Walter Yetnikoff Was a Wolf Among 'Hit Men,' but That Was
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Bulletin YOUR DAILY ENTERTAINMENT NEWS UPDATE AUGUST 13, 2021 Page 1 of 24 INSIDE Walter Yetnikoff Was a • Don’t Expect Radio to Start Paying Wolf Among ‘Hit Men,’ But That Artists Anytime Soon Was His Undoing • Amid Delta Variant Spike, Mexico Goes Ahead With Baja BY FREDRIC DANNEN Beach Fest A Music King’s Shattering Fall. It was September and plates, boozing to excess, cavorting with a bevy • Can Riot Grrrl 1990, and Time magazine’s lead business story related of girlfriends he dubbed his “shiksa farm,” and once TikTok Re-Imagine a Flawed Scene? that Walter Yetnikoff had been fired as CBS Records’ threatening to punch out Mick Jagger over a contract chief executive. Then the world’s largest record label, dispute. (“Hell’s bells,” lawyer and manager Eric • Britney Spears’ CBS had issued many of the top-selling albums of Kronfeld exclaimed after reading that account. Dad Jamie Spears the 1980s, among them, Michael Jackson’s Thrill- “What middle-aged record executive wants to get into Agrees to Step Down as Conservator of er, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA, and George a fistfight with an artist?”) All of Yetnikoff’s excesses, Her Estate Michael’s Faith. The Time article proposed that the and a good number of my anecdotes about him, were bosses at Sony, CBS Records’ parent company since confirmed in his confessional 2004 memoir Howling • Cardi B Signs With 1988, were scandalized by the depiction of Yetnikoff at the Moon. Indeed, his self-portrait made my own Warner Chappell Music Publishing as a “crude, tantrum-throwing egomaniac” in Hit portrayal of him seem tame, including as it did details Men, my nonfiction account of the music indus- I had been unable to nail down, such as cocaine binges • K-Pop Powerhouse try, published two months earlier. The New York and sexual trysts in a room adjoining his 11th floor JYP Launches Times and Wall Street Journal also contended that my office at Black Rock, the New York headquarters that Fan-Engagement Subsidiary book had played a role in Walter’s dismissal. I believed housed CBS television, radio and records. then, and still do, that the claim was overblown. But Yetnikoff rose from modest beginnings in the • Tony Bennett from that point on, his name and mine became linked, Brownsville section of Brooklyn, the son of a laborer Retires From Touring to the displeasure of both of us. who periodically beat him. He edited the law review • Ariana Grande Song I’m not going to pretend that my portrait of Yet- at Columbia Law School, and after a stint in the army, Streams Spike After nikoff, who succumbed to cancer on Aug. 8 only three joined the law firm that represented CBS and its ‘Fortnite’ Concert days shy of his 88th birthday, was flattering. The Yet- founder and chairman William Paley. CBS Records nikoff of Hit Men was a wild man — hurling expletives (continued) TOTAL IMMERSION ESSENTIAL ANALYSIS of the latest business topics and trends formulated to give industry players the competitive advantage in a rapidly changing market. EXCLUSIVE QUARTERLY REPORTS that deliver in-depth, holistic reporting; case studies; and custom data designed to serve the industry. A DEEP DIVE LIBRARY stocked with intelligence on fan data, SUBSCRIBE TO BILLBOARD PRO FOR song catalog sales, TV synchs, Africa’s burgeoning music ACCESS TO NEW REPORTS business and the gaming industry’s embrace of artists. AND THE ARCHIVE Page 3 of 24 IN BRIEF hired him as a staff attorney in 1961, and to his defense. A month after he became in November 2003, a few months before the he moved steadily up the ranks to run the CBS president, I asked Tisch about the NBC publication of Howling at the Moon, which label’s international division, becoming report, and he all but wagged a finger at me. vindicated a good deal more his decision to label president in 1975. Unlike great record “Walter Yetnikoff is a very honorable man,” sell — Yetnikoff’s confessed cocaine use at men such as Ahmet Ertegun, Clive Da- he said. “Don’t go by the fact that he’s not Black Rock could have jeopardized CBS’s vis or Berry Gordy, Yetnikoff had a tin ear wearing a tie and has a beard. Walter is a federally sanctioned broadcast licenses, for music. But he had perfect pitch when it conservative businessman, and too smart which were subject to FCC oversight. came to artist relationships. When Michael to do anything that would