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Jawbone Press - Miles A. Copeland

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102 pages

English

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My real story starts with a disaster, an unmitigated, pull-the-rug-from-under-you, clean-out-the-bank-account disaster. But had it not happened, The Police would never have risen to become the biggest rock band in the world; Jools Holland would not have ended up on TV; The Bangles, The Go-Go’s, R.E.M., and many other music stars might never have made it either. It’s strange how a fluke, a disaster, an unlikely event can lead to incredible results. But that is in essence what happened to me . . .

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back tells the extraordinary story of a maverick manager, promoter, label owner, and all-round legend of the music industry. It opens in the Middle East, where Miles grew up with his father, a CIA agent who was stationed in Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon. It then shifts to London in the late 60s and the beginnings of a career managing bands like Wishbone Ash and Curved Air—only for Miles’s life and work to be turned upside down by a disastrous European tour.

From the ashes of near bankruptcy, Miles entered the world of punk, sharing a building with Malcolm McLaren and Sniffin’ Glue, before shifting gears again as manager of The Police, featuring his brother Stewart on drums. Then, after founding IRS Records, he launched the careers of some of the most potent musical acts of the new wave scene and beyond, from Squeeze and The Go-Go’s to The Bangles and R.E.M.

The story comes full circle as Miles finds himself advising the Pentagon on how to win over hearts and minds in the Middle East and introducing Arabic music to the United States. ‘Never let the truth get in the way of a good story,’ his father would tell him. In the end, though, the truth is what counts—and it’s all here.

Sujets

Musique

Culture musicale

Music

Business Aspects

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Publié par	Jawbone Press
Date de parution	16 juin 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781911036784
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	6 Mo

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Extrait

A JAWBONE BOOK Published in the UK and the USA by Jawbone Press Office G1 141–157 Acre Lane London SW2 5UA England www.jawbonepress.com
Volume copyright © 2021 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © Miles A. Copeland III. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.

CONTENTS
PREFACE
1 ROAD TO DAMASCUS
2 BEIRUT
3 TO ALABAMA AND BACK AGAIN
4 BACK IN BEIRUT
5 COLLEGE EVENTS
6 WHERE WILL YOU BE YESTERDAY?
7 THE LOST CITY OF MOO
8 STARTRUCKIN’ 75
9 THE OLD AND THE NEW
10 JACK OF ALL TRADES
11 KLARK KENT AND MELVIN MILKTOAST
12 THEN EVERYTHING CHANGED
13 SQUEEZE – A LONG STORY
14 FAULTY PRODUCTS USA
15 POLICE ESCORT
16 BEAUTY AND THE BEAT
17 HALF FULL
18 DIFFERENT LIGHT
19 RAPID EYE MOVEMENT
20 7476 HILLSIDE
21 ALL CHANGE AGAIN
22 MY BRITAIN
23 THE SHOK OF THE NEW
24 I NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN
25 THE SULTAN AND THE BURLEY MINDER
26 A CASTLE FOR A SONG
27 GO SEE THE SHERIFF
28 KEITH MOORE, ZUCCHERO, AND THE END OF IRS
29 MERCURY FALLING
30 BREAKBEATS AND BELLYDANCERS
31 HEARTS AND MINDS
POSTSCRIPT

I dedicate this book to my three sons, Miles 4th, Aeson, and Axton, who will at some point be interested in what their father did, where he succeeded, where he screwed up, so that they may learn and hopefully may even be inspired. At least they might be entertained. It took me a while to appreciate my own father, which in the end I did. Believe me, reading his memoirs and prolific writings, I certainly was entertained! I also dedicate it to my wife Adriana, who has put up with me and all the crazy people I had to deal with. Of course, I dedicate it as well to all those crazy people who have made my story, so . . . well, let’s just say ‘colorful.’ You know who you are.

