The Year in Music

It is to be Presumed that when cloning becomes a marketable process, the hustlers and hucksters of that vast Darwinian wasteland we call The Music Business will be among the first to take advantage of it. Imagine, for instance, the revenues that a dozen Ted Nugents or Eric Claptons, touring simultaneously, could generate for themselves and their sponsors. Cynics might argue that, artistically speaking, cloning has always been the standard procedure, that the vast majority of records sold today--in numbers that stagger the imagination and at prices that clean out the billfold--are the products of imitative rather than creative minds. Minds that figure, if something is selling, copy it; that's the type of thinking responsible for the endless reams of rock and disco music, played by studio musicians clonelike in their anonymity, that seem (text continued on page 188) to get sawed up and sold in three- and ten-minute segments, respectively.

It's also the type of thinking that makes some people want to be other people, as in the case of the more than 600 Elvis Presley impersonators now operating professionally in the United States. That we are living in a clone's age was further demonstrated during 1978 by the fact that a pair of bogus Presleys, one a girl, went as far as to have a plastic surgeon mold their features into replicas of the departed idol. They were joined by other would-bes who "became" Janis Joplin, Jim Croce and Jim Morrison (the five were booked for a tour as Rock 'n' Roll Heaven). Morrison himself was brought back from the dead, after, lo, these many years, as the surviving Doors worked on an album featuring tapes he had left in the can. But it was a year in which dead men walked the charts; the surge of record sales by Lynyrd Skynyrd, after the group was decimated by a plane crash in the Buddy Holly/Otis Redding tradition, proved anew that in rock, what goes down at the right time will eventually rise. Not that Skynyrd's posthumous success rivaled Elvis Presley's. When the year began, Presley's producer, Felton Jarvis, was probing the very large can full of unused (and in many cases forgotten) Presley tapes for possible hits; it ended with Elvis' being named Billboard's Male Artist of the Year in the country-music field, after no fewer than 19 of his releases had made the charts (his nearest competitor, "Willie Nelson, had six). Indeed, it was Halloween all year round for the record biz, as the dead on the charts were joined by mummers, in the painted persons of Kiss, whose pubescent followers supported their tongue-waving, blood-dripping screech-rock extravaganzas with such fervor that the group stopped touring and recording together for one year in order to concentrate on their TV specials and individual albums.

The rock world, as usual, had a few other disheveled and premature departures, as The Who's zany drummer, Keith Moon, floated from this worldly sphere on a tide of medication--just after the group had finished a comeback album dwelling on aging, mortality and related themes--and as the 20-year-old girlfriend of punk-rock star Sid Vicious was found dead of a knife wound in the abdomen. Although charges against him remained to be proved, the well-publicized preoccupation of the New Wave in general, and Vicious in particular, with nihilism and violence led much of the press to convict him at once. "He beat out Keith Richards for the story of the year," commented another punk-rocker. And the former manager of the Sex Pistols, after trying to raise bail money for Vicious--whose real name is John Simon Ritchie--was already talking about a movie based on the case.

As is customary, there were a few other sudden exits in the music world and a few near misses. Jazz lost pianist Lennie Tristano and bassist Charles Mingus. Keyboardist Larry Young, a founding father of fusion music who played with everyone from Miles to Hendrix, died of internal bleeding at the age of 38. Rock continued to court a particularly violent destiny, as Chicago's guitarist Terry Kath shot himself to death in an informal round of Russian roulette (shades of Johnny Ace, the original rock casualty) and as Johnny Blitz, drummer of The Dead Boys, another punk-rock group, almost became a real dead boy when he went to the aid of a roadie involved in a street fight on New York's Lower East Side and got stabbed six times in the face and neck.

Rock even paid tribute, this time around, to the outstanding death culture of the known past, as the Grateful Dead (funny about that name, too) made a pilgrimage to Egypt, where they were recorded and filmed in concert at the foot of the Great Pyramid, which was used as an echo chamber; Ken Kesey, a member of the group's traveling coterie, even managed to scale the world's best-known monument to the dead and affix a Grateful Dead banner to its pointed top.

