Walter Yetnikoff: the HP interview

"Where are all the broads in this town?”

The body language spells bull in a crockery shop. Walter Yetnikoff may be a reformed man, but sometimes nature is stronger than training, even in the gentile confines of the Shelbourne Hotel. Decades in the piranha tank of the corporate music industry – decades of stentorian coke snorting, two-fisted drinking and nailing everything in a skirt – have instilled in the old goat a general disregard for pussyfooting around that no amount of AA meetings can reverse.
Short, squat, straight talking Yetnikoff is in Dublin to promote Howling At The Moon, the scabrous, self-aggrandising but entertaining memoir of his dirty life and times, co-written with award winning pop biographer David Ritz. For a sample of the merchandise, proceed no further than the book’s opening lines:
“After her third orgasm, Jackie O looked at me with a mixture of gratitude and awe. ‘Jack was a powerful lover,’ she said. ‘Ari was a passionate man. But you, Walter Yetnikoff, you’re nothing short of astounding.”
Walter was dreaming when he wrote that of course, but he did have the occasion to be invited to dinner with the former first lady when she proposed a book about his life. Howling At The Moon is not that book, but despite the sucker-punch opening, it is far from lacking in merit, although it could well have been subtitled Notes Of A Blowhard Mogul.
The product of a working class New York Jewish background (live-in grandparents, Yiddish witticisms, the whole bit), Yetnikoff started out in law, specialising in recording contracts. Always better at crunching numbers than stroking artists and executives’ egos, he had attained a senior position at CBS Records by the early 70s, overseeing the careers of Paul Simon (whom he hated), Barbra Streisand, Marvin Gaye, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Bruce Springsteen and Public Enemy, and most notably, engineering Michael Jackson’s ascent to the position of 80s MTV icon. He also signed the Rolling Stones in what turned out to be a lucrative deal for both parties, and brokered the Sony takeover in the late 80s, heralding the era of corporate synergy, Walkmans and the fine art of selling people the same old shit all over again on CD.
Come the 90s though, years of vodka for breakfast and white lines for elevenses had taken their toll. Yetnikoff’s professional fall from favour coincided with his various stints in rehab, and subsequent attempts to launch his own label and make it as a movie mogul failed miserably.
These days he’s effectively out of the game, although he does keep busy with soundtrack production, performance poetry projects, artist counselling and various philanthropic enterprises, including serving on the board of the Caron Foundation addiction treatment facility. For the record, his favourite song of all time is Patti Smith’s ‘Because The Night’. Also for the record, he thinks most of today’s young artists are whinging pussies compared with their ’70s counterparts, but he does rate the White Stripes.

Peter Murphy: Did the writing of this book dredge up any bad impulses from the past?
Walter Yetnikoff: Some of it. The business stuff doesn’t bother me, it’s factual, but a lot of the personal stuff, the way I behaved with my first wife and family, that kind of thing. I was very promiscuous, it’s not even that I fault myself for it, it’s that I did it so openly. She was my childhood sweetheart. I didn’t even want to put it in, and Ritz the writer, he said, ‘If you want this book to be honest you have to.’ And he badgered me. But when I read it, it entered my heart in a way, and I said, ‘This was very dysfunctional, this was not as normal as I thought it was’. It sort of had that cathartic effect, although that intent was not there; the intent was to present an honest story.
How much of your promiscuity was a power trip, à la Clinton and Kennedy?
Even Kissinger said power is an aphrodisiac. Clinton just didn’t use it properly. The guy’s fucking this girl with a cigar! That’s what I have against him, not that he did what he did, but number one, tell the truth about it, it’s no big deal, and two, JFK was so much better at it. I mean Clinton’s fuckin’ this fat girl in the blue dress with a cigar and JFK is doing Angie Dickinson and Marilyn Monroe. Jesus!
According to Fredric Dannen’s book The Hit Men, you were quite shy early in your career.
I was.
What happened?!
