Walter Yetnikoff: "If You Have One Foot in Yesterday and One Foot in Tomorrow, You're Going to Hurt Your Crotch"

Great interview with Walter Yetnikoff, former head of CBS Records, who has a new tell-all book out about his very wild years in the music biz:

In the living room of his sleek, two-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Walter Yetnikoff sat enjoying a picturesque sunset, "a real cocaine view," he called it. It was just after 4:30 and Mr. Yetnikoff, the most powerful man in the music industry for much of the 80s, was sober. This would not have been the case 15 years ago.

"I'd come out of a coma around 7 or 8 a.m.," he said, describing his daily routine as president of CBS Records from 1975 to 1990. "By 9 I might have drunk a half a bottle of vodka. Then I would call someone at CBS, maybe the head of the network or accounting, and yell at them. I'd finally drag myself out of bed and get into the office around noon. The steward would immediately bring me a screwdriver." Mr. Yetnikoff was referring to cocktails, not hardware. "I might walk out of my office and say, 'That one's nice, let's make his career,' or I might say, 'Get rid of that one.'"

He is every bit as forthcoming in his new memoir, "Howling at the Moon: The Odyssey of a Monstrous Music Mogul in an Age of Excess" (Broadway Books), which chronicles Mr. Yetnikoff's rise from working-class Brooklyn to the upper echelons of the music industry and to his spectacular downfall. Writing in the tradition of dishy tell-alls like "The Kid Stays in the Picture," by the Hollywood producer Robert Evans, the 70-year-old Mr. Yetnikoff, who said he has been clean since 1989, opens up about his drug-and-booze-fueled days, his overseeing of the careers of megawatt stars like Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger and Bruce Springsteen, his newfound spirituality after a much-needed stint in rehab.

Mr. Yetnikoff took over CBS Records in 1975. In the years to come, the music industry would experience explosive growth with the advent of the CD. Under his watch CBS's annual revenue grew from $485 million to well over $2 billion. He engineered the sale of CBS Records to Sony for $2 billion in 1987. At the time, he signed a multiyear contract that was widely reported to have included a $20 million bonus. Drugs and alcohol, however, destroyed all he had built, including his relationships with colleagues and artists like Mr. Jackson and Mr. Springsteen. In 1990, Mr. Yetnikoff wrote, he was "unceremoniously canned" by Sony.

Continued on the next page Page 1 — Page 2 — Page 3

Article Author: Eric Olsen

Career media professional Eric Olsen is honored to be the founder and former publisher of Blogcritics.org, and former publisher of Technorati.com, which both rule. He is now editor, co-founder, and CEO of The Morton Report.

Visit Eric Olsen's author page — Eric Olsen's Blog