CHAPTER 9

The Rhino Label Part Three

The Atlantic Years

It was a disaster: our controller, Gary Gross, had grossly miscalculated our profit for 1992. Instead of making $8 million, we made $800,000, which meant that our profits were half as much as the previous year’s. We had been in our joint venture with Atlantic Records for only a year, and not only were our profits down, but our credibility was tarnished. I felt bad about it, but the Atlantic execs were surprisingly understanding. Making it worse was that Richard and I had paid bonuses to our employees—not to ourselves—based on the false numbers. Although we would have been justified in asking for the money back, to do so would have further diminished morale, so we didn’t. Because Gross delayed notifying us for many weeks, he had to go.

Atlantic Records was formed in 1947 by Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson. About ten years later Jerry Wexler, essentially, replaced Abramson. Ahmet was a passionate and scholarly jazz fan who later embraced R&B. At the time we came aboard, Ahmet was still at the label, but in a reduced capacity. As a result, we didn’t interact with him much.

The first year of our association with Atlantic was getting to know each other, getting acclimated to their corporate way of doing business. Even though our contract spelled out the artist catalogues we were now in control of, we still had to proceed gingerly. Although we were the ones with the motivation and reputation, there was still some reluctance from certain people at Atlantic. As a compromise, a special logo was concocted, the cumbersome Rhino Presents Atlantic and Atco Re-masters Series. It was almost as if the Rhino logo wasn’t good enough to stand alone. The Atlantic execs didn’t understand the concept of branding. It was especially important for us, as we were a growing company trying to increase awareness of Rhino. Imagine the effect of a well-established logo like Coca-Cola or Virgin being reduced to sharing a small box with two other logos and text? Our egos were in check; releasing the product was the most important thing.

We did extremely well in reinvigorating the Atlantic catalogue—we sold over 100,000 of Aretha Franklin’s four-disc box set Queen of Soul—but the set that sold exceptionally well was The John Prine Anthology: Great Days. Richard and I were fans of Prine from his debut album on Atlantic in 1971. He was the 1970s Bob Dylan: a witty folk singer who championed social causes. After a ten-year run on established labels, he became disenchanted and started his own successful record company. Even though three-quarters of the masters on our anthology were from Atlantic and Asylum—one-quarter from Prine’s Oh Boy Records—we weren’t required to use the funny hybrid logo. We sold 242,000 copies.

Some corporate policies affected us. Early on we realized that we could get our CDs manufactured for ten cents less per disc than what Warner was charging us. Atlantic wouldn’t give us the leeway to go elsewhere. The difference was half a million more dollars to us in the early years, escalating to a million as our business grew. It may have been small change to the Warner Music Group, but not to us. Others policies didn’t affect us. For example, as a public company, Time Warner gave into complaining stockholders who were revolted by the extreme messages in certain rap records. The controversy started over “Cop Killer,” an Ice-T rap recorded by him and others under the artist name Body Count. The labels were pressured to divest themselves of their lucrative rap artists.

On July 31, 1992, John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s one-time favorite singer called me out of the blue. I had never spoken to Harry Nilsson before. He asked me to call the head of his former label, RCA, to see if they wanted to issue a career spanning anthology—which would have included his better known hits “Everybody’s Talkin’,” “Without You,” and “Coconut”—or if Rhino could do it. I thought it was unusual that he didn’t just call RCA himself.

Harry was in a bad way. He was devastated when he learned that his trusted financial advisor had embezzled millions from him, leaving him with $300 in his bank account. Howard Kaylan had called me months earlier. In order to raise Harry’s spirits, he wanted to engage him in recording a new album. Howard would produce, and Harry’s notable friends, like John Sebastian, Stephen Bishop, and Micky Dolenz, would pitch in. I told him I was on board, but the project never happened. After two calls, Joe Galante called me back and gracelessly told me that RCA would do the anthology, but they didn’t. In July 1994 Harry died from heart failure—probably more from a broken heart. RCA issued an anthology the following year.

We organized a company policy on charitable donations and giving back to the community. Contributing to charity was important to Richard’s family, and it was also a component of sixties hippie culture. Because my parents didn’t have much excess money, it wasn’t emphasized in my home. Seeing Richard in action inspired me to develop this area on my own. Gary Stewart introduced us to the Liberty Hill Foundation, which helped us choose organizations that received our cash grants. At Rhino a committee set up a program whereby employees were encouraged to give back to the community by performing community service in exchange for getting time off. We plugged worthwhile organizations in our CD booklets and on our yearly calendar. The organizations benefitted, other companies were moved to set up their own programs after seeing what we had done, and consumers were turned on to charities they might not have otherwise known about.