I don’t know. I was still shy even when I was going through that. Sometimes you have to be number one when you don’t think you are. Part of it was the environment, a lot of screaming and yelling, and then there were the drugs of course. Cocaine has a way of… Billy Crystal said, ‘It’s a great drug: it makes you impotent and paranoid.’ But it also makes you think you’re invulnerable. And circumstances were proving to me that I could get away with anything I wanted, which was pretty much the case up to the very end. Were I not in that environment I don’t know that I would’ve done the same.
You were closely involved with two events that changed the face of the music business. One was the Sony takeover of CBS; the other was the success of Michael Jackson. When he first came to you, he was a young man, still part of The Jackson 5, and you helped establish him with Off The Wall. But what happened with Thriller was unprecedented. Any thoughts on how it became the biggest seller of the decade?
It was the visual element and the choreography. Michael always said that pop music brings an element of dance with it, and no one had really combined the two. (Robert) Stigwood had done it a little bit with Saturday Night Fever, but it wasn’t the artist who was dancing, it was what’s his name, John Travolting (sic) and it was disco. Thriller was pop, and the dance was brilliantly choreographed – not by him, but he was the performer. I think it was Paula Abdul who did the choreography. He brought the two together. It surprised everybody.
It’s clear from your book that Michael had megalomaniac tendencies even then, although at that point it was understandable. But when Bad came out he appeared to want nothing less than world domination.
Then it got worse. He always had to be number one. He had to be number one. He’d drive me crazy, he’d call me two or three times a day. ‘Michael, be calm, stop already!’ Now, when people have to be number one, it’s because they don’t feel that way.
The absolute low point was Invincible a couple of years ago, a truly terrible record.
I stopped with History, when he had his picture placed with Christ at the last supper. We all have some ego, but this was crazy.
You knew him better than a lot of people. He regarded you as his ‘Good Daddy’.
I knew him very well.
Was he messed up from childhood?
He was different from childhood. When he started to do the surgery stuff I got angry at him: ‘What are you doing? You’re not even black, I don’t know what you are, you’re non-colour, you’re non-racial.’ I tried to say to him, ‘Michael, you’re fine, what are you doing?’ and he told me, ‘I don’t like myself.’ And he started to tell me, ‘Look, I didn’t grow up like you. I was a star at six.’ His world shifted at that point and he remained at, not six, but he was a child in a lot of ways.
One of his wives said that when he was with her he spoke in a different voice. I never heard that voice. I always heard the little boy voice. I never heard a grown up speaking, in terms of the sound. He once called my house, my son was 14 and he answered the phone and came in and said, ‘Hey dad, Michael Jackson’s secretary is on the phone.’ I was with him once at a formal kind of thing, presenting an award to him at a party at the Smithsonian, and he turned to me and he says, ‘Walter, I have to tinkle.’ Gaaawd!
What’s your opinion on the recent child abuse allegations?
I have no opinion, I really don’t know. I can talk myself into either side: ‘Clearly there’s something there ’cos where there’s smoke there’s fire,’ or, ‘Hey, he just likes to hang out with young kids.’ Always did. I have pictures of him with that black television actor whose name escapes me at the moment. And the monkey! He would leave parties or wouldn’t show up, he might have been up in his room watching cartoons more than likely. So maybe he liked the company of kids ’cos he felt more comfortable is another possibility. Could be he was set up too, that’s another possibility. If you think that Michael Jackson is a paedophile – and I don’t have an opinion on that – why would you have your kid hang out with him?
The other megastar of the ’80s whose career you developed was Bruce Springsteen. Up until 1984, Bruce was huge in America, but in Europe he was more like a big cult artist with a legendary live reputation. With Born In The USA, was it a conscious decision to try and take it up a notch worldwide?
