The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head-on Collision of Rock and Commerce [Paperback]

Fred Goodman (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 31, 1998

In 1964, on the brink of the British Invasion, the music business in America shunned rock and roll. There was no rock press, no such thing as artist management -- literally no rock-and-roll business. Today the industry will gross over $20 billion. How did this change happen?

From the moment Pete Seeger tried to cut the power at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival debut of Bob Dylan's electric band, rock's cultural influence and business potential have been grasped by a rare assortment of ambitious and farsighted musicians and businessmen. Jon Landau took calls from legendary producer Jerry Wexler in his Brandeis dorm room and went on to orchestrate Bruce Springsteen's career. Albert Grossman's cold-eyed assessment of the financial power at his clients' fingertips made him the first rock manager to blaze the trail that David Geffen transformed into a superhighway. Dylan's uncanny ability to keep his manipulation of the business separate from his art and reputation prefigured the savvy -- and increasingly cynical -- professionalism of groups like the Eagles.

Fred Goodman, a longtime rock critic and journalist, digs into the contradictions and ambiguities of a generation that spurned and sought success with equal fervor. The Mansion on the Hill, named after a song title used by Hank Williams, Neil Young, and Bruce Springsteen, breaks new ground in our understanding of the people and forces that have shaped the music.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If you wanted to write the definitive history of rock music, you'd need three things: a deep appreciation of the music, an understanding of business, and a journalist's skills and instincts. Fred Goodman has all three, and The Mansion on the Hill is a must-read for anyone interested in how a counter-cultural phenomenon with moral overtones became--in a mere thirty years--a multibillion-dollar business. Goodman, a former editor at Rolling Stone, traces the arc of this weird transformation by focusing principally on the stories of a handful of key artists and their managers--Bob Dylan and Albert Grossman, Neil Young and David Geffen, and Bruce Springsteen and Jon Landau--but the book is richly populated with others, famous and not-so-famous. Goodman makes good use of his extensive research (he conducted 200 interviews over three years), and admirably balances reportorial analysis with a certain passion for the values that rock music once stood for--and sometimes still does. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Fans shocked by Bob Dylan's nonreaction to a bank's using "The Times They Are A-Changin'" as an ad jingle have their worst fears confirmed by Goodman's screed on the co-opting of Woodstock nation's music. Taking his title from separate songs by Hank Williams (senior, and barely mentioned), Neil Young, and Bruce Springsteen, Goodman examines how a music marketed for its antiestablishment stance became mere product in the hands of hip capitalists like Jon Landau and David Geffen. Ex^-Rolling Stone editor and reviewer Landau is portrayed as an operator unconcerned with niceties like conflict of interest, such as reviewing records by musicians with whom he was financially involved, in his pursuit of pelf. This should not surprise us about big-time entertainment, of course, and Goodman just underscores how a pop music that arose from the left-wing, anticapitalist American folk scene was merchandised and hyped until it became what it originally reacted against: the boring, unimaginative mainstream. Good book, sad story, and excellent companion to Selvin's Summer of Love (1994). Mike Tribby --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; First Edition edition (March 31, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679743774
• ISBN-13: 978-0679743774
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.9 x 7.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #176,435 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #93 in Books > Arts & Photography > Music > Business

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The rock business is even worse than you think December 22, 2002

By David Field VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

I bought this book because I was mildly interested but before long I was sucked into the tale about how the money talked louder than any musician's ability.

This is story of how several clever people took the talent-driven music of the mid to late sixties and gradually turned this into a money-driven enterprise where all the artist needed to do was keep the gullible public into believing that "it's all about the music, man!"

The book covers some of the major players like Bruce Springsteen's manager, Jon Landau, and record mogul David Geffen, along with the artists they were involved with like Dylan, Neil Young, the Eagles, and plenty more. The book shows how the industry evolved from Warner Brothers execs (in WB blazers) signing the Grateful Dead (and being scared to death of being given LSD) - to the CBS policy of the mid-eighties of taking acts that the company wanted to succeed and have them make a few low-selling albums and play live gigs so they would have more credibility with record buyers.

The execs were every bit as exotic as the artists they represented, and thought nothing about double-dipping their clients' earnings even though they were already assured of millions. I was astounded to learn that at the height of the Eagles' success they went out on tour and got NINETY-SEVEN AND A HALF PERCENT of the receipts, leaving the venue with just two and half percent.

Essential reading for anyone interested in the music industry, especially people trying to break into the scene. Check your integrity at the door, because it will just be an impediment otherwise.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars The sharks enter the lagoon March 24, 2008

By John L Murphy TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

The year of Springsteen's commercial peak, 1985, Dylan's quoted by Goodman: "If you want to defeat your enemy, sing his song." (351-2) This narrative history by Goodman does not, as some previous readers appear to have expected, give you in-depth studies of the music or the lives of Springsteen, Dylan, Neil Young, although these three singers share the subtitle with Geffen. It's about the business, not the music itself.

