A brief and by no means comprehensive list of musicians of the day, in no particular order, may serve to set the record straight:
Vanilla Fudge
Joy of Cooking
Lee Michaels (!)
Mountain (!!)
Black Oak Arkansas (!!!)
Fanny (!!!!)
Delaney & Bonnie
Oliver (“Good Morning Starshine”)
Need I go on?
In the early ‘70s I did promotional work on a freelance basis for a couple of major record labels on the West Coast. In the process of interviewing newly-signed bands for their press kits, I soon discovered the following:
1. Most musicians in the early ‘70s were signed to record contracts by major labels on the basis of how thick, long, and/or curly their hair was.
2. Most musicians who were signed to record contracts by major labels in the early ‘70s were signed to record contracts because they and the label’s A&R man shared a drug connection.
3. Most people who bought releases on major labels in the early ‘70s determined which records to buy on the basis of how thick, long, and/or curly the hair of the recording artist(s) was, and because they, the band, and the label’s A&R man shared a drug connection and possibly a hairdresser.
There were some notable exceptions to this, of course. I can’t remember them at the moment.
But believe me, for every brilliant composer like Lee Michaels, every virtuoso band like Fanny, and every world-class singer like Oliver, there were at least a hundred groups like Yellow Peril, although usually they didn’t get past the paisley rope that separated the unsigned amateurs from those with record contracts.
If you were around in the early ‘70s and don’t recall Yellow Peril, it’s not because you blew out one synapse too many with bad windowpane. Mention the real name of the band today to any former execs of this now-gargantuan conglomerate, and even those shameless hucksters will probably blush. Yellow Peril had been signed to a ten-year contract with a staggering advance. That in itself wasn’t particularly unusual in those days of record biz excess, and neither was the fact that the band had spent eleven months in the studio without coming up with a single useable track for their debut album. Even the fact that the group had been signed on the basis of an audition in the bass player’s garage in North Hollywood under pharmacologically murky circumstances (portions of two songs had been performed, and the blanks had been filled in by the A&R department’s judgment that the band had incredible street cred; this was later determined to be based on certain blandishments proferred to the attendant A&R personnel by one of the band members’ girlfriends) didn’t faze the suits at the enormous company. What they found so mortifying was the fact that despite all the payments, bribes, back-handers and other perks received by the band in an eighteen-month period, the outfit never created one note of releasable music.
Under the circumstances, this was a probably a positive development.
I’m not mentioning all this to infer that today’s mega-labels no longer exhibit similar lapses of judgment. Marginal talent has always been the lifeblood of the American music industry. True geniuses are problematical; hard to recognize in the first place, tough to manage business-wise, and admittedly tricky to sell to a public inured to auditory swill. Far better to focus on the here-today-gone-tonight phenom.
But the next time somebody waxes rhapsodic about the Golden Era of music, just recall the cautionary tale of Yellow Peril. One of its miscreants went on (post-lawsuit) to head up another huge record company; two of his fellows found gainful employment at other labels, and for all I know are still exercising their musical “judgment” on a daily basis. The beat goes on... .
