Customer Reviews

Exploding: The Highs, Hits, Hype, Heroes, and Hustlers of the Warner Music Group

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"Exploding is populated by music stars like Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Lil' Kim, Dr. Dre, the Grateful Dead, Queen, Madonna, Ice-T, Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa, Neil Young, Alice Cooper, and dozens more".

Yeah? Where?

The artists are merely footnotes in this saga; weirdos to be tolerated (barely) and joked about. I spent a lot of money on this tome hoping to read about some of them. Instead I got 450 pages of business talk with about 4500 witticisms to amuse and confuse.

At least I found out why their awesome back catalogue has shamefully been left to earn whatever dollars it can in crappy 80's CD output (in the main) while other labels remaster properly and expand on their reissues - Warners just don't give a damn.

Won't be reading it again, I assure you.

"Exploding" not only gives a very thorough and complete historical structure of how Warner Bros. became a film and music leader, but gives outsiders the intense understanding of what the "insiders" were dealing with, when the company and the music industry went through the myriad changes of the 20th century.It's a time-line saga and sensory experience of all that the Warner Music business was and later became. The book gives readers both funny, poignant and enlightening glimpses into the key players and other personalities of the Warner Music Group, and describes how the rock industry's stars rose and fel. After working in the music industry for many years, I learned even more than I ever previously knew about how WB began and evolved. From mostly behind the scenes and through mainly a mere few "big-wigs" the cards were dealt or held for many future careers at the WB family of labels. Musicians, songwriters, radio and record neophytes could learn alot from reading this book. Industry veterans will enjoy the trips down memory lane, and ultimately, be carried along it's emotional currents. Coryn's writing is witty and he gets to his well-crafted points with style and substance. After dozens of years working deep in the creative trenches as the changes occured, he is well-suited to tell the tales, both bitter and sweet.

then you will definitely find this worth your time.

I've been in the record biz for the last ten years and got an awful lot out of reading this - it tells the business story in an entertaining manner - it's about the personalities behind the music, but not as much about the hype (as much as it's possible to take hype out of anything about the entertainment industry).

now with the record biz in a rough spell is a particularly timely point to put your book out - the perspective of this book (which covers about 40 years quite well) is well needed.

I especially liked the focus on the business end, all the numbers, the annual growth, etc. This is the rare (only?) record biz tale that really gets to the bottom of how records get out there and in the public's hands - the nuts and bolts like NARM conventions and less emphasis on A&R stories than in most books about the biz (yet it's still a great tale of personalities).

It's up there with Hit Men, definitely.

LET ME 'fess up. This is a book I would kill to have written.
It's a book I've been saying should be written for the last
ten years a book, a huge book, about possibly the hippest,
bravest, most nurturing record company rock'n'roll ever spawned. Now Stan Cornyn, a Warners "insider's insider" if ever there was one, has gone and done it with help from smart Rolling Stone vet Paul Scanlon.

"The really important factor was that we were a younger company than Columbia," Cornyn said when I interviewed him in 1993. "We weren't structured so tightly that we couldn't bend."

Bend Warner Brothers did or at least Warner Bros. and Reprise Records,under the inspiring helmsmanship of sometime Sinatra accountant Morris "Mo"Ostin and Boston disc-jock Joe Smith. For a golden half-decade, roughly 1967-1972, Warner-Reprise was the ultimate haven for the crème of the talent pouring out of (and into) the canyons of Southern California. Between 'em, Mo'n'Joe bagged the signatures of Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young,Randy Newman, Joni Mitchell, Ry Cooder, Fleetwood Mac, Van Morrison, James Taylor, Frank Zappa, Little Feat, Van Dyke Parks and on and on and on. Cornyn calls that "a spurt of prescience heretofore unknown in the record business". Frankly, it's hard to argue.

Warner-Reprise didn't do too badly either side of those halcyon five years, of course: from the Everlys to REM, Ostin and Smith green-lit signings that helped the WM Group shift gazillions of albums. But that heady turn-of-the-decade stretch, full of bold impulses and daring risks, is the guarantor of Warners' place in the history tomes.

It's also why Exploding is as much a lament a "They Don't Make 'Em Like That Anymore" about record execs as it is a racy, fact-packed narrative about company politicking. Like Cornyn, the Creative Services ace who conjured up mad as for the emerging underground press ("Win a Dream Date With the Fugs", "the Pigpen Lookalike Contest"), Mo'n'Joe 'n Lenny Waronker, and others like them cared deeply about talent. And the talent,generally, cared about them.

Don't get me wrong: Stan's yarn is first'n'foremost about players,workaholic Jews jockeying for position in worlds of fast deals and loaded stock options. Stan, a token Burbank goy, is as besotted by the greed and manoeuvring of the David Geffens and Bob Krasnows as he is by the talent-rich rosters of Warner-Reprise, Atlantic, Elektra and the other labels woven into the WM fold. Written in prose that's at once manic and
jovial and with both eyes on a Vanity Fair serialisation Exploding contains swathes of detail about money, sales, executive toilets and, above all, who reported to whom. If you want to read about Joni'n'James and all the other ladies'n'gents of the Canyon, you may be better off elsewhere.

