CHAPTER 4

Mr. Perfect

You’re perfect.

—Stephanie Nemeth to Harold Bronson on June 26, 1985, moments before she dumped him

My mom should have been a movie actress—if her Orthodox Jewish mother had allowed her. She was beautiful, at times compared to Lana Turner. She was outgoing and had a daffy personality. She could have been an attractive comedienne like Joan Blondell, Gracie Allen, or Goldie Hawn. Her parents emigrated from Russia, met in the United States, and raised their family in Jersey City. Her father was a gambler who made small portions of bathtub whiskey during Prohibition. He owned a small taxi company that went bust in the Great Depression. He made more money than he lost as a gambler, bought a bus for one of his three sons to drive, and a small clothing store for the family to run. The few times I visited my grandparents and uncles in West New York, New Jersey, they were warm and loving. This was in contrast to my father’s family, who was emotionally cold, and not in the least interested in me.

My mother loved people, talked to anyone, and made her living mostly as a waitress prior to marrying my dad. Despite the daffiness I experienced, there were flashes of intelligence. During World War II, when women entered the workforce as young men were drafted into the military, at Western Electric she was awarded a certificate and singled out during a company meeting for suggesting a mechanical improvement on a machine that was injuring users.

My father’s parents had both emigrated from Romania. He grew up in Los Angeles, in the West Adams district. He remembered playing in the large bowl of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum prior to construction, when he was nine years old. My paternal grandfather was one of the cheapest individuals who ever lived. Even though he owned two apartment buildings, I rarely received a gift from him. Once he gave me a plastic toy car that had twine attached to it so it could be pulled. A departed tenant had left it in a vacated apartment. This parsimony rubbed off on my dad, but less so, and then later on me, albeit watered down. This proved to be invaluable in the first few years of the Rhino label as we struggled for profitability.

My dad took a commercial course in high school and didn’t see a need to go to college. He was working as a bookkeeper for the American Terrazzo Company in the Mojave Desert when he had enough of the heat and quit, failing to realize the impact the Great Depression would have on securing another job. As a result, he went into the wholesale produce business, first with his brother-in-law—that went bust—and then by himself. He had mostly restaurants as accounts. While working with him one day I met Bob Cobb, the co-owner of the Brown Derby restaurant who concocted the Cobb Salad. My dad woke up in the wee hours of the morning, drove his truck to the produce market downtown, and bought whatever he needed to deliver to his customers that day. He didn’t like it, but he did it to earn money to support his family.

At times I thought it would be nice to have a father who worked in an office and had normal work hours and vacation time. While I gleaned a responsible work ethic from him, I also realized that, unlike him, it was important for me to work at something I liked. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, having a role model who had his own business made me feel comfortable with having my own business—not that his was particularly successful. When he was squeezed out by the competition, he got a job working for the post office. He liked the idea of being a mailman because of the exercise and the fresh air, but had to settle for working in the weight room downtown. He said it was the best job he ever had. He liked the paid vacations, which he never had as the proprietor of a one-man business. He worked there for fourteen years until his vision deteriorated so much that he couldn’t drive to work any longer.

By contemporary standards my parents had a good marriage, but it wasn’t one that I wanted. They were opposites. I believe that people with opposite personality traits are drawn together to, subconsciously, complement the traits they lack. In my parents’ marriage, there were rarely fights, just bickering. My mom was an extrovert who liked people; my dad was an introvert who didn’t. As I was growing up, their friends were few and far between. Their marriage gave me a benchmark on which to improve.

My mother was very loving and overly complimentary. My father was as parsimonious with money as he was with praise. I never received much praise as a young adult and have always had difficulty accepting it when it came. My judgment was good, but I also had a non-obsessive need to be right most of the time. As a result, in the early years of Rhino, when building the business was difficult, I was prone to blame others. This came to a head when Gary Stewart and Brian Schuman called for a meeting, which Richard also attended. They expressed themselves. It hurt, but they made their point, and I changed.

I don’t think much was passed onto me by my parents that I could point to professionally. It’s not like Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, Pete Townshend, and Elvis Costello, successful music artists whose fathers were bandleaders. If anything, my parents’ advice of “save a little, spend a little” translated into a guide that helped Rhino to build in the early days. In establishing a new business, proprietors will often spring for new furniture or classy offices to project a veneer of success. For Richard and me, our office was initially stocked with thrift store and castoff furniture in order to have more money to put into our product.

