Bad Days at Black Rock

But Not the "Worst Day in Jazz History"

I still remember the moment on May 29, 1973, that I found out Clive Davis had been fired from his dual roles and president of the CBS Records Group, and president of the CBS Records Division. The latter made him a board member of the parent company, CBS, known formally as the Columbia Broadcasting System.

Bob Sarlin, my boss and mentor who hired me to partner with him on our two-member editorial staff for CBS Records' in-house Playback magazine, called me at home, where I was recuperating from our exhausting few weeks. We had just finished a high-pressure deadline to complete a special issue dedicated to a series of concerts in Los Angeles that Clive Davis, then 40, had hosted showcasing the talent and range of the CBS Records roster. It was called A Week to Remember, and was held at the Ahmanson Theater of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion between Sunday, April 29, and Saturday, May 5, 1973.

Anyone who has followed Clive Davis' career knows he has a big ego; he would not deny it. At the time, it was thought to be the job of VP of Publicity Bob Altshuler to make sure that a picture of Clive Davis with one of the label's hundreds of artists was in every issue of the three weekly  major music trade magazines at the time: Billboard, Record World, and Cashbox. It did not have to be spelled out to Sarlin and I that every page of the special Playback issue for the Ahmanson series were to feature multiple photos of Clive with every artist mentioned, and that he was to be mentioned on every page of the issue. (Altshuler was also a passionate jazz collector whose 250,000 recordings now reside in the Library of Congress.)

Sarlin's voice was shaky as he read to me the memo from CBS chairman William Paley and president of CBS Inc., Arthur Taylor, reciting Davis' dismissal in a lawsuit for misuse of company funds totalling $94,000, including details such as using false invoices to defray some $20,000 costs of his son's Bar-Mitzvah at the Plaza Hotel, renovations of his Central Park West apartment, and a home rental in Beverly Hills, as reported in the May 30, 1973 edition of the New York Times in a story that appeared on page 78. (Conspiracy theories about Clive’s dismissal rather than a quiet request for restitution, considering how many tens of millions Davis earned for the company, are so abundant they are beyond my scope here.)

This wasn't just Clive Davis' problem; it was our problem. Our Ahmanson issue was about to go to the printer, but the order communicated from Altshuler to Sarlin to me was: Every mention of Clive Davis was to be erased from our issue; every photo of Clive Davis had to be removed. It was a directive to Playback from the Politburo playbook: Clive Davis was now an un-person, in the old Soviet style. It was going to be a busy weekend.

"Wow," I told Sarlin once I processed what he told me. "This is like working for Pravda."

To let you in on the task at hand, let me tell you about that week of concerts.

The range of CBS Records was displayed on opening night, which featured Anthony Newman, the prolific pianist, harpsichordist, and Bach specialist. On the other extreme was Loudon Wainright III, the folksy, sardonic singer-songwriter, who against all expectations, including his own, had a hit single earlier in 1973 called "Dead Skunk," a cute ditty with the singalong chorus that went something like "Dead skunk in the middle of the road, stinking to high heaven." The headliner was the Mahavishnu Orchestra, one of Columbia's breakout stars of 1973 led by guitarist John McLaughlin, who had reached a higher spiritual plane and earthly riches by amping up his guitar and putting together and an all star jazz-rock fusion band that included drummer Billy Cobham, keyboard player Jan Hammer, and bassist Rick Laird, who died July 4, 2021. Between 1972 and the end of 1973, McLaughlin/Mahavishnu released half a dozen LPs, including two gold albums in 1973: Birds of Fire with Mahavishnu, and Love Devotion Surrender with fellow seeker and Columbia star Carlos Santana.

Each subsequent Ahmanson concert was dedicated to different styles: a black music night, with Billy Paul, Johnny Nash, the Staple Singers and others; rock, on Tuesday, May 1, with the motley mix of Bruce Springsteen, Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show, and New Riders of the Purple Sage.

May 2 featured Miles Davis, Ramsey Lewis, and the dynamic R&B band Earth, Wind & Fire. Davis had changed the direction of jazz, not for the first time, with his best-selling 1970 jazz-funk album, Bitches Brew. It made the Billboard pop albums chart, which none of the dozens of brilliant Davis albums had done before. Taj Mahal, Loggins & Messina, and Albert Hammond played the next day. May 4 paid tribute to pop singer Johnny Mathis, who had sustained the label through the 1950s and 1960s. Columbia, before Davis' famous awakening at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, had little interest in rock.

Saturday closed the week with the country music grand finale: Epic Records' Charlie Rich, George Jones, and Tammy Wynette, and Columbia stalwart Johnny Cash.

Under the CBS Records umbrella were Columbia Records and Epic Records and its associated labels, and the latter, including Gamble and Huff's Philadelphia International Records, the Isley Brothers' T-Neck Records. There was a newly empowered Epic Nashville division behind the emergence of Charlie Rich, whose great advocate had been music critic Peter Guralnick. Rich had a platinum album in 1973, Behind Closed Doors, with the No. 1 pop single "The Most Beautiful Girl." Though it may not have been the music Guralnick loved from Rich (his Sun Recordings, and "Lonely Weekends" (1960) and "Mohair Sam" (1965) from his Mercury years), I recall Guralnick writing about Rich for Playback.

