On any day of the week, you might find Scooter Braun working his magic in a pair of vintage Reeboks. He has a love of superior kicks, and was among the high-profile investors in StockX, the “stock market for sneakers.” He’s now forty-two, but some of us can still picture him in 2006, a college dropout riding around Atlanta with a writer from Creative Loafing, proclaiming his status as the guy who knows all the guys in the know. Braun, the son of two dentists from Greenwich, Connecticut, was already perfecting his hustle—from basketball courts to boardrooms. “He’s hustle concentrate,” the hip-hop producer Jazze Pha said. “You ever made Minute Maid out of a can? That’s the kind of hustle he’s got.” And this was before Braun raked in an estimated half a billion dollars from his various efforts, including serving as Justin Bieber’s manager. He has also managed Ariana Grande, Carly Rae Jepsen, Idina Menzel, Demi Lovato, and the Kid Laroi. “He is as much the author of the pop music we listen to incessantly as are the artists on his roster,” Amos Barshad wrote of Braun in “No One Man Should Have All That Power,” his 2019 book about behind-the-scenes schemers. “He is, as much as anyone, controlling the last vestiges of the monoculture.” But there’s reason to wonder whether his profession—like that of lamplighters, town criers, and cigarette girls—might be a thing of the past.
In the twilight hours favored by the owl of Minerva (not to mention the industry’s A. & R. scouts), we can now begin to study some vital elements in the job description. Back in the nineteen-forties, the popular-music industry depended on bookers, promoters, and agents, but there was a growing demand for bespoke handling. Nat King Cole found it in the Honduras-born Carlos Gastel, a six-foot bruiser in a pin-striped suit with a pocket square, best known for repping dance bands and the occasional boxer. The two men had been sizing each other up for a while, but the story goes that they became partners at Herb Rose’s 331 Club, where Gastel bought Cole out of his performing contract for ten dollars. (Gastel became the manager of many of the key artists from Capitol Records, including June Christy, Nelson Riddle, Peggy Lee, and Mel Tormé.) “Carlos and I thought generally the same way,” Cole recalled in 1957. “This is really unusual in an artist-manager relationship. . . . Often the manager has very different ideas from those of the artist.” Meanwhile, a new sort of audience was gathering on the horizon, humming a different tune.
The rock-and-roll manager proper, or improper, really begins with Elvis Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, the former carny with the omnipresent cigar, nodding, winking, and fanning his latest flame into a global conflagration. Parker was a huckster—he liked to call Presley “my attraction”—but he never, as far as one can tell, thought of Elvis as anything other than a leg-quivering dynamo who, sooner or later, might be capable of bringing in more than a hundred thousand dollars a week in Vegas. Working the lights from the shadows, Parker was a shambling Svengali, his pockets, one imagines, stuffed with ready cash, matchbooks, and a plethora of calling cards.
A scene in Sofia Coppola’s film “Priscilla” shows a young Elvis, sveltely portrayed by Jacob Elordi, settling down on a soft bed with his intended for a spot of heavy petting. He begins by phoning an assistant and telling her to hold all calls, “unless it’s from my daddy or an emergency from the Colonel.” Among those occasions which life may offer for vital interruptus, a message from one’s manager must rank fairly low for most of us. But not for Elvis. To him, it appears that professional management was a sort of husbandry of the self, and deferring to the Colonel was the price to be paid for all the blessings he had received. “I knew Colonel Parker for almost four decades,” Greg McDonald, who worked for him, writes in “Elvis and the Colonel” (St. Martin’s). “I saw first-hand how Colonel Parker worked . . . how he negotiated contracts, and how he made sure there was enough honey to go around.” McDonald, displaying company loyalty, depicts Elvis as his own worst enemy and his manager as a simple businessman doing his best. The Colonel’s superpower—much mimicked, we are told—was for turning Elvis’s bid for glory into huge bundles of cash. The agonies of creation were not the manager’s concern. What mattered, McDonald thinks, is that Parker “could sell tickets to see two flies wrestling on a windowpane, and the line would go around the block.”
