Herbie, adios...
blubbo
introduced such notables as the Mothers of Invention and Tom Waits
during the '60s and '70s, died Tuesday of unknown causes in Napa, CA.
He was 77.
After beginning his professional career as an L.A. club booker and
operator, Cohen branched into management in the mid-'60s. His biggest
clients were Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention, the outr? band that
became a top attraction in the Sunset Strip's venues.
After the Mothers released their initial albums on Verve, Cohen and
Zappa established their own imprints, Straight, Bizarre and Discreet.
The labels issued material by the Mothers and such off-the-wall,
Zappa-produced L.A. acts as Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band,
groupie unit the G.T.O.'s and itinerant songsmith Wild Man Fischer, as
well as singer-songwriter Tim Buckley, hard rock unit Alice Cooper and
comic Lenny Bruce. The partners' association collapsed amid an
exchange of lawsuits in 1976.
Cohen also handled beat-styled singer-songwriter Waits, who secured a
contract with David Geffen's Asylum Records in 1972. Years later,
Waits - whose long court docket matches Cohen's own -- sued Cohen over
publishing issues and what he claimed was the unauthorized release of
demos cut by his ex-manager. Last year, Cohen sued writer Barney
Hoskyns for libel, claiming statements in his biography of Waits were
false.
Cohen's survivors include his son, Beverly Hills entertainment
attorney and label owner Evan Cohen; his daughter, former LA Weekly
writer Belissa Cohen; and a granddaughter. (Christopher Morris)
Hoodoo
news, web, and blogs. The only mention of his death is within a Wiki
entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herb_Cohen but there is no
citation of a source for the death report.
Hoax?
blubbo <n...@home.com>, on Tue Mar 16 2010 21:27:54 GMT-0500 (Central
Daylight Time), spoke thusly:
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If Herbie be litigatin' with Frank up in heaven .. .
RIP. It's a long vacation.
Rollo
blubbo
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118016565.html?categoryid=25&cs=1&query=herb+cohen
Hoodoo
Daylight Time), spoke thusly:
> No hoax, I have better things to do with my (and your) time:
>
> http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118016565.html?categoryid=25&cs=1&query=herb+cohen
Thank you.
Without the link you have now provided, and no corroboration found via
Google searches, it seemed questionable that the report was factual.
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Mick Brown pays tribute to Herb Cohen, who managed Frank Zappa while
maintaining an enthusiasm for music, cheese, confectionery and armaments.
By Mick Brown
Published: 4:57PM GMT 19 Mar 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/7481931/Frank-Zappas-manager-A-smile-on-his-lips-and-a-pistol-under-the-bar.html
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01600/zappa_1600195c.jpg
Frank Zappa, who was managed by Herb Cohen
This has been a sad week for music fans. On Thursday it was announced
that Charlie Gillett, the broadcaster and author who did so much to
champion the cause of world music in Britain, had died following a long
illness. Alex Chilton, the American singer and musician whose cult
following went far beyond his meagre commercial success also died. And
then there was the passing at the age of 77 of Herb Cohen. Herb who?
Cohen’s was not a name known to the public at large, but his life
provides an intriguing footnote in music lore, as a manager of such
artists as Frank Zappa and Tom Waits, an impresario and a hustler - a
type once defined by Dr John as ‘a char-actor’ - that is completely
unknown in the corporate, blow-dried environment of the record business
of today.
Cohen came up in the 50s and 60s - a period when, as another music
business veteran Bob Krasnow put it, it was "a tough business, and you
had to be tough. You had to be funny too, because everybody was tough.
So, you could lighten up the slap on the hand when they didn’t pay you
on time - because nobody paid you on time". ‘Herbie’, as he was
universally known, was tough, funny - and. it has to be said, a
notoriously slow payer. He was a man who was deeply loved by virtually
everyone except those he did business with - a number of whom ended up
suing him.
Cohen, whom one contemporary described as resembling "a bearded
fire-hydrant", was born in the South Bronx, and had been a marine, a
fireman and discharged from the US army as "incompatible", before
arriving in the early 1950s in Los Angeles.
