Jerry Moss
Jim Guerinot, former general manager of A&M Records, who later managed Nine Inch Nails, No Doubt, Social Distortion and other bands, worked for A&M co-founder Jerry Moss, who died Wednesday (Aug. 16) at 88, and its president, the late Gil Friesen, for years in the 1980s and 1990s. The retired music executive saluted his former boss in a phone interview.
“We had an artist who was getting to release an album and had a capable manger. I put the whole plan together. When I ran the numbers, I saw that we were going to lose money. I said, ‘I’m not going to get hung,’ so I went to Jerry: ‘Here’s the plan, the manager has signed off.’ He goes, ‘Well, good, what’s your concern?’ I go, ‘Well, we’re going to lose money because the artist will not sell records to make that happen.’ I said, ‘Can I ask you a question? Why would we put this record out?’ He goes, ‘Well, that’s easy. Because it’s an A&M artist.’ It was very much like, ‘The ‘M’ is me, pal. If I want to, I do it.’
And that’s how he slept at night and that’s how he and [Herb Alpert, label co-founder] slept at night.
From time to time when I arrived at work at A&M, I’d pass the main guys’ doors: Herb might be painting, and would invite you in to see what he’s up to to; Gil Friesen, the label president, inevitably would push a book on me and expect a report within days; and Moss wanted to play a few hands of gin. Generally speaking, if you and I play gin, I’m going to beat you. I have friends who played in the World Series of Poker and I win at least half the time. I not only never beat [Moss] at gin, I never even won one hand. It was depressing.
This guy had a vision for the business that was beyond what normal people would see. He walked into a room and saw things we didn’t see. He walked into situations and businesses and saw things we didn’t see.
He knew everybody, for starters. Like, literally, everybody.
Where somebody might see an artist, he would see a network of what that artist represented, and relationships and history. It was just much, much deeper. What he saw wasn’t what I saw. He read people differently. He read people very, very well. He knew people who were going to be honorable and who would not be.”
Jerry Moss once spent a day in Athens, Greece, screaming at the heads of the world’s top electronics companies during a Billboard music-industry convention. It was 1981. Sony’s Norio Ohga and Philips’ Jan Timmer were trying to persuade record executives to switch from their beloved LP to this new, high-tech “compact disc,” and Moss, co-founder of storied indie A&M Records, which would break Janet Jackson, Sting, Soundgarden and Blues Traveler, led the opposition.
Moss, who died Thursday at 88, believed CDs “would kill the industry because the perfect digital master would invite and facilitate piracy,” according to John Nathan‘s 1999 book, Sony.
As I was researching this subject for my own book, Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age, I had to verify this claim. Nathan described a mob of outraged record execs chanting, like soccer hooligans, a “slogan that sounded like a Madison Avenue nightmare”: “The truth is in the grooves!”
This was the generous and magnanimous sales expert who was endlessly patient with his artists, willing to lose money on an album to advance a long-term career, whom Sting would describe as an “elder brother, a wise head, a man’s man and a mensch”?
I was sure Moss would be too embarrassed to rehash this history, because, eventually, the CD helped him and his partner, trumpeter Herb Alpert, become super rich, selling A&M to PolyGram for $500 million in 1989. (That’s $1.23 billion in today’s dollars.) But the exec who co-founded A&M with Alpert in a garage in 1962, after selling the master for Alpert’s Tijuana Brass instrumental “Tell It to the Birds” for $750, quickly agreed to a phone interview – and a wonkier follow-up later.
“I made a bit of a small statement at the meeting,” understated Moss, who at the time of our interview was running his post-A&M label, Almo Sounds, which had signed Gillian Welch as well as Garbage and Imogen Heap. “I liked the hardware and the whole ease of the CD, and I generally applauded the idea that Sony and Philips were getting together on this one piece of machinery.
“But,” he added, “I thought they could have done something to stop piracy.”
On Second Thought…
What finally turned Moss around was the economics of the CD. The price of vinyl records was stuck at $8.98 — and after Tom Petty threatened to affix a huge “$8.98!” sticker on his 1981 album, Hard Promises, his own label, MCA, and the rest of the industry were blocked from raising prices. The CD allowed A&M to “charge a multiple for this thing,” Moss said. Also, retail stores were charging labels for advertising — a “mighty blow,” Moss called it. After disco crashed in 1979, LP sales plunged. “Retailing and selling became very pinched,” he added.
“The retailers wanted more and artists and producers wanted more for what they were doing. The record companies were getting squeezed further and further,” Moss went on. “And here comes the CD.”
The shiny, futuristic format was in high demand, and retailers were willing to buy it from labels for $10 wholesale, far higher than the LP, then sell it to customers for $16.
“So A&M, after just a tiny bit of study, decided this was going to be our future,” Moss said.
Like the bigger labels, A&M had to find plants to manufacture the CD, quickly making a deal with a German company. And the CD, to which Moss had been so screamingly opposed in 1981, made A&M profitable beyond anything Alpert and Moss had once imagined: “The company was a different company from 1979 to 1989, certainly.”
A Bittersweet Sale
Alongside Alpert and the late Gil Friesen, then the day-to-day operations exec who referred to himself as the ampersand in A&M, Moss decided they had no choice but to sell the company they loved. Music stars in the late ’80s and early ’90s were demanding multimillion-dollar advances, and, as an indie, A&M couldn’t compete with bigger labels for the up-front guarantees. The trio stayed on for a couple of years after the sale, but PolyGram had a mandatory retirement age of 61. In 1991, Moss found himself with a new boss, Alain Levy, who became PolyGram’s worldwide president and CEO, and, Moss recalled, “wasn’t laughing at my jokes.”
