PRICE OF FAME: Now they're more likely to carry a laptop than drugs, but in the past rock managers were often fearsome types, who were often more interesting than their bands, writes Tony Clayton-Lea.
Some of the things that rock 'n' roll managers have done in the past: procured groupies, dangled people by the legs outside multi-storey hotel windows, organised those all-important daily lines of cocaine, turned a blind eye to thrashed hotel suites, beat security personnel to a pulp, avoided SWAT teams, encouraged the smashing of equipment, cork-screwed the hot orange tips of cigars into the foreheads of malcontents, misfits and musicians.
Oh, and the reasons they give you as to why radio stations won't play your record: it's not in the shops; it sounds like everything else; it's overproduced; it's underproduced; it's too dancey; it's too pop; it's too long; the last time the band were interviewed live they were idiots.
The mythical, fearsome rock 'n' roll manager no longer exists. Now, it's mostly bed by midnight and up with the lark to tap a few crucial keystrokes into the laptop. Organisation is the name of the game; diplomacy, too. The likes of Popstars' Six would never have cut the mustard with rock 'n' roll managers of yore. Now, you've got Louis Walsh warning his teenage fame-and-fortune merchants that the music industry is a tough game to play; that they should be aware of the pitfalls; that perhaps they're just too nice to be engaged in such a potentially perilous career. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Walsh's counterparts would have been testing the resilience of teenage backbone on bedsprings.
Management is based essentially on trust. If there's no trust, then no contract will keep people together. The annals of rock and pop history are littered with stories of ingenuous young people placing their faith (and their future finances) into the hands of those they believe to be working for their best interests. From the 1950s, when corporate rock structures began to be put into place, there has been instance after instance of managers financially screwing their charges for as long as they could get away with it.
Some of these cases come to light, but many don't. The likes of Gilbert O'Sullivan, Joan Armatrading and Elton John have had to bring people to court to extricate themselves from contracts which were weighted with concepts of undue influence (a manager using his position of trust to wrongly influence an artist to sign a contract) and unreasonable restraint of trade (the terms of the contract were so unreasonable that they unfairly curbed the artist's ability to earn a proper living). Theoretically, then, the manager is there to act in the artist's best interests and with supreme good faith (what the legal eagles refer as "fiduciary duty"). In practice, while many are on the side of the artist, a small percentage are not. Some managers run the risk of being larger than life and far more interesting than the poor, befuddled pop stars they oversee.
If there's a Godfather to the rock management system, it's probably London-based Don Arden. Imagine the scenario: it's the beginning of the 1960s, and more than several spivs from the shakedown of Tin Pan Alley (in London's case, Denmark Street) are looking for talent to manage, for money to be made. Arden was one of these; a charismatic but heavy-handed individual who steered the careers of the Small Faces, the Move, ELO and Ozzy Osbourne.
Such was the easy-going corruption back then that housewives were hired to buy Small Faces singles in a number of record shops, hyping the records into the charts. But this was small change to some of Arden's business strategies.
Proprietorial to the nth degree, Arden would protect his interests with a mixture of stealth, threat and action. When Australian manager Robert Stigwood (who would later steer the careers of Cream and the Bee Gees) tried to poach the Small Faces, Arden went to his office with a handful of heavies and dangled him out of a hotel window. When Clifford Davis (soon to take charge of Fleetwood Mac) made managerial advances to the Move, Arden arrived at his office unannounced and stubbed out a cigar on his head - hardly a Hamlet moment, I'm sure you'll agree.
If Arden is the Godfather of rock management, then Peter Grant is the Big Daddy. A second World War evacuee, with virtually no formal education, Grant was a large man who initially earned money as a stand-in for the portly actor Robert Morley and as the professional wrestler, Prince Mario Alassio. By the end of the 1950s, he was a bona fide tough nut, tour-managing for US acts such as Little Richard and the Everly Brothers.
Grant is recognised as being the first manager in rock music to earn more money for the band than for himself. Described by Stephen Davis in Hammer Of The Gods (Pan), as having a "tenacious instinct for the scent of cash", Grant would earn his charges (Led Zeppelin) more money than any rock band before them (at the time of signing Led Zeppelin to Atlantic in the late 1960s, Grant negotiated the highest ever royalty rate for a band). If this meant being charged with serious assault, then so be it - Grant's bullish business behaviour, ruthlessness, malevolence and cocaine-induced paranoia gave him a reputation that was grounded more in reality than myth.
There have, of course, been other managers through the years, each in their own way adding to the fact and fiction: Malcolm McLaren advising the New York Dolls to dress in red plastic and scamming thousands of pounds from record labels for the Sex Pistols as the companies fell over each other to sign the band. Sharon Arden (the daughter of Don Arden), who went on tour with Ozzy Osbourne and ended up marrying and managing him; Simon Napier Bell instructing Marc Bolan to whip his bandmates with a chain; Kit Lambert encouraging The Who to smash their instruments; Madonna's first manager, Camille Barbone, who is still so traumatised by her time with the star that she has had her telephone disconnected; and, perhaps the most bizarre, Michael Caruso, one-time business affairs manager with hip-hop collective Wu-Tang Clan, who was fired by the group after they discovered he was an FBI informant.
It's all different now - no more salacious sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll; we live in a more streamlined, efficient, aware world. But rock and pop stars still need managers to act as a thick line between them and the real world.
If the budding pop star/act happens to pick a wrong 'un, then it's a lifetime of regret, litigation and faded snapshots of what was once a potentially glorious career. If they're lucky, the ideal manager will be a combination of fastidious housekeeper and cunning assassin, and someone who has mastered perhaps the greatest rock management skill of them all: knowing what people want before they know it themselves.