconsistently, and I didn’t want to risk being stranded in Surrey.

At the end of March, the annual NARM convention (National Association of Record Merchandisers) was held nearby at the Century Plaza Hotel. Because of the registration fee, we weren’t planning on going. An attendee from out of town was visiting our offices, and we took note of the badge, which was printed on green stock. We got a similar colored paper, Xeroxed his badge, and placed it in the same style plastic holder. To encounter less scrutiny, Richard and I entered the exhibit area by walking into the lower level through the hotel’s delivery entrance. We were only at the convention a little more than an hour. It made us realize that we had to be more a part of our industry. Initially we attended the smaller NAIRD convention (National Association of Independent Record Distributors) before we became yearly (paying) participants of NARM. Four years later the NARM convention was back at the Century Plaza Hotel. The Wherehouse chain distributed copies of the Los Angeles Times Sunday Calendar magazine, which happened to have Richard and me on the cover, in a feature on Rhino.

Marin was ahead of the curve when it came to anticipating the public’s interest in the new CD (compact disc) format. He convinced Richard to start an import company, Sounds Good Imports, in the fall of 1982. For the most part only classical music CDs were available, which Bob imported from Germany and Japan. Around this time he introduced us to Brett Gurewitz, who produced some twelve-inch promotional singles for us. Gurewitz played guitar for Bad Religion and had just formed his own label, Epitaph Records.

Richard had taken the concept of the successful parking lot sales we had at the store and relocated it to the building the label shared with Richard’s wholesale businesses and a company he was part owner of, the Thinking Cap Company, which sold hats affixed with patches of philosophers’ names. Because vigilance over selling bootlegs was slight, there wasn’t much concern over the number of titles that were among the thousands of albums offered for sale, but overall, they represented a small portion. An undercover officer had attended the November 1982 weekend sale, bought bootlegs as evidence, and came away with the impression that we were a manufacturer or distributor. Consequently, on the following Monday morning, we were raided by a large number of LAPD officers who swarmed into our building—from both the front and rear entrances—supported by two semi-trailer trucks that barreled into our parking lot.

The police officers didn’t have a feel for what was, and what was not, a bootleg. Quite a number of albums that were seized—like Rock Steady with Flo & Eddie on Epiphany Records—were not. One man took crime-scene photographs, including that of an Electric Prunes album propped up in my office that was for my personal use. One officer searching Richard’s file cabinet uncovered a baggie of marijuana. Never knowing Richard to be a pot smoker, I later asked him about it. He said that he had forgotten about it—it was at least four years old. When the officer in charge realized their miscalculation, he dismissed half of his men, along with one of the semis. The other was loaded with so few boxes, they could have easily fit inside of a mid-size sedan.

I was emotionally drained and dispirited that Monday afternoon. The Rhino label was rolling. Our sales were projected to increase by 50 percent over the previous year. What was going to happen now? Would I be able to make the payments on the house I had bought earlier in the year? Even though our label wasn’t at fault, with Richard as co-owner, our licensing from other companies could have been in jeopardy if they thought Rhino was also manufacturing bootleg albums. Eli Okun at CBS Special Products advised Richard to initiate meetings with the major labels we licensed from and put the infraction in context, which he did. The case was settled three years later, with Richard and Bob Marin pleading “no contest” with the Los Angeles City Attorney’s office, and each fined $12,500 on two counts of selling bootlegs.

In the spring of 1983 we moved into a larger building, the former headquarters of San Remo Shoes, at the corner of 12th and Olympic in Santa Monica. I was looking forward to walking the mile to the beach during my lunch break. How often did I go? Never. With Brian and Gary, two warehousemen, a receptionist, and an office manager/bookkeeper—Diane Temkin, who later married Brian—we were now eight, and on our way to generating a million dollars in sales.

