Home » Walter Yetnikoff, Powerful but Abrasive Record Executive, Dies at 87

Walter Yetnikoff, Powerful but Abrasive Record Executive, Dies at 87

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Walter Yetnikoff, who led CBS Information throughout the increase years of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” album and lived the intercourse, medicine and rock ’n’ roll life extra indulgently than lots of his stars did, died on Monday at a hospital in Bridgeport, Conn. He was 87.

His spouse, Lynda Yetnikoff, mentioned the trigger was most cancers.

Mr. Yetnikoff was probably the most highly effective, insatiable and abrasive figures in music within the years simply earlier than the digital revolution upended the enterprise.

He was amongst a small group of highly effective executives who formed the document enterprise within the rock period, together with Clive Davis (who led Columbia Information and based Arista Information), David Geffen of Asylum and Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic. He strode by way of these heady days of hit information brashly, licentiously and, by his personal admission, usually drunk or drug-addled.

Although he by no means claimed to have a lot of an ear for music, he was adept at pacifying the celebs on his roster — who along with Mr. Jackson included Bruce Springsteen, Barbra Streisand and Billy Joel — and at outmaneuvering opponents and perceived enemies, a minimum of into the late Nineteen Eighties.

Then got here a tough fall.

In 1990, Mr. Yetnikoff, having offended too many individuals together with his outrageous conduct, was dismissed by Sony, the corporate that at his urging had purchased CBS Information solely three years earlier. He had gone into rehab in 1989 and kicked the booze and medicines that had been his roughly each day weight loss program all through his reign, however getting clear didn’t make him any extra tolerable.

“I’d go into conferences and ask folks to carry arms and say the serenity prayer,” he informed The New York Instances in 2004, in an interview occasioned by the publication of his eyebrow-raising autobiography, “Howling on the Moon: The Odyssey of a Monstrous Music Mogul in an Age of Extra,” written with David Ritz.

Tommy Mottola, as soon as a buddy and later, as Mr. Yetnikoff’s successor at CBS Information, seen as an enemy, put it this fashion in his personal autobiography, “Hitmaker: The Man and His Music” (2013): “The therapy middle had eliminated the alcohol and medicines from Walter’s life — however not the underlying issues that Walter had been utilizing them to anesthetize.”

Walter Roy Yetnikoff was born on Aug. 11, 1933, in Brooklyn. His father, Max, labored for town portray hospitals, and his mom, Bella (Zweibel) Yetnikoff, was a bookkeeper. In his e-book, Mr. Yetnikoff described a tough childhood that included common beatings by his father.

At Brooklyn Faculty he grew uninterested in engineering and switched his research to pre-law. An uncle paid for his first yr at Columbia Legislation Faculty, the place he did effectively sufficient that he earned a scholarship for his subsequent two years. Upon graduating, he joined the agency Rosenman & Colin. The opposite younger attorneys there included Clive Davis, who would go on to have his personal monumental affect on the music enterprise.

Mr. Davis quickly moved to the authorized division at Columbia Information, a division of CBS, and in 1961 he introduced Mr. Yetnikoff on board there, luring him with a wage of $10,000 a yr (about $90,000 right now).

“It wasn’t a cash transfer,” Mr. Yetnikoff told Rolling Stone in 1988. “I believed it could be fascinating, thrilling. And I received my very own workplace and a phone with, like, 4 buttons on it.”

His cellphone at his previous job, he mentioned, had no buttons.

For a time the careers of Mr. Davis and Mr. Yetnikoff ascended in tandem. By 1967, Mr. Davis was president of Columbia, and inside a number of years Mr. Yetnikoff was president of the worldwide division of CBS Information. Mr. Davis misplaced his job in a monetary scandal in 1973, and in 1975 Mr. Yetnikoff basically changed him, turning into president of the CBS Information Group, which included Columbia and different labels.

In one in all his first acts as president, Mr. Yetnikoff considerably reluctantly let Ron Alexenburg, the pinnacle of CBS’s Epic label, signal the Jacksons. Epic had wrested the group from Motown Information (which retained the rights to the group’s authentic title, the Jackson 5), and although Mr. Yetnikoff wasn’t overly impressed with the Jacksons’ preliminary albums for Epic, he cultivated a relationship with the group’s key member, Michael, supporting the younger singer’s curiosity in increasing into solo work.

In 1982, that encouragement resulted in “Thriller,” nonetheless one of many top-selling albums in historical past.

Mr. Jackson introduced Mr. Yetnikoff onstage, calling him “the very best president of any document firm,” when he accepted one in all eight Grammy Awards on the 1984 ceremony.