The ancient Egyptians believed in a form of resurrection, and most Americans are supposed to as well. Rock certainly does. One who came back from purgatory last year was Joe Cocker, dried out but unbowed. Another was Bruce Springsteen, who emerged from three years of legal and managerial hassles to reclaim his hastily doffed crown as the latter-day king of rock. And how about Keith Richards? He came out the other end of a Canadian heroin bust with a year's probation and six months in which to play a benefit concert for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (his lawyer, citing Richards' nine-year battle with the hard stuff, also announced the guitarist's intention to donate $1,000,000 to help set up, somewhere, a drug-rehabilitation clinic).

The foremost returnees from limbo, however, were a 75-year-old classical pianist and an 83-year-old jazz/blues singer. Ervin Nyiregyházi, a onetime child prodigy whose career had fizzled in die early Thirties and who had spent the past 45 years in total obscurity, was rediscovered as an album on the modest Desmar label that made the critics get very uncritical and inspired Columbia to distribute Nyiregyházi's future releases; and Alberta Hunter, who had played Broadway in the Twenties, then worked with Paul Robeson in London and headlined the first black U.S.O. troupe in World War Two, was rediscovered--at a Bobby Short party for Mabel Mercer--and launched on a comeback after not singing for more than 20 years (she'd even been "retired" from her job as a hospital attendant in 1977--too old, they said).

But then, there were comebacks and resurrections going on just about everywhere you looked in 1978. Alice Cooper was another who dried out and came back. And a flock of Sixties performers made it back to the charts after years of absence, including Bobby Vee, Gene Chandler, Bobbie Gentry, Brook Benton, Mary Travers and Lee Dorsey. The Moody Blues made their first album in years. Johnnie Lee Wills, the brother of Bob Wills, was in the recording studio after a 16-year absence. Also seen in the studio, in New Orleans, was a group called The Reddings; they are the children of the late, great Otis. The Hi-Lo's were reunited after 17 years for an appearance at the Monterey Jazz Festival. Canadian singer Anne Murray was back on the country charts after concentrating on motherhood for two years. The All-man Brothers Band, having forgiven brother Gregg for ratting on his roadie, was talking about a comeback. The Beach Boys made a comeback but discovered die old magic wasn't quite there (though it was for Dennis Wilson, who beat a "contributing to the delinquency of a minor" rap in Tucson when the 16-year-old girl involved refused to testify against him). Bob Dylan came back from his last comeback, with a $1,250,000 movie that the critics didn't like and some new arrangements that he said would make it hard for his fans to recognize his old tunes. He was right, and some of the fans didn't like it--but Dylan has proved more than once that he is smarter than his fans and probably will do so again. Another comebacker was a revitalized Al Green, who took his sleek soul music all the way to Tokyo to win top prize at Japan's international singing competition. Stax Records made a comeback. So did New York's Apollo Theater, reopening under new management. In fact, New York itself made a comeback, as a spate of recording activity--after several years in which all the action seemed to be drifting westward--led to the enlargement and/or renovation of a number of major studios.

And everywhere you looked, they were living in the past. The careers of Buddy Holly and Alan Freed were dramatized in films. A stage show called Beatlemania used film clips and Beatle impersonators--there's some more walking dead for you--to capitalize on the public's longing for the long-haired foursome, which has been cold for quite some time (though Paul McCartney, who owns the publishing rights to Buddy Holly's music, made some money almost every time Linda Ronstadt sold an album last year). As if that weren't enough, the life, times and music of Fats Waller were re-created in a Broadway show, Ain't Misbehavin', with Hank Jones doing the piano. Esther Marrow played Mahalia Jackson in Mahalia, a musical at New York's Henry Street Settlement Playhouse. The compositions of 85-year-old Harry Warren--Chattanooga Choo Choo, Jeepers Creepers, and such--were in the process of returning to Broadway in a new musical called Lullaby of Broadway, set to open in the spring. And a group from Minneapolis called The Wolverines Classic Jazz Orchestra, whose average age is 24, made good impressions in California with their double-breasted tuxedos and their big-band arrangements from the Twenties and Thirties.