Seeing how well Marin sold CDs gave us the confidence to release our initial titles, although it was hard to get them manufactured as the majors also readied their product. In 1984 we released greatest hits CDs by the Turtles and Jerry Lee Lewis, and one by the Firesign Theatre—the first spoken word CD—beating a few major labels to the market. Little did we anticipate at the time how music fans would take to these cute little discs. I was surprised that so many people replaced their records with newly released CDs. As a consequence of that and the effectiveness of MTV in marketing new artists, the industry’s sales boosted to new heights.

While this new medium had many positive qualities, I thought vinyl records sounded better. I did a few comparisons. My main criticism was that vocals sounded warmer on vinyl. This was, in part, because CDs didn’t reproduce the full musical performance, but sampled it at various points and then created the music in between. In January 1985 we hired Bill Inglot, one of Gary’s friends, who had been instrumental in compiling our Monkees rarities albums. Bill took over mastering fulltime and set a standard for reissues within the industry.

Our records were distributed by a number of independent companies throughout the United States. In the early days of rock ’n’ roll, the independents were the primary labels. Sun (Elvis), Specialty (Little Richard), Del Fi (Richie Valens), and Atlantic (Drifters) were all distributed by independent companies. In the 1960s, White Whale (The Turtles), Kama Sutra (Lovin’ Spoonful), Roulette (Tommy James and the Shondells), and Dunhill (Mamas and Papas, Grass Roots) were similarly distributed. As the decade progressed, the major labels sniffed the success of rock and got in on the action. However, the indie network remained strong throughout the 1970s with Motown, A&M, Chrysalis, and Arista. But in the 1980s those, too, moved to the majors, and the effectiveness of the indies diminished. Retailers, naturally, gave the major labels higher priority: they had bigger-selling artists, larger advertising budgets, and were more apt to get paid before the independent distributors.

It was not uncommon for the indie distributors to be delinquent in paying their Rhino bills, which they invariably did, but only after many phone calls. As a consequence, it was hard to plan around not knowing when we would be paid. In the past, because we were fiscally conservative and practical, and had no need to siphon money from the business to fund expensive habits, money had never been a problem.

While the independent distributors used by Rhino had their share of fine salespeople, coordination was extremely difficult. For instance, when the Beat Farmers were touring with the Blasters in Colorado, their engaging performances resulted in significant album sales. Rhino’s distributor in that area hadn’t paid us for months, so we didn’t ship any further orders, hoping that would motivate them into paying. Consequently, we didn’t sell all the records that we could have. As Rhino’s sales grew, the money that was owed to us by distributors increased, and we had to take out our first bank loan in 1984. This meant that we had to incur an additional expense—interest on our loan.

On Saturday, June 22, 1985, my date Stephanie and I were killing time at the Hollywood Palladium between acts on a triple bill of the Unforgiven, the Blasters, and the Beat Farmers. I ran into the L.A. Times music critic, Robert Hilburn. Although I had written for Hilburn in my freelance days, he had given Rhino scant coverage through the years. At the Palladium he asked me questions about how we were able to get the masters for our packages. More specifically, he was nearly incredulous that the owners of Sun Records entrusted to us the sacred recordings of, say, Jerry Lee Lewis. I explained to him that in many cases, the labels didn’t have the product out, or didn’t feel our higher-priced packages would compete with theirs. I told him how we went about licensing the songs. He said he wanted to write a feature on us. When I didn’t hear from him, I thought his interest had waned. It took him almost six months to contact us again and schedule an interview. Given how unenthusiastic he had been previously, I was surprised at how well the article turned out. It was the cover story of the Times Calendar magazine for March 9, 1986.

Our CD sales were increasing, but now that more labels were issuing their own, we experienced difficulty in getting them manufactured. As we were growing, we were frustrated and stymied by the independent distributors. We could have used the help of one of the bigger companies, but the majors weren’t interested in Rhino because our business was too small and we didn’t have hits. Zach Horowitz, a young lawyer at CBS Records with whom I’d become friendly, submitted a proposal to his company, but they declined distributing us. If we wanted to grow, it was clear we needed to make a deal with one of the major labels, but we didn’t know if it was possible.

*(selections from our bargain bin)