“That’s unheard-of,” Mr. Yetnikoff bragged afterward, in line with Fredric Dannen’s e-book “Hit Males: Energy Brokers and Quick Cash Contained in the Music Enterprise” (1990). “You don’t deliver document executives up on the Grammys, ’trigger nobody’s . I went again to CBS and mentioned, ‘Give me one other $2 million for that!’”

Different megahits launched throughout Mr. Yetnikoff’s tenure included Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell” in 1977, the bold Pink Floyd double album “The Wall” in 1979, Mr. Springsteen’s “Born in the united statesA.” in 1984, Mr. Jackson’s “Dangerous” in 1987 and a collection of hit albums by Mr. Joel, together with “The Stranger” (1977) and “Glass Homes” (1980).

Mr. Yetnikoff was not identified to be a discoverer of hits or expertise. His strengths had been in creating relationships with artists, negotiating contracts and easing his stars’ considerations about promotional budgets and a number of different issues.

“I typically really feel like their shrink, their rabbi, priest, marriage counselor, banker,” he mentioned in a 1984 interview with The Instances. “I do know extra about their private lives than I’d wish to know.”

His wild-man persona appeared to develop in proportion to his energy. When he entered the document enterprise, he was an unobtrusive household man. He married June Might Horowitz in 1957, and so they had a son; a second son arrived in 1962.

However his ascension was accompanied by quite a few affairs, which he detailed, alongside together with his substance abuse, in his autobiography. Different document executives from the interval wrote their tales, too, however Mr. Yetnikoff’s was in a category by itself. It was, Forbes said, “a portrait of such out-of-control megalomania that any music govt right now, irrespective of how egotistical or ruthless, has to look higher by comparability.”

Many individuals tolerated and even loved him at first, however not everybody.

“He handled artists like they had been objects, not human beings,” Sharon Osbourne, spouse and supervisor of the rocker Ozzy Osbourne, was quoted as saying in Mr. Mottola’s e-book. “On prime of that, he was the poster boy for misogyny.”

Within the mid-Nineteen Eighties, Mr. Yetnikoff’s title surfaced in an NBC Information report on payola within the document enterprise that targeted on unbiased promoters and their attainable ties to organized crime. However CBS got here to his protection, and he survived.

“Did the ‘Nightly Information’ scandal change me?” Mr. Yetnikoff wrote in his e-book. “If something, I turned extra defiant, extra smug, extra contemptuous of my adversaries.”

He added: “I charged full steam forward. I may need been middle-aged, however I adopted the youthful battle cry of extra intercourse, medicine and rock ’n’ roll. I needed extra of every little thing, and I needed it with a vengeance.”

Ultimately, he went too far too usually. The celebrities whose pictures coated the partitions of his workplace started spurning him. Up-and-coming executives, together with some he had mentored, eclipsed him. In the summertime of 1989, a health care provider informed him he could be lifeless quickly if he didn’t get clear, which scared him into rehab however didn’t save his profession.

After being ousted at Sony, Mr. Yetnikoff tried making a film about Miles Davis (Wesley Snipes was to star), however the challenge collapsed. Then he tried founding his personal document label, Velvel Music Group — Velvel was his Yiddish title — but it surely failed after three years.

“If I had nonetheless been ingesting, I’d have drunk myself to dying,” he wrote of the interval after his fall. “However with out drink or medicine to annihilate my true emotions, I had to deal with a situation that had existed for a lot of my grownup life: acute despair. Whereas I used to be working the free world, I may assuage these darkish spells by ranting and raging, by antagonizing associates and turning each day duties into excessive drama. By yelling, I may transfer mountains. All of the sudden there was nobody to yell at.”

Mr. Yetnikoff’s first marriage led to divorce, as did his second, to Cynthia Slamar. He married Lynda Kady in 2007. Along with her, he’s survived by two sons from his first marriage, Michael and Daniel; a sister, Carol Goldstein; and 4 grandchildren.

In his later years, Mr. Yetnikoff typically saved a low profile, volunteering for habit and restoration organizations.

Mr. Yetnikoff’s e-book features a chapter on a visit he took to the Soviet Union in the summertime of 1987, when Mr. Joel carried out there. He was shocked, he wrote, when he was not obtained there with acclaim and deference. The chapter opens with a sentence that maybe sums up his record-business profession as a complete, a dizzying interval when he let his energy distort his perspective.

“Delusions of grandeur,” he wrote, “are particularly infectious for the semigrand.”

Alex Traub contributed reporting.

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