Those august arbiters of fate, The Charts, also had their eyes on the past, as compositions by Lerner and Loewe, Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Glenn Miller and Oscar Hammerstein returned to popularity. Tom Waits had a recording out of Somewhere, the Leonard Bernstein tune, and Michael Johnson had a Top 40 hit with Almost Like Being in Love. Willie Nelson was up there with his album Stardust, a collection of chestnuts, as was Linda Ronstadt with When I Grow Too Old to Dream. And Isaac Hayes, on the comeback trail himself, had a disco hit with Stranger in Paradise.

It was fully in keeping with the year as a whole when West 52nd Street, once known as Swing Street or simply The Street, was made into a shrine, with the names of a dozen musicians, including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young and Billie Holiday, embedded in the concrete, Hollywood style.

Amidst all this nostalgia for the past were such unmistakable signs of a Tofflerian future as direct-to-disc recording, which essentially eliminates the taping process, and the increased use of lasers in stage shows and in discos, despite warnings from doctors of possible eye damage.

Herbie Hancock introduced a gizmo called the Vocoder, which he said Stevie Wonder introduced him to; it computerizes the human voice and blends it with an instrumental part, enabling a non singer to "sing" with perfect pitch. Other aids to future shock were the nation's first solar-heated record shop, in Appleton, Wisconsin, and the 24-hour city built for California Jam II, a rock concert held on the Ontario Motor Speedway in Ontario, California. The "jam" drew 250,000 paying customers who heard 15 hours of Nugent, Aerosmith, Santana, Heart and others through a 140,000-watt sound system; then they gave the speedway back to the drivers.

Because they were dealing in sci-fi numbers, anyway, there was no time like the present for the people who were making money in music last year. Despite rising promotional and advertising costs that led Warners and Columbia to suggest $8.98 as a retail price for selected albums--retailers everywhere were balking at that--CBS and its affiliated labels were running 32 percent ahead of the previous year's sales pace. Warner Communications, Inc., had its highest revenues ever in the third quarter. Casablanca, buoyed by the success of Kiss and Parliament, was running 113 percent ahead of the previous year. And the Robert Stigwood Organization--RSO--had the two best-selling LPs ever in the Bee Gees' Saturday Night Fever sound track and the Travolta/Newton-John music from Grease. By October, Fever had sold 25,000,000 at $12.98 a copy. Grease had sold 5,000,000 in its first four months. And the sound track for the film version of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a much-ballyhooed RSO production that was panned by the critics and closed after a brief run in New York, shipped platinum at $15.98. A little fast arithmetic indicates that some people aren't having too much difficulty staying alive. And they were just as busy combining music and movies on the other side of town, as Motown and Casablanca collaborated on their own disco blockbuster, Thank God It's Friday, and Motown later went all out to produce The Wiz, with Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Lena Horne, Quincy Jones, Nicholas Ashford and Valerie Simpson all assisting with the music. With the cameras grinding and the s ound mills churning at a record pace, the industry expected to top its 21 percent growth rate of 1977, when it rang up 3.3 billion dollars in sales.

All that booty quite naturally attracted the attention of some bad people. According to research undertaken last year by Germany's Deutsche Grammophon, piracy of tapes and records cost the international music industry $780,000,000 in 1977. Again quite naturally, the industry was fighting back; antibootleg legislation was passed in New York, California and five other states, and individuals found guilty of piracy got jail sentences in Atlanta, New York and Texas. All that was before Eliot Ness got into the act: Just before we went to press, more than 300 Federal agents seized $100,000,000 worth of recording equipment at 19 bootlegging operations spread over five states. The raids climaxed a 20-month investigation, during which the FBI opened its own record shop on Long Island, staffed with undercover agents. Thirty flat-bed tractor trailers were used to cart away the illegal mastering machines, duplicators and whatnot, and it was expected that at least 100 indictments would be forthcoming.

