british rock managers--11/1/24

01 Nov 2024

british rock managers--11/1/24

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Today's selection--from White Bicycles by Joe Boyd. Legendary rock music producer Joe Boyd recounts the outsized contribution of British rock “managerial hustlers,” and contends that America had no equivalent:

“[Denny] Cordell and [Tony] Secunda were an unlikely pair, but they enjoyed success after success from 1966 to 1968 with The Move, Procol Harum and Joe Cocker. Secunda came from South London and had knocked around the worlds of music and professional wrestling since the early sixties. He was a cartoon villain, a reptilian hustler who bragged of his time in prison but was possessed of a ready wit and sinister charm. Cordell was as dapper and cool as Secunda was fevered and scheming.

The Move in 1967

“There were other pairings like this around Soho: the cockney Chris Stamp and the Bohemian aristocrat Kit Lambert managing The Who, for example. Soho that year was like the steppes in AD350, with Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals and Huns queuing up to pillage, destabilize and eventually take over the Roman Empire. Lambert, Stamp and The Who were set to follow in the westward footsteps of Andrew Oldham and the Stones and Brian Epstein's Beatles; Stigwood was setting the stage for Clapton's new Cream; expatriate Jimi Hendrix was preparing for his triumphant return home under the aegis of Chas Chandler and Mike Jeffreys; and Steve Winwood's career was being masterminded by Chris Blackwell. In the coming year, the list would grow: Jethro Tull and Ten Years After with Chris Wright and Terry Ellis; Led Zeppelin with Peter Grant. The Move, in their failure to conquer America, were the exception.

“America had no equivalent of these managerial hustlers. The Brill Building types who built rock'n'roll empires had little notion of how to deal with an artist who wrote his own songs and took acid. Grossman knew, but was content to lie back in Woodstock, building a studio and a Chinese restaurant and muttering gnomic pronouncements to quaking agents and record company bosses via long-distance telephone. The new British managers were willing to put in the hard graft to take America and were determined to enjoy it. The working-class barrow boys took such pleasure in the sound of their own spiels that they made for highly entertaining company. The aristocrats among them had been bred to avoid 'trade', but if one couldn't, at least it had to be amusing. Thugs like Grant and Don Arden resembled Lee Marvin in Point Blank: executives in plush offices couldn't believe anyone would be that vicious and gave in to them just to have a peaceful life. The Yank who paid the most attention to all this, of course, was David Geffen.

“The brilliance of the British managers flowed from the same fount as their flaws. Like the Grade brothers who had ruled British show business since the war, they believed everyone needed a gimmick. Townshend smashing one guitar and Hendrix burning another on stage at Monterey made them overnight stars in America. Both gestures, like Bev's firecracker, were part of a British tradition of artifice. New York would never have moulded Hendrix's genius into as powerful a pop persona as London did.

“When it worked, it was brilliant, but when it didn't, it could go very wrong. Secunda alienated The Move and cost them a fortune when he packaged one of their singles in a libellous cartoon about Harold Wilson. Mike Jeffreys never understood Hendrix the musician. He put him with an English rhythm section and thought that was the appeal: 'two white guys with the flashy nigger in the middle'. When Hendrix wanted to work with his black peers Billy Cox and Buddy Miles, Jeffreys' only response was to sabotage the new line-up, helping drive Jirni to the despair he was in when he died. Another ugly manifestation of the syndrome arrived a decade later with Malcolm McLaren's leering insistence that the Sex Pistols were a talent-free quartet of losers he masterminded to the top of the charts with his punk gimmick: anyone with ears could tell that Johnny Rotten was a singer of genius.

“I never understood why Secunda didn't send The Move to San Francisco on spec. For all his cleverness, he couldn't grasp the changes that were transforming the American market. Cordell got it. He rode 'A Whiter Shade Of Pale' and 'With A Little Help From My Friends' into the sunset, settling in Los Angeles, forming Shelter Records and discovering Leon Russell and Torn Petty. In a melancholy footnote to their long-sundered partnership, Denny and Tony, both in their early fifties, died within days of each other in 1995: Denny in Ireland where he trained racehorses and Tony in Marin County where he published guidebooks to American national parks. They held a memorable Irish wake for Denny, full of devoted friends from all periods of his colourful life. I sometimes imagine Tony, the ex-wrestling promoter from Streatharn, sitting in the Trident restaurant on the Sausalito waterfront, eating his organic salad, gazing at the sailing boats out on the bay and regretting The Move's missed chance.”