My Music History Part 4

In Part 1 I wrote about getting into music, playing in a kiddie orchestra at Carnegie Hall when I was 14, and my friendship with Barry Goldberg. Part 2 detailed the 70+ bands I saw during my first trip to London in 1972 and my days as a college radio DJ. Part 3 was all about how I was a shitty manager of shitty bands, with a sidebar about the time I met Bruce Springsteen.

As I wrote, when I met Springsteen, I was a taxi driver in New York City. It was a horrible job and I was no good at it, but at least I had some income. I also did a little bit of writing on the side, mostly reviewing records for Trouser Press Magazine. It didn’t pay much but I did get some free records this way. They eventually fired me. There was a record, I forget which now, they asked me to be gentle because it was from a new label, but, well, my review basically read, “I’m going to take this piece of shit and throw it against a wall and see how many pieces it breaks into.” I’d like to think that R. Meltzer would have been proud.

The World of Video

On a day off from the taxi grind, I went to one of my favorite record stores. The owner knew how much I hated driving the taxi, told me he was starting a video rental store with a partner, and asked me if I wanted to work there. It got me out of the cab so I said yes.

The store was called World of Video and it was on West 10th Street, just off 7th Avenue South and close to Christopher Street. It was actually a pretty good job. My deep knowledge of film history actually was useful in this job. I got to watch movies all day long in the store (a huge emphasis on “so bad they’re good” kind of films) and each night I’d bring home two or three to watch with the wife. Sometimes I wonder why I didn’t turn into Quentin Tarantino from all of that. Oh, yeah, right, I have maybe 1% of his talent.

World of Video was an almost immediate success. Early on the decision was made that not only would it have an inventory that would be the best in the city, it would also rent XXX porn - gay porn as well as straight, which made sense given the proximity to Christopher Street. I don’t know if there were any other video stores (in the pre-Blockbuster era) where you could rent the latest VHS release, some classic MGM musical, and a XXX hardcore gay porn film. I also made it policy that no one should ever make a derogatory comment or joke about what a customer wanted to rent; that everyone would be treated with respect regardless of their taste.

Memory tells me that the only straight men working in the store were the owner and myself; the rest of the staff was gay and well over half of the customers were gay. Several would try to pick me up (well, I was a lot younger then) and I always said no but also I always took it as a compliment. If I wanted to hang out with my co-workers after work (and I did), it usually meant going to a gay bar (and I did). I also set up video systems in at least a couple of lesbian bars in the Village. But this also placed me pretty close to ground zero when AIDS hit New York City. It was one of the most frightening times in NYC’s history - I had no fear of getting AIDS myself, I was married and 100% monogamous, but so many of my friends at that point were not. Many feared for their lives.

On a more cheerful note, given the Greenwich Village location, we had a lot of celebrity customers. I can’t even recall all of them now. It seemed as if everyone in New York from Daryl Hall to Rod Steiger to Sigourney Weaver (who was out that night with Wallace Shawn and the expression on his face was basically, “I’m hanging out with Sigourney Weaver!”) came to the store at some point, and some were regular customers.

Grace Jones used to come in with her then-boyfriend Dolph Lundgren. Dolph would wear cut off t-shirts and tiny shorts and all of the other guys working in the store would basically pass out. He wanted to rent every action film in the store because he was hoping to become an action star himself (this was in the years immediately preceding Rocky IV). We asked Grace how the two of them ended up together and she told us, “I saw him at a party and I went up to him and said, ‘I’m going to have you!’” Grace Jones in person, by the way, was very different from my perception of her public image. She was warm, friendly, and incredibly sexy. I’d sometimes deliver videos to her home and would invariably end up on the floor playing with her son.

How I Didn’t Get Hired at MCA

For many years, my mother was the office manager at a fairly well-known synagogue in midtown Manhattan. I don’t remember exactly when this happened so I’ll put it in this chapter. One of the synagogue members owned a toy company that was bought by MCA. My mother suggested that I should write to MCA Records and ask them for a job, telling them that I knew this person. So I did.

I don’t recall what I wrote but it must have been pretty good because a little while later I got a phone call telling me that Irving Azoff was going to be in New York City and wanted to meet me.

I went to his hotel and met him in his suite. Azoff, a giant in the industry even though he was just 5 foot 3, met me at the door, wearing pajamas and a robe. (No, this isn’t going to turn into a Harvey Weinstein story.) He told me that Steve Hoffman had just left MCA and he was looking to hire someone to be the head of back catalogue for the label. Holy fucking shit, would that have been my dream job or what?

We seemed to hit it off really well and I thought I had it in the bag. There was just one problem. My mother never called that toy company guy to tell him what was happening. I’m sure Azoff had someone check on me, they would have called that guy, and he would have said that he never heard of me. End of story.

I didn’t give up right away. My wife and I flew out to Los Angeles for a week. I called Azoff’s office - many times - to let him know I was in L.A. and hoping to have a second meeting with him, but it never happened. It was a dead end.

