Gary James' Interview With
Jeff Wald



He is one of the best known names in the world of personal management. The world knows him as the manager/husband of Helen Reddy, but along the way he's also managed the careers of Tiny Tim, Crosby, Stills And Nash, Donna Summer, Clint Black, Flip Wilson, Sylvester Stallone, and the list goes on and on. We talked with Jeff Wald about his colorful career.

Q - Is someone making a movie about your life or your life with Helen Reddy?

A - Yeah. They bought the rights to my ex-wife (Helen Reddy) from 1966 to 1983. That's all I gave 'em.

Q - That's all you gave them?

A - That's all she gave them too.

Q - You're writing your autobiography?

A - I am.

Q - When can we expect to see that?

A - I don't know. I've been half way through it for about two years 'cause I keep getting busy with other projects. So, the answer is I'm not sure. Hopefully sooner rather than later. I'm seventy-five, so it's not like it's an endless process.

Q - When you were a kid you had this idea you wanted to become a manager of a famous singer. Where did that idea come from?

A - That's not true. When I was a kid I had about twenty different jobs. You know, I started working when I was thirteen. My mother was a school teacher. My father was dead. I started at thirteen making more money than my mother. I had a million different jobs. I sold automobiles. I sold life insurance. I sold guided tours of Niagara Falls. I was a lifeguard at a motel. I taught horseback riding. So the idea of getting into the entertainment business didn't happen until I was about nineteen. I wound up going to see someone who I was fan of and got myself backstage at the Cafe Au Go Go and I told them I could do certain things for him. It had nothing to do with management, that I could do certain things that were coming up for him. I knew he didn't believe me and then I did take care of him. Then he said to me, "Why don't you move to Chicago, live with me and I'll teach you the business," and that's what happened. And it went from there, and then I went to William Morris to really learn the business. I'm giving you the short version obviously.

Q - William Morris really did teach you the business of show business then?

A - Oh, no question. Yeah, because I realized what I didn't know and there was plenty I didn't know. And so William Morris was a great education for me, same as it was for Ronnie Meyer and a whole host of people who wound up being CEOs of companies. The first time I was in Chicago I worked with a gang called Blackstone Rangers, which still exists today. They were three thousand gang members then. There was also the Lyndon Johnson War Of Poverty, and so what I was doing was helping them open up a little theatre group and a coffee shop, but I got run out of Chicago by the police after six months. They didn't want me working with the gangs. They didn't want me doing anything like that. That's how I wound up meeting Bobby Kennedy back in New York 'cause he was interested in what I was doing and that's when I went to William Morris. I went back to Chicago in 1967, this time with a big job buying talent for four clubs there, four very iconic clubs. As a matter of fact, there's a documentary coming out on that, that I'm on. I stayed there ten months and made a lot of relationships which continued after I left. Everybody from Flip Wilson to Dionne Warwick to Joan Rivers. Just a ton of people. (Bill) Cosby came into the club to have dinner and I knew Cosby slightly from The Village in New York when he was playing at The Bitter End. I told him I wanted to move to California and he told me to call his manager. I did. He gave me one of these, "If you're ever out here kid, call me," and I flew out that night and showed up at the guys' office the next morning. He hired me on the spot. I flew back to Chicago, had us pack up our shit and drove to L.A. I got here in August of '68 and have been here ever since.

Q - One of your clients when you first started was Tiny Tim.

A - That was the first big client I ever had, yeah.

Q - I remember reading a column by Earl Wilson. He said that Tiny Tim turned down an endorsement deal for $250,000 from a ukulele company. Why would he do that?

A - He didn't, not that I know of.

Q - You never heard that story before?

A - No. He would never do that. He liked money. He would've done that in a heartbeat. He was a prick by the way. He was older. He was in his fifties, but we never got to know exactly how old he was. We went to Australia to work. He spent the entire eighteen hours of the flight in the bathroom on the plane. He was a nut job. When we played The Fountainbleau in Miami he brought his parents down 'cause we had the Sinatra suite, a huge suite. New Year's Eve he took the door handles off his parent's room so they couldn't get out. He was a total prick. Through him I met everybody. I met Jackie Gleason. I met Rudy Vallee. There was nobody who didn't want to meet Tiny Tim. So, a young kid who met everybody and I was still involved with Bill's manager Roy Silver and Ron De Blasio. We left Roy Silver and formed De Blasio And Wald and I signed George Carlin, The Turtles. We still had Tiny Tim. That was an eighteen month run, Tiny Tim. But it was quite a run though.

Q - You were with Tiny Tim when he went to The Royal Albert Hall in England, weren't you?

A - Right.

Q - And he met The Beatles there.

A - I met them before in 1964 with Oscar Brown Jr. They were playing a club called The Cool Elephant. They didn't mean much then. But I went back with Tiny Tim and they were The Beatles. They presented Tiny Tim at the Albert Hall.

