CHAPTER 10

The Andy Warhols of the Music Industry

When Richard and I attended art openings in our twenties and thirties, it wasn’t that we were intrigued by the new crop of modern artists. We thought it would be a good place to meet girls, although that rarely paid off. Despite our motives, much of what we did could come under the category of conceptual art, in which the idea was more important than the execution or result. While Andy Warhol is more associated with pop art, his concepts were always much stronger than the artistry. He embraced a sense of humor and an absurdity in painting canvasses of cans of Campbell’s Soup and garish images of Mao and Elvis Presley.

In a similar manner, our thought processes coalesced into recordings and other elements where the concept was stronger than the finished product. This was the result of active minds that weren’t directed to broader or higher purposes. It also reflected our sense of humor, and channeled whatever antiauthority attitudes we had. Warhol is a reference, not an influence. Lurking in our subconscious minds was the gimmickry of low-budget horror filmmaker William Castle.

By our very natures, in the workplace Richard and I were fairly conventional, responsible guys. Although not outgoing, we were approachable and low-key, and tried to be helpful. We were not screamers, we didn’t swear, we were not rude, and we weren’t flamboyant or needing to bring attention to ourselves. Yet, there was that kernel of rebelliousness and a restlessness to push the limits, which found its way into our product.

That sense of mischievousness was a part of Richard’s and my personalities, and we were able to express it at Rhino, whether or not it was perceived. In a sort-of tribute to the Warner Brothers, we referred to ourselves humorously as the Rhino Brothers. In designing the cover to one of our novelty compilations, Anne Brownfield came up with the concept of a circus to accommodate our many acts. Drawing upon the circus promoters Ringling Brothers, she coined the Rhino Brothers. I thought it was funny because Richard and I weren’t brothers. Rock acts the Righteous Brothers and Walker Brothers weren’t composed of brothers, either. I next used it for our publishing company name, Rhino Brothers Music, just like publishing giant Warner Brothers Music.

I find coming up with a novel idea or approach very gratifying. It shows my brain is working. Sometimes an idea falls short when realized, or gets changed by budget considerations or the involvement of others. Richard and I gave each other a reasonable amount of leeway to express ourselves creatively, even if our commercial expectations were low. Checkpoint Charlie is an apt example.

Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman were fans of Kraftwerk, a German all-synthesizer band that hit it big in 1975 on the strength of their Autobahn album and hit single. A few years later, the Casio Computer Company manufactured a cheap, toy-like synthesizer. Mark and Howard wanted to record an EP of Kraftwerk-like arrangements on their Casios. I oversaw the record, and had the cover written in German so it looked like it could have been an import. Mark and Howard called their “group” Checkpoint Charlie—after the name of the guarded crossing between East and West Berlin during the Cold War—and adopted pseudonyms of Salz and Pfeffer (German for salt and pepper). I resurrected an obscure concept, of mastering a record so that it played inside out. One put the needle on the inside where the label was, and the record played the music properly (not backwards) until the needle was on the outer groove. I thought if record fans didn’t initially respond to the musical content, how could they not want to impress their guests with a record that played inside out? (The cover was clearly marked in English and German that it played that way.) It got little media attention, and consequently sold less than 2,000. Later we found out there was a real German band named Checkpoint Charlie.

Sometimes the result is unexpected. A record we thought would sell little became a best seller for us. “Louie Louie” was one of the defining songs of the 1960s. The Kingsmen’s cover of Richard Berry’s original didn’t become a national hit until late 1963, seven months after it was released. It was sloppily performed, sounding as though it had been recorded in a garage. Much of the vocals were unintelligible, to the point where the FBI made an investigation after the record became a hit because they heard that the lyrics were dirty. The song has endured because it captured the feeling of teenage abandon so well.

