New Rock on a Red-Hot Roll

By J.D. Reed

Sizzling sales have record execs dancin' in the suites

By any standards the summer is a knockout. After four years of slumping sales and stagnating sounds, the pop music industry is once again experiencing a welcome artistic and financial bonanza, one that is making this rock 'n' roll's headiest season of the decade. Says Gil Friesen, president of A&M Records: "People are buying so many albums by new artists, it adds up to a new passion."

The fervor is big business. If the beat continues, record and tape sales will soar some 10% over last year's total of $3.6 billion. Soul Rocker Michael Jackson's No. 1 Thriller may sell 9 million copies by the end of the year. David Bowie's Let's Dance has moved 1 million in just three months, and Synchronicity, the latest album by the Police, has sold 2 million in less than a month.

From 1979 until just a few months ago, many of the ten-to 24-year-olds, who buy 44% of all pop records and tapes, were spending their money in video arcades instead of the stores. Arcade revenues have flattened out, but the music industry has also suffered from rising production costs, huge long-term artists' contracts and an estimated $1 billion in revenues lost to home made recordings on cassette tapes each year. The result: 150 million fewer records and tapes were shipped last year than in the industry's peak year, 1978.

Now a diverse but irresistible mix of sounds had brought the kids back not only to the record racks, but to the clubs and the concerts as well. New Music, a blend of soul, rock, reggae and disco set to a synthesized, whipcrack beat, has them buying and dancing again. The robotic rhythms are not a return to the polyester fever of disco, however. "Disco's out," says Arista Records President Clive Davis, "but dancing isn't."

New Music, by stars like post-punk Adam Ant (Goody Two Shoes) and Boy George (Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?), unknown to most people over 30, is moving millions of adolescent feet. Indeed, all pop music, from heavy metal to soul, is sharing in the revival. Poly-Gram Records Executive Jack Kiernan notes that the recording studios are booked solid again, a sign of long-term stability. Says he: "We're spending for the future."

Why is it happening? One place to ask is your local cable company. Seven days a week, 24 hours a day, MTV, the two-year-old Warner Amex channel, beams rock-'n'-roll videotapes into 14 million homes across the nation. The tapes, from established stars like the Rolling Stones to hopefuls like the Fixx, are offered free by recording companies in return for air play. Their impact has gone far beyond promotional gimmickry. Says PolyGram's Kiernan, whose group Def Leppard went platinum after TV exposure: "You can feel the sales right away."

Costing an average $35,000 to produce, the three-to five-minute clips on Music Television were originally little more than lip-synched concert or studio bits. Now they accompany almost every album and are often mini-epics. Michael Jackson's Beat It is a $150,000, five-minute West Side Story, in which the singer flashdances through a cast of 80 gang members (most of them real Los Angeles street dudes) and 60 scenes to avert a showdown.

Jackson's tape almost did not make the air, providing New Music with its first real controversy. Top black stars like Soul Singer Marvin Gaye and Funk Punk Rick James do not appear on MTV. The network claims that music, not skin tone, dictates air play: rock 'n' roll, not soul. Nonetheless, CBS/Records Group President Walter Yetnikoff reportedly threatened to pull his company's videos (including platinum groups Men at Work and Toto) off the channel unless MTV played Jackson. Still, Clive Davis says, "the current concession is tokenism."

The question of who gets on playlist matters, because videos have become all but compulsory for rock groups hoping to go gold. Robbie Grey of Modern English thinks MTV has exposed exotic groups to nationwide audiences. Says he: "There was a rea big buzz about us in places like Baton Rouge, La., and Lincoln, Neb. The band Journey sold a whopping 6 million copies of its last album Escape, without any clips, but it has made three for its current Frontiers anyway. Says Drummer Steve Smith: "We feel it's necessary just to be part of what's going on." The form also attracts talented directors who like to experiment with it. TV Commercial Specialist Bob Giraldi (Miller Lite, McDonald's) masterminded Beat It. Director Jay Dubin (Sony, Care-Free gum) is filming Billy Joel in a high-budget series of clips, including a variety-show spoof co-starring Model Christie Brinkley. Dubin wants to keep his micromovies lighthearted. Says he: "A lot of the clips are too heavy and self-indulgent." Performance Artist Laurie Anderson thinks that rock video is potentially exciting, but notes, "Much of it is just boys playing the guitar on the roof, boys playing the guitar in the shower. It's redundant."