“Yep. Landau (Jon – Bruce’s manager) was always (evangelical) but not erroneously so either. Born In The USA, its time had come, and they say nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has come. He had been through The River sequence, and he had been through what I called Omaha – Nebraska – I actually liked the record, the songs were great, I thought it was the maturation process of an artist, it was necessary, but you could always sense that something big was about to happen. His live show, which you must have seen, was incredible. I am not wild about Bruce Springsteen these days, but he’s still a great performing artist. He was an idol to me, as an artist.
In the book, your take on Landau’s fanatical devotion to Bruce is quite funny.
Well it is a little strange y’know? – ‘You know what Bruce had for breakfast today? He had sausage!’ ‘Jon, what the fuck is wrong with you?’ I mean it was quite like that! At that time when he announced a big worldwide tour, Landau was making me a little crazy. Bruce was going on a worldwide tour – this was as if he had discovered life beyond the sun or something. It was important, but to Landau it was the end of the world.
People like Ahmet Ertegun and Clive Davis made their reputations on being seen as artist-friendly. They schmoozed the talent. You were all business though – that was borne out in your relationship with the Stones, the fact that you got on better with Mick than Keith.
That’s sorta true, but in retrospect I don’t think it was ’cos Keith was more the musician than Mick, but Keith was not as outgoing or manipulative as Jagger was. But it was true, in fact my 50th birthday party, my girlfriend at the time got Jagger to take me, and I said, ‘Where are we going?’ and he said, ‘We’re going to the penthouse suite in the New York Hilton.’ I said, ‘Why are we going there?’ ‘Aw, well, Keith is there and he feels you know me better than you know him so we oughta spend some time with him, make him feel better.’ So I said, ‘Keith Richards in the penthouse suite of the Hilton? That doesn’t sound like him.’ And we walk in and there’s a birthday party, which was this four-day event with strippers and god knows what else going on – I have pictures; you can see it degenerate after a day or two.
But I don’t know that it had anything to do with the musician stuff as such. I was always fond of saying that I knew people very well, and I understood the vulnerability of performing artists. You have this weird ego situation going on where you get up there and you bear your breast – not like Janet Jackson – but you’re saying, ‘Love my music’ and what you’re really saying is, ‘Love me’. And the audience may not love you. And I think most of ’em are smart enough to know that this too will pass, you can’t keep doing this forever. But the younger artists are wimps, they got no balls there.
You got the Stones at what was regarded as a dud period for them, the mid to late ’80s.
But we also picked up their catalogue, which was the best part of it. I didn’t even realise how valuable that catalogue was. The better stuff, Beggars Banquet and stuff, was with Allen Klein. But we recouped that $4 million advance on the catalogue in, like, months. So the deal financially actually worked out very well. The problem there was that I think Keith was upset that Jagger was doing individual albums.
There was a lot of in-fighting at that point.
I was not party to it, but it was obvious. Keith Richards disappeared; he was gone. But he and I, at the signing, we had an argument, Keith was… I think he was using, I dunno, but he came up and said, ‘Whatever Mick says is right, whatever Mick says is right! and I said, ‘Shut da fuck up, it’s three o’clock in the morning, no one’s heard from you for 15 years, (you) get your blood changed in Canada and I have to listen to, ‘Whatever Mick says is right’ – you shut up and sit down.’
The Bob Dylan story in the book is pretty amusing.
I thought it was funny. He’s an ex-Jewish boy who grew up to be… Bob Dylan.
You had dinner with him and his family in New York in the early ’80s.
It was 22 years ago, 1982. I got word through his office: ‘Y’know, his family’s in town and he wants you to give a party for them.’ So he’s working in Madison Square Garden, now we got to find a place open ’til two o’clock in the morning, the Metropole Café on the west side of Manhattan. I show up there and he’s not there, his family’s there. And there’s Mama Zimmerman, there’s Uncle Harry, and I said, ‘This is crazy, I feel like I’m at a Jewish bar mitzvah or something.’ Mama Zimmerman is saying things in Yiddish like, ‘Bobby’s a good boy, I get a lot of pleasure from him.’ I said, ‘He needs a haircut.’ She says, ‘No, he’s a good boy.’ This sort of ridiculous conversation. Then he shows up with his girlfriend at the time, who was also Jewish, with a mastiff, a gigantic dog with a big head, and the mastiff comes over, puts his head on my leg and I ain’t going anywhere.