If an artist was fortunate enough to have had a run of hits, its record company would usually issue a “Greatest Hits” or “Best of” album which was a sure bet for impressive sales, without additional recording costs. But nobody had been crazy enough to put together an album composed of different versions of the same song. Who would want to hear one song, although differently arranged, numerous times? Richard got the idea from California radio stations KALX and KFJC, which played all the known versions, back-to-back, during “Louie Lou-a-thons.” To make the album more contemporary, Richard and Bob Wayne produced an arrangement that copied the style of David Bowie’s recent hit, “Let’s Dance,” as performed by Les Dantz and his Orchestra.

A nice inclusion was the version of “Louie Louie” by the Rice University Marching Owl Band. In the 1950s and 1960s, rock music was anathema to both college and professional sports. By the 1970s, attitudes had changed, and one would hear the novelty of a marching band playing a rock song during the half time of a football game. It was a good arrangement, and we kicked off the album with it. When I was able to license the recording to a couple of movies, including Naked Gun, it provided some bonus money for the school and for us.

Richard was in touch with Max Feirtag, the owner of 1950s R&B label Flip Records, who, as Limax Music, published the song along with his wife Lillian. Richard Berry’s 1956 release of “Louie Louie” hadn’t sold much, about 7,000 copies. Originally the B-side of his single, he felt the song wasn’t worth much (and, three years later, was happy to sell the publishing and writer’s share of that and the other songs he wrote for Flip to Feirtag for $750 because he needed money for his impending wedding and honeymoon). The “contract” was written on a napkin in a restaurant. Feirtag was fine with what Rhino wanted to do, as he stood to benefit from nine cover versions of the song. Because he was having difficulty with Richard Berry at the time, he refused Richard’s request to license the original Flip Records version recorded by Berry. Feirtag failed to grasp the significance of the inclusion of the song’s first recording.

Richard contacted Berry, and produced (also with Wayne) a version that matched the original so closely, he received a call from Feirtag’s lawyer who thought we had bootlegged the original recording. When Richard told him that he had made a new recording of the song, the skeptical lawyer told him that they were going to “conduct laboratory tests” to determine if there was a difference. Richard’s production was so faithful, we never received even one complaint that it wasn’t the original version in the package.

As we were having a good year, the outrageousness of releasing one album of all the same songs appealed to our sense of fun more than the thought that we could possibly make money on the release. Richard was so sure it would be a sales flop, thinking it might only sell 3,000 records, he didn’t even credit himself on the jacket. Because I thought he should, when I mastered the record I had the engineer inscribe into the inner groove “COMPILED BY RICHARD ‘I WISH MY NAME WERE LOUIE’ FOOS.” We sold over 80,000.

Henny Youngman had a long career as one of America’s best comedians. He was called “The King of the One-Liners,” which meant that he favored short jokes. He even wrote his letters, vertically, with one-liners. His best-known one-liner is, “Take my wife—please!” A typical joke is this one, included on the album we released: “My wife said to me, ‘For our anniversary I want to go somewhere I’ve never been before.’ I said, ‘Try the kitchen!’” We got in touch with Henny and licensed from him an album that was out of print.

In reimagining the album, Richard’s inspiration was to take a 20 Greatest Hits-type of record and adapt it to Henny’s accumulation of jokes, resulting in our title of Henny Youngman’s 128 Greatest Jokes. (No, we didn’t count how many jokes were actually on the album.) The design of our cover called to mind those albums that depicted gold records with titles of hits placed over them. On ours we had the opening joke phrase in place of the hit title. I expanded on the trick track process heard on Monty Python’s Matching Tie and Handkerchief, wherein one side was mastered with two concentric grooves. When the listener plopped the needle onto the disc, he didn’t know which of the two tracks he would hear. I elected to go for four. One complaint of comedy records is that after you’ve played them once, you’d heard all of the jokes. Side one contained four, three-minute sides. You put the needle at the beginning and it played to the end of the record. You could do that four times and not hear the same jokes. Although the album was among Rhino’s steadiest sellers, the resulting innovative package didn’t seem to ensure any additional sales. Henny questioned the gold records on the cover: “Why did you put doughnuts on the front?”

