Making book on the biz

Fred Goodman checks the intersection of love and commerce

by Ted Drozdowski

In Nashville, there's a pair of cross streets named Love and Commerce. It's a delicious irony in the Music City. And in music itself. Art and business are locked in constant combat and consort within the world of musicmaking. Particularly in rock, where artistic integrity is essential to the music's original, defiant spirit -- and, again ironically, a viable marketing tool.

Former Rolling Stone editor Fred Goodman's bold, thoroughly researched book The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, and Springsteen and the Head-On Collision of Rock and Commerce (Times Books) puts the intersection of love and commerce under a microscope. By detailing the transformation of rock culture into a multibillion-dollar industry, and using the artists in its title as a cumulative case study, Goodman explores the contradictions of a creative world rooted in human passion but increasingly driven by cold hard cash.

In a chapter of his book excerpted in the print editon of this week's Boston Phoenix, Goodman recounts the founding of the famous Beantown club the Boston Tea Party, and its role in launching some of rock's most serious players . . . and players -- thereby explaining the genre's initial steps from counterculture to industry.

In fact, much of Goodman's book illuminates Boston's oft-forgotten role in the rock biz's evolution. "I had been interested in tracing the roots of the rock underground, and Boston is a great place to do it because you can see it go from purists and hobbyists, guys feeling their way, and crafting it into a business," says the author. "It's also sort of an untold story. Everybody thinks about San Francisco, but on some level, Boston never really got its due."

Goodman rectifies that historical slight, but the meat of the book lies deeper than storytelling. It's in his relentless probing of the fascinating clash of art and business. That's what launched him on the book's 36 months of research and writing. After years of observing the interplay of those forces as a music journalist writing for various consumer and trade publications, he found his accumulated experience sparking him to action during the 1988 induction of Woody Guthrie into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.

"I was just struck by the `not rightness' of it," he says. "After writing about music for 15 years, how do you reconcile these things that seem antithetical? That was really the question. I didn't start out to write about any of these guys in particular. My feeling was, `How do you start with something that is not a business and end up with something that seems to be about business most of the time?' "

In writing about music-industry moguls like Asylum Records founder David Geffen and Springsteen manager Jon Landau, Goodman details a fascinating pattern of shameless opportunism, greed, and ego -- without judgment. He takes the Joe Friday approach, and with narrative elegance and crisp language he makes their empire-building exploits utterly compelling.

But players like Geffen, Landau, and Giant Records honcho Irving Azoff are all products of the '70s, the highest-growth era. Today the rock industry's fortunes are failing, and it seems the days of the industry capos might be over. Goodman, however, insists they aren't: "In some ways, it's still a very young business. During the course of doing the book I talked to Irving Azoff about his record company, and he explained that he was trying to do a broad-based company. But, he said, `The market seems so diverse, I didn't think you could do a niche label at this point, but I think Rick Rubin is proving me wrong.' Don't forget, Geffen essentially started Asylum as a niche label about singer-songwriters from California. I think that's a game plan that could continue to work. If you can establish some sort of credibility in the business world, and grow and adjust your company, there's no reason someone else won't come along and do it again. What's interesting to me is the way that history repeats itself."

After digging deeply into the gearbox of the industry's machinery for so long, has Goodman become cynical about the way moneymaking impacts musicmaking? "Well, you only look at something for the first time once. I think my view has changed. As a journalist, you get on this treadmill: you do interviews, you see the business part of it, people come in and go out, you wonder what's art and what's artifice. The trick is to try to be fair and consider what's the reality for the artist. What happens if you have a hit record is that you get to make another one. That's a real thing. And you can't hold against anybody that they want to maintain some level at which they can work. The question is, when someone's in that fourth record of their eight-record $85 million contract, are they making that record because they want to make a record, or because they owe three more records on that massive contract? Then there's the matter of constantly trying to sort that out, and that does affect how I look at things."

The Mansion on the Hill is also excerpted on Microsoft's Music Central Web site, http://musiccentral.msn.com/