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It required two people to replace Clive Davis. Goddard Lieberson, a CBS senior vice president and patrician charmer who led CBS Records through its dominance of show tunes and classical music (My Fair Lady, West Side Story, Leonard Bernstein) in the pre-rock era, came back from the boardroom to lead the records group. Irwin Segelstein, a VP of CBS-TV, with little to no knowledge of the music business, entered to run the CBS Records Division. When I interviewed Segelstein for Playback after his appointment, there was no softball question slow enough for him to even make contact. I was 23 years old and embarrassed for him. This expert in the TV business had little clue about how the music business operated, and it appears that his figurehead presidency allowed him to be eaten alive by the sharks in well-tailored suits with VP titles who jostled for power at CBS Records after Clive. Marketing, promotion, sales, A&R, all competed for power after Davis.

The winners were sales.

I wanted to provide this background to amplify, answer, and provide context to a Substack post recently by the esteemed Ted Gioia titled "The Worst Day in Jazz History." I am an admirer of Gioia's great skill as jazz expert, music historian, and author of a dozen important books. I am reading his Music: A Subversive History, freshly out in paperback, and it not only dense with research but exciting to read, a valuable insight on every page.

But in his June 23 Substack, The Honest Broker, to which I subscribe and suggest you do as well, Ted declared that "worst day" was the "Great Columbia Jazz Purge" of 1973. "By some accounts, the move transpired over a longer period, perhaps a few weeks or months," he writes. So it's not "the worst day," in any kind of history. It was a process, a brutal one, based only on the criteria of sales, carried out on a month-by-month numerical calculation. I understand that Gioia felt an emotional attachment to Columbia Records for having given records to his high school, as he wrote:

I was in 10th grade back then, and Columbia Records even came to my working class high school—donating a stack of albums to the student body government, with the stipulation that they auction off the records for fundraisers, and thus build an audience for the label’s youth-oriented recordings. I was 15 years old when the Great Jazz Purge took place, and never again would I be so courted by a major label—one that seemed intensely concerned about me and my buddies, and our raw, unformed musical tastes.

The jazz artists whose sales did not make the grade Gioia names are Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Keith Jarrett, and Bill Evans. That is unfortunate. But these four jazz geniuses were not taken to the top of CBS' Black Rock building at 51 W. 52nd Street and thrown to their deaths, nor were they tortured in the basement, fingers crushed, lips and teeth broken. They did not die; their careers bore no stigma. They were released from their contracts. (Italics intentional.) To buttress his argument, he quotes another fine writer, James Isaacs:

Isaacs later compared the situation to "the 1961 New York Yankees suddenly placing Roger Maris, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, and Mickey Mantle on waivers." That may sound like hyperbole, but it really isn’t.

But it really is hyperbole, and not even an apt metaphor. Because those Yankees were No. 1 in every category: Mantle and Maris chased Babe Ruth's home run record all year; Ford and Berra were the outstanding battery (pitcher and catcher) of their time. They were the music industry equivalent of multimillion sellers. It would be like Capitol dropping the Beatles and the Beach Boys in 1965. Or Columbia dropping Pink Floyd in 1979.

But "The Worst Day in Jazz History." I gave this some thought, and these are the ideas I came up with. First, the day Charlie Parker died, March 12, 1955, age 34; the day John Coltrane died in 1967, age 40; the day Clifford Brown died in a car accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, 1956, age 26. This was especially haunting to us at Columbia Records, because in 1973, the label released The Beginning and the End, a compilation of the first (1952) and last (1956) recordings by the young hard bop trumpeter showed a world-class musician, a possible all-time great.

Clifford Brown, released and promoted by Columbia Records, 1973

Bruce Lundvall, the vice president of marketing, was both a musician himself and devoted jazz fan, and he made sure we wrote about Brown's recording in Playback. Why the much-loved Lundvall was not made president of the label after Clive's dismissal troubled many of us who loved music. Lundvall became president of Columbia in 1976, and in 1984, he revived the  the great jazz label Blue Note. But in 1973, even Lundvall was powerless the stop the bottom-feeding bottom-liners.

"The worst example of this was when Bruce Lundvall’s pet project, five 2-LP sets worth of Lester Young, was deleted from the catalogue, or rather some of it was deleted," Gregg Geller, an A&R man at Epic Records at the time told me in a recent email. "Apparently some of the five didn’t make quota, others did, leaving the complete set decimated. Bruce was appalled, outraged, but there was nothing even he could do, such was sway of Sales at the time."

The individual responsible for letting go under-performing jazz artists was most likely Jack Craigo, whose title I believe was Vice President of Sales and Distribution. "I think it was a Craigo thing," said a former marketing executive who was there at the time. Craigo played hardball, no question about it. When I joined the company in September 1972, part of the corporate lore was that Craigo's wife or ex-wife had come to his office with a gun, shot him, and missed. I seem to have had that wrong. According to the marketing exec, "She did [shoot] but she hit him!" But she didn't kill him, anymore than jazz died at CBS Records or anywhere else during the difficult year of 1973. Bob Dylan left Columbia in 1973 for one year and two 1974 albums with David Geffen’s Asylum Records: Planet Waves and, with The Band, Before the Flood. Now that messed up my mind.