We had outgrown our space, but still hoped to stay in Santa Monica, even more so after Sony Music moved in a block away. But there didn’t seem to be anything suitable. We had a number of meetings with Frederick Smith to relocate to one of his industrial buildings in Culver City, which was to be refashioned by architect Eric Own Moss. As the process was taking more time than we anticipated, we weren’t confident the space would be ready in time. We set our sights on a newly completed building on Santa Monica Boulevard, south of Westwood, yards from where silent film comedian Harold Lloyd once had his studio. The Atria West was across the street from where Warner Chappell Music Publishing was ensconced in its sister building. As the entire second floor—36,000 square feet—had been vacant in the year since the building was completed, we were able to negotiate a rent that was workable for us.

Brian Schuman did an exemplary job in using his organizational and design skills in planning our new space with the firm we hired, Beckson Design—with the exception of allocating to Richard a noticeably larger office than mine. As conceived by Beckson, the light and airy interior deviated from a typical linear layout as though a rhino had charged through, knocking offices out of alignment. In one of the hallways there was a sequence of lights that was supposed to recall rhino horns. The main conference room had a large, custom-made table that was in the shape of a rhino horn. It sure looked cool, but it was impractical; the long curve caused some people to disappear from view. The grey color of the fabric chairs represented the color of a rhino’s hide. I don’t think many people noticed the rhino-inspired touches. We were environmentally conscious, and our reception area floor was made from Syndecrete, a concrete-like composite material made from recycled elements including, in our case, pieces of vinyl records, CDs, and cassettes.

I furnished the lobby in a space age Jetsons style with pieces I acquired from vintage furniture stores Futurama, Off the Wall, Modernica, and the yearly Modernism Show. At Modernica I added an accent piece I’d never seen before, a Weltron 2005 combination turntable and eight-track player that looked like a spaceship hoisted on a pedestal. Richard provided his vintage Coca Cola vending machine, which he had stocked with bottled Rhino Water. After a few months, when the walls still hadn’t been addressed, I had old movie posters and our album jackets framed, and hung large photos of rock performers used in the set of our Billboard series infomercial. I ordered complementary circus mirrors—one that made you fat, one skinny—to make a walk through a narrow hallway more interesting.

Art’s is a popular delicatessen in Studio City. The tagline, “Where every sandwich is a work of Art,” was complemented by framed photos of various dishes on the walls. The food looked so appealing in the photos that I contacted the photographer and bought a number from him, ordering as though I would have from a menu: “I’ll take the corn beef sandwich, blintzes …” It gave our lunchroom a novel look, but didn’t reflect the food that was served. We brought in a catered lunch every day that the company subsidized, so it cost an employee only two dollars per meal. In the adjacent room, Richard contributed two pinball machines from his collection, one baseball, the other of the rock group Kiss. We had a small gym, and a meditation room.

I had an idea for a museum-like display in our lobby that featured items from Rhino’s history. Rhino, in a traditional sense, didn’t have a history: the hit records we reissued were originally on other labels. It was a reaction to those who flaunt their history. In contrast with more legitimate historical displays, our items were mundane. I’m not sure how many people got the joke: just because something is displayed with importance doesn’t mean that it is important. A few years later, when Ray Charles showed up to collect his million-dollar check for renewing with us, his manager described to him a jacket of his we had on display—one Richard had picked up years previously in a thrift store for five bucks. Ray thought we deserved better and sent over a flashier one to replace it. It fit me perfectly. Our offices were featured in Interior Design magazine and used as a location for the Adam Sandler movie Airheads. George Clooney filmed a car commercial for Japan out front.

As I mentioned, when Richard and I moved into our first label location, it was just the two of us and a warehouseman. As our sales increased, we could afford to hire more people. What that meant was that other people were now assuming duties I once had. There were other, newer tasks to oversee owing to the growth of the organization. But this dilution in my duties caused me to meet with Richard and ask for guidance on other things I should be doing. He didn’t offer me any ideas in that meeting, or subsequently. It was up to me to redefine my role as the company grew.

I was still making deals and coming up with projects. Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t justify the time to produce any of our reissues, but I made suggestions, and on occasion edited or rewrote liner notes. I had established our media licensing (film/TV/commercials), but it didn’t appear that we could have increased business enough to hire a full-time employee, so I saved the expense and added revenue to the company by doing it myself. I pursued deals for our home video division.

In the early ’90s the concept of branding was in the zeitgeist. For a company like Rhino, it meant that people in general were familiar with our company and logo and, more pointedly, that music buyers were. The next step was to make them aware that we made the highest quality reissues in the market. We hoped that if consumers were considering two or more similar packages, they would buy the Rhino one. Emmer compared Rhino’s logo to that of the Good Housekeeping “Seal of Approval.” In addition to bolstering consumer interest, the increased presence of the brand would make doing business with Rhino more appealing to artists, licensors, and retailers.

