| The Warner Years | ||||
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| The Warner Raiders: l. to r.: (back) Ed Silvers, Tony Byrne, Mel Bly; (front) Artie Wayne, Craig Aristei | ||||
| In 1968, I made several trips to the West Coast to promote our catalog and find some new writers. I also did some writing while I was out there, most notably "Hallelujah," which I cowrote with Gary Zekely and Mitch Bottler. Somehow the song wound up with ASCAP. Since I was a BMI writer at the time, and the two performing rights societies were not on the best of terms and weren't honoring songs that were not 100% theirs, I had to use an alias. I chose Roberta Twain...RTWAIN...I think Gary had the same problem and was initially credited as Brandon Chase. Gary was producing the Clique, who had just scored with a cover of Tommy James "Sugar On Sunday," (co-written by Mike Vale) and "Hallelujah" wound up on their album. The song was subsequently cut by Sweathog (a Top 30 hit) and Chi Coltrane, coincidentally both on Columbia. Sensing a change in POP music, coupled with my growing love of the "California sound," not to mention the California girls, I contemplated a move there to get a fresh start. In the summer of '69, my friend Allan Rinde had just joined Columbia Records as head of Epic Records publicity. Two weeks into his stint there he himself went off to L.A. for a Columbia convention and returned with two thoughts: he didn't want to be a publicist and thought L.A. was paradise. I did my best to convince him that both of us should move there. Excited by the prospect, he approached Cash Box owner George Albert (Allan had just left Cash Box to join CBS) and convinced him he needed more help in his West Coast office. Then he quit his job. Boy, was he pissed when he found out I didn't quite have it together to make it out there with him. It actually only took me several more months to achieve my independence and by January 1970 I was in L.A. Unlike Allan, I hadn't bothered to line up a job. My old friend Ed Silvers was running Viva Music, the publishing arm of Snuff Garrett's record company. He offered me a job and I grabbed it. It was a small operation...but not for long. Snuff decided he had enough of the record business and sold out to Warner Brothers. They absorbed the publishing company into their own, but rather than firing the staff, they put us in charge of the whole operation. | ||||
| Back Next: Chapter 6, I Join Irving/Almo (A&M) | ||||