I grew up in Westchester, the Los Angeles suburb that includes the Los Angeles International Airport. Bean fields gave way to tracts of modest housing to accommodate the postwar demand. Because of the proximity to the airport, quite a number of aerospace companies, like Hughes Aircraft and Northrop, were located nearby. In October 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth. The US government accelerated its program to catch up, resulting in an expansion of the related businesses in the area. As a result, many engineers and college graduates moved to Westchester. As parents, they were smarter than average, and so were their kids. In two of the three years I attended Westchester High School, we placed tops academically among the city’s high schools. Westchester was devoutly conservative, had no teen nightclubs of its own, and was so far out of the happening Hollywood area (twelve miles) as to strip it of all means of convenience to acquire that hipness comfortably. In the early 1970s, Westchester’s potency was severely sapped as funding for the aerospace industry diminished. Nice tract homes were demolished when the airport expanded to accommodate larger jets—ruining a nice community.

My parents weren’t interested in the arts or culture. They didn’t read books or respond to art. They weren’t interested in the theater, classical music, or poetry. As a family, we did go to the movies. My mom cooked, cleaned house, and enjoyed daily outings visiting the neighborhood stores. She chain-smoked, drank coffee continually, and chatted endlessly. My dad enjoyed keeping up with current events by reading the afternoon newspaper. What we did have was television. As a family, we were heavy on the comedies that proliferated in the 1950s: Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, The Ernie Kovacs Show, The Jackie Gleason Show, The Steve Allen Show, and Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life. The latter was more of a quiz show, and I responded to and absorbed the factual answers to the point where, at an early age, I was able to do better than most of the TV contestants.

At age ten I became a fan of The Twilight Zone. I watched it by myself late at night, in the dark, which could be unnerving. It was a novelty watching old movies on TV instead of in a theater. Horror movies of the post-World War II period were low budget and, after their initial run in second-rate theaters and drive-ins, ended up on our local Chiller Theater. Their popularity among kids spawned magazines like Famous Monsters.

There was another show that programmed Sherlock Holmes movies. The re-exposure of these older films revived interest even though they were decades old. For kids or teens, it was not nostalgia or yearning for a previous era, but a response to what they experienced regardless of when the movies were produced. The Three Stooges became so popular that fan clubs sprang up, and the reconstituted trio was enlisted to star in three new movies, which weren’t very good. The new phenomenon of Head Shops—which catered to the new drug culture—sold new posters of old movie stars Humphrey Bogart, W. C. Fields, Jean Paul Belmondo, and the Marx Brothers.

As soldiers returned from their service in World War II, and as the country returned to normal, a large number of babies were born. Decades later those who were born during this period were labeled “baby boomers.” This resulted in a large youth culture which had its greatest impact in the growth of rock ’n’ roll, the first music that was marketed to appeal to teenagers.

We didn’t listen to much music in my house. Sunday mornings were an exception. While my mom prepared a scrumptious breakfast of pancakes and eggs, we listened to 78 rpm records. These were ten-inch records made from fragile shellac that revolved 78 times per minute (rpm) on the turntable. By the mid-1950s they were already dying out in favor of the less fragile and smaller seven-inch vinyl records which played at 45 rpm. Because longer programs that played on a number of 78 rpm discs were housed in a book with sleeves like a photo album, the multidisc set was called a record album. That name stuck when the longer playing time could be accommodated on one twelve-inch disc that played at 33 1/3 rpm.

We listened to pop songs of the 1940s and 1950s, such as “Fascination” by Jane Morgan (’57), and even the rhythm & blues of Ella Mae Morse performing “Down the Road Apiece” (’52). But it was the novelty records that I liked the most: “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)” by Tex Williams, “Pico and Sepulveda” by Felix Figueroa, “I’m My Own Grandpa” by Lonzo and Oscar, and “I’m My Own Grandmaw” by Jo Stafford (all ’47). I particularly responded to the Jewish humor of Mickey Katz, who parodied songs like “Witch Doctor,” making it “K’nish Doctor,” and to Stan Freberg’s “St. George and the Dragonet,” his Christmas-themed parody of the Dragnet detective TV show.