Q - You saw The Beatles in a club?

A - Yeah, 1964 in London. I think the club was Cool Elephant or something like that. I can't remember. They were just playing in small clubs. I didn't think much of 'em at the time.

Q - You saw The Beatles that we all saw on Ed Sullivan?

A - Oh, yeah.

Q - You sure it was 1964?

A - I may be wrong on the dates. That's one of the reasons I haven't finished my book. I need a research person. I did go to the concert at Shea Stadium. Sid Bernstein, who promoted the show, was a friend of mine. I was backstage at the time. You couldn't hear a fuckin' thing, the audience was so loud. They couldn't hear. It was ridiculous.

Q - Since you're a manager, what did you think of The Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein?

A - Obviously he did a really good job. (laughs) I liked him better than Allen Klein who wound up handling their stuff afterwards. I became friendly with John (Lennon) back in those days for a variety of reasons. He was a lot of fun.

Q - In America, Tiny Tim was considered more or less a joke. Why did The Beatles think so much of Tiny Tim? Or was it John's idea? He liked to put people on.

A - It was his humor I think because Tiny Tim was a world-wide phenomenon. You know how he did that whole thing. I knew Tiny Tim from his Greenwich Village days when he was going to The Fat Black Pussycat and Steve Paul's The Scene. He was in the raincoat, the shopping bag, the ukulele and the crazy long hair. He was a joke. What happened was when I moved out here, Mo Ostin, who was head of Warner/Reprise, called up Roy Silver. (Bill) Cosby was on Warner/Reprise at the time. Mo Ostin called Roy Silver and said, "I want to send an act to you. We just made a record that I think is a hit with this new producer, Richard Perry." The record was "Tip Toe Through The Tulips". And so he came over to the office. Those in the office like Roy Silver and myself knew who he was and thought this was quite a joke. But we sent him over to George Schlatter at Laugh In. George Schlatter put him on for, I don't know, seventy to eighty seconds and generated eighty thousand pieces of mail. There were no faxes or anything like that in those days. So that was a really big deal. So, we sent him to The Tonight Show and the same thing happened at Johnny Carson. So, we invested $3,000 and rented the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and paid a magician, Harry Blackstone Jr. and put together a little showcase for some of the agencies and buyers. He came down in a swing in a puff of smoke, surrounded by some girls in some sort of flimsy costumes. Harry Blackstone put him though a puff of smoke and Tiny Tim got off the swing and said, "Welcome to my dream," and he sang a bunch of songs. (laughs) We wound up getting $60,000 a week at Caesar's Palace and everything fed off that. That led to a whole bunch of other dates. We played I think The Palmer House in Chicago, The Chevron Hilton in Sydney. I can't remember all the places. The fact of the matter is he drew crowds wherever he went, but he didn't draw paying crowds. He never really drew. But on TV, a whole other story. The wedding (of Tiny Tim on The Tonight Show) did about seventy-some-odd million people.

Q - When Helen Reddy played Three Rivers Inn in Syracuse, New York in 1966 and drew twelve people, were you with her that night?

A - Yes. It took me five years to get her a record deal.

Q - Did you look at Helen Reddy for the first time and say, "I can make this lady a star"?

A - I didn't hear her sing until we were together for about four months. I never heard her sing nothing.

Q - But how about when you did hear her sing?

A - I just thought she had a unique quality. Dionne Warwick paid to make a demo with her. That got us a small, tiny deal at Mercury Records, Fontana Records. Irwin Steinberg was the president then. I remember he said, "Remember, songs that come in here go to Lesley Gore first." And so we made two singles for Mercury. Neither one of them sold shit because they didn't do anything with them. So, I spent the next few years; I couldn't even get her a job for twenty-five dollars doing demos for publishers. Finally a guy I met through the Cosby connection, Artie Mogull, we had a record company at Cosby called Tetragrammaton Records. We also did the John Lennon brown bag album where he and Yoko were naked. We put the album out in a brown bag. The first record we put out was by Deep Purple and that was a hit. I was managing Deep Purple. I went on tour with them. Once we did a solo tour and we were an opening act for Cream, which was Eric Clapton's group.

Q - What I find so interesting is that when you finally got Helen a record deal with Capitol Records, you were calling up radio station program directors, asking them to play her record. Capitol Records had a promotion department. Why were you doing the work that the promotion department should have been been doing?

A - Because they didn't even know they really had her. The deal was to make a single. Again, like the deal with Mercury, there was no album deal. Nothing. Originally we went into the studio to do a single of a Mac Davis song called "I Believe In Music", which I thought could have been a hit. The B-side was a song I didn't really like, "I Don't Know How To Love Him", from Jesus Christ Superstar. When we got out of the studio "I Don't Know How To Love Him" was a much stronger record than "I Believe In Music". I don't want to say "I Believe In Music" fell flat, but it just didn't have, in my mind, what it took to be a hit. The problem with "I Don't Know How To Love Him" was on the Jesus Christ Superstar album, which had sold by then about two million units. They were putting it out as a single by Yvonne Elliman, who sang it on the album. And so what I did was I went to the stations. A lot of these stations had what they called Battle Of The Bands. They played two records and had people vote. So, what I convinced some of the stations is play the Yvonne Elliman record, play the Helen Reddy record, and see what happens. On some occasions, yes, I flew up to San Jose, sat in a motel room and dialed the station I don't know how many times, and did it that way. I did it in a few markets, but in general most of the markets the voting went her way anyway. Her version was a stronger version than Yvonne Elliman even though Yvonne Elliman's was on the album. So that record made the Top 20. I think we got as high as number eleven with that record, "I Don't Know How To Love Him". And because of that, Capitol then made an album deal for us. On the album she wrote "I Am Woman". Then a producer named Mike Frankovich heard the song and wanted to make it part of a movie he was doing called Stand Up And Be Counted, with Jackie Bissett, quote "A Woman's Movie." But he wanted another verse. So, she wrote another verse and we put the record out in March of '72 and the record went on the charts at 99 to 98, to 97 and fell off the charts. And that's where I developed a reputation. I did piss on a guy's desk for not making eye contact with me. I did beat somebody else up in the elevator. What happened was they tried talking me out of putting that record out. They told me, "Nobody wants to hear that women's lib shit, especially your male program directors and DJs." Everybody's telling me I'm going to end her career before it starts with that record. But we were playing small places, four hundred to five hundred seats, and wherever she played, women went nuts for that record. Women were half the population. It didn't do anything to me, "I Am Woman", but it resonated with women, strong. And so what I did, I found a station called WINX. It's outside of Washington D.C., but a five thousand watt station which is a very small station. I convinced the guy to put the record on his station. I was able to do that because nobody even calls a five thousand watt(er), not a record company or anything. I could get on a plane with him and schmooz with him and tell him stories. He put the record on and it went to number one in two weeks on his station. Phones rang off the hook with women. I picked that station because it bled into Hartford, Connecticut which is a Top 10 market with a bigger station there called WDRC. And so the program director called me up from the station and said, "I hate this fuckin' record, but my phones are ringing off the hook because of the bleeding from these other little stations. I'm gonna have to play it." And he did. It went on to number one there in a few weeks. Station by station. By December of 1972 the record was number two. "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" was number one. It took me nine months to get the record up the chart, a little bit at a time, but it kept movin' and movin'. Everywhere it got played it went to number one. I called Billboard because Helen was pregnant by then and expecting the baby any day. I said, "If you make it number one instead of 'Papa Was A Rolling Stone' I'll name my kid Billboard Wald." (laughs) I was just fuckin' with 'em, but the record went to number one by itself. It knocked off "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" and we found it went to number one the day my son was born, December 12th, 1972. It won the Grammy. Because the record company had nothing to do with the success, it got us a new deal at a lot more money than Lennon and McCartney and Glen Campbell and all the rest of 'em were getting. Then she had a string of hits. We had four number ones and I think it was thirteen Top Tens or Top Twenties. Number one with "Delta Dawn". Another one where somebody else had it out first, Tanya Tucker. We wiped her up with that. Then we had a record, "Leave Me Alone (Ruby Red Dress)" and that went to number one. The biggest record she ever had was not "I Am Woman", but "Angie Baby". That went to number one in fifty-one countries. So, she played all over the world. Then we had a TV series on NBC.

Q - Helen was performing at the New York State Fair in August, 1975. It was an outdoor venue and it was pouring rain. I didn't think she would come out, but in the end she did. Years later I heard that you were backstage screaming and swearing your head off, telling her not to go on. The person who told me this said you were acting very badly. I'm thinking, wait a minute, if that was my wife, maybe I'd be more than just a little concerned that she would be electrocuted.

A - That's not true. I knew she would go on. You have to remember she'd been singing since she was four years old. Her parents had a traveling Vaudeville show. Her father was a radio comic. Her mother wound up having a big TV series. But she did shows whether she was sick, not sick. We missed one show in the eighteen years we were together. We just couldn't get there. She always went on. We were playing a place, three thousand people, sold out, and some schmuck with a car hit a light pole and took out the power to the place. She had somebody standing there with a fuckin' flashlight and she did the show anyway.

Q - In 1977 I actually stopped into your management office and inquired about getting a job. A woman told me "We're family here." Family. That told me that you just can't walk in off the streets and expect to get a job in a high profile entertainment business. It doesn't work that way, does it?

A - It did later on when I became president of Juber-Peters. I didn't hire people off the street, but I hired people that were recommended to me.

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