jeopardize the Walter’s self-portrait was harsher than Jackson swept the 1984 Grammys for Thrill- company or himself.” anything I had written about him, yet long er, he grabbed Yetnikoff by the arm and The honeymoon didn’t last long. By 1987, after his tell-all was published, the men- brought him onstage to share in the glory. Yetnikoff was calling the short and bald tion of Hit Men still set him off. In a 2010 The Walter Yetnikoff I met in the late Tisch “the kike upstairs” and “the Evil interview, he called me “a plagiarist,” ‘80s was bearded and barrel-chested, and Dwarf.” That year, Walter midwifed the claiming I had appropriated passages from chain-smoking Nat Sherman cigarettes, a sale of CBS Records to Sony for $2 billion, a privately recorded tribute to the late God- habit that left his Brooklyn baritone a bit making himself rich in the process, with dard Lieberson “with no attribution.” raspy. The beard, I always suspected, was a sign-on bonus estimated at $20 million. (Not true: the attribution was in my source worn to cover a weak chin, but it also ac- He was gleeful. The last time I saw him, in notes.) Walter was always swearing to take cented his ethnicity, which he paraded with May 1988, Yetnikoff was standing outside legal action against all enemies, real or pride. He called himself Velvel, Yiddish the Titus Theater at the Museum of Modern perceived — in 1988, he told journalist Fred for “Little Walter,” and dubbed Thomas Art in New York City. Inside, Tisch was Goodman he was contemplating a RICO, Wyman, CBS president from 1980 to 1986, conducting the annual CBS shareholder’s or racketeering, complaint against MCA “the goy upstairs.” At the conclusion of my meeting, fielding questions about the sale of Records — but not once did he threaten me first encounter with him, he relayed plans the record division. “You know,” Yetnikoff with litigation. for a new musical genre, “Hasidic rock,” and said, noticeably drunk, “in the springtime, That honor fell to Clive Davis and David crooned one of his own compositions, “The life blooms, and the flowers grow, and the Geffen. In late 1989, the unedited manu- Shiksa Shtupping Song.” grass is green, but dwarfs die in the light of script of Hit Men was leaked by someone at When Laurence Tisch — a “landsman,” the sun. And it’s sort of early spring. That’s a Random House, and before long it seemed as Yetnikoff put it, Yiddish for “fellow dream I had.” all the book’s principal subjects had a copy. Jew” — ousted Wyman in September 1986, Tisch, for his part, had ceased referring to Davis sicked the prominent trial law- Yetnikoff was initially delighted. NBC News Yetnikoff as “a very honorable man.” In 1991, yer Robert Morvillo on me, and among his had recently singled out Yetnikoff for op- he asked a reporter for New York magazine, litany of complaints was my purportedly posing an investigation of alleged organized “Did you read that book Hit Men? Do you false and defamatory account of an unfor- crime influence in record promotion, and understand why I sold that business? Would tunate meeting between himself and the implied he was a cocaine user. Tisch rushed you want to be in that business?” Tisch died 21-year-old Bob Dylan. The Random House AUTHORITATIVE INTELLIGENCE. DELIVERED DIGITALLY. 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[email protected] ON SALE : 8/28 | +447843437176 Issue Close: 8/18 Ryan O’Donnell Materials Due: 8/19 [email protected] BILLBOARD COUNTRY UPDATE APRIL 13, 2020 | PAGE Page 4 5 OF of 1924 ON THE CHARTS JIM ASKER [email protected] IN BRIEF SamHunt’s Southside Rules Top Country lawyerA askedlbu to ms;see my source Brett material. YI oungman no longer ‘Catc had reasonh’-es to fear Yetnikoff, Fifth AirplayI don’t know whether Landau ever made showed her. It was Clive’s 1974 autobiogra- because Yetnikoff was self-destructing. In peace with Yetnikoff, but I wish I had. Walter phy. Geffen,Lea meanwhile,der; unleashed Travis his legal 1989,Denning Yetnikoff had checked Makes himself into Historymay have disliked me, but the feeling was bulldog Bertram Fields, and wasted his the Hazelden clinic in Minnesota, emerg- by no means mutual. In 2014, I updated Hit money, because the disputed passages had ing clean and sober, and remaining so, he Men’s e-book edition with a new last chapter Samalready Hunt been’s second removed studio in full-length,the course and of fact- first in overmaintained, five years, Southside until the endsales of his(up 21%)life.