Neil Portnow Background

My story is one that I like because it’s a story of somebody that’s pretty much a self-made individual. I don’t have any relatives or anybody that was ever in the music field and neither did I frankly as a kid think that I was going to be able to make a living at it. I think the tipping point for me was turning on the television and seeing Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show. I’m old enough to be able to remember that and I was a little kid and I thought, that’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen, you know, coming out of an era of much more middle of the road kinds of music. This was eye opening so eventually after bugging my mom and dad long enough, they said, “okay, you can have a guitar, and you can have guitar lessons,” which I did at the age of seven. I got very serious about that; I took lessons, I was the first kid to demand, as a guitarist sitting in with the elementary school orchestra, it was pretty unheard of but I got my guitar teacher to write parts that would be transcribed from the violin parts in the orchestra and sat in. That was the beginning of a forever interest in music, as a musician, for me. I continued in high school, had the cool, successful high school band, did it in college as well and had a band there. I, being somewhat pragmatic, was never convinced that I was going to be a rock star, or that I could make a living, so I had another agenda which was being a child of the sixties, wanting to save the world and make a contribution that way. In the same sense that someone like Bill Clinton grew up in that era and wanted to make that commitment that was something that I thought I would do. I went to school in Washington, D.C. with the intention of going to law school, and running for office actually. It never quite went that way. I was student body president in high school; I was student body president in college as well so I was sort of on that path. But, as student body president in Washington, D.C. during the Vietnam War era and being in buildings taken over by students with bullhorns and trying to, sort of, be the mediator for that, I think at some point I grew a little disillusioned with the role of trying to be all things to all people. A number of things happened that I felt were, kind of, betrayals to a guy who was trying to be the mediator and the good guy. I got out of undergraduate school and said, “you know, I’m not sure I want to continue the school situation and I’m really not sure that I want to continue the path, as far as running for office and going to law school,” and so forth. I remember having a heart-to-heart with a high school buddy of mine who was a musician and who was in a number of bands with me. We sat around at Joan’s Beach on Long Island one summer afternoon and said, you know, you think when you’re thirty years old you’re going to want to be carrying your big bass amp around and playing sleazy night clubs, because I was still doing that as a musician, and we came to the conclusion that maybe if we got into the production side of things in music that that might be an interesting path. That’s what we did. A couple of us starting our own little production/publishing company, put an add in the Village Voice for talent, was inundated with lots of terrible tapes but one was something that we liked and we wound up producing and paying for some singles and getting a record deal. That put me on a path of getting involved in the music industry legitimately. It’s been that way ever since.

Subsequent to making those demos and doing them in friends’ home studios, and so on and so forth, getting this one record deal was a tipping point for me because the record, while the guy involved never had a career beyond that single, we did have a top 30 record from this fellow. It was a remake of a song that Dell Shannon had had big hit with called, “Runaway.” We did this single, which we paid for; it was the days of singles deals, it’s interesting how tracks are back today, with a company that was established by Playboy, who was in the record business at that time. This record went top 30. Well, when you get the top 30 in those days, there was one thing that was automatic that was that you get a call from American Bandstand, Dick Clark’s show, to be on the show, because he was chart based. If you hit the top 30 in Cashbox or Record World in those days, in addition to Billboard, you’d get an invitation to the show. So that happened and we came out to California, I’m from New York originally, did the show, but then your whole career as a producer is in a whole different realm because you might be the next big thing. You might be the producer of something that’s going to not be the next top 30 but the next number 1. Everybody automatically has a different way of looking at you, a different openness to talking with you and so on. So it opened a lot of doors for me, particularly in the publishing community because we were looking for material for this artist to record. It ultimately lead to a job offer, which I took at a company called Screen Jems, a major music publishing company, today owned by EMI, which is the world largest, with a tremendous catalog at that time. People like Barry Man and Cynthia While, David Gates from Bread, we’d signed Boston, we had the Monkees, and we had a lot of great, solid, Fleetwood Mac, a lot of terrific people signed to that company. I was hired to do something that was very revolutionary at that point, which was to be a song plugger, but also to scout writers, to be signed to Screen Jems, who might also be artists. To the extent that they were capable of being artists, we would sign them not only to a publishing deal but we’d sign them to a production contract. Then we would fund my taking them into the studio doing demos and then I would go and shop those artists for record deals. In which case, if we got a deal, with a major label, the publishing company would have a small piece of the production contract. That was the theory; it was very revolutionary at the time. I did that for about two years and then was offered a job as a full-time producer for RCA Records who, at that time, the major labels had staff producers. That was very appealing to me, to be full-time, making records. RCA, as did CBS at that time, owned its own recording studios so I’d come into work every day, go down to the studio and start making records. It was a fabulous opportunity for me, to do that and learn that first hand.

