“Walter Yetnikoff was a giant in the music industry at a time when it was more fun, more outrageous and complex and extremely less corporate than today, and he was a man for the times,” Jackson’s estate said in a statement. Whether or not the boozy bonding sessions helped, a number of CBS artists released massive albums during Yetnikoff’s tenure, including Springsteen with Born to Run in 1975, Boston’s Boston in 1976, Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell in 1977, Jackson with Off the Wall in 1979 and Streisand with Guilty in 1980. In his Rolling Stone interview, he said he saw his role with artists as a mix of “rabbi, priest, guru, banker, for sure, adviser, counselor friend, psychotherapist, marriage counselor, sex counselor, you name it.” Yetnikoff said he became increasingly dependent on substances in part to connect with the artists on his label - “not only was it cool to party with them, hell, it was practically obligatory,” he wrote. ![]() In Howling at the Moon, the executive painted this promotion as a turning point: “The appointment went to my head, went to my dick, and over a period of years turned me into a madman.” Davis was fired, accused of mis-using company funds, in 1973, and when Lieberson retired in 1975, Yetnikoff took over as President of CBS Records. He quickly embraced the prevailing record company ethos of the time, as described to him by his then-boss, Goddard Leiberson: “A serious record man is always looking for… ways to make the artist happy while making our blessed corporate accountants even happier.”ĭavis rose within CBS in the mid-Sixties and became increasingly excited about the rock explosion, signing acts like Janis Joplin and Santana and bringing the company a new level of success Yetnikoff rose as well, taking over the international division in 1969. “It seemed pretty glamorous,” Yetnikoff told Rolling Stone in 1988. In the early Sixties, Davis brought Yetnikoff to CBS as well, offering him a raise of $2,000 a year. Working at a law firm, Yetnikoff met a young Clive Davis, who eventually joined CBS Records’ legal department. He decided to go to Columbia Law School because “for good Jewish boys looking to get ahead it was medicine, dentistry, accounting, engineering, or law,” he wrote in Howling at the Moon, and “law seemed the least taxing.” He attended Brooklyn Tech High and then Brooklyn College, working jobs on the side to help pay for textbooks. Yetnikoff was born August 11th, 1933, in Brooklyn, to a father who painted hospitals and a mother who did bookkeeping. While he loved another one of his artists, Bruce Springsteen, Yetnikoff once wrote that the star’s manager, Jon Landau, “drove me up the wall” by offering “endlessly detailed reports on how they mixed ‘Hungry Heart.'” “I don’t care if they mixed it with an eggbeater,” Yetnikoff remembered retorting. Yetnikoff was also known for his violent eruptions (“as my prowess increased, my temper shortened… increasingly accustomed to getting my way, blew a gasket when circumstances when against me,” he wrote), his taste for alcohol (“booze was the soul and substance of who I was”) and drugs (“I just wanted to get high and stay high”), and his interest in commercial success over creative pursuits. ![]() He was known for his close relationships with artists, including Barbra Streisand (“culturally, we come from the same place,” Yetnikoff wrote), Cyndi Lauper ( “she’s my buddy,” he said to Rolling Stone, though she also called him a “male chauvinist pig”) and Michael Jackson (Yetnikoff famously fought to get his videos on MTV, which initially only played rock the Thriller star later called him “the best president of any record company.”)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |