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Billboard Q&A: Warner Bros. Chairman/CEO Tom Whalley
November 21, 2008
By Melinda Newman, L.A.
In a forthcoming history of the first 50 years of Warner Bros. Records, "Revolutions in Sound," Sire Records founder Seymour Stein bluntly describes the early days of the Burbank, Calif.-based label. "You couldn't compare Warner Bros. Records to anything good. They were horrible."
It is safe to say things changed.
Half a century later, history looks back favorably on Warner Bros. Records. And with good reason. Initially started by Warner Bros. Studios in 1958 as a way to exploit the singing talents of the actors contractually signed to the film house, Warner Bros. Records morphed into much more than just a repository for warbling screen idols. In a way that no other label before or since has, Warner Bros. Records became a place where artists could not only safely and steadfastly follow their artistic vision, they could sell records-millions and millions of them.
That history is recounted in the 240 pages of "Revolutions in Sound" by Warren Zanes, set for publication Dec. 9 by Chronicle Books. The book's title recalls Warner Bros. Studios' introduction in the 1920s of the first sound-on-disc system for feature films. The book's title will be used by Warner Bros. Records to market a 10-CD boxed set and upcoming compilation marking the company's milestone.
Today, Warner Bros. Records is a key component of Warner Music Group. Its family of subsidiary labels includes Reprise, Sire, Nonesuch, Maverick, Warner Nashville and Word Label Group. Among its best-selling acts of the past year are Josh Groban, Metallica, Disturbed, Linkin Park, Michael Bublé, Madonna, the late Frank Sinatra, Avenged Sevenfold, R.E.M., Goo Goo Dolls, My Chemical Romance and the Raconteurs. But the company's roster was not always so stellar.
After a shaky start-among Warner Bros.' first releases was "Terribly Sophisticated Songs: A Collection of Unpopular Songs for Popular People"-the label started to find its footing and voice in 1960 when it signed the Everly Brothers for a then-unheard of $1 million. The brothers delivered the label's first No. 1, "Cathy's Clown."
It is impossible to easily cite all the artists that followed the Everlys to compose the musical mosaic of Warner Bros. and its affiliated labels. But you might start with this year's hitmakers, then look back to Jimi Hendrix, the Ramones, Talking Heads, Neil Young, Peter, Paul & Mary, the Kinks, the Sex Pistols, Little Feat, Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, Fleetwood Mac, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Ry Cooder, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Faith Hill, Alanis Morissette, Van Morrison, Green Day, Dire Straits, Prince, Van Halen, Grateful Dead, ZZ Top, the Doobie Brothers, Randy Travis, Jane's Addiction, Christopher Cross, Elvis Costello, Tom Petty and the White Stripes. But Warner Bros. was more. There was room for comedians: Bob Newhart, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, Steve Martin and, more recently, Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy. Tiny Tim tiptoed through the tulips courtesy of Warner Bros. Debby Boone lit up people's lives.
From the start-and despite one-hit wonders like Edd Byrnes' "Kookie, Kookie (Lend Me Your Comb)," the company's first president, Jim Conkling, saw Warner Bros. as an LP-oriented label, which served it especially well as music tastes segued from pop to rock in the late '60s. But that transition wasn't necessarily smooth.
Mo Ostin, whom Sinatra handpicked to run his Reprise Records, recalls in "Revolutions" that Ol' Blue Eyes initially forbade him from signing any rockers. Through his label's acquisition of Reprise, Ostin eventually became head of Warner Bros. His tenure, which lasted until 1994, is seen by many artists and executives as the most golden of any era in the history of the music industry. That is, in part, because of the executive talent he surrounded himself with, including Stein, Lenny Waronker, Michael Ostin, Joe Smith, Stan Cornyn, Bob Krasnow, Ted Templeman, Russ Titelman, Gary Katz, Karin Berg and Russ Thyret. His team in the early '80s included current Warner Bros. Records chairman/CEO Tom Whalley.
Whalley started in the Warner Bros. mailroom in 1979, quickly working his way into the A&R department, where he helped bring in acts like Modern English and the Cure. He left in the mid-'80s for Capitol Records and later became one of the quartet of executives that launched Interscope Records. He was president of Interscope when he journeyed back to Warner Bros. in 2001 as chairman/CEO, with the Bunny still in his DNA.
"If I had been in the mailroom at Columbia Records, I wouldn't do this job as well because I had breathed the air, I had listened and understood the philosophy that Mo Ostin built the company on," he says. "I didn't have to think about it, I didn't have to make it up."
In a wide-ranging and rare two-and-a-half-hour interview at his house, the notoriously press shy Whalley (he shares that with Ostin, who declined to be interviewed for this article) discussed the history of the label-including his tenure-which has seen multiplatinum releases from many acts, including Bublé, Groban, Green Day, Linkin Park and My Chemical Romance, and the continued development of such acts as Damian Rice, Regina Spektor, Avenged Sevenfold, the Used and many more.
