[Peter Paterno: About Peter Paterno]
I was a general practitioner for just a year and a half. Then I went to work at Manet, Phelps as a music lawyer. I did that for ten years or longer. Michael Eisner decided he wanted to start a record company and he called me up and I talked to him and at some point decided he wanted me to start the record company. So that's what I did.
I always want to - I really actually did want to be more involved in the music business
and the record business, than just being a lawyer. It was actually a pretty easy decision
for me to make.
Like I said, I started out - I played in bands. I was terrible. Then I went to college. Then
I went to grad school. Then I went and I wrote software. I used to write software for the
space shuttle. Remember it blew up; I think that was my software. (Laughter) No, I'm
just joking about that. It was many years after I left. It was somebody else's software.
But that was my training. I was a math major. I did math. One thing you learn when
you are in math is that a guy is great in math is so on another planet from anybody else. I
mean, the math geniuses, like, they really are different. And I realized that I might be
good in math, but I would never be that. So I had to go find some place where the people
weren't quite as smart. And I found law school.
So I went off to law school and I did that for a while. Then I got out and didn’t know
what I wanted to do. So I started a firm where, I think I talked about this before, I just
did general practice for like a year and a half. You know, dog bite cases. What kind of
got me off that is I’d done a divorce for some woman and she called up at four in the
morning and said, “My husband’s here and he’s got a gun and he wants the couch.
Didn’t I get the furniture in the divorce.” And I go, “What, what. He’s got a gun? Give
him the goddamn couch.” So I figured well, that’s enough of this.
So I heard there was an opening, actually it's very funny, this is my current partner Howard King was doing music law at Manet, Phelps. He hated the person he was working for and calls me up and says, “If you know of anybody that wants a job doing music law, I'm about to quit.” So I applied for the job at Manet, Phelps and they ultimately hired me. So that’s how I started doing music law.
I did that for 12 years and got the job running Hollywood Records at Disney and that was a colossal failure. At the end of four years they fired - well, they didn’t fire me my contract technically ended, but I prefer to think of it as I was fired.
Then I moved back into private practice. Well, I spent a year trying to get a real job, because I really - being a lawyer is just not all that much fun. And I was going, “God, I can't do that again.” Then after about a year where I couldn’t get anybody to hire me, because I was basically a persona non grata in any business. I had a slink back to practicing law again. That’s what I've now done since then and it still isn't all that much fun.
The way I met Metallica was early on in their career they were on a label called Megaforce and they were managed by the guy that ran Megaforce and published by the guy that ran Megaforce. Cliff Burnstein their current manager, called me up and said, “You should check this band out. These guys are really amazing.” He had Lars Ulrich give me a call and I met with them. I sort of remember the first time I saw them play - this was like 1982 or 3. I had no idea who they were and the music was a little bit, I have to say, foreign to what I was listening to at the time. Just didn’t really sound much like the Eagles or Jackson Brown.
So I went and say them play a show at the Palace and I could listen to the music and I went, “You know, this is really good but I just don’t get it.” But I could tell it was good, but it was just it wasn’t what I was really used to. I went and saw them play the Palace. I remember one walking out of that thing and turning to nobody in particular and saying James Hetfield is Jesus Christ. He was that amazing. It was that - didn’t know the songs. Didn’t know the - it was just amazing.
So it was from Cliff that I met with Metallica and then I looked at their situation, which wasn’t the most favorable. A bad record deal on an independent label with not only their own publishing or their management and my first job was to get them out of that. That’s what I did. Then they went on and hired Cliff and Peter Mensch and we’ve been together for a really long time.