The company best at branding was Disney. Walt Disney started out making cartoon shorts and then later produced animated features. The brand was successfully extended into many other areas. It was the standard for me, but by no means a model. Rhino was originally two record stores, and then the record label, and we were conscious of maintaining that identification. Rhino Home Video and Kid Rhino also became established brands in their respective markets.

I took it upon myself to extend our brand into other areas, all at no cost to the company or our business. I created a Rhino Books imprint and made book distribution deals with three publishers to get our name and logo presence in book stores. One of the goals of Rhino Films was to get exposure in theaters and on TV. Another was to celebrate the music of our vintage artists by producing docudramas.

With Richard’s input, I developed a concept for a Club Rhino restaurant chain. Unlike other theme restaurants, like the Hard Rock Café and Planet Hollywood, ours would have humor. Additionally, I liked the idea of customers being able to order CDs off the menu. Richard and I had meetings with some of the major hotels in Las Vegas. Felix Rappaport, the president of New York New York, had us back for a second meeting, but the others didn’t quite get the concept. The main problem was our timing. The novelty had worn off with theme restaurants. Planet Hollywood had filed for bankruptcy.

Steve Nemeth, my brother-in-law, met one of the owners of the Dodgers minor league team, the San Bernardino Stampede. We were invited to a game, with the intention of renaming the team the Rhinos, and using our logos. It would have increased our merchandising and visibility, not just in San Bernardino but also in the other cities of the Class A California League. While it would have been nice to have seen a team sporting the Rhino logo, I felt that I would have to make a few visits a year to the stadium to check on how it was being used, and I didn’t relish the 150-mile round-trip drive. Similarly, Richard looked into forming a Rhinos minor league basketball team to play in the Continental Basketball Association. He and I would have funded it, and we were thinking of placing the team in Santa Barbara or San Diego (formerly the home of the NBA Clippers). Ultimately, we didn’t proceed because it didn’t seem that there was a way to make money. The league’s relationship with the NBA was such that if a stellar player were plucked for one of the major teams, the CBA team would only get a minimal amount of compensation.

One of the more interesting promotional ideas we had was a yearly music trivia contest we promoted with Tower Records, called RMAT (Rhino Musical Aptitude Test). We also co-promoted Retrofest, a one-off pop culture and music festival at the Santa Monica Civic in August 1999. We had a number of acts perform, like Flo & Eddie and the Turtles, Dick Dale, and Berlin, and a number of attractions, but too few people showed up and we lost a lot of money. If it had worked, we could have staged it in numerous cities throughout the summer.

The Monkees was our first property that interested companies in branded merchandise. Because Warner Brothers Pictures had a well-staffed division that handled this area, we offered them the Monkees, but they thought it would bring in too-little revenue to justify their time. I learned the business and made quite a number of deals for common items such as bobble head dolls, bathrobes and pajamas, as well as for expensive, limited edition, band-signed drumheads and lithographs. I made sure the items were made with quality before I approved, and I was sensitive to any issues the members of the Monkees might have had. A few rock artists, such as the Rolling Stones and Grateful Dead, had licensed their name to wine. We were approached to license the Monkees. Knowing that Peter Tork was a member of AA, I spoke to him about the request. We proceeded in licensing a non-alcoholic wine, but it was never produced.

Not every move we made was a successful one. Our decision to enter the kids market at a particular heady management meeting in Oxnard, in June 1990, smacked of hubris, and was a rare misstep. We thought we could be successful in an area we knew nothing about. With a young staff, few of us had children, and that included Richard and me at the time. We weren’t interacting with kids, or learning what appealed to them. Raffi, a Canadian singer with a soft tone in the manner of Cat Stevens, sold hundreds of thousands of albums in the kids market, leading those in the music business to perceive that there was a new market for kids’ music.

I was designated to oversee the new Kid Rhino imprint and hired one person to head it up. After the first two years, it reported to the A&R department. My initial ideas made sense. One was to compile albums of hits that would appeal to kids. I wanted to record new albums with kid-friendly performers, whose records parents bought when they were younger, and that they might buy for their children. I thought of Donovan, but couldn’t get a good phone number for him or a manager. John Sebastian declined, explaining that his voice had deteriorated. My good friend Peter Noone would only agree if I hired the very expensive Phil Ramone to produce. That left Micky Dolenz.

Micky Dolenz Puts You to Sleep was not a commentary on how boring he was, but soothing music intended to relax a child when in bed. It was Kid Rhino’s first release in October 1991. Working with Micky was the best experience I had as a producer. He showed up on time, always sang in tune, and possessed a rare ability to sing in any style. Sales were encouraging enough that we followed it up with Broadway Micky—much to the chagrin of his fellow Monkee Davy Jones who whined, “Everybody knows I’m the Broadway guy!”