The Colonel was old enough to be Brian Epstein’s father, and, in management terms, the distance between them is the journey from the peddler of wares to the custodian of genius. Epstein, a young Liverpool store manager, had turned himself into the Beatles’ biggest fan when, in January, 1962, he signed them. He was slightly weak at the knees, and he never gained the steadiness required of hard business. Where Colonel Parker’s relationship with Elvis always seemed largely transactional—with a shift in demand, he might readily have swapped out his young buck for a brace of bearded ladies—Epstein had a worshipful attitude toward his most famous clients. They were always “my boys.” He told a friend that once, during a big Beatles concert, he slipped into the crowd and screamed like one of the girls, saying it was what he’d wanted to do from the minute he saw them.
In Epstein’s 1964 memoir, “A Cellarful of Noise,” the young mogul with a silk tie and an Aquascutum coat establishes the credo of all pioneering pop managers from the golden age of twisting and shouting: I was there, calling the shots. He wasn’t Colonel Parker’s equal when it came to making his clients rich, but he was a few steps ahead when it came to protecting them as artists. Nat Weiss, Epstein’s American business partner, felt that a great moneyman was not what the band required at that point: “They needed a person who would inspire them, whose neurosis was sufficient for him to identify with them. And for Brian the Beatles were an alter ego.” Epstein’s sense of sacrifice was always a major part of his character, and, even while he was making sensible managerial moves (pushing the Beatles toward matching suits and clean hair), his notion of being a manager was to bleed himself out. Robert Stigwood, who knew Epstein socially, recalled him saying that what he really wanted to do was manage a cuadrilla of bullfighters in Spain.
“Manning the phones, injecting our hustle into every moving thing”: that was how Andrew Loog Oldham described his life as the Rolling Stones’ manager. Oldham was a King’s Road ingénue, a manic child of the fashion boutique. It was Oldham who got Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to write songs, but perhaps his main contribution was to introduce them to Allen Klein, the son of a butcher from New Jersey, who was to accountancy what Colonel Parker had been to the cowboy hat. (He wore it well.) Richards later described their first meeting: “In walks this little fat American geezer, smoking a pipe, wearing the most diabolical clothes.” It helped that Klein could make the Stones laugh. “Let’s go with someone who can turn everything round,” Richards added, “or fuck things up once and for all.” Klein came on like a gangster, which was completely shocking to the little gray gentlemen of the British recording industry. “We’ve got a lot of good people working at this company,” Sir Edward Lewis, the head of Decca, once reportedly said to Klein, who replied, “Well, I hope they can sing, because you’ve lost the Stones.”
Klein immediately got the band a better publishing deal, upping their end from fifty-six cents on the dollar to seventy-two. He came in like the man who shot Liberty Valance. “I will succeed because I believe all men are born evil,” he apparently said. Having started out as the Stones’ moneyman, he’d edged out Oldham by 1967. According to Ray Davies, of the Kinks, the word “bully” doesn’t begin to cover it. At one meeting, Davies’s lawyer was so horrified by the way Klein was treating the label bosses that he ran from the room in tears. (And Klein was on his side.) When Epstein died, of an overdose, in 1967, Klein moved quickly to gain the confidence of John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr—Paul McCartney never liked him, preferring his girlfriend Linda Eastman’s father and brother. In the end, Klein’s efforts at managing the Beatles, appearing to sort out chaotic finances while not having the backing of McCartney, would be added to the accumulating number of reasons they had for splitting up. There would be lawsuits between Klein and the Beatles, and Klein and the Rolling Stones—the latter alleging “mismanagement of funds.” He would later be convicted of tax fraud and spend two months in prison.
Rock management, it was becoming clear, was a protection racket. For a high price, the early pop impresarios worked to shield their young charges from the venality of the record labels and the greed of the concert venues; only with time would the artists come to recognize that they also needed protection from their protectors. Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman spent a lot of his career hammering out deals for artists who claimed to hate materialism. A Chicago-born son of Russian tailors, Grossman had owned the Gate of Horn, a club in the basement of the Rice Hotel, on Chicago’s Near North Side, and he began to manage some of the acts that appeared there. Grossman had already helped start the Newport Folk Festival, in 1959, when he saw Bob Dylan at the Gaslight Cafe, in Greenwich Village. “Whenever he came in, you couldn’t help but notice him,” Dylan later wrote. “When he talked, his voice was loud, like the booming of war drums.” Dylan, signing with him in 1962, appears not to have known about Grossman’s deal with the music publishers M. Witmark & Sons, which promised the manager fifty per cent of the publishing income his artists brought in.