Jumping ahead several years - around 1988 or 1989 I did some consulting for the head of RCA Records back catalogue. I don’t recall how I got the job. I think Bill Levenson recommended me. Bill started out as a computer programmer working for IBM, and he somehow went from that to becoming the head of back catalogue for Polygram. He produced the landmark Eric Clapton Crossroads box set, and hundreds of others. We became friends through my work at CD Hotline (which I’ll detail in the next chapter).

RCA Records had every recording from its entire history listed on index cards. My job was to go through those and present them with both a summary of what they actually had in the vaults as well as some recommendations for catalogue releases. I had fun doing it but I never had the opportunity to go into any “vault” to actually listen to this stuff and I was unable to turn this into a permanent job. Almost 40 years later, I actually still have all of the reports that I wrote for them. I know that they did take at least a few of my suggestions. And I grabbed a shit ton of CDs for free while I was doing this stuff.

Vinyl Mania Compact Disc Center

In 1984 I bought my first CD player. I told myself I was just going to buy 10 CDs and that would be that. I remember one was Abbey Road (only out on CD in Japan at that point); probably another was Steely Dan’s Aja. The thing was, the CDs sounded so much better. Yes, maybe vinyl is better on a state of the art system, but on a cheapo home stereo like the one I had, CDs sounded infinitely better. I ended up going to Tower Records (walking distance from where I lived) almost every day. This was getting to be too expensive.

So I had an idea, and I brought the idea to the same record store owner/friend who got me into World of Video. He wasn’t really selling CDs yet. I said, what if we had a store selling only CDs? Let’s partner up and do that! And he agreed. We each put up equal amounts of money so we should have been 50/50 partners, but I wanted to use the name of his stores for our store. He said that since he’d spent years building up that name, either he had to have 51% ownership or I should choose a different name. It seemed to make sense so I signed a contract that gave him 51% ownership.

The store took off really, really, really slowly. Three months in, we were barely taking in enough to cover the rent. I had no idea what I was doing, my partner didn’t offer much advice, and I was too full of myself to ask for help. It seemed as if the whole thing was destined to failure. I priced stuff at the price I would have wanted to pay for it (and I never wanted to pay much), not the price I would need to charge in order to cover expenses and maybe even turn a profit.

There were two things that happened that turned things around, at least temporarily. The first was used CDs. I reasoned that, unlike with vinyl, which could get scratched and warped, a used CD was generally as good as a new one. People tell me I was the first person to do that; I have no idea if it was true or not. I probably paid too much for peoples’ used CDs and I probably charged too little when I sold them, but it did increase business.

As for the second thing? Back in the 1980s, British CDs and American CDs were very different. They sounded different - British catalogue reissues of British bands used better quality sources for the digital mastering, so they invariably sounded noticeably better. The British CDs also regularly had bonus tracks that didn’t appear on the American ones. British CDs could often get released weeks or even months before the American release, and some catalogue reissues weren’t scheduled for US release at all. As a result, these imports were highly sought after by American collectors.

My partner somehow found some guy in England who would call me every Monday, read me the list of that week’s new releases, and whatever I ordered would be in my hands by Thursday. So I had the latest imports at least a week before anyone else in the area and I was selling this stuff for a buck or two less than anyone else - when I should have been charging a premium. Word got out and soon I had people traveling from New Jersey, Connecticut and even Pennsylvania to get their hands on this stuff.

The problem was that it was illegal. It was called “parallel imports” - I was bringing recordings into the US without the permission of the American copyright holders. Someone (possibly another record store owner in the area) complained to the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), they sent in undercover agents to buy some discs, and then sent me a cease and desist letter.

My 51% partner ordered me to immediately comply with the letter, which left me no choice. No more imports. And with no more imports, within weeks the business collapsed. Weekly sales dropped by more than 75%. The store could not survive. Revenue dropped off the face of the earth, debts were piling up.

If the handwriting was on the wall, my 51% partner decided to blow up that wall. He sent me a letter from his attorney that declared that I had mismanaged the store, that my original investment was worthless and forfeit, and that I was fired as the store manager. I countersued and won (for reasons that I won’t go into here). I was gone from the store (and my 10+ year friendship with that partner was shattered) but at least I walked away with the money I had originally invested.

It’s now the fall of 1986. I was 32 years old, unemployed, and had zero idea of what I was going to do next. I thought that at best I was qualified to work in someone else’s record store. But as fate would have it, one of my customers came to my rescue.

People used to come into the store and ask a ton of questions since the CD format was still relatively new. I knew how the format worked, I recommended CDs that sounded great in that format, and I could also explain things such as why the UK version of the latest Peter Gabriel CD was better than the US one.

One customer had a shit ton of questions every week, and I almost always knew the answer. What I didn’t know was that this guy was a big deal in syndicated radio. And I didn’t know that our conversations got the wheels spinning in his head. He later told me that he thought, “It’s great that I get to ask Steve these questions and can get answers. What if everyone in America could ask Steve these kinds of questions?” And out of that, the CD Hotline was born.

I’ll tell that story in the next chapter.