Other Stuff
 about Larry Page....
WHEN LARRY MET TIN PAN ALLEY

In the Sixties, when the music industry was still young and innocent, pop success often depended on pulling the right stunt at the right time. Larry Page, king of the stunts, talks to PETE CLARK



There is a series currently running on television called Routes of Rock, which attempts to unravel the glorious mayhem which was eventually transformed into the slick monster that is today's music business. I reviewed the first programme for this newspaper, and a few days later received a phone call. "Hello, this is Larry Page. I would like to meet you and have a chat. I want to tell you what it was really like." The name Larry Page may or may not mean anything to you. In his time, he was a record packer, and a singer. More importantly for posterity, as a manager he brought us The Kinks and The Troggs. He also brought us Lieutenant Pigeon, but we can safely forget about that. Larry Page comes from an era when the record industry was peopled by characters, men who were engaged in making up the rules as they went along, because there were no rules in existence.

Page learned about the business from the bottom up. As a singer, he acquired a record contract - "Columbia Recording Star" and the newspapers tagged him the Teenage Rave.

"In the late Fifties when I started out, this country, in musical terms, was a satellite of America. Everything that was a hit in America, we would cover. Including the original, there could be five versions of the same song on the market at any time. We did these cover versions badly. In fact, we did them very badly. I wasn't a rock 'n' roll singer, but I was asked to do a version of Buddy Holly's That'll Be The Day. I went in with a big orchestra and the Rita Williams Singers, because they thought that was the way to do it. Well, it was crap, it was rubbish."

Larry soon turned his attentions elsewhere, first as a promoter, then as a manager. His great opportunity presented itself when he was approached to go and see a band who were called The Ravens. He signed them and the first thing he did was change the name to The Kinks. "Ray Davies didn't write songs at the time," he recalls. "I talked him into it because I could see that was the way things were going. I worked on a stage act. I knew what it was like to be on stage - either kill or be killed. "The Kinks have gone down in pop history as one of the most volatile acts to step on a stage, prone to outbreaks of violence which were not always transmitted through the music. They enjoyed a stormy relationship with their manager. "I gave the group a name which they hated. I wanted to shock, to create an image. They rebelled against it."

The trials of a manager were many and various. Then, as now, the ultimate goal was success in America. This was hard enough to achieve, without the perils that lurked in the land of the free. "When you went to America with a band on tour, it was always the same. The hotels were riddled with bloody drugs - complimentary - and the first thing I did was flush everything. The minute they knew your weakness - gambling, drugs, gay, into little girls - they had you. Somebody had to be in charge of the situation, or we'd all have ended up in jail."

The other great bane of the manager's life was negotiating deals on behalf of his acts. In recent years we have heard plenty from pop stars who claim to have, been swindled by unscrupulous managers early in their careers, and no doubt many have a just case. There is another side to the story, however, and Larry is quick to give it. "Ray Davies made millions out of the deals I did for him. I signed the group to Pye when every other label had turned them down. Ray's always complained about the deal, but it couldn't have been a bad deal if it was the only one on the table."

Larry's other big signing was The Troggs, and there were wrangles even with this relatively easy-going bunch. "Even Reg Presley has said that his deal was shit. That was the same deal that has just earned him £2 million for Love Is All Around (from the Wet Wet Wet cover), so it wasn't such a bad deal. If you piss it all up the wall at the Georges Cinq in Paris, don't blame the manager.

Beyond the gripes, the strongest memory that remains is being part of a small and tightly knit club. "We all knew each other in the Sixties. The original club was Tin Pan Alley in Denmark Street. All the musicians would go there and you knew that eventually, they'd get to your door. Maybe you were the seventh person they saw, so you either knew that they were shit, or the other six people had no ears.

"The story goes that Brian Epstein came to London to get a publishing deal for The Beatles. He got to his appointment at 9am and nobody was there. So he went round the corner and he found Dick James's office was open, so Dick got The Beatles. After that, I got in early every morning just in case someone walked in."

The other great joy of life was creating hits. "When I did Wild Thing with The Troggs, I knew I had a smash. I took it to the BBC. Everybody hated it. I bumped into a producer friend in Bond Street and, without even hearing the record, he put it in his show that weekend. One play, and we were off, straight to Number One. It was the same with You Really Got Me by The Kinks. Everybody hated it, everybody thought I was mad. You just had to do a few stunts."

LARRY Page smiles at the memories. The man who brought Sonny and Cher to Britain and booked them into the Dorchester knowing that they'd be thrown out because of their clothes, has seen and done it all before. But he is not merely a container for entertaining stories from the past. A couple of days after our meeting, he called me again. "I just thought I'd mention that my old group, the Larry Page Orchestra, has a song on the soundtrack of the new Melanie Griffiths movie, Crazy in Alabama." You can't keep a good old boy down.



Popmusik
La musique pop

There were many who thought (and still think) that Pop was the Sixties. The roll-call of hits and stars reads like a Who's Who of popular music - Elvis, Ike and Tina Turner, Sonny and Cher, Little Richard, Little Eva, Buddy Holly, Hendrix, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Everly Brothers, The Doors, The Crystals, The Ronettes, The Supremes, The Animals, The Bee Gees, The Who... the list goes on for ever.

Behind all the ballyhoo, there were the starmakers - Colonel Parker, George Martin, Larry Page, Phil Spector - those who manufactured the sound or arranged the money.

Never before had music brought such fame. 'If I get any more popular,' said Eric Clapton, 'I shall have to have plastic surgery and get myself a Dr Kildare face.' Never before had record sales been so gross. At the centre of it all were The Beatles, the four lads from Merseyside, who became the most famous people in the world. The Stones ran them close, but Mick and company were naughty and mischievous, and never straddled the generations as comfortably as John, Paul, George and Ringo. As the decade neared its end, sales of The Beatles' Abbey Road album topped four million in two months.