Managers who prey on their clients often mask their bad faith with theatrically belligerent displays of loyalty, and Grossman, with his double-breasted suits and comb-worthy eyebrows, was true to type. In “Don’t Look Back,” D. A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary about Dylan on tour in England, a hotel manager arrives at Dylan’s room to say that there have been complaints about the noise, and Grossman lets loose: “You’re one of the dumbest assholes and one of the most stupid persons I’ve ever spoken to. If we were someplace else I’d punch you in your goddam nose.” The theatre could only go so far. “Evidently, Dylan had finally got around to reading all his contracts,” Clinton Heylin writes in a new book, “The Double Life of Bob Dylan, Vol. 2, 1966-2021: Far Away from Myself” (Bodley Head). “Please don’t put a price on my soul,” Dylan implored in his 1967 song “Dear Landlord.” His contractual relationship with Grossman would end definitively in 1970.
When Dylan was asked, in a deposition, how long he had known Grossman, he replied, “I don’t think I’ve ever known the man.” There were suggestions, alluded to by Dylan in other songs, that the manager had a tendency to keep his clients in a state of narcotic dependency as well as financial uncertainty. “Too many of his artists were junkies,” Ed Sanders, of the Fugs, told a music critic, “and I think it’s possible he used their addiction as a way of controlling them.” Grossman’s response to the heroin addiction of his client Janis Joplin was to take out a life-insurance policy on her.
In the early nineteen-seventies, the notoriety of rock managers was starting to rival that of their clients. Don DeLillo’s novel “Great Jones Street” (1973), about the “devouring neon” of fame, gives us the rock star Bucky Wunderlick, who, burned out at twenty-five, holes up in a cold New York apartment, awaiting cosmic lessons about power and language. After stepping out for food one day, he returns to find his manager with one arm down the toilet bowl looking for a dime. Bucky’s manager is a stand-in for many famous managers, putting his client at ease about broken commitments, “revenues, monies, so forth—grosses and the like.” Before Bucky gains the attention of a terrorist group, we get to admire the bold imperatives of his manager, a man “propelled, ballistically, to and from distant points of commerce.”
The type is captured quite hilariously in the character of Dennis Hope, played by Jimmy Fallon in Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous” (2000), also set in the early seventies. Hope is angling to manage the band Stillwater, and he arrives wearing a brown leather jacket and a brazenly spread collar, preening beneath the kind of glasses that helped Elvis conquer Las Vegas. “I didn’t invent the rainy day,” Hope says, with relish. “I just own the best umbrella.” The rock manager had by then become his own tribute act, and in the overblown manner of the day Hope goes on to impress on his neophyte charges the Wagnerian seriousness of their world-conquering quest. “Welcome to New York,” he says. “It’s O.K. to be nervous. You should be nervous. All you can do is be yourself and leave a pint of blood on that stage.” The consensus was that the manager had become the bullshit king of the turning world, a belief that hasn’t quite gone away. (“He’s a piece of shit,” an industry source told Business Insider, commenting on Scooter Braun’s relationship to his clients. “But he’s my piece of shit.”)
Peter Grant, who started out in the late nineteen-fifties as a bouncer at a London rock-and-roll coffee bar, was, by the mid-seventies, a cosmic beacon of death-defying behavior as well as the chief exemplar of the criminal-adjacent management style. He once wrapped Little Richard in a bedsheet and carried him to a waiting vehicle when he refused to do a gig. A whole bygone era is encapsulated in the fact that Grant, who became best known as Led Zeppelin’s manager, once tried to drive a car into a swimming pool but got it wedged between two palm trees. (Bands today are kind to trees, and some have been known to mount concerts in aid of them.) At Seattle’s Edgewater Hotel, Grant encountered a hotel manager who confessed to envying the rock guests who could vent their frustrations by trashing their rooms. Grant took the gentleman to his own suite and, as he recalled, told him to do his worst. “Here you are, have this room on Led Zeppelin,” Grant said. “And he went ‘Oh, yes!’ and enjoyed himself, and it cost me $670.” He claimed that, in the company of Don Arden (Sharon Osbourne’s father and the onetime manager of the Small Faces), he dangled Robert Stigwood, a rival manager, from the fourth-floor balcony of Stigwood’s London office. “He had disgusting skinny ankles,” Grant later recalled.