If it was a great year for the music industry overall, rest assured that it was an encouraging one for minorities and special interests. Minorities like musicians, for one: The record companies paid out almost $34,000,000 in wages to sidemen on recording sessions, an increase of 18 percent over the previous twelvemonth. Or like women, our disadvantaged majority. The number of female vocalists on Billboard's charts increased 30 percent between 1967 and the beginning of 1978; and female solo vocalists on the Hot 100 chart have increased 90 percent since 1976, as Donna Summer, Dolly Parton, Crystal Gayle, Debby Boone, Natalie Cole and Rita Coolidge, among others, have continued to solidify themselves as consistent hit makers and top concert attractions. The first all-female jazz festival was also successfully sponsored last year in Kansas City by Carol Comer and Dianne Gregg, a local singer and a radio producer, respectively, with Toshiko Akiyoshi, Marian McPartland, Mary Lou Williams and Betty Carter headlining the shows.

Jazz itself seemed to be in an unusually advantageous position, as numerous people thought of as jazz artists made some noise on the charts, crossing over into the rock sphere like Al DiMeola and Chuck Mangione, or into the disco/R&B market place a la Lonnie Liston Smith. This prompted talk of a jazz renascence, and also a good deal of skepticism from people inside the industry and critics on the outside who felt that the jazzmen on the charts had gotten there by playing music that wasn't jazz. Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, who appeared to have crossed over safely, did an about-face and proclaimed, "Here I am, 39 years old, playing music that doesn't really fit me and working with producers who are telling me what notes to play, notes I don't really want to play. Man, I'm too old for that." Another nonbeliever was John Snyder (no relation to the writer), who had been producing avant-garde jazz for A&M's Horizon label. When A&M decided to go middle-of-the-road, Snyder had to form his own label, Artist House, in order to keep producing Ornette Coleman and other nonmainstream musicians. "Jazz involves the interaction of musicians on every level," he told us, "and it's a fact that those crossover records are made in layers. I don't see how a soloist can go into the studio and relate to the musicians who laid down the rhythm tracks several weeks earlier."

Regardless of what one thought of the crossovers, there seemed to be fresh interest in the relatively pure strains of jazz. New clubs cropped up in all the major cities, with a dozen spots opening around Los Angeles. New festivals were organized everyplace from Ann Arbor to Bombay, India. About 100,000 people paid to attend the 25th Newport Jazz Festival, and 200,000 made it to the ninth annual Jazz & Heritage Festival in New Orleans. Independent record labels that hadn't been heard from in decades, such as Progressive and Discovery, were resurrected. Dizzy Gillespie, (continued on page 222)Year in Music(continued from page 190) a onetime Presidential candidate, played Salt Peanuts at the White House. And a new college-bred audience gave such stalwart support to resurrected beboppers such as Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins and Johnny Griffin, who came back from 15 years of voluntary exile in Europe, that work began on a film biography of the greatest bebopper, Charlie Parker, with Richard Pryor cast as the bedeviled saxophonist. Black music also got recognition from the National Educational Television network, which contracted Ashford and Simpson to host a 20-part history of same, and from the industry itself, as Kenny Gamble and Ed Wright founded the Black Music Association of America in Philadelphia, where disco is king; ironically, Philadelphia also saw the establishment of the nation's first all-black symphony orchestra.

Unlikely as it seems, the country-music business was in a position analogous to that of jazz in 1978. Like jazz, country music was received at the White House. And the key word in Nashville was also crossover, as the music business worked hard all across the board to break down the categories it had worked so hard to establish. Dolly Parton went mainstream front and center as a media heroine; country records suddenly accounted for more than 20 percent of what was played on middle-of-the-road radio stations; and it seemed as if the death of Mother Maybelle Carter during the year signified the passing of an era, as Nashville got its first discos, its first disco production company (Dillard & Boyce) and even its first disco hit, Bill Anderson's I Can't Wait Any Longer.