And his girlfriend is cutting his food, like lamb or something, and saying, ‘Bobby, Bobby you’ve gotta eat, because we’re gonna have to go back home, you’re gonna have to walk the dog, he’s gonna take a big shit, you should eat Bobby, eat.’ And I’m saying, ‘What is going on here, it’s like another Jewish mother!’ And then his mother gave his number out to someone that he didn’t want her to, and he’s says, ‘Maaaa! Maaaa! Did you give my number out?’ And I says, Dylan, ‘You’re a fuckin’ fraud!’ He says, ‘What do you mean?’ I says, ‘Did you not write, ‘Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command/The times they are rapidly changing’, did you not write that? He said, ‘Of course I wrote that. It’s a long time ago! Is it okay with you if I love my mother?!’
That sounds bizarre.
He had a very weird sense of humour; he could be very funny. We gave him a party once in some restaurant, there was a whole bunch of reporters outside including a lady named Maureen, and he was not talking but he would take questions in writing and answer them in writing. So she sends him a question, I don’t know what it was, but he sends out the answer: ‘Dear Maureen. The answer is blowing in the wind.’
Looking through my CD collection recently I realised I own more albums by Bob Dylan and Miles Davis than any other artist, all with that red Columbia logo.
You know I wanted to do the Miles Davis story on film. And I had the rights to all the music, all the publishing. The movie idea fell apart because I couldn’t pull it together, hard movie to make, it takes place in France, the United States, it had racial overtones. So I gave the rights to a guy named Marvin Worth who had produced Malcolm X, a white guy, and we had a handshake that if we made a movie we would share fifty-fifty on the profits. I knew him very well, so a handshake was good enough. And he died. I would like to resurrect that.
Clint Eastwood is probably your director there.
I thought of it, but I was always afraid to approach him. Maybe I should call him.
Who did you want to play the lead?
I wanted Wesley Snipes. That would have been a bad choice actually. He didn’t come across like Miles. Miles was a little short shit. A very talented, mean guy, but very small. And dark.
How was Miles to deal with?
Crazy. Crazy. He would call the office sometimes in his crazy mode, drugs or whatever, and he would yell at the girls: ‘Stupid fuckin’ honky bitch!’ The girls would be crying, I’d say, ‘Hang up on ’im! Fuck ’im!’ But he was a brilliantly talented guy. Take out Bitches Brew and play it, it sounds like yesterday. Bitches Brew to me was, he didn’t change the music, he didn’t make jazz pop, he just changed the instrumentation and left the music alone. That was the fusion people were talking about, he did it in a very different way, and it sounds like it was recorded yesterday. So he was a genius in that respect.
One gets the impression you got on with Barbra Streisand because, like you, she was working-class Jewish made good.
We used to fight with each other a lot. I liked her. Very opinionated, but a woman, not one of these women’s libber types at all. And a bad temper. And I never knew what I was getting. We used to have screaming arguments. Once I went to visit her and took my secretary with me to California, and Jon Peters (Streisand’s lover/manager/hair-dresser) was there and I was very friendly with him, which got me in a lot of trouble with her sometimes. And Sue Mengers was there, she was a very powerful agent at CAA, and they were talking about some script, and Barbra said, ‘I never saw that script, and I would’ve wanted to do it.’ And Sue says, ‘We told you about this, you said you didn’t want to do it. Barbra says, ‘No I didn’t.’ And Jon says, ‘Barbara, you said you didn’t want to do it.’ And she says, ‘In the future, you’ll give me a written record of every submission. Do you have that straight?’ And he went off the top: ‘You fucking cunt. You miserable bitch. Sit on this! Put your fuckin’ pussy on my finger you miserable fucking cunt!’
