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Fact #64418

When:

Short story:

When Joni Mitchell plays at the Cafe Au Go Go, Greenwich Village, New York City, USA, she impresses music business agent Elliot Roberts so much that he offers to become her manager.

Full article:

ELLIOT ROBERTS - Artist-friendly management shark whose killer instinct ensured Neil Young’s creative freedom on the ride to the top.

When Elliot Rabinowitz, a young, Bronx-born buck with an eye for musical talent, took a lowly job in 1965 at New York’s William Morris Agency, he walked into a partnership that would revolutionise rock management.

One of the rising stars of the agency, David Geffen, took a shine to Rabinowitz, and used him as a talent scout. Learning the ropes from Geffen, Rabinowitz saw his big break when he first heard Joni Mitchell at the Café Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, early in 1967. Within a year he had jumped ship from the agency to become her full-time manager, legally changed his surname to Roberts, and moved out to Los Angeles.

It was through Joni that Roberts met Neil Young who, following the demise of Buffalo Springfield, was in the market for managerial guidance. As became his practice, Roberts signed Young to a deal sealed by a firm handshake instead of a contract. Asked why, the affable Roberts would explain, “Friendships are more important than any business deal.”

The former Byrd, David Crosby, soon joined Roberts’ roster, and he rapidly acquired a reputation for being scrupulously honest with his clients, but ruthless with record companies and agents. “He has no rules,” says one former business associate, John Hartmann. “Whatever it takes, Elliot will do.”

Roberts maintained his friendship with Geffen, who was still at William Morris, but the two men were strikingly different. Whereas Geffen was effectively a drug free workaholic, Roberts hung out with his artists, smoked dope with them, and even got busted and jailed along with Crosby in 1967. Another former associate, Will Hinds, has marvelled at Roberts’ ability to “get so fucking high that nobody else could walk – and then run business.”

When Roberts assumed management of the supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Geffen realised that a slice of Roberts’ new pie could be infinitely more rewarding than his agency salary. So, in 1970, he talked the initially reluctant Roberts into setting up the Geffen-Roberts Company, and the pair operated a legendary good cop-bad cop routine. According to David Crosby, Roberts achieved financial miracles for his clients by being naturally likeable, but “if he doesn’t rob you blind, we’ll send Dave Geffen over. He’ll take your whole company.”

Rock photographer Henry Diltz has fond memories of the Geffen/Roberts office on Sunset Strip during this era. “You could go down there any time of the day and you'd find Graham Nash or David Blue or Glenn Frey or Joe Walsh or Joni Mitchell. You would find two or three of those people there at any time. Or you could sit there and make a few phone calls and someone would show up and you could go out to lunch and it was kind of a clubhouse.”

The next stage in the Geffen-Roberts campaign for global domination was the formation in 1972 of Asylum Records. The singer-songwriter oriented company was marketed as an antidote to the stranglehold of the major labels, an artist –oriented haven with a small roster, offering complete creative freedom backed by the massive clout of Geffen and Roberts.

At first it seemed idyllic. The label enjoyed major successes with The Eagles and Jackson Browne, and even briefly tempted Bob Dylan away from Columbia. Asylum’s runaway success, however, sowed doubts about Geffen and Roberts in the minds of many of their clients. The Eagles tackled them head-on about the conflict of interests inherent in a situation where the same men who managed the artists also controlled their publishing and ran the record company. The duo’s power over their artists had reached alarming levels and they began to be perceived as part of the problem rather than the solution.

When Asylum was sold to Warner Bros for $7m, with Geffen taking a lucrative executive post at Warners, the cosy, trusting relationship between Asylum’s artists and Geffen-Roberts largely evaporated in a cloud of re-negotiated contracts. Nevertheless, Geffen rapidly ascended to stratospheric levels in the entertainment world, and Roberts didn’t do too badly either.

Remaining on the outside, Roberts invested his Warners profits in his next venture, Lookout Management, with Neil Young remaining his flagship artist. “I have a personal manager for every act,” he explained in one interview. “I have four managers that work for me that I oversee. The only clients that I look after myself, that call me directly when they have a problem, is Neil and Joni (Mitchell). I have a ranch next to Neil's ranch.”

The honeymoon, however, was over. In early 1985, Joni Mitchell parted company with Roberts, going on to write a bitter song, The Windfall, chastising someone (usually assumed to be Roberts) because, “You want too much, You want too badly, You want everything for nothing.”

Roberts remains a major industry player, still managing Neil Young, with whom he formed Vapor Records in 2002 and, among other interests, he has recently been involved with a venture to install CD manufacturing kiosks in anything from coffee shops to colleges and record stores.

(This feature by Johnny Black was first published in Mojo magazine)