Speaking of disco, it looked a little shaky early in the year, as gay discos in Philly admitted straight patrons and discos in the New York area were resorting to gimmicky extra attractions such as strippers, jugglers, mimes and sex-fantasy parties in order to lure customers. Insiders were also warning that the growing parochialism of disco music would limit its appeal and its future, and one prominent New York disco jock went into the recording, production and mixing business himself because he was so turned off by the quality of product he was getting. People in the biz, if you can believe this, were talking about the need for disco to establish crossover appeal. But, of course, everything got straightened out. New discos opened from Kuala Lumpur to Las Vegas, where Paul Anka had his own $3,500,000 disco and restaurant, called Jubilation. Studio 54 got a $500,000 face lift. Syndicated how-to-do-it shows brought disco to television. Small's Paradise went disco. So did roller rinks around the country. And the Cultural Affairs Council of the city of Philadelphia replaced its free open-air rock concerts with disco, to eliminate those rowdy rock audiences (disco crowds are presumably more passive). By June, Billboard was able to report that disco was grossing an estimated four billion dollars a year, courtesy of a world-wide audience of 40,000,000 to 50,000,000 people.

Crossover was also the Holy Grail for the folks in the burgeoning Latin-music industry, and the people at the big record companies were paying more and more attention, especially at CBS, which staged a two-day free festival and talent hunt in Havana, finally signing a local group called Irakere.

But if any special-interest group had a banner year in 1978, it was the lawyers. Maybe it was because the stakes were getting higher; maybe the industry was just following the rest of society in becoming more litigious. But everywhere you looked in 1978, music-business people were in court, for one reason or another. CBS and Bob Dylan ganged up on little Folkways Records to stop distribution of an LP called Bob Dylan vs. A. J. Weberman (Weberman was the "garbologist" who raided Dylan's cans; see Playboy After Hours, page 28). Dylan and CBS sought $7,500,000 in damages. The executors of Terry Kath's will joined the surviving members of Chicago in suing to get away from the group's longtime producer, James William Guercio, claiming he had wrongly withheld royalty money for administrative fees and asking for $10,000,000 in damages. Chicago and CBS together sued several manufacturers in the U. S. and Canada to halt sales of an LP based on a concert the group gave in Toronto in 1969. The Grateful Dead, Round Records and two music-publishing companies sued United Artists for $290,000 in record royalties, $180,000 in publishing royalties, $407,000 in "net profits," $50,000 in unreimbursed advertising costs and $5,000,000 in punitive damages. Mike Roshkind, a Motown vice-chairman, was indicted by a grand jury for, and later convicted of, income-tax evasion in 1972 and 1973. Former Beatles manager Allen Klein was trying to avoid a second trial on similar charges at year's end, after being mistried once. Marvin Gaye filed bankruptcy papers. Fania Records, tops in the Latin field, sought $2,000,000 in compensatory and punitive damages from 13 New York-area retailers who it claimed were selling pirated material. Olivia Newton-John and MCA sued each other for breach of contract; Olivia claimed damages in excess of $10,000,000, while the company asked for a measly $1,000,000. Gato Barbieri's neighbors went to court to stop him from practicing in his New York apartment. Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé also went to court, charging Columbia with failure to account for some $500,000 in royalties. RCA and Vernon Presley, Elvis' father, went to court to stop distribution of Tell Me Pretty Baby, a record that the producers claimed was cut by Elvis on a visit to Phoenix, before he began his documented career at Sun Records in Memphis. Gladys Knight sued Buddah, Arista and, yes, her supposedly indispensable Pips for a total of $23,250,000, hoping to get away from them and start over as a solo act with Columbia. Naturally, Jerry Lee Lewis went to court, too; he was fined $200 and given a year's probation, plus a 30-day suspended sentence, on a charge of driving while drugged. Four Brunswick execs were acquitted of charges that they sold records under the counter, thus depriving musicians of their royalties. And a projected Warners LP based on the Nixon tapes, with narration by George C. Scott, was killed when the Supreme Court ruled against any release of the tapes until Government archivists had first crack at them (the producer of the LP was so enamored of the project that he distributed 200 copies of a mock-up, with blank spaces surrounding Scott's narrative bits, to people in the industry).