I was a little too young to relate to rock ’n’ roll, which seemed too sexually oriented to me at the time. The first record I bought was a 45 of “The Battle of New Orleans” by Johnny Horton, a number one hit in 1959 about the War of 1812. History was awash on TV during this time. Coming out of the tumultuous War, people wanted distraction and escape in their entertainment rather than reality. While game shows proliferated, most of the diversion was offered in historical settings.

Despite how unappealing the American Western is to contemporary audiences, when I was a kid it was prevalent. Gunsmoke and Bonanza were the most popular and longest running, but there were over fifty other western TV shows, including Have Gun Will Travel, The Rebel, Sugar Foot, Maverick, Zorro, Wyatt Earp, and The Cisco Kid. Among the more popular series shown on The Wonderful World of Disney were ones that combined the western with historical figures: Davy Crockett, The Swamp Fox, Elfego Baca. Older cowboy film stars, like Roy Rodgers, Gene Autry, and Hopalong Cassidy experienced a revival as their movies were shown on TV.

Westerns were popular in feature films as well, with John Wayne being the most popular film star in the world largely from starring in Westerns. Low-budget productions filmed in Spain and Italy, and later referred to as Spaghetti Westerns, aimed to make modest profits from a genre that seemed on its last legs in the mid-sixties, but became minor hits. The star of these was Clint Eastwood, who found it difficult to reestablish himself after a six-year run starring in Rawhide.

Shows from other historical settings were common. Ones based on World War II became hits, whether serious, like Rat Patrol and Combat, or comedic, like Hogan’s Heroes and McHale’s Navy. The Roaring Twenties and Margie took place in the 1920s.

With families being reintegrated after the war and others being started, family comedies proliferated. I watched most of them: The Danny Thomas Show, The Life of Riley, Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, Bachelor Father, My Three Sons, The Real McCoys. The family life as depicted in a series such as The Donna Reed Show was so appealing that it made me wish my mom were Donna Reed. The show with the longest duration, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, launched the career of their son, Ricky Nelson, whose music I liked. I also watched programs starring animals: Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, and Circus Boy (which starred future Monkee Micky Dolenz billed as Mickey Braddock.) Despite the weekly situations presented, and the conflicts that dramas needed, these shows instilled positive family values.

In addition to history, I was drawn to the many sources of comedy: sitcoms on TV (Sgt. Bilko and Car 54, Where Are You?); older films on TV starring the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, the Bowery Boys, Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, and W.C. Fields; new films starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

The second record I bought was comedic. “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini” by Brian Hyland topped the charts in the summer of 1960. I only occasionally bought a record prior to the Beatles, but I did hear records on the radio that I liked.

The next summer my mom and I visited her family in West New York, New Jersey. The hits I enjoyed listening to on the radio were “Pretty Little Angel Eyes” by Curtis Lee (an astonishingly arranged record) and “Hello Mary Lou” by Ricky Nelson. In 1962 I liked “Little Red Rented Rowboat” by Joe Dowell and “Old River” by Walter Brennan. The next year it was “Surfin’ Safari” by the Beach Boys and “Surf City” by Jan and Dean. My two favorite artists of the pre-Beatles era were Buddy Holly and the Coasters, although I didn’t buy their records until years later.

The reason I bought so few records was because I spent my meager allowance on baseball cards and baseball magazines. Baseball was much more interesting to me than popular music. I enjoyed playing the game, but soon realized that my ability was only average. More to the point, I loved collecting baseball cards even before the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles for the 1958 season. Jackie Robinson, having been a star for the Dodgers in Brooklyn, made a big impression on me as the first Negro to break the color barrier in the major leagues. Seeing The Jackie Robinson Story movie on TV gave me a perspective on race relations that I didn’t experience growing up in a white community.

My main link to the sport was through the cards and baseball magazines. I went to only one or two games a year and, for the first few years, there was little baseball on TV. A local station only broadcast eleven Dodgers games a season, all against the rival Giants in San Francisco. At that time the only nationally broadcast games were the All Star games and the World Series. I was so hard up for baseball that in the winter of 1959 I regularly watched games that were televised from Cuba because each team had a few major leaguers on its roster.

My interest in history gave me a desire to learn about the greats of decades past. I bought hardcover books, like the excellent anthology Baseball’s Greatest Players and Babe Ruth, and paperbacks of contemporary greats Willie Mays, Stan Musial, and Ted Williams published by Sport Magazine.

My passion for the history of the game even brought me a small windfall when I was thirteen. Bennie the Fan hosted a local show prior to the Los Angeles Angels televised games. I submitted a postcard to be a contestant. I received a call on a Friday afternoon inquiring if I was going to be home the following afternoon, as my postcard was going to be near the top of the fishbowl, and they wanted to check that if my card were drawn, I would be home to answer the call. I wasn’t assured that they were going to call me, so I watched the show alone.

I was up to speed in knowing the contemporary players and the greats from history, but when they called me and displayed a photo of a player from the past, it wasn’t one with whom I was familiar. It looked a bit like the much older Angels’ General Manager Fred Haney, and that was my guess. I won a McCullough outdoor motor for the boat I didn’t have. We sold it for over a hundred dollars.

I was much more of a Dodgers fan, and in 1963 the club fielded the best lineup in Los Angeles history, with Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, and Tommy Davis. While I listened to and watched as many games as I could, through their winning of the World Series, my interest in collecting baseball cards diminished and I gave up halfway through the season. It coincided with my interest in girls, and girls weren’t into baseball.

When I was in junior high I had a young science teacher who exposed his students to science fiction. My next-door neighbor also recommended authors. Their enthusiasm, and the many genre films that were produced to appeal to teens, made me a science fiction fan. I enjoyed reading Ray Bradbury, Alfred Bestar, George Orwell, and Jules Verne. I got further into it and mail ordered “true stories” of alien encounters and Hans Holzer’s books on ghosts.

As far as becoming interested in music, my first exposure to the Beatles was from a photo on the large button a classmate wore to school in anticipation of their performance on The Ed Sullivan Show. With their hair combed over their foreheads, they all looked like Moe Howard from the Three Stooges to me. I was intrigued by their performance, but not sold. The sound through the TV was muted and dull. Hearing their records on the radio was a different story: they were exhilarating. I was hooked and bought every single and album.

In press conferences and interviews the Beatles came across as witty, which was unique among pop music performers. Compared to the Beatles, the members of any number of other groups I may have heard interviewed, like the Beach Boys or Four Seasons, came across as dull. I found out that it wasn’t the Three Stooges who were an influence on the Beatles, but the Goons, a comedy trio that included Peter Sellers, who had a long running radio show on the BBC. The Beatles sense of humor made them even more appealing and is best displayed in their first film, A Hard Day’s Night.

I became a fan of the other British groups that followed in their wake: the Rolling Stones, Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, the Kinks, the Zombies, and later the Who and the Yardbirds. The lead singer of Herman’s Hermits, Peter Noone, who was only two and a half years older than I, was the only one who was as personable as the Beatles.

The primary appeal to me was the records, not the personalities of the musicians. In interviews the Rolling Stones always came across as disinterested. As intelligent as Mick Jagger’s musical contributions appear to make him, in interviews he never seemed interesting. The Dave Clark Five in their movie Having a Wild Weekend didn’t project well as personalities or actors, nor did Gerry and the Pacemakers in their movie Ferry Cross the Mersey.

When the American groups got up to speed and formed Beatles-styled combos, I was on board. The first group to have a hit was San Francisco’s the Beau Brummels, with “Laugh Laugh.” I bought their records and those by the Byrds, Turtles, Lovin’ Spoonful, Paul Revere and the Raiders, and later the Doors and Love. While I was inspired by the rock groups of the era, I remembered liking most of the Top 40—including Motown and songs by smooth singers like Mel Carter and Dean Martin.

It was the music I responded to, not the fandom. I didn’t buy the teen magazines, which were the only news source for pop music until Rolling Stone appeared a few years later. The teen magazines focused on personality, life style, and romance, while Rolling Stone was concerned with the music and the process.