PREFACE
August 18, 1983. I am standing centerstage at Shea Stadium, New York—the ballpark made famous as a music venue two decades earlier by The Beatles—making the introductions, as my brother Stewart and his bandmates, Sting and Andy Summers, prepare to take the stage.
‘LADIES AND GENTELMEN, IT’S TIME FOR . . . THE POLICE!’
Moments later, I am watching from the side of the stage with my mother and father. Who could have imagined they would be standing here in front of eighty thousand people, to see their sons bask in the glory of the biggest rock’n’roll band in the world?
*
The story of my career in the music business is filled with moments like these. But my real story starts with a disaster, an unmitigated, pull-the-rug-from-under-you, clean-out-the-bank-account disaster. A disaster that led me so close to the edge of bankruptcy that I still don’t know how I survived to fight another day.
It was a disaster that, if it had not happened, The Police most likely would never have existed, and they certainly would have never risen to become the biggest rock band in the world. Jools Holland would not have become a TV fixture in the UK; The Bangles, The Go-Go’s, R.E.M., and many other music stars might never have made it either.
It’s strange how a fluke, a disaster, an unlikely event, can lead to incredible results. But that is in essence what happened to me.
That disaster was StarTruckin’ 75, a kind of traveling music festival—probably the first of its kind in Europe, and maybe anywhere. The idea was to bring together my management clients—Wishbone Ash, Renaissance, The Climax Blues Band, and others—with acts like Lou Reed and Mahavishnu Orchestra. It was ‘greatness by association,’ hoping their fame would splash on my artists.
We chartered two planes to take the acts around Europe—thirteen dates in six countries, beginning in Copenhagen, Denmark, on August 5, 1975. I quickly learned that if you take one band out on the road, you only have one set of problems to deal with, but if you take eight bands, you know someone’s going to screw up.
The big problem was Lou Reed. Where was Lou Reed? Nobody knew. The shows were happening, but there was no sign of Lou. Eventually I tracked him down to a hotel bathroom in New Zealand: ‘He’s been in there a day already, and I don’t see him coming out for another week.’
We had to scamper around to find out who might be available to replace him at short notice. In the end we got Ike & Tina Turner, who gave us a great show, but it was last-minute, so the agent had the opportunity to hit us with a big bill. Financially it was a complete disaster. With each show we were losing more and more money, and that just pulled the rug out from under the tour. It was a financial fiasco that took me to the brink of bankruptcy. The bailiffs closed my London office, and the New York office disappeared too, leaving my brother Ian stranded. The booking agent I had worked with for so long and so successfully in the USA was telling people, ‘Miles Copeland is over.’ And for much of the music world that I had been dealing with up to then, that pretty much summed it up.
It never occurred to me that I would be going too far or doing too much. I had never been in a position where I had failed to do what I said I’d do. But this was also the key turning point in my life. It firmly ended one era and set me on a course to a new one. If it had not happened, my morphing into the punk world and everything that followed might never have happened either. Perhaps the whole punk-to-new-wave revolution might have been very different.
Maybe StarTruckin’ was an idea ahead of its time. There were big lessons to learn from that tour, but more than anything, the scale of the disaster forced me to look in places I might not have. I owe a lot to that disaster. Without it, none of the rest of this would have happened.
*
For several years I dabbled at writing a book, first from a motivational approach, like: This is what I did, what I learned, and what you might learn from too . My intent was not to boast about my accomplishments or trivialize my failures. Rather, to offer them as lessons one can learn from, and that might apply to many endeavors beyond the narrow confines of the entertainment business.
As my children are about as interested in my musical tastes as I was in my father’s, I figured if they were going to read anything I wrote, the more universal I could make the lessons, the better. And, of course, put in plenty of funny and crazy stories to hold their attention along the way. Believe me, there are plenty to tell.
My father, a notorious CIA operative involved in various stories of skullduggery both real and perceived, used to have fun writing about his children. He liked to mix up known theories with ones he made up, but he always managed to keep a grain of truth in the many letters he sent me and the stories he created around my brothers, Ian and Stewart, The Police, and even Sting and Andy Summers.
The high-profile success of his kids in the music business and the propensity for ‘hype’ in the entertainment world gave him license to write in ways he could not do when describing his own exploits in the CIA in the books he published ( Game Of Nations , Real Spy World , Without Cloak And Dagger , The Game Player ).
One of his favorite Copeland family stories was this:
Miles, we like to say, Thinks Big Upwards—in geography, dollars, economic whammy, and political power. Stewart, on the other hand, is Breadth. Students of the Copeland phenomenon have marveled at how Miles III is able to ‘conceptualize beyond horizons’ ( New York Times , January 12, 1976). Stewart’s concepts START at the horizons. As you know, it has been a family routine to have each of the kids tested by CIA psychologists upon reaching his or her twelfth birthday. The results of Miles, his sister Lennie, and brother Ian were ‘positively astounding,’ as an agency’s director of personnel wrote in a memorandum to the recruiting office in 1962, when the whole family, as such, was being considered for ‘certain community duties’ in Beirut, Lebanon. On the second day of Stewart’s sessions, however, somewhere out in Virginia, an hour’s drive from Washington, the psychologists gave up on him, with remarks on his test report to the effect that his kind of intelligence ‘simply isn’t relevant and is therefore immeasurable.’ Isn’t RELEVANT? What the hell does that mean? ‘It means,’ explained the patronizing little shit who headed the testing unit, ‘that we’ve all got one kind of intelligence and Stewart has quite another, and we can only measure the first kind.’
I can assure the reader that I have tried to avoid my father’s oft-quoted rule, ‘Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story.’ As far as I know, I have made no claims that are untrue, as I have tried to be as accurate as humanly possible.
Some important players, like my brother Ian and my partner Kim Turner, are no longer with us, so I could not benefit from their help. In the end, I hope my experiences and lessons learned will entertain but, more than that, will offer insights and inspiration for others, no matter what walk of life one has chosen.
CHAPTER 1
ROAD TO DAMASCUS
I like to joke that I was born under a bright star, but no one was sure what star it was. In fact, I doubt if anyone was looking skyward that night, unless they were in London, watching for the German buzz bombs that were about to fall on the city—or the Germans looking skyward, to see if the allied planes were bombing them that night. It was a year before the end of World War II, and bad things were happening in most of the world. Of course, I knew nothing about any of this, as I was just a tiny baby. But had that war not happened, I would not have existed either, and I would not be here to tell this story.
You see, my father was a jazz trumpet player from Birmingham, Alabama. My mother was a secretary