All of which suggests that for young people hoping to make it in music today--and, according to a 1978 Gallup Poll, there are 50,000,000 amateur musicians honing their chops outside the door--the most logical path might not be to learn to play an instrument, or to write a song. Or even to visit a plastic surgeon. It might simply be to hit the books hard and get into the best law school possible.

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And now here at last, the results of your voting:

Records of the Year

Best Pop/Rock LP: Aja / Steely Dan (ABC). Thinking man's pop/rock that last fall cut through the sludge accumulated at the top of the charts and floated up to number one. Not bad for a group named after a dildo.

Best Rhythm-and-Blues LP: All 'n' All / Earth, Wind & Fire (Columbia). On the soaring strength of Serpentine Fire, this album became an enormous crossover hit--and helped to make E.W.&F. the biggest money-maker on Columbia.

Best Country-and-Western LP: Heart-breaker / Dolly Parton (RCA). What can we say? She surely is.

Best Jazz LP: Feels So Good / Chuck Mangione (A&M). The man with the golden Flügelhorn tore up the charts with this one. Rochester, New York's favorite son obviously has found the magic formula.

Best Pop/Rock LP

Best Rhythm-and-Blues LP

Best Country-and-Western LP

Best Jazz LP

Music Hall of Fame

It's been sad but true over the years: One fine way for a musician to be voted into the Hall of Fame is to die prematurely. That's how too many of them have arrived, and this year we say goodbye and hello to Keith Moon, one of the true original rock-'n'-roll crazies. Neil Diamond in second place is up from third last time; maybe next year his bridesmaid status will change. Barbra Streisand in third is also always well up in the voting, but the hot surprise entry in fourth--Bruce Springsteen--didn't even make the top 20 last time around.

They are this year:

Readers' Poll

After a couple of years in which the top spots seemed to be the permanent turf of the same superstar repeaters, the voting results this time brought us some changes and new faces.

The hottest newcomer appeared in the Pop/Rock category. No stranger in town anymore, Billy Joel took top slot in the male-vocalist, keyboards and composer categories--not bad at all, considering that a year ago his name didn't appear among the finalists in any of the three. Once again at the top of their categories in Pop/Rock were vocalist Linda Ronstadt and bassist Paul McCartney. Steely Dan, up from number five, grabbed top group honors away from Fleetwood Mac, but Mick Fleetwood jumped from number 13 last year to the top of the drums heap.

In the R&B category, you stuck with more old favorites. In his continuing see-saw with Stevie Wonder as best male vocalist, George Benson came out on top this time--and Johnny Mathis appeared for the first time in a while at number four. Welcome back. The big news in R&B was Donna Summer, who came from 16th place last year to displace Natalie Cole as best female vocalist. Stevie Wonder did it yet again as best composer, and for the second year in a row, Earth, Wind & Fire was counted best group.

You jazz lovers apparently stick by your guns--or axes. In no less than seven categories, you renewed the lease at the top. One especially strong finisher was Chuck Mangione, who took both best composer and brass player and knocked Weather Report down a notch to number two in the best group category.

Good news for Austin and environs in the Country-and-Western voting. Up from number five last year, Willie Nelson was named top male vocalist--and we'd like to thank him personally for Stardust. Otherwise, it was pretty much business as usual, with Linda Ronstadt, Roy Clark and Gordon Lightfoot doing it again in their respective satrapies.

1979 Playboy Music Poll Results

Pop/Rock

Male Vocalist

Female Vocalist

Guitar

Keyboards

Drums

Bass

Composer

Group

Rhythm-and-Blues

Male Vocalist

Female Vocalist

Composer

Group

Jazz

Male Vocalist

Female Vocalist

Brass

Woodwinds

Keyboards

Vibes

Guitar

Bass

Percussion

Composer

Group

Country-and-Western

Male Vocalist

Female Vocalist

Picker

Composer

"Crossover was the Holy Grail for the folks in the burgeoning Latin-music industry."