Fred Goodman
Mansion on the Hill
Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen and the Head-on Collision of Rock and Commerce
Times Books, 448 pp., $ 25
The much-lampooned Cold War worry about rock music — that it was a Kremlinbred virus designed to clear the way for world communism — has proved spectacularly unfounded. As rock and roll nears the end of its first half- century, it finds itself part of a $ 20-billion industry that arguably began in 1835, when Daniel Decatur Emmett signed away the rights to “Dixie” for $ 500. Today’s rock executives can hold their own in any contest of capitalist machismo. Last August, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) threatened to sue a troop of Girl Scouts in Lafayette, California if they performed the “Macarena,” forcing the young ladies to learn the dance without any music.
That same month, Warner Records re-signed R.E.M. to a five-album, $ 80- million contract, topping similarly huge pacts recently procured by the Rolling Stones and U2. Among rock fans, such deals are met with a curious sort of hand-wringing. Instead of being pleased that R.E.M. is being rewarded for two decades of hard work and superior music, fans worry that the band is ” selling out.” Freelance rock journalist Fred Goodman is such a fan. His new book The Mansion on the Hill examines the “collision of rock and commerce, ” and concludes that business has survived the collision. His prognosis for artistic integrity is not so optimistic.
The rock pioneers of the 1950s, such as Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis, saw their music less as art than as an escape from poverty. Goodman, however, skips all that, and opens his story with the Boston folk musicians of the early 1960s, who saw themselves as outcasts from a society obsessed with consumerism.
Goodman focuses on characters like Albert Goldman, who — as the manager of Odetta, Peter, Paul and Mary, and the young Bob Dylan — was widely reviled by the folk establishment. Goldman strove to reconcile making music with making money, and in the process opened a Pandora’s Box of capitalist sin into folk paradise. His innovations, such as artist-owned publishing companies and production firms, would enrich his clients a great deal. But that acumen could also be turned against his musicians, as Dylan found out in 1965, when he traded Goldman an Andy Warhol lithograph (Double Elvis) for a sofa.
Goodman also draws an entertaining portrait of Atlantic Records’ Mario Medious, one of rock’s first FM promotion men and “the perfect businessman for a group of people who loathed business.” In one instance, Medious got an on-air disc jockey so stoned that he passed out in the station’s bathroom, whereupon Medious commandeered the microphone and played nothing but Atlantic releases for two hours.
When Goodman turns to the musicians themselves, he fails into heavy-handed moralizing. Take rock’s greatest-ever flash-in-the-pan, Peter Frampton. Nobody was more surprised than Frampton when his double album Frampton Comes Alive became a hit in 1975. Over the course of the following year, the album and subsequent tour generated $ 50 million. Frampton appeared on the Mike Douglas Show, posed shirtless for Rolling Stone and People, and starred with the Bee Gees in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, of which the New York Times said: “This isn’t a movie, it’s a business deal set to music.” Frampton went into a tailspin from which he has yet to emerge. Goodman’s moral: Commercialism has its limits.
By way of contrast, Goodman offers thirty-year rock veteran Neil Young, arrogant, self-indulgent, and something of a demigod among rock writers. For Young, it makes little difference “if my audience is a hundred or a hundred million.” Indeed, he has released a number of albums so uncommercial it seems only his family and close friends could be bothered to buy a copy. Still, a Neil Young tour is as close to a sure moneymaker as exists in the music industry today. Goodman’s moral: Be true to your beliefs and rewards will follow.
These conclusions, inspiring though they may be, are weakened by the author’s failure to place any critical value on Young’s or Frampton’s music. Young is able to ooze artistic integrity because he is immensely talented, not the other way around. By the same token, Frampton Comes Alive was a lucky aberration. Frampton could hardly have been expected to catch lightning in a bottle a second time, and indeed he never did.
Goodman had higher expectations for Bruce Springsteen. Early in his career, Springsteen was seen as a rock messiah, a humble, blue-collar guy for whom music “was a street corner communion,” not a quest for wealth. The release of Born in the U.S.A. in 1984, however, made Springsteen an international star and deposited a heap of wealth in the New Jersey native’s lap. The album’s success was a sin that many of his fans have found hard to forgive. When Al Teller of Columbia Records told Goodman that his goal for Born in the U.S.A. was to sell ten million copies, he provided the author with a pretext for pages and pages on the subordination of art to business. Goodman goes so far as to accuse Springsteen and his marketing team of orchestrating the release of the song “Born in the U.S.A.” to capitalize on the Vietnam-was- a-noble-cause wave of the early 1980s. If that’s the way most casual listeners took it — including Ronald Reagan, who referred to it in campaign speeches — it’s only because they hadn’t the faintest clue of the song’s antiwar sentiments.
In the end, Goodman’s image of a collision between rock and commerce fails him. These half-forgotten rock bios hardly seem worth the effort in a book that purports to tell us about commercial excess and yet barely mentions the advent of the compact disc or MTV. If, in 1997, we have Madonna running her own music company and the CEOs of giant corporations attending board meetings in blue jeans, it seems safe to say rock and commerce did not collide. They merged.
Shawn Miller is a writer living in Portland, Ore.