My tenure at most of my industry business careers was about three years. Three years and move, three years and move. So, three years at RCA, which was fantastic, I then was transferred by RCA to the west coast in LA, which I had no intentions or desire to do but it worked out that way. I was head of A and R for the west coast. During that time, RCA struck a deal with 20th Century Fox, who had a record label, small one, whose main success was Barry White, and all the Star Wars Soundtracks. They were kind of floundering, they were going to close up the business, but they thought, let’s take one more shot, we’ll make a deal with a major label and it’ll be basically a distribution arrangement. 20th didn’t have to carry a huge staff but could continue to produce and make recordings that would come out under its label. That came under my watch while I was in charge of A and R for the west coast. We had a great relationship with Fox, who eventually asked me to come over and run that little label. That’s what I did, I went to Fox as Senior VP and within six months they made me President of the record label. So I’m under 30 years old and running a label, going to the RIA meeting and sitting a the table with the Clives, and the Yetnikoffs and all those legends of the business, and trying to eek out, for 20th, some game plan to keep the company afloat and successful. Which we did, we focused on the black music department, and we had some great artists. We signed Stephanie Mills and had success with her. She had come out of being in Broadway in The Wiz, had a big hit with her. We had Carl Carleton with a song called “She’s a bad mamma jamma,” which was a big hit for us. We had The Dells and The Chi-lites and The Staple Singers, on and on. So we had a good little run going. 20th was taken private by Marvin Davis, and he sold off the music company assets. At that point I got a wonderful phone call from Clive Davis, who I’d met in my Screen Gems days because we were owned by the same parent company, we were owned by Columbia Pictures and I had been introduced to him over the years. Clive said, you know, Neil, I’ve watched what you’ve done, you’ve done a good job on a lot of things, we haven’t had a head of the west coast for Arista Records for a couple years and I know that Fox is getting out of the record business because I’m good friends with the Chairman of the company and would you entertain the thought of coming to work here at Arista and being the head of the west coast? I said, “Clive, where do I sign and how fast?” That’s what I did. I moved to Arista during a very very fertile period there. It was during those times that we signed and developed Whitney. Whitney was 19, Whitney Houston, when we signed her. I was involved in that project. We were breaking Aretha Franklin on the Arista side; we had Dionne Warwick’s great success, Barry Manilow, Air Supply, of course it was more of a pop/middle of the road kind of a company, at the very height of the success, in that realm. In the rock area, bands like the Kinks, and The Allan Parsons Project, and so on and so forth. So it was a very heady time at Arista and especially for me, being as young as I was and being able to work with someone as legendary as Clive Davis, and to be able to work from that kind of a platform, which gives you such unbelievable credibility. So I was there about three years, at Arista and did a few things personally there. I signed Jermaine Jackson; we had a big hit with Jermaine. I also brought in and signed a soundtrack project and it was early days for big soundtracks, but we had Ghostbusters, which we did we Gary La Mill and Columbia Pictures. So a few good contributions there. Then, as I’ve said, my tenure is about three years, and after three years I start getting a little itchy, and the other thing about Arista was being the west coast of an east coast company, I’d really gone about as far as I could in the hierarchy unless I wanted to go back to New York, which I wasn’t really enamored of doing. A few other phone calls came through, one of which was to the EMI Group and I was offered a position as the head and A and R for EMI America, which is one by Jim Massa.

EMI was sort of the boutique label of the group; you had Capital Records as the flagship. But EMI America was, as I said, the boutique with more interesting acts, if you will, like Kate Bush and David Bowie. We had the Straight Cats on the label, so I got to see the solo projects that came out of that group. We had Queensryche who was just about to be dropped and I had a different view of that and we kept them and started to turn that around. One that was a very interesting project was continuing with a band that was selling about 18-19,000 records that was on tour 365 days a year in their Volkswagen bus; that was the Red Hot Chili Peppers. They were about to be dropped too because people at the company didn’t quite understand it. I can’t say that I understood it exactly either, but I could tell by their perseverance and what was developing there that it wasn’t something that we should let go of. We continued to develop them and, as they say, the rest is history. So, acts of that ilk. We also eliminated the black music department before I got there, which I thought was a strange move, and we reinstituted [sic] that. We also had a very interesting deal with Rounder Records, which had brought us George Thoroughgood and some wonderful acts of that nature, many of whom have gone on to be very successful like Bayla Fleck and Alison Krouse was another band on the Rounder radar at the point. So I spent three years at EMI until there was one of the typical corporate mergers, downsizing, and they moved the company back to New York City. That wasn’t where I wanted to be. So I was bought out of my contract and for the first time, in all this time, I was without a corporate job. It was very interesting for me because on the one hand, it was very liberating, which is “I can do anything.” On the other hand, it was very terrifying, which is you wonder if the phone’s ever going to ring again because so much of what you do is based upon the desk that you sit behind and the check that you write.

