A terrible show.īut Gordon, all of twenty-two, was convinced his group was bound for stardom, so when they were offered an opening spot on a national package tour in the summer of 1970 only to be denied the tour support money they would need by Zappa’s partners at Bizarre/Straight, the manager decided to take his case to the central office on Warner Blvd. The band didn’t help itself the night Gordon corralled a group of Warner/Reprise executives to their show at the Whisky a Go Go and, amid the band’s lackluster set, the drummer managed to fall off the stage. Signed by Frank Zappa for his Warner-distributed Bizarre/ Straight label, the band’s first two albums bombed, due in part to Zappa’s disinterest in them. The gorilla suits alone make us nostalgic for a long-gone aspect of the business.Īlice Cooper, a five-piece hard rock band known for its cross-dressing, horror movie villain–style front man (who later took the band’s name as his own), had been a tough sell for its first couple of years in the Warner/ Reprise family. Records from Hendrix to Fleetwood Mac to Madonna to Prince, the label - especially head publicist Bob Regehr working with band manager Shep Gordon - decides to go all out to launch a new band called Alice Cooper in 1971. In this excerpt from Peter Ames Carlin’s Sonic Boom: The Impossible Rise of Warner Bros. The result wasn’t just a mind-boggling string of classic and often groundbreaking music but also plenty of profit to go around - and plenty of ways to spend it and revel in the excesses of the times.

Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Van Morrison, the Grateful Dead, and Randy Newman were among the label’s first wave of talent, followed in later years by Prince, Madonna, Van Halen, Devo and the post-indie Replacements. allowed those musicians the freedom to roam and grow in the studio with few artistic constraints. But even better, the label - and executives like Mo Ostin, Joe Smith and Lenny Waronker.

During the halcyon, Wild West days of the music business in the Sixties and Seventies, Warner Brothers - along with its associated labels like Reprise and Sire - earned a reputation for signing some of pop’s most idiosyncratic or unconventional artists. There were record companies, and then there was Warner Brothers.

Catch a Wave by Peter Ames Carlin