Early on Bob Emmer made a deal to distribute Rabbit Ears, the producer of a high quality animated TV series that paired a familiar actor reading a children’s story with a noted musician providing the soundtrack. For example, Robin Williams read Pecos Bill with Ry Cooder; Jack Nicholson read The Elephant’s Child with Bobby McFerrin. Sales in this initial period were poor. It was clear that we had misjudged the market. It was then I adopted a defensive strategy, one aimed at minimizing losses until we could get a new direction. Emmer inadvertently provided that when he made a deal to issue the songs from Steven Spielberg’s new cartoon show Animaniacs. The show was wacky and witty, but also with an educational element. The 100,000 we sold of the first album recouped most of the division’s losses in that period. It pointed the way to what worked for Kid Rhino. Despite our ambitions, the only releases that had a chance to be successful were ones associated with movies and TV shows.

We contracted with a number of companies that had appealing brands. Among the more successful titles were Nickelodeon’s Blue’s Clues (200,000) and Cartoon Network’s Space Ghost (83,000). The Fisher-Price and Music for Little People brands didn’t work for us. Space Jam was a hit movie, pairing basketball great Michael Jordon with Bugs Bunny and other Looney Tunes characters. We sold 175,000 copies of the soundtrack.

Even though at one time Kid Rhino was considered the number two kids label after Disney—a very distant number two—it never made money. The product was lower priced to be affordable to kids. Sometimes we had to absorb the cost of an enclosed toy, or more costly packaging to fit on the racks at toy stores. Also, unlike our catalog business, retail did not look upon kid product as generating sales beyond its initial release.

When a Warner Brothers artist illustrated a 1997 sampler CD for us that depicted Bugs Bunny embracing Kid Rhino, I realized that our junior character had the look—and personality—of a unique cartoon character. I pitched it to Warner Brothers’ animation division, but they didn’t feel the same way. Kid Rhino lasted longer than it should have, with various personnel taking the helm. Warner Brothers’ lack of interest in developing either Rocky Rhino or Kid Rhino as a viable animated character missed the real potential in my mind.

Breaking newly recorded artists was still a problem for us, even with our new relationship. Danny Goldberg was a senior VP at Atlantic, head of A&R for the West Coast office. He has a number of admirable qualities: he’s smart, a real music fan, and a champion of liberal causes. He also has a politician’s sense of reality, whereby the end is given preference over the means, a trait I discovered when he tried to foist Roger Clinton on us. In a move to get chummy with Roger’s brother, president-elect Bill Clinton (or at the very least to be well-positioned at the premier Inaugural Ball, a person in Roger’s camp speculated), Danny spent $60,000 having Roger record a cover of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” with R&B vocal group En Vogue singing backup. When his strategy didn’t work, he wanted to wash his hands of the relationship. When the press got wind of the recording, Danny denied that Atlantic had signed him and then came up with an alternative.

He called me and asked, “as a favor,” for us to record an album with Roger that Atlantic would pay for. Even if we had been interested, Clinton didn’t fit in with our label. A few months later, Richard was able to secure a deal for him with Pyramid Records, a label we distributed. Clinton’s original recording was forgotten about. It was a fine performance, but to this day has never been released.

Despite the long odds, there was still a push to record new artists at the company. Our RNA (Rhino New Artists) label failed, so our head of marketing, Chris Tobey, and our A&R Department concocted the Forward imprint. Todd Rundgren wanted to record a new album, and Chris thought he was enough of a prestigious artist to make an impact for Forward’s debut. Similar to our contract with Capitol, we had a stipulation that Atlantic’s radio promotion department had to work a minimal number of records per year. From overseeing the Bearsville catalogue, I developed a good relationship with Todd’s manager, Eric Gardner. Eric wanted confirmation from Atlantic that they would work Todd’s record before he made the deal with us. In a conference call, Danny Goldberg assured Eric and me that Atlantic would work the record.

Todd long ago professed boredom with composing the melodic rock songs at which he excelled. His last big selling record (397,000) was 1978’s Hermit of Mink Hollow. This time out he wanted to revamp himself as a technologically progressive artist named TR-i (Todd Rundgren interactive). The advance and recording cost for Todd to make New World Order exceeded $100,000. We spent money on marketing the record, but hadn’t seen any effect of Atlantic’s radio promotion department. I called Danny to see what had happened. He admitted that it hadn’t been worked, and then astonished me when he said that he thought we only wanted him to tell Eric that Atlantic was going to work the record so we could sign Todd. Yeah, Danny, I thought, that’s why we spent all this money. The record was over—it was too late to rekindle any interest. In January 1994 Doug Morris appointed Danny president of Atlantic Records.

Colin Reef had been hired to head our finance department. Fairly early on he more than paid for his salary when he noticed that our joint-venture partners were paying us for our product in ninety days, meaning they had our money at their disposal while we had to pay interest to a bank on our $3 million line of credit. He made a case for us being paid on a current basis, just like Virgin Records, a label Atlantic distributed. When they agreed, we no longer had a need for the line of credit.

In the mid-nineties the concept of the superstore took hold. Best Buy, Borders and, to a lesser extent, Circuit City and Barnes & Noble, greatly expanded their stock of deep catalogue. What this meant was that in addition to stocking the hits and the more recent releases by contemporary artists, they were also accommodating older hits and albums. All of those chains were in expansion mode, as was Tower Records, which already was a deep catalogue retailer. Every time a new store was about to open, a large quantity of our product was brought in. As a result, our sales flourished.

Because we were passionately driven, we had the patience to realize our projects. Our Righteous Brothers Anthology took six years. Releasing the early recordings of Quiet Riot took ten years. I met Kevin DuBrow at Wong’s West nightclub in 1979. He invited me to sit at his booth for a chat, and we both discovered that we were big Steve Marriott fans. Marriott had been the lead singer of the Small Faces and subsequently Humble Pie. We were both in the audience the night Humble Pie played the Whisky in December 1970. We also shared a fondness for other British groups of the period. Kevin had been the lead singer in Quiet Riot, but the group had fallen apart after guitarist Randy Rhoads left to join Ozzy Osbourne’s band. At one time they were the heir apparent to Van Halen as the area’s most popular heavy metal band. With an enormous local following, the group had sold out venues such as the Starwood, Whisky, and Palomino, but they couldn’t get a record deal in the United States. I hadn’t seen the original band play, but I borrowed their two albums—which were only released in Japan on CBS Sony—from A&R man Jeff Samuels when I saw them in his office at United Artists Records in 1978. I could see why they didn’t get an American deal. The sound on the two albums was thin. Still, Kevin licensed me a track—the first appearance of Quiet Riot on a US record—for our 1980 local bands compilation Yes Nukes.

With the accolades Rhoads was getting on tour with Ozzy in the early eighties, I expressed to Kevin an interest in wanting to release the original Quiet Riot material. I also liked his new band, DuBrow, and wanted to sign them to Rhino, but his manager at the time was a flake, and nothing happened. In March 1982, Rhoads was killed in a plane crash, and his notoriety soared. Subsequently, Kevin put together a new band, also called it Quiet Riot, and got a record deal with a label distributed by CBS. On the strength of the band’s hit single, a cover of Slade’s “Cum On Feel the Noize,” in November 1983 Quiet Riot scored the first number one album of the burgeoning heavy metal revival. The band’s successive albums each declined in sales from their predecessor, and Kevin quit the band in 1987.

I saw him around this time, and we renewed our discussion about rereleasing the original Quiet Riot records. He had done a test of a song as an example of how the sound could be made more dynamic. One way of doing this was to play an original guitar track through a beefier amplifier and record it in the studio. It took Kevin a few years before he could address the project properly. He and his coproducer did an exemplary job on the album; half of the tracks were from the band’s first two LPs, and half were unreleased. But by the time Quiet Riot: The Randy Rhoads Years hit the stores in October 1993, interest in both the band and Rhoads had subsided. Had it been released when I first suggested it, in 1982, the album would have sold a multiple of the 50,000 it totaled.

Richard, Gary, and I were a formidable source for ideas of product to release. Yet on the morning of November 2, 1993, our regularly scheduled A&R meeting entered an unwelcomed dimension. Gary led off with suggesting an album by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, calling it “Strangers in the Night.” How was this a Rhino project? I wondered. Richard then chipped in with “Frank Sinatra Jr.’s Greatest Hits”—except he had no hits. Was I hearing right? I knew it wasn’t a hallucination, I hadn’t taken any acid, and my office walls were not moving. I checked myself and no, it wasn’t a dream, either. It could have been the Twinkie Defense: impaired judgment from eating too much after-Halloween candy. It was like a shift in reality, like the Bizarro World in Superman. The meeting continued with Gary suggesting a box set of feminist songs, and he followed that with a Hair (the stage play) tribute album. Richard then had the best idea of the meeting, songs that were on Elvis’s jukebox, but it still wasn’t a good one.

I wasn’t on a power trip, and I didn’t enjoy saying “No”—quite the opposite. Still, a person in my position is sowing rejection, in essence: Your idea isn’t good enough. Anytime we launched a project, it passed through many departments and many hands: legal, to make the deal; A&R, to determine what songs would be on the album; art, for the packaging; sales and marketing; and royalties—no matter how small the revenue. A bad project meant that all of these people had to occupy their time on a money loser at the expense of a title that might have actual potential. I was sensitive to encumbering our employees with an idea that I thought wouldn’t justify their efforts and the expense. From these above examples, Gary’s liberalism was prone to those who considered themselves marginalized. Richard’s emotional makeup included a gambler’s roll of the dice, where anything had a chance to be a winner, even long shots. So, in addition to contributing my own ideas—I made no presentations that day—I viewed my role as a mediator. As that November meeting exemplified, sometimes it was difficult to contain my exasperation. I derived no pleasure in being the person most likely to say “No,” which also created tension at times.