The Olympics, a light R&B vocal group from Los Angeles, were best described as a poor man’s Coasters. Although their recordings were very credible, they weren’t as sophisticated as their peers. They drew upon the same humor and references, as exemplified by “Western Movies,” which was similar in subject to the Coasters’ later-recorded “Along Came Jones.” Their most remembered songs include “(Baby) Hully Gully,” “Big Boy Pete,” “Good Lovin’” (later a smash for the Young Rascals), and “Peanut Butter” (recorded originally by the Olympics under the name Marathons), which is familiar from its use in TV commercials. While the Olympics had only one national top twenty hit, they more than merited a best of, but that’s not what motivated us to release an album.

We were bothered by the commercial trivialization of the Olympics sporting event, owing to the 1984 Olympic Games committee selling the name to all sorts of products with little regard to the relevance or nutritional benefits: the Snickers candy bar was the “Official Snack Food,” Coca-Cola the “Official Soft Drink,” Budweiser the “Official Beer,” First Interstate Bank the “Official Bank.”

We decided to comment on the absurdity by releasing The Official Record Album of the Olympics. We couldn’t resist thumbing our noses at the organization as we developed a package that incorporated US flags, event tickets, and a special Rocky Rhino marathon runner bearing a lighted-torch logo. The actual theme music from the games was released by Columbia Records as The Official Music of the XXIIlrd Olympiad, Los Angeles 1984. Whew! We parodied the Olympic Games endorsements on our album jacket with group favorites: The Official Car of the Olympics: 1949 Convertible; The Official Drink of the Olympics: Ripple Wine; The Official Restaurant of the Olympics: Stan’s Drive-In; The Official Dance of the Olympics: Hully Gully.

The Olympic Committee heard about the album and sent us a threatening demand letter, dated August 29, that we “cease and desist.” We were amazed at the serious tone. Richard responded with a retort that explained that the band adopted its name in 1957 from LA’s Olympic Boulevard, and suggested the committee “might also want to collect a royalty from the city of Los Angeles for using your name on their street signs.” He pointed out that, unfortunately for us, “the average customer seems able to discern the difference as Columbia’s LP has outsold ours, approximately 250,000 to 3,000.” The Olympic Committee never responded.

Rhino’s biggest seller in its early years was a concept of Richard’s. He was bothered that many of the successful rock acts of the ’70s had abandoned the irreverent and fun spirit inherent in rock, with Led Zeppelin being a prime example. In order to satirically expose the seriousness of their music, he thought of rendering their “Whole Lotta Love” performed on kazoos. I named the act the Temple City Kazoo Orchestra, and we recorded the song in a garage in Santa Monica. When it became the most popular cut on our Rhino Royale compilation album in 1978, we produced a few more songs in Michael Sembello’s Encino garage with members of Stevie Wonder’s band helping out. In 1983 Sembello scored a number one hit with “Maniac,” a song from Flashdance.

We released a twelve-inch EP on multicolored Disco Vinyl, initially in a numbered limited edition. Unlike other studio recordings of fictional artists, we did not merely concoct a name, but created a persona and accompanying biography that explained the music. Richard’s liner notes were inspired, claiming that the leader, David Humms, had transposed all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies to be played on kazoo and revealing that the group had finished second in Temple City’s annual Kiwanis Club talent contest, losing to a woman who played “Yankee Doodle” on her false teeth.

We received calls from radio stations requesting copies to play. We put together an ad hoc group and performed two songs on daytime TV’s The Mike Douglas Show, the second one alongside Cheryl Tiegs, Lou “the Hulk” Ferrigno, Lee Grant, and comedian David Brenner. The TCKO, as we referred to them—our inside joke at the Electric Light Orchestra, whose name was abbreviated to ELO—played a UCLA parking lot concert and received a better response than local band X, who followed us.