Warner Bros.' first significant music signing was the Everly Brothers in 1960. How did that set the tone for the label going forward?
If you look at that period, the songwriting talent, the singing talent, it was something that stood out. It was different: It was a little bit country, it was a little bit pop, a little bit rock, it was all that stuff. What I knew of Warner Bros. was they were always looking for something different. They thought songwriting was a key element to being an artist, that you had to have a great voice and you had to stand for something, and the Everly Brothers fit all that criteria.
Warner Bros. was always a mixture of things. So you go from Everly Brothers to Bob Newhart to Tiny Tim at some point. It just came in all different ways. As long as it had an impact on popular culture, it fit Warner Bros.
Mo Ostin's signing of Jimi Hendrix to Reprise in 1967 was part of a transition into the rock era for Reprise and Warner Bros. How important was that period?
It seems to me that was when Warner Bros. really came into its own. That's the renaissance period. It was a time for free expression and free art and freedom of speech, and all those things seem to come together inside of rock music, and that was the thing that a generation of young people used to define themselves. All of that was captured by these amazing rock musicians who were also poets at the same time. To go from Neil Young to Fleetwood Mac to Jimi Hendrix to James Taylor to Joni Mitchell . . .
In "Revolutions in Sound," Mo Ostin says that his guiding principal was, "Always music first." Can you think that way in this economy?
Yes, but you have to have the leadership that allows that to happen. You have to have the strength of personality and an independent mind-set to hold on to that principle.
Although Warner Bros. had a number of British acts on its roster, it seemed uniquely American in its first 20 years.
Yes. It was absolutely a cultural thing. If you talked to Lenny Waronker, there was something about the strain of music culture going all the way from the '60s backward going into the blues and country and singer/songwriters that that was where they always drew from. It didn't matter whether you were a rock band or a pop singer or a pop writer. Somehow or another, they could feel that sense of writing and musicianship coming from the soul of where American music came from [and] they would sign it. The Blasters. T Bone Burnett. They always had it. Bonnie Raitt. The Del Fuegos. It defined American rock culture.
During the '70s and '80s, Warner Bros. also included imprints and affiliates that defined certain cultures, genres and tastes, like Capricorn, Slash, Sire and others. Most of those exist in name only now, if even that. Why?
It's a difficult thing for the labels to maintain their vision for a long period of time. Sometimes it's money that gets in the way of that, sometimes it's a certain taste that actually runs out. Some of the independent labels were about a particular sound, they came out of a place, they were a punk thing or a dance thing or a Seattle thing, and to keep evolving, you have to be in all different kinds of music.
Speaking of that, the No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 song in the history of Warner Bros. is Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life," which was on Warner-affiliated Curb Records. She's not an artist that you immediately identify with Warner Bros.
No, but that's what I always thought is part of what makes the label so great: it was everything. There was no issue of Debby Boone being there at the same time as Fleetwood Mac. That, again, speaks to Mo's brilliance. He thought that Mike Curb was a brilliant record man, Mike clearly had pop taste, and Mo was fine with it. When I was in the mailroom, I went down the halls delivering mail where the independent labels were and you had Sire and Bearsville and you had Curb Records with Debby Boone and Leif Garrett. No one thought twice about it.
One area that has never been Warner Bros.' strength on a consistent basis is R&B. There was never a continuous flow of superstar R&B artists. Why?
I wish I knew. I honestly don't know what it is. I think part of it comes from the fact that if you're a label that has a lot of breadth, then you might find a particular thing that you're the best in. But the other things that come along besides that, you're not going to get many of them. You're going to get some of those. We are able to find particular hip-hop, urban artists that we make a great record that we put out, we do really well with it, but if we try to do 10 of those, we won't get it done, we just won't. But a particular urban or hip-hop artist can be right up against a Josh Groban, Red Hot Chili Peppers, a Faith Hill, Wilco and all these other things. Warner Bros. would do a deal with Quincy Jones and boom! He'd bring in two or three artists that would succeed-Patti Austin, James Ingram. That's kind of how it would be, this coming and going, but it never really just stayed.
What was Warner Bros.' culture like when you arrived in the mailroom in 1979?
It was incredibly overwhelming and intimidating to walk the halls and hear music-all the records sitting on people's desks, on shelves, it was like being a kid in a candy store. At the end of the month, you were allowed to take a few records home. It was like, "Oh, my God! Free records." The other part was once or twice a week, they were throwing another party for a hit record, whether it was a platinum album or a gold album or a No. 1 single or a No. 1 album. I was always setting up the conference room for another party.
Do you remember your first meeting with Mo Ostin?