By the time we made our deal with Atlantic, Ahmet Ertegun seemed to have been slowed by old age. But that didn’t stop his drinking. When I was in Hong Kong in April 1999 for the Warner Music Group meetings, Atlantic president Val Azzoli told me a typical story: “After drinking twelve vodkas, Ahmet signed a lounge band at the Grand Hyatt. They showed up on Monday morning, and we paid them off. This would usually happen twice a year.” Still, to me, Ahmet was to be respected. So, for example, when he called me and wanted Rhino to issue a CD of a 1973 album by jazz singer and pianist Bobby Short, I didn’t reply that it would sell so few CDs that we would lose money on it. It was Ahmet’s request, so we did it.

I saw Pulp Fiction at an advance screening in New York when we were on a promotional tour for our Sweet Sixteen Anniversary in September 1994. I was so blown away that I plugged it in our interviews. Many months before, I got a call from Karyn Rachtman, the film’s music supervisor, who wanted to license Dick Dale’s “Miserlou” over the opening credits.

Dick Dale created the style that would be referred to as surf instrumental. An avid surfer, he wanted to approximate, musically, the power of the waves he felt when he was on a surfboard. Although “Miserlou” originated as a Greek folk song with Middle Eastern influences, Dick’s ferocious arrangement resulted in his best recording. Dick Dale and his band, the Del-Tones, were extremely popular in Southern California in the early 1960s, but their renown was geographically limited because Dick refused to tour so he could be close to his favorite surfing spots. The band’s November 1962 record Surfer’s Choice is regarded as the first surf music album.

Like other instrumental surf groups, when the Beatles hit, their popularity dwindled. Around this time Dick was diagnosed with rectal cancer and given three months to live. An operation was successful and he went to Hawaii to recuperate. He cultivated a menagerie of animals—including a tiger—studied martial arts, and fell in love with his wife, Jeannie, Hawaii’s top Tahitian dancer, whom he married shortly after returning to California in 1971. Jeannie encouraged Dick to return to performing, but with her involvement it was more like a Las Vegas lounge act. He started at the bottom and his popularity grew all over again. During the seventies he became very successful in real estate.

In 1981 Bruce Springsteen—and members of his E Street Band—helped to resurrect the career of early sixties rocker Gary U.S. Bonds with a hit single and album. Richard thought that Bruce, and other Dick Dale fans like John Fogerty and ELO’s Jeff Lynne, could do the same for Dick. In July, Dick and Jeannie drove to our funky warehouse office in their Rolls Royce, after which we reconvened at a coffee shop. I had met Dick previously, when I covered the Surfer’s Stomp revival concert for Rolling Stone in August 1973. Paul Rappaport and I went backstage at the Palladium to meet Dick. He was very congenial, and even gave Paul one of his guitar picks—which Paul framed and hung on his office wall.

In his mid-forties, Dick was a handsome and charming man. What I liked most about him was his positive energy and aphorisms. What I liked least about him was his self-centeredness. When he talked, he peculiarly referred to himself in the third person. This could partially be explained because his real name was Richard Monsour. Although he’s identified as a pioneer of surf music, when he previously performed country and western music, a DJ thought he should have a more appropriate handle and named him “Dick Dale.” Dick and Jeannie had a unique rapport, conversing in a manner that was one or two steps above baby talk. Jeannie, beautiful and voluptuous, sucked on a lollipop.

Dick entertained us with his anecdotes. He once sold out the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena (15,000 capacity), leaving thousands of ticketless kids to mill around outside. He had an offer for management from Elvis’ manager, Colonel Tom Parker. He gave guitar lessons to a young Jimi Hendrix, who also played guitar left-handed. (In Hendrix’s “Third Stone From the Sun,” he whispers, “You’ll never hear surf music again,” which referred to Dick’s battle with cancer.) Springsteen sent a limousine for Dick and Jeannie to see him in concert at the Sports Arena—they went, but Dick claimed he was unfamiliar with Springsteen’s music.

The album never happened because we couldn’t get responses from possible participants. Dick’s original records were not available, and there were many fans, like me, who desired them. Dick didn’t want them out because he felt those recordings never fully captured the power of his band in concert. In May 1982 I traveled fifty-four miles to his home in Newport Beach, on the Balboa Peninsula right next to “the Wedge,” one of his favorite surfing spots. The seventeen-room mansion was built in 1925 for razor heir King Gillette. The place was impressive, right on the bay, but there were a number of areas that Dick had started to fix up and never finished. I needed him to sign a two-page contract so we could include “Miserlou” on the first volume of our History of Surf Music series. I was only there a matter of minutes. Dick seemed preoccupied.