He was really blowing up and she started to cry and he wouldn’t stop. And she runs to her car crying, and my poor secretary cannot believe this is happening, I don’t believe this is happening, and I don’t know whether to go after her or stay in the pool with him. It’s a no-win situation. So she could get into that kind of thing. I liked her spirit, even though it was maybe a little over the top. Maybe she’s happy now; she’s got this actor she’s married to James Brolin.
Do you think part of the decline of CBS in the late ’80s was that it was as never as good at developing new talent as Warner Bros or David Geffen?
Well I have to differ with you about David Geffen. Name some of the talent he developed.
Guns ‘N’ Roses.
That’s it.
Nirvana.
Nirvana, okay. But that’s all.
But those were the two major rock bands of the time.
Axl Rose made him very rich. Very rich. I don’t even know where Axl Rose is today. We had a lot of new artists. Cyndi Lauper, Public Enemy, Living Colour.
Did Professor Griff from Public Enemy and his apparently anti-Semitic remarks give you much of a headache? (In May 1989, Griff gave an interview to the Washington Post in which he allegedly declared that Jews are responsible for “the majority of the wickedness that goes on across the globe”. He later claimed the whole thing was a set up, and the Post journalist was sent out with an agenda.)
Yeah, well it would have because Scamola (Tommy Mottola, then Yetnikoff’s second in command) got all nervous, so what I did is I wrote a memo actually saying that sometimes you have to not allow things to happen. This could be called censorship – it’s a very difficult thing to do, because record people of all people don’t want censorship. But sometimes things cross the line and can be very dangerous. I actually didn’t think this was that bad, so therefore this goes, but in the future we will interfere if it gets really bad. If the artist gets pissed then the artist gets pissed.
David Geffen took my memo and sent it to his own organisation to read it. And then it turned out okay because Chuck D actually became sort of, not an adherent, but supportive. And Griff said he didn’t mean it this way.
When I interviewed Professor Griff a couple of years ago he claimed it was a stitch-up. He was peeved that he got more support from Ice T than his bandmates.
It didn’t really cross the line that badly – I don’t even know what he said, but there can come times when you do have a responsibility to censor things, otherwise a band comes out and says everyone should fuck their mother and kill her.
Can you remember the point where your career started to fall apart?
I was (Norio) Ohga’s friend, the chairman of Sony, and we just started to fall apart over a lot of different things, the whole relationship changed. A small example, nothing important, is that Sony wanted to sign Herbie Von Karajan, the conductor, $20 million for the laser disc rights to his operas. Now his operas are Wagner, not all of ’em, but a lot of that Teutonic stuff. So number one, Herbie Von Karajan is not known at all hardly in America, and two, operas are not a very good seller, and number three, there was no such thing as laser disc and there isn’t now. And four, he was Hitler’s fucking musician in the same way that Wagner was Hitler’s composer, he went and performed for Der Fuhrer, so he was not high on my list. But he was high on their list.
And I said, ‘You’re not doing it on my budget, go and do it somewhere else’. It was not a major point in and of itself but it was indicative of stuff. So we started to get into fights about a lot of things. We had fought in the past, but over understandable stuff like home taping. Now all of a sudden it had changed. And I felt changed.
I have to admit, I always thought that ‘home taping is killing music’ campaign was a crock. I bought a whole bunch of albums after taping songs off the radio first.
Don’t admit that, they’ll sue you!
Did you feel betrayed after you got pushed out of CBS, and people didn’t call?
Well, you see, there were people who did. Not a lot, but Billy Joel, he was supportive (but) I was ignoring him ’cos I was feeling so shitty and uncomfortable. When people reached out I pulled back. I’m in contact with Billy these days and we may do something together. I like him a great deal; we went through our puberty together so to speak. He said, ‘I did try to reach you, but you wouldn’t let me.’ In retrospect, if I had stayed in that corporate culture with Sony, I don’t know that I would have survived.

Howling At The Moon is published by Abacus