Sometime in 1985, a new label-wide policy was instituted regarding all new signings. There were to be none. Nada. The staff was called into a departmental meeting to receive the news, which, to my mind, might as well have been notice that the oxygen supply to the building was being abruptly cut off. Success at the major label level involves constant evolution. Like the care and feeding of a miniature bonsai tree, sculpting, shaping, and pruning the roster is a delicate and subtle business that eventually yields strong roots and fine blossoms. To withhold basic nutrients is to doom the entire undertaking to a slow and withering death, and not one I cared to be a party to.
But this new edict, however strange it seems, actually led me straight to my next signing.
That morning I had gone through the previous day’s mail, sorting promising looking demos into one stack, and depositing the rest in the trash. Exactly what a “promising demo” looks like is anyone’s guess, and tossing the others is not flattering behavior for an A&R man, but the company also had one of those “no unsolicited tapes” policies so I suppose any route out of the building for these offerings was more or less the correct one.
On this particular day I received a twelve-inch vinyl record in a white sleeve with a picture of three large bowling balls in triangular formation. These bowling balls bore the inscriptions “Steve,” “Bob&,” “Rich.” I took one look, declared the item preposterous, and threw it away. Two hours later, fuming from the meeting which ended all further A&R activity, I returned to my office and declared out loud to no one in particular, “Well, if I’m going to waste my time, I might as well waste it on this!” With that, I fished Steve, Bob, & Rich out of the wastebasket and slapped in onto the turntable. I cranked the stereo’s volume way up, figuring to disturb just about everybody within earshot with this complete rubbish. What emerged from the speakers, however, was not the misguided and amateurish attempt at immortality that I had imagined but rather an incredible piece of writing and performance called “Let My People Go-Go” (download). Even the track’s count off, not “1-2-3-4″ but rather “Father, Son, and Holy Cow!” had me going wild. The lyrics were sublime:
Moses went up to the mountain high
To find out from God, “Why did you make us? Why?”
Secret words in a secret room…
He said, “A wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom!
What a hoot! Still, there was a moratorium to be observed, so I simply made a cassette copy of the record and threw it in the bottom of my tape bag to enjoy again at my leisure. (more…)