I don't remember saying a lot to Mo the first time I met him. I remember when I eventually got into the A&R department his asking me my opinion and my jaw dropping, like "My God, what am I going to say?" We would have these A&R meetings in Lenny Waronker's office . . . It was just so intimidating because you're in the room with all these super talented people. I was going to last a week before they discover I don't know what I'm doing [laughs]. I didn't say a lot; I spent a lot of time listening.
What was the biggest thing you learned from Mo Ostin?
He always put the artists first, 100% of the time. Sometimes you have this sort of sense that Warner Bros. was never about business, it was only about art. But it absolutely was a business. But because it was the artists first, the business was in the background. Art and the music and the artistry was always in the foreground and so that was a huge lesson for me.
The second part [was] the artists needed equally as good executive talent around them to help build their careers. And lesson three was if you didn't allow the artist to express themselves or if you tried to homogenize the music to fit a radio station, then that was all short-term thinking. There was always long- term thinking when it came to Warner artists.
What did you think the first time you heard Madonna?
Seymour Stein was always trying to get something signed, one or two [acts] a week. Seymour is in New York in his hospital bed [with a heart infection] and he's meeting Madonna and the DJ that she was signed to. He said we can do a single, a 12-inch deal, and [he'll] get Nesuhi Ertegun [as head of Warner Records International] to pay $12,500 and Warner Bros. will pay $12,500 and we can sign her for $25,000. I was listening to the music, I thought it sounded good. One or two of the promotion guys were going crazy. I went down to Lenny and I said, "Seymour's in the hospital bed, the music sounds pretty good to me, everyone here loves it, it's not worth fighting Seymour for $12,500, I think we should do this." I called Seymour back and said, "We're doing this."
In "Revolutions," Nick Tosches writes that an end of an era occurred at Warner Bros. in 1992, when Ice-T and Body Count removed "Cop Killer" from their album due to pressure from shareholders and the public. Ice-T stressed Warner Bros. didn't force them to do it, but the climate was changing.
That was the beginning of a massive change in the industry. There was the issue of "Cop Killer," you have the board of Time Warner censoring their labels, and Interscope was a part of that. We were all gung-ho in rap music and aggressive rock music and we were the opposite [of Warner Bros.]. We said, "Hell no, we're not giving in to the pressure," and we got kicked out. [Time Warner sold its interests in Interscope in 1995 to MCA Music Entertainment, which subsequently was absorbed by Universal Music Group.
I think that would have had to set Warner Bros. back a bit. Even though they probably wouldn't have signed 20 rap artists, it would have been unusual for them to have missed some of the highlights from the West Coast or even some of the New York stuff because the A&R staff was too good to miss that stuff.
During the '90s, while you were at Interscope, the hitmakers on Warner Bros. and its affiliated labels included Seal, Madonna, Eric Clapton, Color Me Badd, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Barenaked Ladies. As a Warner Bros. competitor, how did you view the label?
It's still stood for all the things we talked about, but it didn't feel as aggressive in the streets in terms of finding the next great talent. It seemed more like if the Chili Peppers wanted to leave EMI, they'd go to Warner Bros. At Interscope, we were finding the new stuff. If I'd go to a club and find Primus, there was no Warner Bros. A&R guy to be found.
You returned to Warner Bros. in 2001 as chairman/CEO. What was your assessment of the company?
It clearly needed a strong sense of leadership. No disrespect to anyone who had done it before, but there were numerous people who had done it since Mo. Mo had been there for 30 years or whatever it was. [That] creates a stability of leadership and in the roster and so those two things were married up. [After Mo Ostin], those two things became unstable. It was behind in its sensibilities. It was important to me to bring [back] the philosophy that Mo built the company on. It was not completely lost, but it needed the leadership to really make it vibrant again.
Warner Music Group went public a few years after you came back. The stock price has gone as high as $28 per share. On Oct. 20 [the day before this interview took place], it was $4.82. How does that affect you?
It doesn't affect the day-to-day business. The stock is for investors, I run my company off of a budget and as long as I'm selling records and bringing money back into the company, which I do, I have money to spend. I've never not had the money to sign an artist; I've never not had the money to support an artist with marketing money. I have everything I want, I have everything I need.
Will you sign someone to anything other than a 360 deal now?
If you're talking about a new artist, then I would say pretty much no. But for me, it's not just the financial side of that. It's the information I want because in order for me to break an artist's career in today's world, there's too much going on, and if I don't have that information, I can't make the right decisions.
What do you mean?
It can be anything from a young rock band who's in a van that's touring and how many T-shirts did they sell at the venue last night.
You can get that information without taking a percentage of the sales.
