Anything for a Hit: An A&r Woman's Story of Surviving the Music Industry - Hardcover

Carvello, Dorothy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0912777915 ISBN 13: 9780912777917

Verlag: CHICAGO REVIEW PR, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Dorothy Carvello knows all about the music biz. She was the first female A&R executive at Atlantic Records, and one of the few in the room at RCA and Columbia. But before that, she was secretary to Ahmet Ertegun, Atlantic's infamous president, who signed acts like Aretha Franklin and Led Zeppelin, negotiated distribution deals with Mick Jagger, and added Neil Young to Crosby, Stills & Nash. The stories she tells about the kingmakers of the music industry are outrageous, but it is her sinuous friendship with Ahmet that frames her narrative. He was notoriously abusive, sexually harassing Dorothy on a daily basis. Still, when he neared his end, sad and alone, Dorothy had no hatred toward him'only a strange kind of loyalty. Carvello reveals here how she flipped the script and showed Ertegun and every other man who tried to control her that a woman can be just as willing to do what it takes to get a hit. Featuring never-before-heard stories about artists like Michael Jackson, Madonna, Steven Tyler, Bon Jovi, INXS, Marc Anthony, Phil Collins, and many more, this book is a must-read for anyone who has ever wondered what it's really like to be a woman in a male-dominated industry.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dorothy Carvello began her career in 1987 as an assistant to Ahmet Ertegun, the legendary Atlantic Records founder, and went on to become the label's first female A&R executive. She worked for many of the biggest names in music'morris, Azoff, Galante, Buziak, and Ienner'at Atlantic, Giant, RCA, Relativity, and Columbia.

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Anything for a Hit

An A&R Woman's Story of Surviving the Music Industry

By Dorothy Carvello

Chicago Review Press

Copyright © 2018 Dorothy Carvello
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-912777-91-7

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Page, 
Dedication Page, 
The Men (Then), 
Fast Forward, 
Part I: Atlantic Records, 
1. Rewind, 
2. The Joker, 
3. We're Not in Kansas Anymore, 
4. Oz, 
5. The Clown-Fucking Awards, 
6. All Access, 
7. Down Under, 
8. Lucky Sperm, 
9. Lucky Criminals, 
10. Follow the Yellow Brick Row, 
11. Goin' Down, 
12. Damned If You Do, 
13. Howdy, Partner, 
14. Magic Mike, 
15. Fractures, 
16. Platinum, 
17. Game of Thrones, 
18. The Tender Trap, 
19. Sucka Punch, 
20. Knockout, 
Part II: Giant/RCA, 
21. A DJ Saved My Life, 
22. The Poison Dwarf, 
23. Southern Comfort, 
24. Too Short, 
25. A Good Man Is Hard to Find, 
26. Mr. Freeze, 
27. With a Little Help from My Friends, 
28. Knight in Shining Armor, 
Part III: Relativity/Columbia, 
29. The Wake Up, 
30. He's Gone, 
31. Lucky Criminals, Part II, 
32. Break Up, 
33. Page Six, 
34. We're Number One (Columbia), 
35. He's Gone Too, 
36. Top Banana, 
37. She's Gone, 
38. Gaslight and Glitter, 
39. Meteor, 
40. Dorothy Sees Behind the Curtain, 
The Men (Now), 
Photos insert, 

CHAPTER 1

REWIND

I was born in Brooklyn in 1962 to a working-class Italian American family. My mother was an unfulfilled housewife; my father was a gambling addict. She worshipped the ground he walked on; he wouldn't give her the time of day if he worked in a clock factory. You could have torn us from a Scorsese film — one of those period pieces on the Italian immigrant experience — except no one in my family had an association with the Mafia. Yet.

My father and I had no real relationship. He was a narcissist, and our lives revolved around his gambling addiction, without any thought for what it did to us. The best I can say is he never hit us — his father beat him as a child, and he didn't believe in administering discipline that way. He also didn't believe in administering anything. He was absent. He worked a civil service job and did real estate deals on the side, but as soon as the money came in, he'd gamble it away. He took night shifts as a waiter to pay his debts. On weekends, he'd make himself scarce.