Although neither of my parents had gone to college, it was always a goal of mine, and UCLA was the natural choice and the top academic university in the area. In high school I probably should have been an art major, but I couldn’t think of how to apply it. I never thought of myself as Mr. Perfect, and I wasn’t the type of student who studied excessively in order to get perfect grades. I was in the honors program for math and science, not because I was particularly interested in those fields, but because I thought the school’s hardest major would better prepare me for the rigors of college. Some people look back at high school as the best time of their lives. For me it was a stepping-stone to college.

When I entered UCLA in September 1968, I was intending to be a lawyer. My favorite subject had been history, but as I didn’t want to teach, I couldn’t figure out what to do with a history major professionally. As there was no pre-law major, the counselor recommended political science. It was while reading one of the textbooks for a class in international relations—reading a page four times and still not retaining the information—that I realized political science wasn’t for me. I also didn’t feel strongly enough about being a lawyer to spend an additional three years in law school to get a degree.

In the spring quarter I went to the office of UCLA’s newspaper, the Daily Bruin, to inquire about writing record reviews. I was told to see John Mendelsohn, the paper’s music editor. His writing in the Daily Bruin—and in Rolling Stone—was exceptional, and his taste was exquisite. He was my first editor and gave me some tips. I was so motivated to improve my writing that I analyzed better written reviews to learn the craft. Although I didn’t realize the significance at the time, writing for the Bruin was my window into the record business.

When I started UCLA, I never considered joining a fraternity. To a rock fan like me, it sounded passé, the rituals and hazing of another time. Yet I had close to that camaraderie with the writers in the entertainment section of the Daily Bruin. The cubicles didn’t resemble a clubhouse, but it was a place to hang out, to make phone calls, or to write up a story between classes. I often went to shows with Jim Bickhart, Mark Leviton, and movie reviewer Stan Berkowitz.

Since I wasn’t paid for my submissions, I had the freedom to write whatever I wanted, which included retrospectives on bands I liked. Most of the rock artists that were popular prior to the existence of late sixties music magazines like Rolling Stone, were never the subjects of a serious history or commentary. Coverage in typical teen-appealing magazines like Teen, 16, and Tiger Beat, were concerned with more superficial topics like the artist’s favorite colors, TV shows, or clothes, and included overly familiar responses like, “Girls who wear short skirts and not too much make-up” to questions such as, “What type of girls do you like?” The Yardbirds, Manfred Mann, Herman’s Hermits and the Move were sixties bands on which I wrote the first semi-scholarly features.

I expanded to writing for Rolling Stone, L.A. Free Press, L.A. Times, and various rock magazines. It sure beat washing dishes or working as a market box boy for extra money—both of which I had done—plus I received free records and concert tickets. I got to know the publicists at the Hollywood based labels and learned about the functions of a record company. I wasn’t interested in writing about artists whose music I didn’t like, which meant that I turned down assignments, even if they paid.

Sometimes I even got to interview performers from my favorite bands. In November 1969 I conducted my first interview, with Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees. Because I hadn’t done one before, I didn’t own a cassette machine, so I lugged my heavy reel-to-reel tape recorder up to the publicist’s office on Sunset Boulevard. When I entered, Maurice’s wife, the singer Lulu, zipped past me on the way to an afternoon of shopping. I found that I had to share my time with a plump young woman who was writing this for her mimeographed, eight-page newsletter. Her mother took photos and made a snide remark about Lulu.

Maurice (pronounced Morris) was a little guy, thin-boned, with a receding hairline and a fringed beard. I found him friendly and charming. He drank a beer. Although he was the first rock star I met, I wasn’t enthralled, nor did I feel anointed. It was enjoyable to spend time with him and learn about his career. But there was also a disquieting element. As it was my first interview, my sensibility was still unformed. I couldn’t understand why he was making claims that I sensed were untrue. Was he forever in pop star mode, where he had to fabricate outrageous tidbits to get into the gossip columns? But I was a representative of an august journal! He said he had played bass on two songs on Abbey Road, which had been released the previous month; that he was pleased that “Something,” the single off the album, was a big hit because he had played the lead guitar on it; and that he had written a song with Eric Clapton and George Harrison. Why would Paul McCartney have permitted somebody else to play bass on a Beatles record? Why would George Harrison not have played lead guitar on the song he wrote and sang? Could Maurice have been delirious and really believed what he told me? I wasn’t experienced or confident enough to have challenged him, and I left those assertions out of my article.