Instead, this study focuses on such men as the managers and handlers who prospered along with their clients: Dylan's Albert Grossman, Springsteen's Jon Landau, Dee Anthony with Peter Frampton and Humble Pie, Irv Azoff vs. Geffen with the Eagles, and of course Geffen himself as the main character throughout, morphing from agent and advisor to owner of a label with Young and the Eagles and CSNY & Joni Mitchell and Nirvana and dozens of other artists. I found many of the blow-by-blow deal making accounts necessary but rather dull. It's difficult, on the other hand, to provide a thorough treatment of the business that makes music without such details. So, some readers may be engrossed by the complex litigation around Mike Appel vs. Springsteen and Landau, or how Grossman played off the industry differently than Geffen. The author shows his talent in charting the rise of the capitalist behemoth that crushed the fragile naivete of the counterculture. "The shark entered the lagoon"-- as Ned Doheny puts it. Geffen comes to L.A. as the 1970s begin, and the business overtakes the music.

The Eagles and then the Boss, in different poses and for different reasons, appear to be the prime motivators here for getting from coffeehouses and bars to arenas and mansions in Malibu or Beverly Hills. Fitting too that first Dylan left for SoCal and later Springsteen, and how this happened while the songwriters attempted to keep their bohemian aura or streetwise cred proves certainly an instructive tale for any rock fan or ambitious musician. The anecdote of how the Grateful Dead backed down from their expletive that they had insisted be an album title--once they found from WB's Joe Smith that it would not be stocked at Sears-- turns into a marvelous fable about the purported hippie self-righteousness vs. their desire to cash in on their attitude against the Man.

In such comparisons between the late-60s folk-rock Boston clubs that spawned Elektra and Asylum Records and the CBS-Warner battles that characterized the mid-80s stadium sellout scene, Goodman indeed displays his strengths. John Sinclair had been always a footnote to me, but his story, and that of Landau and Lennon and the MC5 became a welcome look into the clash of ideals and the marketplace. The role of not only Landau but Dave Marsh and others at Rolling Stone, however, could have been expanded even more at the cutting of some financial detail, for it made me wonder what Goodman, credited on the dust jacket as a "former Rolling Stone editor," might have been holding back from what needed to be more fully told-- perhaps he's saving it for another book?

Also, to my disappointment, a tale not told fully here as also skimped on in later books. (I have also reviewed on Amazon and my blog Michael Walker's "Laurel Canyon" and Barney Hoskyns' "Hotel California" about this same period; the lapse also enters Hoskyns' earlier history of L.A. pop music, "Waiting for the Sun") Goodman should have covered more into the 1970s the ethos, half-cynical, half-affectionate, that Stan Cornyn appears from Goodman's account to have pioneered at WB Records. I still recall the clever marketing ads to get you to buy "Schlagers"!" and other WB-label cheapo compilations on the inner sleeves of that label's releases in the early '70s.

However, Goodman-- whether discussing the savvy of Geffen, the drive of the Eagles, the abandonment of Sinclair, the reasons why Jackson Browne made his management choices or how payola did and did not differ from an Atlantic A&R rep with a few joints for the d.j.'s he visited with new records-- remains scrupulously fair to all involved. He balances damning recollections of those betrayed with other quotes or editorial insights into why the decisions to move from clubs to arenas had to be made, partially to offset the enormous expenses such lesser entities as Humble Pie had generated on tour and in excess.

Goodman's own bias--one understandable and well-supported with much primary evidence-- against those who manipulated the artists or their earlier supporters when times were rough, or his own explanation of why Landau sought to make rock music criticism more serious, plays well into the trajectory he marks of the shift to the mansion on the hill from "But the Man Can't Bust Our Music." His deadpan recital of such infamous Columbia ads in 1968 issues of RS I found hilarious. The move from sincere folkies at the Boston Tea Party to cocaine cowboys at Doug Weston's Troubadour to the pandering of "Born in the U.S.A" may after a few hundred examples turn rather obvious. Still, it's a tale well worth telling. This book should be rewarding reading for those as interested in the "starmaking machinery behind the popular songs" (Mitchell's lyric in "A Free Man in Paris" about Geffen is oddly missing from the narrative) as hearing the songs themselves.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Very well written, if depressing September 5, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

You don't have to be a raving fire 'n brimstone type to lament the passing of the "good old days" of rock. You just have to switch on your radio now and hear songs that were once anthems being used to hawk jeans, beer, bank cards, etc. and if that doesn't make you even a little indignant, you're either too young to remember or too embalmed to give a damn. Fred Goodman's book is a good accounting of some of the other nails in rock's coffin, the forces of the entertainment business who saw gold in them thar hills. Yeah, I know, I know---how foolish, how naive to think that rock could be anything BUT a commodity, as with any other form of popular entertainment. Perhaps so, but naivete is what started rock off in the first place, the idea that boundaries were made to be broken and that not all rebels join the herd in the end. I'm still playing my Dylan albums, though, and if the lustre has worn off the man's image somewhat as time has gone by, it doesn't change the fact that Dylan---and Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen and Joni Mitchell and even Glenn Frey and Don Henley---still made a large body of music that mattered then and matters now. But the old image of rock as "music of the people" or whatever, that's gone the way of all flesh.