(In 1998, PolyGram was sold to Seagram, which merged it with Universal Music Group, today the world’s biggest label.)
“I don’t regret selling, because I felt we had nothing but to do that. There was no alternative. We would have had to have gotten a lot smaller, and gotten our investment in different, other ways,” Moss told me. “I can’t say I’m sorry I sold A&M. I will say I’m sorry I had to leave.”
A&M co-founder Jerry Moss, who died Wednesday (Aug. 16) at 88, once said that if he could have just one album, it would be Sting’s solo debut, 1985’s Dream of the Blue Turtles. The legendary Police frontman and Moss met in March 1979, the day that The Police played their first Los Angeles show at the Whisky a Go Go. They formed a strong bond over the music, with The Police going on to international superstardom while on A&M. The band’s 1983 smash, “Every Breath You Take,” was A&M’s biggest hit, spending eight weeks at No. 1. But even stronger than Moss and Sting’s musical connection was their potent friendship.
From his house in Tuscany, Sting talked to Billboard about what Moss meant to him both professionally and personally.
I first met Jerry Moss in 1979. I just got to California with the band and I hugged a palm tree. I’d never seen a palm tree in my life. We booked into the Sunset Marquis and obviously sat at the swimming pool. And then in walked Jerry Moss and [A&M executive] Gil Friesen, two very tall, handsome, distinguished-looking Californian businessmen. Jerry really looked the part, I have to say: Such a striking, handsome guy. Jerry very quickly became a family friend rather than a record executive. But if I’m asked why I think they were so successful as a record company, I would say Jerry was, not to my knowledge, a cutthroat businessman, he was a gentleman first.
He was a friend. He was a mentor. He was a confidante. And I think his success was based on those very human qualities, rather than being some kind of shark.
Then I met Herb [Alpert, A&M co-founder with Moss], and, for me, it was fascinating that A&M were two people. It wasn’t like a faceless, corporate acrostic. Mr. A and Mr. M were people. You could sit on their desk and chat to them. They were the perfect company for us. They were artist [friendly], they would be patient, and they knew what they were talking about. They weren’t like just the set of accountants, who are guessing. These guys knew the business.
Jerry would have informed opinions about [the music] he was hearing and would say things like “I think it needs a bridge here.” He wasn’t necessarily right [laughs]. I’m joking. But I would always listen and take what he said seriously. He knew what he was [talking] about.
He became a very close friend. [Sting’s wife] Trudie and I would stay at his house in Malibu and in Hawaii. When he became a horse breeder, he named [a] horse after our album, Zenyatta [for Police’s 1980 album, Zenyatta Mondatta] and [another] after Giacomo, my third son. The horse won the Kentucky Derby. It was 80:1 odds when we put the bet on him. We’re still living off the winnings. It was amazing that he had just as much talent spotting musical talent as he did horseflesh that would win. But again, I think his success came from his generosity, his humanity.
Luckily, a month ago, he turned up at a gig I was giving in Halifax, Yorkshire, in the north of England. It’s so unlikely that Jerry would turn up there, but he wanted to see a gig. That was the last time I saw him. He was in a wheelchair. He wasn’t speaking, but he was really able to demonstrate how pleased he was to see me and how pleased I was to see him. We hugged and he watched the show, and that was maybe five weeks ago. It was the most unlikely setting for a final meeting, but I’m so grateful that I had that opportunity. We spent a lot of time with him. He’s irreplaceable. I love him and it’s been a devastating loss for Trudie and myself and the record industry.
As told to Melinda Newman
Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss, who died Wednesday (Aug. 16) at his home in Los Angeles, launched A&M Records out of Alpert’s garage in 1962 with the intent of making it friendly home for artists.
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The label — which the pair sold to PolyGram for $500 million in 1989 — went on to carry that ideology to wild success, working with such artists as Sting, Janet Jackson, Cat Stevens, Peter Frampton, Amy Grant, Dionne Warwick and Alpert and his own hitmaking band, The Tijuana Brass.
A story from A&M’s early history reflects Alpert and Moss’s artist-first attitude, even when it potentially could harm the label’s bottom line. One of the label’s first signings was Waylon Jennings in 1964. Alpert went to Arizona and produced several songs with Jennings, including the Bobby Bare-penned “Four Strong Winds.” “It was a really good recording,” Alpert told Billboard in an Aug. 15 interview, the day before Moss’s passing, for a separate story.
RCA label head and legendary guitarist Chet Atkins heard the recording and liked it so much, “he made some overtures to Waylon about when he gets out of the contract with A&M, he’d like to talk to him,” Alpert says. “He shouldn’t have done that because Waylon was under contract to us and it seemed like he was jumping over our bones a bit, but I loved Chet. He was certainly a brilliant musician as well as administrator.”
Jennings wanted to be a country artist, while Alpert wanted to take him “a little more pop,” Alpert says. “[Waylon] told me confidentially that Chet Atkins wanted to see him, so Jerry and I decided to let Waylon out of his contract so he could go with Chet and RCA. I remember we told Waylon and he couldn’t believe we were willing to do that. I remember the day that Jerry and I signed his release.”
As they let Jennings go, they were well aware of the future country legend’s potential, but cared more about letting him pursue his artistic vision than keeping him yoked to A&M. “I looked at Jerry and said, ‘Man, this guy’s going to be a big star,’ and Jerry said, ‘I know it.’ And I got goosebumps thinking that if we could be that honest with our artists, we’re gonna be a big success,” Alpert says. “It was a pivotal moment for me and my feeling about A&M Records and what we were doing.”
Upon learning of Moss’s passing Wednesday, Alpert simply said in a statement, “I never met a nicer, honest, sensitive, smart and talented man then my partner Jerry Moss.”
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