He moved into the nascent folk-music scene, running nightclubs including
one, Cosmo Alley, which had the distinction of being busted for
obscenity during a performance by the scabrous comedian Lenny Bruce.
Cohen had an enthusiasm for music, cheese, confectionery and armaments.
He kept a pistol under the bar in his clubs, and it was said that he
would drive around Los Angeles with a box of hand-grenades in his car.
When, in the late 50s, he took a sabbatical from the music business,
rumours circulated that he had been fighting as a mercenary in South
America and supplying arms for the Congolese revolutionary leader
Patrice Lumumba.
"I don’t know whether Herbie ever dangled people out of windows", one
acquaintance remembers. "But he was certainly somebody who asserted
himself..."
Returning to Los Angeles, Cohen went on to manage Frank Zappa (who once
described him as "a little Jewish man that nobody likes who always wears
nylon shirts"), Captain Beefheart, and Tim Buckley, and to set up the
labels Straight and Bizarre whose artists also included a deranged
street singer "Wild Man" Fischer and a group made up entirely of
groupies, The GTOs. Cohen seemed almost wilfully to resist managing
anyone that might have smelled of mainstream commercial success, arguing
that he would have found that "boring".
Perhaps his most distinguished discovery was Tom Waits. I remember Waits
once telling me how he had first met Cohen in 1971, when Waits was
performing at the Troubador folk club in Los Angeles. "Herbie was
outside on the side-walk exposing himself", Waits remembered. "Actually,
it was so cold he was just describing himself..."
Cohen would remember it differently, telling Waits’s biographer Barney
Hoskyns "I was on my way to the toilet when I heard Tom sing. When I
came out of the toilet I asked him what he was doing and he said
'Nothing', so I signed him up."
Like virtually all Cohen’s business relationships, it ended in tears.
But possibly the most bizarre case in which he was involved was a
dispute over the ownership of a set of plaster mouldings of rock stars’
penises.
The mouldings had been done by Cynthia Plaster Caster, who in the 1960s
pursued a singular artistic vocation of making "anatomically precise’
casts of rock stars" genitalia. In the 90s, Cynthia sued Cohen for the
recovery of 25 casts, of figures including Jimi Hendrix and - oddly -
the Broadway singer and Joan Collins’ former husband Anthony Newley,
that Cynthia claimed she had asked Cohen to look after following a
burglary at her home.
Cohen claimed that he acquired ownership rights in the 1970s following a
legal dispute with Frank Zappa, and that the orginal cast had been
‘lost’ after he had mounted bronze and silver copies of them on wooden
pedestals.
Cohen, who married twice, took a robustly unreconstructed view of gender
politics. The "ideal wife", he once argued, was "a beauty queen from
Playboy who spoke no known language, ever."
"Herbie was a true gentleman", David Apps, the music business agent and
a long-time friend of Cohen, told me when I spoke to him this week. Apps
first met Cohen in 1968, when Frank Zappa performed at the Royal Albert
Hall. Following the concert, Apps remembers, Cohen decided to travel to
Istanbul, where he rented a car which he then drove across Europe to
Paris. He arrived back in London with the car keys still in his pocket.
"He couldn’t remember where he’d parked it".
As far as Apps is aware, the car was never recovered. And Cynthia still
wants her penises back.
[Amusing content interspersed within the article text:]
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/men_shealth/5351083/Why-men-look-to-their-mothers-for-approval.html
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Combative label boss and manager of Frank Zappa and Tom Waits
Rob Hughes
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 1 April 2010 18.46 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/apr/01/herb-cohen-obituary
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2010/4/1/1270143960660/herb-cohen-001.jpg
Cohen, left, with Frank Zappa and Tom Wilson, musical manager of Mothers
of Invention, in 1967 Photograph: John Hodder
Herb Cohen, who has died aged 77 of complications from cancer, did not
elicit much affection from the artists he managed, but he played a
pivotal role in shaping the music of the Californian counterculture in
the 1960s and early 70s. His most notorious relationship was with Frank
Zappa, with whom he co-founded several record labels before they parted
company amid a flurry of lawsuits.