I never got the information, the merchandising company had it. That information-who bought it, how many did they sell, how much did they sell per head that night-that gives us the information to keep investing to put the money behind their career. Or if you're running their fan site or fan club, the information caught by talking to their fans every day-what are they thinking, what do they like, what don't they like. We launched an instant marketplace in October for [Groban's "Noël"]. We went after the fans first. Because we ran his fan club for years, we knew how to push the button so that as soon as it hit the stores, boom! They all went running to buy it; they created the buzz in the stores. They [then] tell everyone else to go buy it, and that's what happened. That's what the 360 deal really does, in my opinion. It gives you the information to know when, how, where to do what because it's all connected.
A number of the artists associated with Warner Bros., Neil Young, Paul Simon, Randy Newman, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, have had 40-year careers. When you sign an act now, do you think 40 years or do you think four years?
I think 10. And I think if I can get to four albums, [we're] doing amazing.
Where is the room these days to grab those acts that capture the cultural zeitgeist of the moment? I imagine that's why you signed Paris Hilton-even though she's no longer on the label.
That was the intention. If you go back and look at the early days of Warner Bros., they're capturing TV stars and movie stars and putting out singles from them. That's kind of what that was. From a sales standpoint, we did fine. Around the world, we sold around a million records or something like that. It didn't work out from having a hit single and things I was hoping we would do, but I'm still glad I did it.
Many classic acts, some of whom are still on major labels, are making exclusive deals with one retailer for new albums. What's your view of that?
We did it with Tom Petty's DVD with Best Buy. As a label, I have mixed feelings about it. I still believe in the independent retailers, even though there aren't as many left as there used to be. So excluding anybody when it comes to putting records in stores, I don't 100% agree with. I'd like to believe that if I spread it out to everybody, I can sell as many. I may not get the benefit of one-way business, I may not get the benefit of some advertising campaign, but for most of the artists who are on Warner Bros., I want it [to be] easy for their fans to find their music.
You picked up Oasis' new album for North America. Are you looking to do more of that where you have an act in only one territory?
I would have picked them up for the world if they were available, but they weren't available, so I wasn't going to walk away from Oasis because they weren't. But the vast majority of what I do is sign artists for the world.
iTunes has changed the business back to a singles-oriented model for many artists. Should artists be allowed to have their music sold only as albums, if they choose?
We're here to represent individual people's artistic vision and there are clearly artists who make album art and there are some who make singles art. Some may make a combination, but Metallica makes album art and, in particularly rock bands do. I think there are other artists who clearly put a lot of time, effort, songwriting, musicianship, etc., into making a body of work, whether that's one song or 10 songs or 12 songs, and if they put effort into a body of work that is intended to be 10 or 12 songs and they call it an album, I think that's how it should be sold.
How do you feel about iTunes pricing?
The balance is off between the price of a single and the price of an album at iTunes. If anything, if should be the other way around. It should more expensive to buy the single and then you go, "Wow, by the third or the fourth [single], maybe I should buy the whole thing." But if you take Metallica, I don't think there would be anything wrong if the songs you take to radio are available as singles and maybe you do that twice or three times and after that, the only thing that's available is the album. There's a balance there that could easily be met. I think it's, in part, killing the culture of what made the industry great . . . bodies of work of an artist that allowed them to go perform them at a show and the audience knew all the songs.
You're a member of a diminishing species-the major record label chairman/CEO. What keeps you up at night?
What keeps me up at night are my kids [laughs]. It's more about how to do it better tomorrow. I don't stay up at night thinking that there won't be a music industry. I believe that the glass if half-full. It went from full-full to three-quarters-full to half-full. I'd like it to stop at half-full.
How do we service the artists' careers better? How do I live up to the promises to the artists that I made, whether it's Tom Petty or Meaghan Smith, a new artist we just signed? How do I keep stability in a crazy world and protect the artists from all these things so that they can continue to make great music? Those are the things that keep me up at night.
What will Warner Bros. look like 50 years from now?
We have started with these steps to become a music entertainment company. I don't even think "record company" reflects us appropriately anymore. So I think that 50 years from now, I could see Warner Bros. Records, a music entertainment company, doing all kinds of things from being in every part of an artist's career to anything from owning radio stations, if they still exist, to really just evolving and drawing beyond what we had done in a great way for 50 years, where we were a singular business in that we signed artists, we made records and we sold records, whether they were vinyl, CDs, cassettes, 8-tracks. It was fundamentally the same thing for 50 years.
Your contract expires in the next year. Are you going to reup as head of Warner Bros. Records?
Nothing would make me happier.
How much does the history and culture of Warner Bros. help you when you're looking to sign artists? In your essay in "Revolutions," you said it meant everything to Jack White when the White Stripes signed with Warner Bros.
It's everything as long as the people who work there today and the people leading the company can support their vision and put music first and build trust and can live up to their promises. They're not going to come just for the past; they're going to come for the present as well.
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