The conceit of developing a humorous background for a made-up artist was first expressed on the Rhino label’s fourth single, “Baseball Card Lover” by Rockin’ Richie Ray. Richard had a knack for writing these “official bios,” as evidenced here with an excerpt: “Rockin’ Richie Ray was four years old when he first heard Gene Vincent singing ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula.’ He immediately discarded his corduroy playsuit for a leather jacket, and was soon expelled from Mother Goose Nursery School for organizing protection rackets on the milk and cookies run.”

We tried to help where we could. I don’t mean to say that we had been around Wild Man Fischer so much we could think like him, but we did have his patter down and could write songs like him. When we recorded Wildmania, he was having difficulty coming up with material, so Richard and I (as Kowalski-Schwartz) wrote six songs in his style. Fischer liked them, and he performed them on the album. Other times we stood in for him. When he failed to show up on a Saturday afternoon we were being interviewed on the phone by a radio station in Cleveland, Richard impersonated Wild Man. He stepped into those shoes a second time when, as Wild Man Jr., he effectively rendered “I’m the Creature from Outer Space” when Fischer failed to show for the recording session.

There were so many Elvis impersonators springing up following Elvis Presley’s death in 1977, it got Richard to thinking: Elvis was such a worldwide star, there must be impersonators in many countries, and what would they sound like? That idea was the basis of our The International Elvis Impersonators Convention EP, which was released in 1979. Richard and I produced the various made-up acts in the studio. Richard wrote mini bios of the performers, with a large dose of humor, like this passage from the Japanese representative, Hound Dog Fujimoto: “Vastly popular from playing Elvis in over twenty-four Japanese movies, Hound Dog received his greatest acclaim in the classic Elvis versus Godzilla.”

The cover of 1960’s Elvis’ Gold Records—Volume 2 contained the phrase “50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong.” For our record, Richard adapted it to “20,000 Elvis Imitators Can’t Be Wrong,” and speculated that, at this rate, “by 1986 one in eleven employable males will make their living imitating the King of Rock ’n’ Roll.” In a case of life imitating art, an Elvis Presley Impersonators International Association Convention was held in 1990 at Chicago’s Sheraton-O’Hare hotel, attracting 150 impersonators from around the world.

Faced with poor sales from our novelty records, Richard had largely bailed out of producing, but I was still coming up with ideas I wanted to try. While the world was inundated with Christmas rock songs, I had never heard one celebrating the joys of Hanukkah, so I wrote one for the 1981 holiday. The title “Hanukkah Rocks” was inspired by Ian Hunter’s “Cleveland Rocks” (a song on his 1979 album You’re Never Alone with a Schizophrenic). I rewrote Allan Sherman’s “Twelve Gifts of Christmas” to the eight days of Hanukkah, and trivialized the chorus to “Hanukkah rocks all around my block”—instead of using “the world.” I had Graham Daddy and Louis Naktin compose the music, and got a class of grade school students to sing the chorus, just like Roy Wood had on his massive English hit “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day.” That, and the three other songs by Gefilte Joe and the Fish, were pressed onto blue vinyl in the shape of a six-pointed Jewish star that many were surprised actually played on their turntables. The sticker on the jacket invited the purchaser to “join the old wave … with the world’s oldest and only known Jewish Senior Citizen rock band.”

Will Ryan and Phil Baron, who recorded for the kids market as Willio & Phillio, were excellent at impersonating voices. I wondered what it would sound like if you had the Three Stooges sing a song by the Stooges, the rock band fronted by Iggy Pop. I copied the musical backing of the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” had Will and Phil sing as Larry, Moe, and Curly, and released it as by the Seven Stooges.

In early 1981 Blondie had a hit with “Rapture,” signaling the rush of white artists to record in this new style. Richard reasoned that if the Beatles were still together, they would have recorded a rap record as well, so we wrote “Beatle Rap” (as S. Fields and P. Lane). I produced the recording in the studio, impersonating two of the voices while Ryan did the other two. For the label of the single, we reproduced the yellow and orange swirl of Capitol’s mid-1960s Beatles’ 45s. It looked so good we used it for subsequent singles releases.