Even though MTV may end this year several million dollars in the red, the experiment should eventually pay off. The channel now boasts four times as many commercials as it had last year. And there is already a growing flock of imitators. NBC will air Friday Night Videos, a 90-minute rock-tape fest starting later this month, and HBO now has Video Jukebox "LP." The Nashville Network is offering its 7 million subscribers videos of Conway Twitty, Barbara Mandrell and other country-and-western stars. Black Entertainment Television will program six weekly hours of soul and reggae clips. The Playboy Channel has a predictably unzipped approach to rock 'n' roll. Plans now include Banned in Britain (tapes the BBC would not air) and mildly steamy footage of a From Here to Eternity-style beach scene in Bowie's China Girl, expurgated for MTV censors.

Radio, in the form of the 300 album-oriented rock FM stations (AORS) across the country, is still more important to the industry than all of the cable companies combined. Record executives consider it by far the most powerful selling medium. In the late '70s, AOR stations had developed bland, unimaginative formats, courting affluent older listeners with golden oldies like Jethro Tull and the Doors. The play-it-safe programming stifled new sounds and new sales. Says Songwriter-Bassist John Crawford of the pop group Berlin: "Radio kept playing Stairway to Heaven [the decade-old Led Zeppelin tune]. Everybody already had that album. They weren't going to buy it again."

In 1979, the debt-ridden and desperate KROQ in Pasadena, Calif., broke the bland playlist. Its new format: then unknown bands like Britain's Duran Duran and the rockabilly Stray Cats (both now megagroups). The reversal was quick. When Berlin's Pleasure Victim played on the station, a surprising 25,000 copies were sold locally. Now KROQ is the No. 1 rock station in the large Los Angeles radio market. Says then Program Director Rick Carroll, who now advises ten other stations on strategy: "I sensed that there was a big audience out there looking for something of their own. Music just didn't have the excitement of the early '60s." This year Atlanta-based Consultant Lee Abrams, a czar of AOR programming, began feeding his 75 client stations a completely revised "Superstars" format, opening it up to unknown artists. Says Steve Leeds, an MCA talent director: "People have gone from artist orientation to song orientation. They hear a song and buy it without caring who the artist is, and the business thrives on breaking in new acts."

Television and radio have created a demand for rockers in the flesh. After three miserable seasons, the concert business is thriving again. The Police, who four years ago played to seven people in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., will perform before 1 million fans this summer in 30 U.S. cities. They sold out New York's Shea Stadium in just five hours for an August concert. Frontier Booking, New Music's hottest agency, will put 20 bands on the road this summer, twice as many as last year. The Liverpool group A Flock of Seagulls, for instance, arrived last year planning to give just a dozen concerts, and wound up touring for six months.

Dance clubs are jumping skyhigh. From New York's Ritz to Madame Wong's West in Los Angeles, the dead discos have been displaced. Gone are the glitterballs, replaced by giant video screens. Their new music? Ringing cash registers and everything from rap music to technopop. The First Avenue club in Minneapolis, for instance, attracts up to 1,200 patrons each night to its multilevel cavern of stages and dance floors, plus four giant screens and 15 video monitors integrated with computer graphics. A good club disc jockey keeps well ahead of radio, dropping a record when it starts getting air play. Says Deejay Roy Freedom: "The club is an escape. People want to hear something that's not on the car radio."

For home listening, the record industry has helped itself by developing a number of low-priced alternatives to $8.98 albums. The mini-LP ($4.49) contain-about five rather than ten songs, and introduces new groups like Scandal, who might have been bypassed on a full-price album. The 12-in. single ($3.49), an extended version of the standard 45-r.p.m. disc remixed with extra instrumental riffs for dancing, can sell as many as 200,000 units extra for every million-selling hit. Deejay John ("Jellybean") Benitez, 25, of Manhattan's Fun House, is so accomplished at remixing hits for club use that his version of Far from Over, the single from the just released Staying Alive sound track, has been made the official one by RSO Records. He stretches the song by moving segments of it around and expanding the tonal range so that there are more deep-bass and high-register sounds. The result is a more spacious and physical experience on the dance floor. Says Jellybean: "Before, it seemed like a record just got started, and before you could dance, it was over."

In New York last week, a seminar on the New Music drew 3,000 registrants, triple last year's attendance, when the sounds were still percolating in urban clubs. Along with performers sporting exploded haircuts, leather earrings and unisex makeup, the execs celebrated rock's sizzling summer with predictions about an even more lucrative fall. Said Organizer Tom Silverman of independent Tommy Boy Records: "People are all psyched up here. It's a changing of the guard. Instead of preaching, even the white-beards are listening." What they are hearing right now is bound to keep their toes, and their calculators, tapping to the beat.

--By J.D. Reed. Reported by Stephen Koepp/New York and Alessandra Stanley/Los Angeles

With reporting by Stephen Koepp, Alessandra Stanley This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.