On January 2, 1970, I sent a letter to CBS Records’ A&R department in New York expressing my idea to compile a comprehensive best of the Yardbirds, who had recorded for Epic. I had a title, “The World’s First Super Group,” a song list, and a suggestion for the cover art. I was informed that I first had to submit my idea to CBS’s legal department. It took a couple of exchanges before they permitted me to submit it to A&R. Twelve months later, A&R’s Don Ellis informed me that, my suggestion notwithstanding, they had no plans to produce such a reissue. I didn’t receive a comment on the viability of the project, or any of the specifics. It was more like a standard-language legal letter to protect the rights of CBS. Even though I didn’t realize it at the time, this early interest in revisiting a musical artist’s career planted the seed for Rhino releasing reissues almost ten years later.

At UCLA I was most drawn to psychology and film classes. In order for a psychology major to be meaningful, it had to entail post-graduate studies. I liked the classes, but didn’t feel strongly about committing to the major. By the time I realized I wanted to learn more about film, I didn’t think I would be accepted to the much-in-demand program. The more obvious major for me, journalism, was one UCLA didn’t offer. I concocted a major of mostly psychology, sociology, and film classes. I found a professor who gave her approval and named it “Sociology in the Media,” with which I graduated in 1972.

My senior year I was the campus rep for CBS Records. The company’s more familiar labels were Columbia and Epic. I excelled at getting records added to the campus radio station, putting on concerts, composing and placing ads in the basketball program, and promoting product at the four Westwood Village record stores. Despite my impressive track record, CBS didn’t hire me after graduating, nor did any of the other record companies. As much as the record business was populated by wild and creative personalities, much of it was staid. Only years later did Paul Rappaport, who hired me for the part-time position, speculate on why CBS didn’t offer me a job: “You liked to stretch the envelope and you had a strong personality. I remember suggesting that you tone down your Redbone ad, that the CBS-types would think it’s too wild. They would wonder if they would be able to mold you to what they wanted done.”

Almost a year after graduating, I finally got a job, a four-month placement as a US passport agent. Four days a week I was at my desk checking over applications and documentation that were mailed in by various post offices. Saturdays I joined others behind the counter dealing directly with the public. With no real supervisor on duty, I pushed the “jacket” dress requirement. The previous fall while in London, I had purchased a thin, purple satin jacket with exaggerated lapels in the manner of glam rock star Marc Bolan. I paired that with a large bow tie in the style of the Kinks’ Ray Davies. Other times I donned a Civil War marching band coat—with tails—that I had picked up at the MGM Studio warehouse sale. There were no reprimands or negative comments from the acting supervisor and surprisingly few comments from the public. My stint as a passport agent provided an income, but I knew a straight job was not one in which I would feel comfortable or thrive.

I have always responded to throwaway lines, one-liners, and asides: short phrases that are incidental to the focus of the main content. There’s a scene in A Hard Day’s Night where the Beatles are sitting in a train coach. John Lennon picks up a bottle of Coca-Cola and sniffs from the top. I didn’t realize until I saw the film the third time—in my twenties—that he was referring to cocaine. (Until 1904 the soda was made with the drug.) Or on the live side of Flo & Eddie’s Illegal, Immoral and Fattening album, Howard Kaylan (Eddie) keys off the piano player’s noodling with “All my friends in Tulsa,” impersonating Oklahoman Leon Russell, who was popular at the time.

In the introduction to the Mystery Science Theater 3000 TV show, one of the robot characters, Tom Servo, says, “Hello there,” in the same manner that Irish singer Val Doonican is impersonated in the Bonzo Dog Band’s “The Intro and the Outro.” The appeal of these comments probably started with me viewing Marx Brothers movies on TV. The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show incorporated the style, as did The Simpsons decades later. Mad magazine did the same thing, with its background gags and later, MAD Marginals, drawings outside the edge of the frame.

In a similar spirit, I took an Epic Records biography for the Hollies that was so generally written, I did little more than substitute my band’s name for the Hollies when retyping it, and passed it off as our bio. When we played a noontime concert at UCLA’s Ackerman Union Grand Ballroom, I had Justin Pierce introduce us with the same “Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s all about to happen …” that opened the Rolling Stones’ live album Get Yer Ya-Yas Out, and also had guitarist Bill Pique recite the same line Mick uttered during the concert about busting a button on his trousers and that they might fall down. It was funny, or at least amusing to anybody who made the connection. And to those who didn’t, it was just part of the show.

On the last day of my job at the discount department store Fedco, where I worked as a sacker, I changed my nametag to read “Pete Townshend.” Nobody commented on my name change, or that it was the same as the guitarist of the Who. When I reviewed soul singer Willie Henderson for Cash Box magazine, in a performance at the Playboy Club, I referred to Henderson as being “late of Pablo Fanque’s Fair.” That wasn’t his previous engagement, but a reference to the Beatles’ lyric in the Sgt. Pepper’s song “Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite.”

On occasion I amused myself similarly at Rhino—whether anybody noticed or not. Every year we took a company photo that was featured on the back of our yearly calendar and catalog. Every year I wore a red shirt. I was waiting for someone to mention it before I would change shirts. Only prior to my last photo session did someone, Sharon Foster, our head of human resources, ask me about it. I had worn it for eight straight photos. For the last one, I wore a white dress shirt with a large clock face on the front. I pointed to the clock, inferring that my time was up at the company.

The Beatles led the charge of what became known as the British Invasion, but no one had compiled a comprehensive overview of that mid-sixties period. I loved the music and wanted to produce such a series. I couldn’t hope to get tracks by the Beatles or Rolling Stones—although any buyer of the series should already have albums by those artists—and I was frustrated by those who turned us down on other artists. Even though we had been referred to in the press as “the Smithsonian of the music business,” and our product was of a high quality, it didn’t mean that the other labels valued our commitment to the preservation of rock history. ABKCO controlled the Rolling Stones, but also Herman’s Hermits, Marianne Faithful, and the early Animals’ hits, and had a policy of not licensing to other record companies so people had to buy their own product. PolyGram initially declined to license us their artists—the Bee Gees, Cream, Dusty Springfield, Eric Burdon & the Animals, the Mindbenders, and Them—but later agreed for our second set of releases.

We were distributed by Capitol Records, so it was hard for them to refuse our request for the artists they controlled: Gerry & the Pacemakers, Freddie & the Dreamers, Billy J. Kramer & the Dakotas, Manfred Mann, Peter & Gordon, the Hollies, and the Spencer Davis Group. Other artists that were part of the initial four albums included the Kinks, Yardbirds, Searchers, Zombies, and Troggs. Released in 1988, sales of The British Invasion: The History of British Rock averaged 60,000. Even though the next set of five were equally as good, having been issued three years later, totals were half of the first release. The series wasn’t definitive but we did manage to include one Beatles hit, “Ain’t She Sweet.”

The Rutles was a 1978 TV special that parodied the Beatles segment of a British documentary on pop music, All You Need Is Love, which provided inspiration for the show’s UK title: All You Need Is Cash. Monty Python’s Eric Idle wrote and codirected the mockumentary. Neil Innes, who had been a member of the Bonzo Dog Band and had written songs for Monty Python, composed and produced the music. It was almost like hearing a new Beatles album. Even though the TV special only managed low ratings, the album was on the chart for nine weeks.

I arranged for Rhino to license it for CD and included extra tracks that Bill Inglot discovered in the tape vault that were part of the special’s soundtrack but not on the original LP. As part of the process I enjoyed getting to know Neil. He was so good with melody in capturing the feel of songs from the sixties that I asked him to write for the Monkees’ reunion album we were planning, but he never got around to it. I felt gratified that not only could we give the fans the six extra songs on the CD, but that I could send Neil a check for $35,000 for the publishing on those songs, as his regular royalty payments had been absorbed by the black hole of the production company. We sold 80,000 albums.

After Stephanie Nemeth’s short, first marriage—to someone else—she became my wife on April 1, 1990. I chose the date because it was easy to remember and, as it was April Fools’ Day, to fly in the face of those who say it’s foolish to get married. We’ve been married for over twenty years. We have a good life with two wonderful children. Since getting to know her, she’s always been my favorite person.