It took until 1986 before I was able to make a deal with him for a best of album and, at his insistence, a 1983 live album he had recorded and issued on his own label. Needless to say, sales of King of the Surf Guitar: The Best of Dick Dale & the Del-Tones trounced those of The Tigers Loose.

Karyn Rachtman was lowballing me on the fee for Pulp Fiction, pleading poverty, only offering $7,500, claiming that she had a lot of songs to license. It’s not as if I felt like doing writer/director Quentin Tarantino a favor. I had met him only once, and he berated me because Rhino passed on putting out the soundtrack album to his first film, Reservoir Dogs. There was sound judgment behind that decision. I didn’t think the movie would be seen by enough people to sell albums. I was right, as it only grossed two and a half million at the box office. The soundtrack sold well only after the success of Pulp Fiction. I did license “Little Green Bag” by the George Baker Selection to the movie.

Pulp Fiction’s budget was $8 million. I could have turned Karyn down, but I liked her and thought she did a good job. I had also been friendly with her father when I was at UCLA and put on a concert with one of the acts he managed, Flash Cadillac & the Continental Kids. I made the deal. The prominent placement of “Miserlou” in Pulp Fiction is a good example of how a song in a hit movie can generate interest. It was a boon to Dick’s career, and it sparked a financial windfall for both of us.

The soundtrack album sold over a million copies. In an interview in conjunction with the release, Tarantino arrogantly referred to burning the song’s future appeal. He said, “‘Miserlou’ will be old news.” I was offended. I licensed the song for big money to a few commercials. Sales of our King of the Surf Guitar album swelled to 275,000. Because of the popularity of surfing in Australia, I thought we could license the album there. We received this response from Warner Australia: “Is Dick Dale a comedian? No one around this office has heard of him!”

“Miserlou” also exemplifies how a quality piece of music can have an effect regardless of when it was originally recorded. The majority of people who took note of the song didn’t know that the original record was released in 1962, and they didn’t know who Dick Dale was. They were not relating to it as nostalgia or as an “oldie, but a goodie,” but because it was a great record.

My friend Eddie Sotto, who worked at Walt Disney Imagineering, called me to get a phone number for Dick’s manager. Eddie hired Dick to provide a new soundtrack for the Space Mountain ride at Disneyland. Dick played his trademark riffs over a newly recorded segment of the Aquarium movement from Camille Saint-Saens’ nineteenth century romantic composition The Carnival of the Animals. Dick’s playing was so frantic, riders thought the ride’s speed had increased, but it hadn’t.

I got a call from Dick. He was going over his taxes and was surprised that on the 1099 tax form we had sent him, it indicated that he had made over $250,000 in the previous year. I felt gratified that Rhino had played a part in his resurgence. Only ten years earlier, his life was a mess. After defaulting on his mortgage, he was evicted from the dream home he never finished restoring. He barely survived a nasty divorce, and was reduced to living in his RV parked in his parents’ driveway. Dick didn’t express any appreciation. He called, he said, just to check that the amount was correct.

When Richard and I were producing comedy recordings in the early years of Rhino, we weren’t consciously trying to make records like Stan Freberg—it was in our DNA. The antiauthority feelings and absurdist views we shared with Stan would make him our spiritual father. It came as a pleasant surprise when Gary Stiffelman called us to see if we would be interested in talking to his new client, Stan Freberg, about a possible project.

My appreciation for Stan’s talent came at an early age, but at the time I didn’t realize it was him. My favorite TV show when I was very young was Time for Beany, the adventures of Beany (a boy) and Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent. Stan was one of the two main voice actors and puppeteers. In the 1950s Stan’s comedic records—exceptionally well-produced mini-plays—scored more novelty hits than any other recording artist. Many were brilliant, like “St. George and the Dragonet,” a parody of the Dragnet TV show which was number one for four weeks in October 1953. But Stan was eventually lured away by the creative challenges and big bucks of advertising, where the sense of humor he displayed had Advertising Age magazine credit him as being “the Father of the Funny Commercial.”

Although Stan’s singles had been collected onto LPs before, in 1961 he went into the studio for the first time to record an album. Stan Freberg Presents the History of the United States was so popular that it stayed on the charts for half the year. Recorded as musical theater, it spanned the time from Columbus’ discovery of the New World through the Revolutionary War. Award-winning Broadway producer David Merrick (Oliver!, Hello Dolly!) loved it so much he had Stan write a subsequent volume, bringing the story up through World War I. The play never worked out and Stan was so disgusted with the experience he shelved the script for twenty years.

Rhino funded the recording of Stan’s revised second volume and issued it in July 1996. A double album set—packaged with volume one—sold much better at 42,000 copies. The success made it possible for us to produce a proper box set of Stan’s career, four CDs and a video tape that included his best commercials. (Stan won twenty-one Clio Awards for advertising.) Through Stan I met Ray Bradbury. It was a thrill for me as Bradbury had been one of my favorite authors. During Stan’s busiest years he didn’t have much time for acting, but in September 1966 he did appear on one of the best episodes of The Monkees, “Monkee vs. Machine.”

One afternoon at our office, Richard was conversing with Stan and sensed that he was a conservative Republican. When he confronted him on it, Stan said, “What’s wrong with being a Republican?” Richard said, “To us in the sixties, you were a hero of the antiestablishment: you were the first person we knew to take on modern consumerism, wanton consumption, and the shallowness of the media. You were like Lenny Bruce to us. To me, it would be like finding out Lenny Bruce was a Republican.” Stan responded, without irony, “Lenny Bruce a Republican? That would be weird.”

Richard and I never managed by instilling fear. We considered it counterproductive. As a result, just because we championed a project, it didn’t mean that our freethinking staff was inclined to “win one for the Gipper!” and support it. This came to light on a project Martin Lewis brought to us in 1987. In order to show the governor of their state, Illinois, how much they wanted the new state prison to be built in their town, the civic leaders of Flora produced a song and video to promote their efforts. “Is We Is Or Is We Isn’t (Gonna Get Ourselves a Prison)” by the Barbed Wire Choir featured creaky townspeople rapping sections of the song. It was like a real Village People come to life, including the police chief, the mayor, and the newspaper publisher. I thought the effort by these atypical rappers was funny and endearing, and it was getting enough national TV exposure to be worth a shot. Martin even arranged for Spencer Christian, the weatherman from Good Morning America, to intermittently report from Flora throughout the show. Our marketing, sales, and promotion people didn’t know how to handle such an oddity, and weren’t motivated to try. It was a low-money deal, and I wasn’t expecting a big seller, but I was disappointed by our company’s lack of effort. Flora didn’t get their prison, nor did their Rhino release sell more than a minimal number of copies. But more to the point, it made me realize that if we didn’t have the support of those department heads in the planning stage, a project might not be successful. And they weren’t always right.

I read the screenplay for the movie The Full Monty and thought it was so good I would have even invested my own money in the production. The budget was only $3.5 million, and Twentieth Century Fox didn’t need any contribution from me. But as a low-budget movie they did need our songs at an accommodating price. As a result, we were in first position to put out the soundtrack album. In June 1997, I set up a screening of a rough cut (not quite finished film) at Fox for our senior staff, marketing, and sales people. Other than me, the only person who wanted to put out the soundtrack was Julie D’Angelo, my former assistant who now headed up soundtracks for us. I was surprised that even Gary Stewart failed to see the potential of the film. I wasn’t going to make the soundtrack deal if nobody else believed in it. The low-budget movie was a hit, grossing $45 million at the US box office and $200 million more outside of the country. RCA issued the soundtrack album in the States and sold close to half a million copies.

Ian Whitcomb was an anomaly among performers of the British Invasion. He had a top ten hit with “You Turn Me On” in the summer of 1965. He was a student of history, graduating with a degree from Trinity College in Dublin. As much as he was energized by 1950s rock ’n’ roll, he was more taken with the music that was popular around the turn of the twentieth century, particularly with Ragtime. He was hired, briefly, as a consultant on the Titanic movie, but quickly became disenchanted when it was clear that the producers had no interest in recreating a musical soundtrack that accurately depicted what was played on the ship. When he told me this, I suggested to him that he should record such an album, and that we would put it out. The album was released midyear and was well in place when the long-delayed film debuted in December. When the movie hit big at the box office, people took notice of Ian’s affectionate tribute, resulting in the biggest selling album—over 100,000 worldwide—in his career. Titanic: Music As Heard on the Fateful Voyage also won a Grammy Award for best packaging.

At the national WEA sales meetings in February 1999, we started our presentation with a short film that dubbed a Rhino sales pitch onto a 1967 film of Japanese superhero Ultraman. Richard was then introduced, but it wasn’t he who came to the lectern, but—keeping in dub theme—a Japanese actor who mouthed Richard’s words—out of synch—while Richard recited his speech hidden from view. The actor hammed it up, including one segment during which he drank water from a glass while Richard was still speaking.

Finally, we were given access to the Warner Brothers vaults, and at that meeting we previewed our first box sets, Deep Purple in March and Alice Cooper in April. Similar to Atlantic, we had to use a specific Warner Reprise Archives logo with diminished Rhino presence. Had the Warner execs not been so stuffy, we could have embarked on the Warner reissue program six years previously, with the Music Group benefitting from six years of additional profits. But events were only going to get stuffier.