My mother didn't know how much money my father made. If he gave her five dollars for the week, we had to find a way to live on it. I remember going two straight years as a child without new shoes. I assumed we were poor, and so did my mother. I didn't learn until later that we were actually middle class, or at least we would have been had my father not gambled our money away. I revered my mother. If this life was good enough for her, what right did I have to expect better?

I have two older brothers, but when it came to chores and housework, the responsibilities all fell on me. At the tender age of six, I learned my duties: "Bebe," my mother said (Bebe was my nickname; Ahmet was the first person in my life to call me Dorothy), "you have to clear the table and wash the dishes every night."

"Why?" I said. "They eat too, but they don't have to clean up."

"We're not talking about them."

"Why aren't we talking about them? What's the difference?"

She grabbed my arm and pulled me to the sink. "Do the dishes," she said.

"I can't reach the sink."

She got her wooden spoon, gave me a couple of whacks on the ass, and set up a bench. Every night, while my brothers lived wild and free, I had to set and clear the table and wash dishes like I was in the army. That's when I first discovered the difference between boys and girls.

I felt rejected at birth just by being female. It wasn't something to be cherished or honored. It was a burden to bear. The message was: men live for themselves; women live for men. I saw this message repeated everywhere, from my brothers, to my parents, to my aunts, who pretended to be modern but were just as backward as the rest of them.

I also have a younger sister. My parents spoiled her in comparison to the rest of us — they had more money by the time she came. When she turned six years old, I didn't want to do the dishes anymore. I asked my mother if my sister could start doing the dishes, and my mother said, "No, she has to develop at her own rate." There was another message: if you have to be a woman, at least don't be the oldest one.

My mother devoted her life to taking care of others, and she trained me to do the same. It was like a script I had to follow. The playbill of life listed my role as girl who follows men around with a broom and a mop. It seemed like a bum deal, but every time I tried to wrestle my way out of it, someone came along waving the script in my face. Don't get any bright ideas, they'd say. Know your role.

Life under these conditions left no room for fantasy. "Look at where you come from," my mother would say, tethering me to reality. "Look at how you look, how you speak. This is the best you can hope for." To even acknowledge my needs and desires felt selfish and wrong.

Sometimes I'd see a crack in my mother's facade, a glimpse into her inner life with all its stunted desires and unused talents. In those rare glimpses, I sensed a mother's tenderness. One particular moment stands out. I was ten years old, it was the Saturday before Christmas, and she took me to lunch at Abraham & Straus, a high-end department store in Brooklyn. Walking past the toy department, I mooned over a stuffed Siamese cat in the display window. It must have cost about eight dollars — serious money back then — but I begged for it. My mother said, "I know you want it, but Christmas is coming and we can't afford it." I upped the ante, threatening to make a scene the way children do. She relented. God only knows what she must have sacrificed to buy that stuffed cat, but I cherished it. I still have it in my bedroom today.

Despite my mother's occasional shows of support, I felt no encouragement from the rest of my family. No one jerks you off in an Italian household. If I expressed any determination, any dreams or ambitions, I got smacked down. "You're too stupid," they'd say.

Life outside the house wasn't much better. One year my uncle took us to see Santa Claus in the old Daily News building on Forty-Second Street. Santa Claus asked what I wanted for Christmas. I said an Easy-Bake Oven. I knew I wasn't getting the oven. I just wanted to dream. He said, "I can't give that to you because you might burn yourself." Motherfucker, I thought. Even Santa Claus won't jerk me off.

Once or twice, my mother tried to warn me away from her life. She told me the most important job in life is being a mother, but she cautioned, "Don't do it unless you're prepared to give one hundred percent." She told me I could do better and I believed her.

At the same time, my own desires were crushed under insurmountable guilt. I learned to feel the guilt at home and had it drilled into my skull at Catholic school. Those Irish Catholic nuns didn't fuck around. They believed in an angry God and built their world around repression and retribution. These women never had a normal, healthy human impulse they didn't despise.

As an Italian girl in an Irish school, I was treated like low-rent riffraff. I...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: CHICAGO REVIEW PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0912777915
• ISBN 13: 9780912777917
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar