Machat Gods, Gangsters & Honour

A Rock n Roll Odyssey
1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9839057-5-2
Verlag: Consciousness Manifesto Inc
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 388 Seiten

After spending 40 years in the music industry, Steven Machat reveals the dark underbelly of this rock n roll industry. His travels and interpersonal relationships along the way gives insight from one traveller to another that this trip on Earth is one hell of a ride. There is a spiritual thread throughout the book that gives powerful insight to this harden tale of life in the fast lane.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Machat, Steven

Leseproben

CHAPTER THREE Voodoo child In 1981, I was flying high and feeling blessed. Machat and Machat, the business my father and I ran jointly, had many of the world’s top artists as its clients. We covered the East and West coasts in America with huge bands like ELO and Genesis, and our London office was constantly busy with both established and burgeoning artists. I felt the world was for the taking. I could go anywhere, do anything, but in reality I was getting tired of the grind of life inside the Western corporate music machine. I wanted to broaden my horizons, and I was fascinated by what seemed to me to be the potential globalisation of the music business. Why should popular music remain the preserve of just a limited range of artists? What about other styles, genres, cultures? So in February, I decided to escape another New York winter and go down to Brazil to experience the Rio Carnival. The idea was to find out about the local music and, of course, to keep half an eye on a deal. I’d set up a meeting with the head of WEA Brazil, Andre Midani, having told him I was interested in breaking some Brazilian artists in the US, so I found myself invited along to the carnival. Midani recommended that I make contact with legendary artists Gilberto Gil and Rita Lee. Gil, who is now the cultural minister of Brazil, asked me to put together a tour to Europe, which I duly did, but the deal collapsed over money disagreements with the tour promoter I’d found him. Rita Lee, meanwhile, had made her name as a founding member of a group called Os Mutantes, which emerged in the late 1960s and was as much about art, revolution and defying the Brazilian military junta as it was about music. Their mix of local musical styles was blended with the influence of psychedelic acts like The Beatles, during their Sgt Pepper years, and Jimi Hendrix, and it was Os Mutantes that launched the so-called Tropicalia musical style. Tropicalia was revolutionary in its impact and had replaced Bossa Nova, which had come to be seen as mind-numbing music that simply perpetuated the status quo. Beck, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, the Talking Heads’ David Byrne, Nelly Furtado – all have all cited Tropicalia as a big influence on their music. Rita was a hippy. She dressed simply but with style and didn’t need designer labels to make her stand out from the crowd. She believed in spirits and was able to summon spirits into her body. She didn’t care about material possessions or the illusions that they brought in her wake. At the time, she had a big single in Brazil called Lanca Perfume – sweet perfume – that was about snorting amyl nitrate in the local nightclubs. She told me that her great grandfather was an expatriate Confederate general, from Huntsville, Alabama, who had left the US for Brazil after the civil war was lost. His family believed in slavery and felt that Brazil offered the best chance to perpetuate their lifestyle. Since Brazil didn’t abolish slavery until the late 1880s, the story had more than a ring of truth about it. Brazil fascinated me with its social and racial layers. At the top of the caste pile were the direct descendants of the European Catholic invaders. After them it was the Mixtas, which meant those of mixed race, then the indigenous peoples and last and least the blacks. As far as I could see, all the different castes seemed to hate each other and I was left feeling that white Europeans and colonialism had an awful lot of karma to correct. Rita was an educated, cultured and urbane woman who could speak in at least five languages. But she was also a heroin addict who took drugs to call up or to quell her spirits. At times she could barely physically function, but in the business I came from, she was hardly unique in that respect. When we first met I promised her that I would help her to re-negotiate her contracts with the government-owned record label Son Libre. I realised that a whole new world was opening up. When I arrived back in New York two months later, I had a verbal contract to manage Rita but little else. I was trying to work out the next move, when in walked a man from Son Libre who didn’t have an appointment but sure had a lot of nerve. He sat there in our reception and told the receptionist he wasn’t leaving until we talked with him. Eventually he was ushered into my office and he was nothing if not blunt: ‘I want to make a simple deal. I will keep Rita Lee for Brazil and you can have Rita Lee for the rest of the world.’ He was very quick, straight to the point. ‘I am not interested in royalties outside Brazil, you can keep them. I will not pay Rita royalties either but I will pay for her lifestyle. Her house, cars, drugs and servants will all be paid for. ‘Now that we have sorted out Rita Lee, you can sort me out.’ The large satchel that he had dumped on the desk had caught my eye. He unzipped the top and out spilled a large amount of US dollars. More than I had ever seen before. He continued: ‘This is $1 million. I need an American banking existence because our Brazilian currency is worthless. ‘I have done my research on you. You can be trusted. My wish is that Mr Machat Senior will accompany me to a bank, introduce me to the manager and help me open an account. Mr Machat Junior, you will handle Rita. Mr Machat Senior will handle me.’ I went to get Dad. The Son Libre guy repeated his story, and I could see that Dad was flipping out. He thought this man was a gangster and wanted nothing to do with him. We reconvened in a side office alone and my father said: ‘I want nothing to do with some Banana Republic hitman wandering the streets of New York.’ I told Dad that Son Libre was effectively owned by the Brazilian government, and after a while he agreed to introduce him to a bank manager downstairs. When that meeting was over, Dad wanted nothing more to do with him, and I could see that the man sensed Dad’s disrespect. But of course, he didn’t understand my Dad like I did. I knew that Dad wasn’t being disrespectful – he was just scared. But for my part, the mysterious Son Libre guy was as good as his word. Later that year Lee and her man Roberto came up to New York and signed with me. To celebrate, I decided to take them to Gino’s restaurant, which was just about as conservative an Italian restaurant as you could get. The Republican and Old Money New York establishment ate there and the clientele was seriously moneyed. Everything was going fine, until suddenly Rita passed out and crashed backwards on her chair. I was stunned and looked at Roberto, who sat there as cool as a cucumber, while the waiters stood frozen in time and the ladies lunching looked on, mouths agape. With a voice that was slow and spaced out, almost like he was talking backwards, Roberto said, ‘Don’t worry. She’s OK. She’s on the train.’ I realised he meant that she was on heroin. Although I knew all about blow, I had never engaged in heavy-duty drugs like heroin. We sat her upright and for the rest of the meal Rita stayed there with her chin on her chest, completely out cold, while we continued our meal as if nothing had happened. Soon after, with Rita’s masters in my baggage, I set off for France and cut a record deal with Barclay Records in Paris, which was run by Parisian legend Eddie Barclay. His label boasted icons like Jacques Brel, Charles Aznavour, Fela Kuti and Jimi Hendrix. Barclay himself even worked with the Sex Pistols on their Great Rock and Roll Swindle film. Eddie always used to wear white, like me, and seemed to have a different wife every time I met him. When he died in 2005, a friend told me that Eddie had racked up nine spouses over the years. The man himself boasted to me that he had had more wives than he could remember, and told me how the mayor conducting one of his later weddings said, ‘Bonjour, Monsieur Barclay, what a pleasure to see you again.’ With Rita’s Lanca Perfume, Barclay Records and I had a huge hit in France in September 1981 and suddenly it was game on because I had the leverage I needed for a big label deal. Before too long, I made contact with a business acquaintance called Rupert Perry, who was running Capitol Records in LA and I told him about Rita Lee. He told me that Capitol’s parent company EMI was setting up a Latin division out of London and Rita would be the perfect match. In June 1982 Rita Lee and Roberto came over to Barcelona to sign the EMI contract and watch the World Cup. The idea was that Rita would issue four albums, each recorded in four different languages: Spanish, French, English and Italian. Remember, Son Libre kept the Portuguese recordings. Everything would have been perfect if only it wasn’t Rita Lee. The problem was Rita was the musical equivalent of a barbiturate. If everyone else was working at the equivalent of a 78 rpm record, Rita was on 33 and Roberto was on 45. She didn’t like the sun, preferred darkness and worked, if she worked at all, to her own rhythm. Rather than live in Rio, she preferred the far more laid back Sao Paolo, which was her home town and which was more conducive to spending the day taking drugs to listen to or shut off the spirits in her head. In those days, I still thought that what you saw in life was all there was. I had no knowledge of the occult, of different dimensions of consciousness. Rita was the first to really broaden my perspective. I began to get an idea of this...