If, on the other hand, you dig sweeping accounts of musical empires, and you loved Hit Men and The Mansion on the Hill, get your teeth into Cornyn, whose sardonically honest take on the vanity, megalomania and brilliance of the key dramatis personae from Ahmet Ertegun and Jac Holzman to Steve Ross and Seymour Stein is never less than entertaining and nearly always affectionate. ("There are the shrewd," he writes nicely, "and then there are the shrewder.")

Cornyn, retired for several years and living the sweet life in Santa Barbara, says he still talks to people at Warners. "Stan, it's just not like it was," they sigh to him. "Now it's just about money and covering your [rear]."

Once 'pon a time, it was about money, covering your [rear] and making astonishing music. Who's to say it couldn't still be?

At age 44, and with an album collection of over 400 LP's, I have been an avid music fan since age 10, as a wide-eyed, curious kid in 1968. I have always wondered just how the record industry worked, besides what I have learned over the years. Stan Cornyn's new novel "Exploding", is everything I could have asked for and then some! This book is very well written, concise, and stuffed full of details only an insider such as Stan Cornyn would know. This book had me turning pages late at night as I felt like a confidant to Cornyn, in that this book was written for me personally. I am a huge fan of 70's music, and what went on during this era at Warner / Reprise was simply unbeleivable, author Stan Cornyn will take you on a rollercoaster ride of this crazy time in the Record Industry, as well as American History, and how music is the bridge that connects it all. I highly recommend this book to all serious music fans. Now, whenever I play an album with the Warner Brothers label, I see much more than "just" a label, thanks to a brillantly written book by Stan Cornyn. Well done, this was money well spent for me, I learned a lot about music and record companies, as well as being entertained and amused with each page I read. Excellent work, Mr. Cornyn!

Stan Cornyn should know all about hustlers. He took the art to a new low, and this book barely scratches the surface. It was Stan Cornyn who, in early January 1976, frisbeed a copy of my single "Friendly Neighborhood Narco Agent" across his office, and declared to Dr. Demento's manager, Larry Gordon, "You don't expect me to push this turkey, do you?"

"This turkey," which Warner Bros had secured from me for the "Dr. Demento's Delights" LP in late 1975, had been a consistent #1 hit on Demento's syndicated radio show for a year. The song received over 50 percent of the "Delights" album's airplay, and was responsible for pulling the LP into Billboard's Top 200. I sold 5000 indie singles myself before signing the deal with Warner. But when it came to picking up my album option and promoting "Narco Agent" as a single, Cornyn finally came out his closet. He and his A&R accomplice Pete Johnson told Gordon, "We're not interested in him, we hate his song, we're embarrassed to have it on our label, and we never had any intention of picking up his album option. Tell him, don't even bother coming by." For the rest of the story, see www.eljefe.net/fnnafaq.html.

Stan Cornyn's claim to fame is how many people he screwed. Now he admits it in print, and gets to bore us with the details. Been there, seen it the first time around. Don't waste your money.

EDITOR'S CHOICE

Long-in-the-tooth music fans may remember those flippantly
hilarious print ads Warner Bros. Records and its sister label
Reprise used to run in the late '60s/early '70s. You could win a
dream date with one of the plug-uglies in the Fugs, enter a
Pigpen look-alike contest, or score a double-LP sampler for two
bucks. Those campaigns were created by Stan Cornyn, a
30-plus-year Warner vet who, with Paul Scanlon, has just written
Exploding: The Highs, Hits, Hype, Heroes, and Hustlers of the
Warner Music Group (HarperCollins, $ 39.95). Beginning with movie
mogul Jack Warner's decision to enter the music biz in 1958, the
book presents an insider account of the company's history. As
fly-on-the-wall tomes go, Exploding rates five flies, thanks to
its plethora of dish about machers like Frank Sinatra, Ahmet
Ertegun, and David Geffen. Cornyn's prose is laced with his
trademark barbed wit, which is so penetrating it pulls you
through the dull passages about warehousing and distribution.
The music biz may not be what it once was, but thank God Cornyn
escaped with his irreverence intact. A- --Tom Sinclair

...music and the people who create it, or music executives and the deals they grind out?

If you answered the latter, this book is for you. If you answered the former, you will be exasperatingly disappointed by this book.

Good writing, tedious content.

Not only is this a wonderful and ambitious book by Cornyn & Scanlon, but it is also a great tool for young musicians because this book takes the mystery out of the record business. Cornyn has a wonderful appreciation for great stories, but he's also bright and is able to recount the stories behind the signings of artists and the whys in great detail. He also captures the energy and team effort of all of those Powers-That-Be (Were) at Warners because it was for the love of the music.
The turning point in the book is when after an exhaustive 8-10 hr meeting about sales units, how to change the corporate structure Cornyn got into this car to drive home and realized that during the whole 8 - 10 hr meeting, no one mentioned music. These guys were from the streets and got into the industry because of their passion for music.

The pace of the book is terrific, starts at the biginning of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Studio, builds up to the peak, then the reader is slowly let down when Cornyn starts talking numbers instead of artists.

It's a fun ride thru the "inside track"....enjoy!

This book is one long ego trip by the author. That's all I have to say.