Re-Terry Ellis

Dear Bob,

Back in the day before Chrysalis Records there was the Ellis-Wright Organization with a small office, I believe at 123 Regents St. with just Chris and Terry and their secretary Rose.  I knew them through Mike Vernon, my partner and founder of Blue Horizon Records original home to Peter Greene’s Fleetwood Mac and Chicken Shack which featured Christine Perfect (later McVie) on Piano.  Mike was also a star producer at British Decca where he produced John Mayall’s Blues Breakers, Eric Clapton, Keef Hartley, Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation, and two bands looked after by Ellis Wright: Ten Years After and also Savoy Brown Blues Band. Mike also produced David Bowie’s first album for Decca.

Back then, I always had a complex about the fact that I couldn’t play an instrument.  I was in the music business since age 14 working at Billboard while in school and later for Syd Nathan at King Records and finally for George Goldner at Redbird Records and his partners Leiber & Stoller in the Brill Building.  I was in the business, but couldn’t play.  It really bothered me.  It was in the Brill Building that I met Richard Gottehrer who was to become my partner and close friend in Sire Records.  Richard’s company FGG Productions was on the 10th Floor and Redbird was on the 9th Floor of this fabled building.  Richard was a great and gifted musician (as well as songwriter/producer/artist) When we started Sire my complex about not being a musician grew even greater.

One day in London I went with Mike Vernon and his then engineer Gus Dudgeon, (later Elton John’s producer) to the Windsor Pop and Jazz Festival where some of our Blue Horizon artists were playing.  There was this one new band managed by Chris and Terry.  They took the stage and stole the show.  I couldn’t believe how great they were. The minute their set was over I turned to Mike and said, "We ought to sign this band to Blue Horizon, you know they are looked after by Chris and Terry."  Mike turned to me and said, "Seymour, I don’t want to work with a band fronted by a flautist."   My heart sank!

I turned to Gus Dudgeon and said "Gus, please help me. Tell Mike we should try to sign this band."  Gus turned to me and said, "Seymour, obviously you don’t play a musical instrument.  If you did you would have heard all the bad notes the band hit."  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.  The band was of course Jethro Tull.  Jethro Tull launched the Chrysalis label which along with Island and Virgin were the three great English Indie labels that emerged in the early 1970’s.  

I am happy that Warner Music Group played a major role in the launch of these labels in the United States.  I am also happy that about two years later when I found and signed the Dutch band Focus featuring Thijs van Leer on flute and Jan Akkermann on guitar. I took the demos to Mike Vernon and said, "I don’t care if you like flautists or not you’re producing this record."  That album "Moving Ways" was Sire’s first platinum record and helped keep our doors open ’til I discovered CBGB’s and along with it The Ramones and Talking Heads. By that time Richard Gottehrer had left Sire, but found and produced Blondie so we were both well on our way.  

Perhaps most important of all, after that incident at the Windsor Pop & Jazz Festival, I was never again bothered that I couldn’t play an instrument.  Finding and signing the artists, hearing hit songs are more than enough for me and have served me well over the years. Had I followed Gus Dudgeon’s rules I would have never signed The Ramones, the band that opened up all the doors and along with Talking Heads landed Sire the deal with Mo and Lenny at Warner’s.  

Thank you Chris, thank you Terry.

-Seymour Stein

bob;

easy letter for an old geezer who has done well to write.
music doesn’t count any more; we depleted it, we became the fool on the hill.
events… festivals …. they matter, because the stars of these events are joe & josie public.
they get out, get off, they go home…. but they no longer take us with them.
terry sez it all in para 3 " in the mid-60’s ".
going, going, gone…..
anyway, basically great acts manage themselves.
when there’s a problem, most managers leave the room.
and john lennon’s 70th birthday – a branding disgrace.
we just continue to shit on our goldmine.
the victims of too much data and too many dollars.
it’s all sergio leone from here, dear…

best, andrew loog oldham

Hi Bob

Two interesting and seemingly conflicting points in your last two emails on Amanda ghost at Epic and Terry Ellis’ wise words on independents.  But are they really conflicting?

Terry points out that he and Chris Wright realised in the sixties that they could not do a worse job than Decca; that he and Chris knew nothing about the music business but that they loved their acts.  Amanda Ghost was brought in to bring that mindset to an ailing epic.

To me the problem is likely to be that such a mindset..a passion for music, getting up late, staying up late, empathising with the artist – these just don’t hang now in a label on a major, where artists are commoditised and then forgotten, where the paradigms are short-term, market-driven and celebrity rather than sustained support for talent.

Yes Jimmy was a producer first but a producer who spent more time in the marketing dept making sure his acts were priority than he ever did in a studio. Rick Rubin by his own admission hates being in the studio and spends as little time there as he can, preferring to go around making sure the people who will have to sell it get it.

Everyone is looking for a solution. Here is mine. I can’t take all the credit for it. This thinking came from hours and days spent with the much maligned Eric Nicoli as special advisor in the year leading to the sale of EMI to Terra firma.  Eric, Like Terry Ellis and Chris Wright, was educated, had career options and no music business experience – except that he had spent 7 years on the EMI board, and everyone forgets that his brother Fabio was a fabled record sleeve designer and head of art at Atlantic, so Eric was imbued in the backstage and record company offices from his teens and early twenties.

Eric sacked Alain Levy because Alain did not understand artists or get on with them. He kept Tony Wadsworth on because he knew how much the artists loved him. As soon as Guy Hands came in, Tony went, and with him went a clutch of big name acts running for the exits.

Eric also stalled the merger with Warner because he did not think the Bronfman mindset was compatible with a music-first label.

But Eric’s real coup was selling EMI to Hands for what now must be seen as the deal of the century – $6bn in the teeth of the storm.

If this deal had not gone through Eric and I had a philosophy. Not a plan but a philosophy of where to start a new way of thinking. It chimes with Terry’s wisdom as follows:

"There is a saying in my native Ireland that when someone asks you the way from here to there, more often than not the best answer is ‘Well, I wouldn’t start from here’.

You are approached in a bar by a man with two boxes. In one box he has every living contract for EMI recorded music and song publishing; in the other box is a digital archive of the entire EMI catalog.  "Fifty thousand bucks and they’re yours."

Do you accept? Hell yes! Do you then plan to set up 30 offices around the world and take on upward of 2,000 employees? Hell no! Half the product is worthless. Half the music will be downloaded for free. You have no control over distribution. Not like the old days. So what do you do?

You call the 20 smartest people you know. the youngest is 12 years old, the oldest is 80 years old. You rent a huge loft in a scruffy part of town. You get coffee and ice cream. You put the boxes on the table and say "We have ten percent of all music sold right here and some great artists. Let’s make some money people!"

Any major worth its salt needs to start again from somewhere else. Forget paying anyone a million dollars. Forget executive lifestyles. Forget market share, mergers, redundant licensing companies. Forget the stupid comments by Vivendi about puny cost cuts and ‘not affecting muscle and bone’ and sacking a few secrretaries. Start again and don’t start from here. Look at what the Erteguns, Moss & Alpert, Blackwell, Branson, Wright & Ellis and the others did. Get some great music, a studio, an office and a phone and start selling great music. You can’t lose.

Robin Millar