Dressed in silk scarves, rings, and a long beard, Grant, weighing in at three hundred pounds at his heaviest, was driven by fear and cocaine to do everything he could for the band. Before him, the usual split with bands and concert promoters was sixty-forty; after him, it was ninety-ten. “The artist always wears the white hat,” Colonel Tom Parker had said, but with Grant the artist also wore white suits and white feathers, bleached with sanctity. “The power we had was incredible,” Phil Carlo, the band’s road manager, recalled. “At this point I discovered the only people who could jump red lights with a police escort were the president of the United States and Peter Grant.”
A contrasting case is presented by Malcolm McLaren, the London-born agitator and propagandist, who not only messed with the capitalist yearnings of rock but installed the manager as its central artist. (It took Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex, Viv Albertine of the Slits, and a tranche of female punk artists to expose the conformity in McLaren’s program of change.) Attending to a stable of Dickensian types, McLaren was part Fagin, part Uriah Heep, up from the streets to magnify your life and pick your pockets. In Paul Gorman’s “The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren” (Constable), an exultant recent biography, McLaren plays a catalytic role similar to the one Warhol played for the previous generation; the Sex Pistols emerge as McLaren’s house band, embodying his situationist rant, his cultural riposte, and his big joke. McLaren turned making an exhibition of yourself into a ruse de guerre, and when New Musical Express finally went big on the Pistols it was McLaren the magazine interviewed, under a banner headline, “Meet the Col Tom Parker of The Blank Generation.”
According to her brother, Madonna had a Sid Vicious poster and a naked light bulb hanging in her New York apartment when she started out. Her first manager, Camille Barbone, promised a weekly wage of a hundred dollars and got her bicycle repaired. It was different for girls, but, in the nineteen-eighties, toughness became central to the rules of engagement. “Madonna basically pushed me to my financial limit, my loyalty limits, my patience limits,” Barbone recalled. “I knew she was using me. But what could I expect, really?” Madonna’s biographer Lucy O’Brien tells us that Barbone knew she didn’t have the juice to get her client to the next level. (Other biographers reported that Barbone was in love with Madonna.) It’s true that managers—like agents, like husbands, and like wives—are often fired and that, when they are, the parties involved seldom agree about how to split the blame. Madonna wanted the eighties and nineties to be a testing ground for female power and erotic candor, and they were. But the manager couldn’t keep up with the star’s ambition. Barbone was so distressed by the experience that she left the industry altogether and temporarily took work in a nursing home. “I needed people to say, ‘thank you,’ ” she later explained.
All artists have their own particular spiral of needs. Staci Robinson, in “Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography” (Crown), recounts that when execs at Time Warner, Tupac’s record label’s distributor, grew concerned about violent content (politicians had started to speechify about gangsta rap), the hip-hop star’s manager, Atron Gregory, agreed with them that Tupac’s next album “would have to be rethought.” Atron’s unease made Tupac uneasy about him, and he thereafter insisted that he become his manager’s only client. “I need to be the most important to you,” Tupac told him, testing not only Gregory’s loyalty but his own requirements. “And if you don’t want to do it this way, I gotta move on.” His next manager came from the Black Panthers.
Managerial hysteria has evolved in all sorts of ways in the decades since Brian Epstein first joined the girls to scream his head off. Kurt Cobain, of Nirvana, turned out to require a manager who would protect him not only from the industry but also from himself. Danny Goldberg, who looked after the band in the early nineties, recalls having a telephone conversation with the manager of Aerosmith to find out how you go about rescuing a rock star who’s out of his mind on drugs. Cobain wanted to call Nirvana’s third album “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die,” like his anthemic song, and one of Goldberg’s jobs was to talk him out of it while he still could. Goldberg was expected to double as a second father and the person in charge of critical interventions, which worked until it didn’t. Cobain died by suicide in 1994.
Father fixations come up a lot in these highly fraught situations. The nineties boy-band impresario Lou Pearlman, known to his clients as Big Poppa, looked after many young men who yearned for a dependable father figure. ’N Sync had already toured for two years and sold millions of dollars in records when its five members received their first checks from him: ten thousand dollars each. A fellow-manager said Pearlman reminded her of “the kid who would tear the wings off of flies—not to kill them, just to watch them crawl around and not be able to fly.” He had spent his bands’ earnings promoting a huge Ponzi scheme, stealing hundreds of millions of dollars, the life savings of fourteen hundred people, and by 2008 his fiction had unravelled. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, where he died, in 2016, at the age of sixty-two. Still, his last days were spent dreaming of a comeback. All he needed was a phone and an Internet connection and he could start some new bands.
Management is increasingly portrayed as a creeping ailment in the omniverse of the singular rock artist. Not that anyone comes off well in HBO’s “The Idol,” a series about the music industry which was co-created by Sam Levinson and aired last year, about a young and beautiful star, Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp). She gets entangled with a sleazebag called Tedros (played by the Canadian singer-songwriter Abel Tesfaye, better known as the Weeknd), who advises her to ditch her professional team and let him take over her career.
“The Idol” is consistent only in its depravity. With the plausibility of daytime soaps, the casual menace of Grand Theft Auto, the logic of revenge porn, and the momentum of a psychotic episode, the series takes the issue of control and turns it into a lethargic rock opera, with levels of confusion repurposed from the career of Britney Spears. That performer’s struggle with professional and parental control is central to the memoir she published last October, “The Woman in Me” (Gallery Books), in which she questions the decision of her managers “to claim I was some kind of young-girl virgin even into my twenties.” In Spears’s time, managers operated variously as cult leaders or spin doctors, issuing editorials about their clients as opposed to repairing their bicycles. By the end of 2006, Britney had begun to fall into a period of mental illness, and she later endured a legal battle with her father to escape from his conservatorship. The singer writes that, at the height of her mismanagement, her father told her he was the boss. He was Britney now.
Scooter Braun has reportedly been losing many of his high-profile clients; Carly Rae Jepsen, Idina Menzel, Demi Lovato, BabyJake, and, most recently, Ariana Grande have moved on. He was never Taylor Swift’s manager, but his troubled relationship with the superstar, a billionaire who in February became the only artist to win Album of the Year at the Grammys four times, may have a lasting impact on questions of authority in the music industry. In 2019, backed by the Carlyle Group, Braun bought Big Machine Label Group for three hundred million dollars, giving him ownership of the masters of Swift’s first six albums. “Never in my worst nightmares did I imagine the buyer would be Scooter,” she wrote on Tumblr. She has been rerecording those early songs, each one labelled “Taylor’s Version.”
Taylor Swift is effectively the C.E.O. of her own company. An article in Forbes, “What Taylor Swift Can Teach Us About Leadership,” reveals that, when she gave the staff on her recent tour bonuses totalling fifty-five million dollars, she included five hundred notes she’d written herself. (It’s hard to imagine Bob Dylan writing five hundred notes to his peeps, and even harder to imagine Albert Grossman or Colonel Parker signing off on bonuses to lighting operators and catering staff.) In the higher reaches of the industry, the backstage hustlers and hot messes are being supplanted by the executive power of the star herself, backed by a calming “manager” in a nice suit who helms a team of lawyers. “Everything has changed,” as Swift sings. Douglas Baldridge, a Washington litigator and a former partner in a white-shoe law firm, is now the general counsel for 13 Management, which helps look after Swift in her efforts to look after herself. He is unlikely to be dangling anybody from a fourth-floor window by his ankles. The carnival barker and the charismatic goof, the superfan and the mad accountant—these types belong to a sunset tale of diminishing power. We’ll probably miss them when they’re gone. ♦
