New Day at Black Rock

The mood was tense as Columbia Records' annual sales meeting got under way last September in San Francisco. Columbia had recently been rocked to its storage bins by the firing of its adroit, youthful (41) president, Clive Davis, on grounds of improperly diverting corporate funds to personal uses. Fears of a scandal concerning "drugola"--the alleged currying of favor by supplying acid, pot and cocaine to rock groups and disc jockeys--hung over the entire industry, Columbia included. When Davis' successor strode to the podium and began his remarks by quipping: "A funny thing happened to me on my way to retirement," everyone laughed--but not too hard. If there was one person who could clean Columbia's house quickly and thoroughly, and in the process give it new life, it was Goddard Lieberson, 62, the man who during the late 1950s and early '60s pushed it to the top in the first place.

Since 1967, when he stepped aside for his protege Davis, Lieberson had been toiling in the highest echelons of CBS, Columbia's parent organization, as a senior vice president. Now back in his old territory, he was somewhat appalled. If the record business had finally nosed past the movies as the biggest entertainment medium in the U.S., it had also begun to tilt dangerously out of control. "I came back," says Lieberson, "because I didn't want to see something I'd been building for 25 years go down the drain."

Surprisingly, drugola did not seem to be the central problem. Vestiges of the drug-oriented youth culture of the late '60s linger on in the rock world. But so far there is little likelihood of a scandal approaching the scope of the payola debacle of the '50s. A federal grand jury in Newark is investigating the matter, but is reported to be months away from any conclusions or possible indictments.

What did worry Lieberson right at the start was the shortage of vinyl now beginning to hit the industry hard. Vinyl, known in the trade as PVC (polyvinyl chloride), is the chemical byproduct of crude oil from which records are made. As a result of oil shortages, Columbia has been forced to suspend its $1.98 Harmony pop label; it also trimmed its November output by postponing several releases until 1974. In general, the industry will probably have to opt for greater selectivity in its releases--or, as Lieberson puts it, "an end to buckshotting--throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks."

High Bidding. Lieberson was also concerned that the record world seemed to be "drinking that fatal glass of beer" that many movie studios had taken--a switch in emphasis from artistic control to mere entrepreneurism. Like other large record companies, Columbia under Davis had moved more and more into the distributorship of smaller labels (Stax, Philadelphia International, Monument), more and more into high bidding for established stars (Neil Diamond and Laura Nyro for multimillion dollar deals) and less into its own experimentation and development of talent.

Lieberson's response has been a subtle reassertion of the record company's authority and artistic conscience, largely through the tone, personality and authority of his own presence. "I don't doubt that there were times when record companies exploited artists," he says, "but it had come to the point where the artists were exploiting the record companies." The first to get the word was Bob Dylan. One of the label's superstars for more than a decade, Dylan came up for contract renewal last month and found that he could no longer write his own ticket. He has now signed with David Geffen of Elektra/Asylum.

One of Lieberson's first moves after taking over was to give a push to an already conceived twelve-LP package devoted entirely to black composers from the 18th century to the present. Further, Columbia's February release will feature new American music by Leon Kirchner, George Crumb and Morton Subotnick. Lieberson has also given the green light to record everything ever written by Charles Ives.

In pop, Lieberson has done far less, but far less has been needed. With such steady sellers as Loggins and Messina (rock), Charlie Rich (country) and Billy Paul (soul), Columbia had 24 LPs in 1973 that reached $1,000,000 in sales.

Born in England, raised in Seattle, Lieberson settled in New York to write music, hobnob with composers like Ives and Henry Cowell and write irreverent music criticism for the now defunct magazine Modern Music. After signing on with Columbia Masterworks in 1939 as second in command, he made one of his first projects the first recording of Pierrot Lunaire with the composer Arnold Schoenberg conducting. It was something that only an ex-composer would have fought for. The album bombed financially on 78 r.p.m., but finally made back the investment when transferred to LP a decade later.

On Top. The success of the original-cast album of South Pacific, produced by Lieberson in 1949, gave Columbia's new long-playing record the commercial push it badly needed. It also paved the way for a hugely profitable succession of similar ventures, such as My Fair Lady and Sound of Music.

In the 1950s, he kept up a steady reissue of such jazz greats as Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke and Bessie Smith, and brought in Mitch Miller to manage the company's middle-of-the-road pop line. In the early 1960s, as Lieberson is fond of pointing out, he helped usher in the rock era by signing Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel and the Byrds.

A trim, aristocratic-looking man, Lieberson still walks each morning from his town house on Manhattan's East Side to his office in CBS'S dark gray stone skyscraper (known to employees as the Black Rock); he still finds time for tennis and doodling on an unfinished violin concerto, still entertains such friends as the Leonard Bernsteins, Richard Rodgerses and Dick Cavetts. He frequently gets away with his wife of 27 years, Ballerina Vera Zorina, for long weekends at their second home in Santa Fe, N. Mex.

But he has already created what Classical Records Co-Director Thomas Shepard calls "a different feeling on top." Lieberson feels that if Columbia is going to experiment and take chances, as it has frequently in the rock area ("And not all rock groups make money, I assure you"), it should be willing to do the same thing in the classics. "The moment we stop being able to do that is the moment that I stop wanting to be a part of this business."

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