Sometimes we got lucky and licensed one of our original productions to a movie. I had heard that surfing was popular in Bombay, India, which spurred the idea that they must have their own version of surf music, and what would that be? I covered classic surf instrumental “Pipeline” using sitar and tabla, named the artist “The Bombay Beach Boys,” and included it on one of our compilation albums. The second Austin Powers movie was going to play it in a scene, but the scene was cut, much to my disappointment. It was used in the movie 200 Cigarettes, which paid us many times the $500 it cost to record. Similarly, Sixteen Candles used one of our Temple City Kazoo Orchestra recordings.

In the early 1980s, yearly wall calendars featuring large photos were being sold in bookstores. The more obvious titles displayed photos of rock groups or swimsuit models. I thought we could make our own calendars to give away as a means of branding. This way a buyer for a chain would be reminded of our company every time he looked at our calendar. Initially we used photos of music artists whose product we had released, but then changed to reprints of album covers from the previous year. Music fans loved them. One of the disappointments of Pete Townshend’s life, or in February 1992 when he wrote me, was his absence on a Rhino calendar: “Harold, it’s become my dream to feature, even in a very small way, in one of your calendars.”

We included typical anniversary-type entries of rock star birthdays and significant events, like the Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. I deviated from the standard expectations by adding less than landmark occurrences, such as on February 20: 1965: Keith Moon breaks his manager’s dishwasher by using it to wash fruit. I included trivial Rhino history, as on March 11: 1974: The Rhino Store creates a new way to get rid of non-selling records: it pays people 5 cents to take home Danny Bonaduce’s album. Some of the birthdates identified the band the performer was most associated with, such as Steve Marriott (Small Faces). I threw in a few baseball players, similarly identified, such as on November 3: 1918: Bob Feller (Cleveland Indians). On days when there was no entry, I selected non-musicians whose work I appreciated, like Raymond Chandler and Mel Ramos. No one asked me about the baseball entries or the non-musicians. I also added half-tone messages, like BUY A RHINO ALBUM TODAY. The partially visible sales pitches were humorous stabs at subliminal advertising, inspired by Vance Packard’s groundbreaking The Hidden Persuaders, which I read while at UCLA.

Comics, of course, are a staple of youth culture. Richard came up with the idea of having the cover of our 1982 product catalog look like a comic book. I thought it was a great idea, but the first one he oversaw while I was in France at MIDEM, had poor artwork. I took it over from then on, with superb covers illustrated mostly by Scott Shaw.

Our unconventional thinking also applied to our anniversaries. Most companies that have been in business a while, acknowledge familiar years like ten, twenty-five, and fifty. We commemorated our first ten years with a huge party on the Santa Monica Pier. I was fine with celebrating anniversaries, but the expense only made sense to me as a means to promote the company and the product; in other words, anniversaries were recognized primarily to increase revenue. We decided to do it differently, to do it the Rhino way, by selecting unusual year anniversaries that related to teenage/rock ’n’ roll culture. Having a Rhino Bar Mitzvah at thirteen years was too close to our ten-year celebration. We next did a Sweet Sixteen, and five years after that a twenty-first anniversary. During these celebration years we held sales promotions and Richard and I traveled to five cities to do press and radio interviews. We produced special advertising supplements for Billboard magazine, deviating from the norm with a National Enquirer parody and a comic book.

As much as Richard and I loved novelty records, it was hard to continue producing them because they didn’t sell. In the fall of 1993 he had an idea: he wanted to record “the ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ version of ‘Davy Crockett.’” Crockett, best known as one of the heroes of the Alamo, was the subject of a miniseries on Disney’s ABC TV show in the 1950s. The impact created a cultural phenomenon. A second miniseries was produced, and even though kids had seen the programs for free on TV, they paid money at the movie theater to see two feature films edited from the footage. The phenomenon wasn’t restricted to the United States. Phil Collins, growing up in London, was so enamored as a young child that when his income soared twenty-five years later as a member of Genesis, he started collecting Alamo artifacts, accumulating over a thousand objects. “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” became a top ten hit for three different artists in 1955. Additional verses were used in the program as story bridges. No one had released a version of the song with all twenty-nine verses.

“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” was a seventeen-minute song that made up one side of the Iron Butterfly’s 1968 album of the same title. A three-minute edit was released as a single, but the popularity of the longer version sold so many copies that it was the biggest seller for Atlantic Records prior to the popularity of Led Zeppelin. What Richard suggested was to make a recording of “Davy Crockett” with all twenty-nine verses, a long song like “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”

Like Richard, I had been a big Davy Crockett fan as a kid, even owning a coonskin cap, just like Crockett’s. I looked for a marketing hook to avoid producing another poor-selling novelty record. There were two proposed feature films garnering attention in the trades: a serious one on the Alamo, and a humorous one on Crockett written by the team responsible for the Police Academy series. I thought either one had a good shot to be produced. TV producer Alan Sacks recommended Riders in the Sky, and I worked with the Riders’ Doug Green on the song selection. The album was recorded in Nashville over a three-day period in March 1994, and then sat on the shelf waiting for a movie to be realized. A year after I left Rhino, I asked David McLees, who succeeded Gary Stewart as head of A&R, to release it as a favor. The recording had already been paid for. I don’t think he was that interested, but after a few months he reported that they couldn’t find the tape. The comedy film never happened. It took until 2004 for The Alamo—which starred Dennis Quaid and Billy Bob Thornton—to hit the theaters. Riders in the Sky released the album themselves through their deal with Rounder Records. They thanked me as “That Guy at Rhino Who Got the Ball Rolling.”

Hugh Brown shared our creativity and sense of humor, but he was an actual artist. His calling card described him as “Evil Genius.” I met Hugh after a performance by the Dictators at the Keystone Berkeley in April 1977. He was a friendly guy and visited me at the Rhino store when he came to town later in the year. He brought a shirt he had made from a silkscreened pattern with repeated images of the notorious President of Uganda, Idi Amin. During subsequent visits to LA, he showed me other art pieces he had completed. The Keith Richards Blood Transfusion Kit, inspired by reports that the Rolling Stones’ guitarist had his blood changed in Switzerland prior to the group’s fall 1973 European tour, had medical tools set in a velvet-lined box. In the late 1880s, a convicted forger serving time in Sing Sing prison carved the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin. Hugh was inspired to write the Lord’s Prayer on an enlarged photo of circus performer Zip the Pinhead. His printed resume had a background of white raised lettering, a repeated pattern of “HIRE ME.”

Hugh’s first album cover credit was courtesy of the Clash, who used a work he created from altered Chinese propaganda imagery for their second LP, Give ‘Em Enough Rope. Over the years I had him photograph and design a handful of albums for us, but what I wanted most was to hire him for Rhino. He kept putting me off, telling me that he liked the freedom he had freelancing. After giving up my quest, I was dismayed when he told me that he had accepted a job from IRS Records in 1989. In 1996 the label was about to fold when he accepted a job at Rhino as our creative director. He won three Grammy Awards (with shared credits) for Titanic: Music As Heard on the Fateful Voyage (1997), Beg Scream and Shout! (1998), and Brain in a Box: The Science Fiction Collection (2002). The last release depicted a brain floating in formaldehyde—as one might have seen in a horror movie—with three different lenticular (3-D) views of the brain on the sides of the box. Hugh created a number of inspired works after Richard and I left, including the top of an amplifier to house a heavy metal box, which featured a volume knob that rotated to eleven—instead of the standard ten—just like in the Spinal Tap movie.