I got an interesting phone call from a wonderful woman by the name of Becky Mancuso. Becky had worked for Epic Records for a long time and was one of the pioneers of the whole music supervision world, and had been the Music Supervisor on Flashdance, Footloose… the big, early, soundtracks. I knew her over the years and she called, just out of the blue, serendipity, and said “Neil, I’m working at Paramount on a film and they’ve just fired the Music Supervisor and I need to get someone in here to finish the picture. I’m going to wind up doing a lot of it myself but I just really need the help. What are you up to and would you like to come and do that?” Another one of those great calls where I said, how fast do you need me and I’ll be there. I went over to Paramount and was on the lot for about a year with Becky and learned all the ins and outs, first hand, of the music supervision world. It was a fascinating little movie. It was based on the Bob Woodward book on John Belushi’s life. It was called Wired and was produced by Ed Feldman who’s a big producer. The Paramount film was a film called Permanent Record, that was an early film with Keanu Reeves in it and that was about a teenage suicide, a tough subject matter. But there’s a lot of original music that we had composed for it so I was able to work on getting songs composed and produced especially for film. Then in terms of the actual composer for the underscore, they didn’t want to do something traditional, we wanted to do something different. I wound up being able to hire Joe Strommer, from The Clash, to be the composer for the underscore. He’d never done a movie before. It was a very interesting experience because basically what we had to do was have Joe write a dozen songs and we had to create the score out of the songs that he’d written because he didn’t have explicit knowledge of how to do the underscore from a technical standpoint. That film, which didn’t do very much, but had a soundtrack album, lead me to think that I wanted to do this as a career.

I then went on to get and agent and to be hired to do a film called Wired, which is based on the book that was written about John Belushi’s life. It was a very controversial project because John’s friends didn’t want this movie produced; it was not very flattering. Nevertheless the movie was made; it was independent. I got to do everything because I was hired before the movie was cast, so I was involved in casting the lead role for John Belushi, which turned out to be someone who’s doing very well as an actor today, Michael Chiklis who’s the star of The Shield. Probably not too many people know, but Michael’s a good singer and was able to actually sing and recreate all of the John Belushi material from The Blues Brothers, Saturday Night Live, and so on; we created that from scratch. So, that project, which also we hired Basil Poledouris, who’s a very well known, respected, film composer, that put me really hands on for every facet of music supervision. I thought I was going to continue to do that, career-wise, and then I got another one of those surreptitious, but serendipitous phone calls, and this was from two guys, Clive Calder and Ralph Simon, who were the owners of an independent music operation called Zomba. Zomba was growing into a huge independent force in the music world, based in the UK, music publishing. The record company was called Jive Records. Management and many other facets of their business, they owned recording studios, they owned equipment rental businesses, true entrepreneurs that came from nothing and really built this into a substantial business. I met these guys when I was working at Arista because we made a distribution deal with Jive Records because Clive Davis was interested in being a little more in the rock music business. Jive Records was breaking Flock of Seagulls, if you remember the guy with the Mohawk, not Sly Stone This Year, but the real Mohawk of the day, which was sort of this techno band music. A deal was struck with Jive to distribute. What happened with Jive over the years though is that their focus shifted from rock more into the rap world. They were very early with Kool Moe Dee, they were there with Too Short, and a whole variety of rap acts that was a little bit ahead of the pack and ultimately distribution was shifted from Arista to RCA. But that was my relationship with Mr. Caulder and Mr. Simon because we would plot out all of the west coast activities and marketing for Jive Records, as it was to be distributed through Arista. They called and said, “you know Neil, we don’t have an office in Los Angeles, and we’re growing. We’re getting much larger than we’ve been. We should have had an office there years ago. You know us, we’re very down to Earth and we’re very modest. So what we want is a kind of guy that can roll up his sleeves, who’s very broad-based in his experience. You know we’re in publishing, you know we’re in records; you know we’re in management; we’re in studio operations, equipment rental and so on. We just want a guy to come in and open up. We’ll see where it goes.”

So in 1989, sensing that that was a very unique opportunity and that I could always go back to my music supervision, I said “yes” and we opened Zomba Los Angeles, which, four years ago when it was sold, as part of the 2.7 billion dollar sale of the company to BMG, Los Angeles was a group of 80 people, two floors of a major office building out here and we had really become the leading independent music company in the world at that point. I’d been privileged to be a part of really creating something of value, and unique for the Zomba Group, which was not only the records and publishing thing that I did, but we set up the first and only one-stop-shop for film and television music, encompassing: a film composer agency, a music editing company, a music clearance operation, production music library business, we were the market leader, plus the music label and publishing company. So anyone who was making a film could come to one place and get the job done. That was something that we were very very proud of and something that I’m personally very proud of that we set up over that period of time. That’s the one job that didn’t last three years; that lasted 14. I was there really until coming to the Academy three and half years ago.

Looking in the window here to this job when I decided to go for it, so many people said to me, that were familiar with my background and such, “you know, it would seem on paper that everything you’ve done, historically, career-wise, and everything in your life would lead you to this job, because it has elements of all the things that you’ve studied, that you’ve been interested in.” Now that I’ve been here for a number of years it certainly feels that way. I can point to so many elements of the various things I’ve done throughout my life, whether music business or otherwise, but all that have a good application right here in this role.