Cohen was born into a family of New Yorkers, and his initial ambition
was to join the military. After a brief stint in the army in 1952, he
moved to Los Angeles, where he began running coffee bars and folk clubs
such as the Unicorn and Cosmo Alley. Among the first events he promoted
in the late 1950s and early 60s were concerts for the folk icons Pete
Seeger and Odetta. His big break into artist management came in 1965,
when he saw the avant-garde outfit the Muthers, led by Zappa, in an LA club.
Cohen immediately offered them a deal, organised a residency at the
city's premier rock club, the Whisky a Go Go, and set about securing a
record contract under their amended name, the Mothers of Invention.
Their satirical debut Freak Out! (1966), a mess of dadaist psychedelia,
made Zappa an instant hero of the west coast demi-monde. Cohen himself
was listed on the record sleeve as one of those who "have contributed
materially in many ways to make our music what it is. Please do not hold
it against them." He is also credited as "playing cash register" on the
following year's Absolutely Free and featured on the cover, pastiching
Sgt Pepper, of We're Only in It for the Money (1968).
Cohen's other discoveries included the singer Tim Buckley, whom he first
met at an LA club called the Trip in July 1966. He promptly booked the
19-year-old into the Night Owl Café in New York and alerted the Elektra
label boss, Jac Holzman. "Herb called to tell me that he had a new
artist and that he was sending us, and no one else, a demo disc with
about six songs on it," Holzman later recalled. "I didn't have to play
the demo more than once." Buckley's Elektra debut arrived three months
later. Cohen also managed Linda Ronstadt and the comedian Lenny Bruce.
In 1968, Cohen and Zappa formed the Straight and Bizarre labels, with
the intention of nurturing LA's more outre musical talent. A key release
was Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band's 1969 masterpiece, Trout Mask
Replica, which fused zero-gravity jazz with surreal blues. Cohen was
startled during recording when Beefheart, aka the eccentric Don van
Vliet, landed him an $800 expenses bill for a tree surgeon. Van Vliet
had apparently feared that the band's music would frighten or damage the
trees outside the studio. The Cohen-Zappa axis also funded records by
the GTOs, Ted Nugent, Wild Man Fischer and the then unknown Alice Cooper.
But Cohen's ruthless streak, hidden behind an affable exterior, drew the
wrath of several of his charges. The producer Jerry Yester remembered
him as "a lot scarier than people would think", the GTOs' Pamela Des
Barres claimed Cohen never cared for the music and Van Vliet, in a
typically elliptical putdown, said he resembled "a red marble in a can
of lard".
Tricky relations with Zappa came to a head in 1977, when Zappa claimed
that Cohen and his lawyer brother Mutt were skimming off his earnings
and helping themselves to holidays with the profits. He wrote Mo 'n
Herb's Vacation as a riposte, before stinging Cohen and the distributor
Warner Bros for $10m. Cohen countersued, claiming that Zappa had
bypassed their new label, DiscReet, and taken his album Zoot Allures
straight to Warners.
By then, Cohen's main focus was the beat-styled songwriter he had met at
the Troubadour club in Los Angeles in 1971, Tom Waits. Waits's first
demos had been recorded for Straight/Bizarre (later issued as The Early
Years I & II), and Cohen had helped secure him a deal with Asylum. But
again, the pair also fell out and in 1993, Waits successfully sued Cohen
for allowing two of his songs from a 1980 album, Ruby's Arms and the
title track Heartattack and Vine, to be used in television advertisements.
That year Cohen founded Manifesto Records, which has since released
early recordings of Buckley and Waits, as well as albums by the Wedding
Present and Concrete Blonde. A year ago, he filed a $1m lawsuit against
the writer Barney Hoskyns over allegations made in his biography of
Waits, Lowside of the Road.
Cohen is survived by his wife Elizabeth, and their daughters, Lisa and
Tamurlane.
• Herbert Cohen, record label owner, music publisher and manager, born
30 December 1932; died 16 March 2010
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