And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records by Larry Harris, Curt Gooch, Jeff Suhs
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father was bankrolling his promotion company. He had little experience beyond promoting several area college events, though he grew to be a very important contact for KISS. The station arranged for the show to be held at the Michigan Palace, an old five-thousand-seat theater in downtown Detroit. It sold out immediately—I think the ticket price was only ninety-seven cents, since ninety-seven was WABX’s frequency on the radio dial—and the WABX staff showed up in force: David Perry, Dave Dixon, Dan Carlisle, general manager John Detz, and Ken Calvert. Mark and I walked through the audience as KISS began to play. The minute Gene Simmons spit fire, everyone froze. You could hear the proverbial pin drop for about two seconds. Then there was a deafening roar. Mark yelled in my ear, “You win!”
The gig was plagued with production problems, likely stemming from Glantz’s inexperience with larger gigs. The amount of time between acts (Bob Seger and Ted Nugent were also on the bill) was an issue. At multi-act shows, the first bands on the bill do not typically use their full production, which helps shorten the gaps between acts, but I was paying for the gig, and the last thing I was going to do was let KISS take the stage with anything less than their full production. Following KISS’s set, the venue’s representatives threatened to close the building at midnight in compliance with their contracts with the stagehand and security unions. By the time I resolved the matter, it was approaching 2:00 a.m. To compound the problem, the audience was leaving the hall, exhausted after rocking through six hours of music. Steven Tyler threw a screaming hissy fit. Mike Klenfner was there representing Aerosmith’s label, Columbia Records, and he wound up on the receiving end of Tyler’s rant. The image of Tyler, about five foot two and about one hundred pounds wringing wet, yelling up at Klenfner, at least six foot four and three hundred and fifty pounds with hands the size of catcher’s mitts, was by turns hilarious and surreal. I was expecting Klenfner to lift Tyler off the ground and throw him from one end of the backstage area to the other, but he kept his cool, and Tyler lived to sing another day.
KISS clearly needed to headline. This would be tricky in markets where they had little or no airplay. ATI had to skip over whole areas of the country until we could establish the band on radio there. In the case of San Francisco, we never got airplay from the legendary KSAN-FM; station PD Tom Donahue was not crazy about the band, even though he was friends with Neil.
KISS did play small gigs in the market, and they began to establish a following, but this still did not translate into KSAN airplay. We waited until the demand for a live show in the market became overwhelming due to airplay and exposure from KFRC (the Top 40 station), outlying AOR stations, and the print media. Then the band went back to San Francisco and did a headlining arena show for Bill Graham. Graham had avoided presenting KISS in other markets. I think he just did not like the band and the kind of rock they represented. I found his reluctance interesting, because he shared a Hungarian Jewish heritage with Gene Simmons.
With KISS finally off and running, we turned our attention to other ventures. One of the more interesting plans was for Neil to do a series of musical greeting cards with Bob Crewe of BC Generations. (Bob was famous for writing songs with and producing The Four Seasons.) The first card was to feature the song “My Happy Birthday Baby.” The idea was decades ahead of its time, and unfortunately it went nowhere; musical greeting cards are, of course, sold widely today.
We also concentrated on expanding our roster of artists, and one of the first we signed was Parliament, fronted by creator George Clinton. To call George unique would be a vast understatement, and there was nothing understated about George Clinton. He was a creative genius whose music
The gig was plagued with production problems, likely stemming from Glantz’s inexperience with larger gigs. The amount of time between acts (Bob Seger and Ted Nugent were also on the bill) was an issue. At multi-act shows, the first bands on the bill do not typically use their full production, which helps shorten the gaps between acts, but I was paying for the gig, and the last thing I was going to do was let KISS take the stage with anything less than their full production. Following KISS’s set, the venue’s representatives threatened to close the building at midnight in compliance with their contracts with the stagehand and security unions. By the time I resolved the matter, it was approaching 2:00 a.m. To compound the problem, the audience was leaving the hall, exhausted after rocking through six hours of music. Steven Tyler threw a screaming hissy fit. Mike Klenfner was there representing Aerosmith’s label, Columbia Records, and he wound up on the receiving end of Tyler’s rant. The image of Tyler, about five foot two and about one hundred pounds wringing wet, yelling up at Klenfner, at least six foot four and three hundred and fifty pounds with hands the size of catcher’s mitts, was by turns hilarious and surreal. I was expecting Klenfner to lift Tyler off the ground and throw him from one end of the backstage area to the other, but he kept his cool, and Tyler lived to sing another day.
KISS clearly needed to headline. This would be tricky in markets where they had little or no airplay. ATI had to skip over whole areas of the country until we could establish the band on radio there. In the case of San Francisco, we never got airplay from the legendary KSAN-FM; station PD Tom Donahue was not crazy about the band, even though he was friends with Neil.
KISS did play small gigs in the market, and they began to establish a following, but this still did not translate into KSAN airplay. We waited until the demand for a live show in the market became overwhelming due to airplay and exposure from KFRC (the Top 40 station), outlying AOR stations, and the print media. Then the band went back to San Francisco and did a headlining arena show for Bill Graham. Graham had avoided presenting KISS in other markets. I think he just did not like the band and the kind of rock they represented. I found his reluctance interesting, because he shared a Hungarian Jewish heritage with Gene Simmons.
With KISS finally off and running, we turned our attention to other ventures. One of the more interesting plans was for Neil to do a series of musical greeting cards with Bob Crewe of BC Generations. (Bob was famous for writing songs with and producing The Four Seasons.) The first card was to feature the song “My Happy Birthday Baby.” The idea was decades ahead of its time, and unfortunately it went nowhere; musical greeting cards are, of course, sold widely today.
We also concentrated on expanding our roster of artists, and one of the first we signed was Parliament, fronted by creator George Clinton. To call George unique would be a vast understatement, and there was nothing understated about George Clinton. He was a creative genius whose music
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