Looking for the Magic is about Arista the independent record label—and about Bell Records, its immediate predecessor—so the narrative ends with the conclusion of its indie era in the mid-’80s, when it began being distributed by the RCA branch system. This isn’t intended to be a comprehensive account of everything that happened at Arista Records. Some artists who did pretty well aren’t mentioned at all, others just in passing (the only place you’ll see the names Tycoon and Point Blank is inside these parentheses). It would be foolish to try to discuss everyone who ever recorded or worked for Arista, let alone the vast number of characters and songs that made appearances in Arista’s pre-history, on the Bell-Amy-Mala labels and all the labels that company distributed.

Obviously, a good chunk of the label’s history happened after the period covered here; Clive Davis’s memoir, The Soundtrack of My Life, would be the place to pick up the story if you’d like to know more about, say, The Bodyguard, Arista Nashville (which deserves a book of its own), LaFace Records, or, if you must, Milli Vanilli.

What I’ve tried to get across is the shape of things: how different genres evolved at the label and what the tone of the times was like, through representative albums and artists. Arista has a reputation as a “pop label,” and there's no shame in that: Its pop success was pretty extraordinary. But that's like calling Hachette a “romance” book publishing company because they put out Nicholas Sparks's novels: true but incomplete, since they also publish Malcolm Gladwell and David Sedaris. The film production company StudioCanal, in the first decade of the 2000s, released Love Actually, but also Shaun of the Dead and Mulholland Drive. So think of Barry Manilow as Love Actually.

Arista released Horses, Street Hassle and Squeezing Out Sparks; signed Gil Scott-Heron, Anthony Braxton and Iggy Pop; reinvigorated the Kinks and Aretha Franklin; distributed albums by Ian Dury and the Blockheads and the Contortions. Having successful records is always a good thing; that’s how the industry keeps score. But often the character of a record label comes into focus on the projects that didn’t, in the end, strongly connect outside the company’s walls, the ones everyone at the label believed in and fought for in vain. Some of the artists who make appearances in Looking for the Magic, like David Forman, Quazar’s Glenn Goins, Linda Lewis, and Willie Nile, and some of the albums that came out on the Freedom and Novus labels, are less familiar than they should be. And so much of the pop and soul music that was on Bell Records in the decade between 1965 and 1974 is way too overlooked. This is partially an attempt to fill in those gaps and paint a more expansive picture.

Looking for the Magic. That’s a music business job description. You hear a couple of minutes of a demo or catch a few songs of a new artist’s live set, and once in a very great while you’re struck with what feels like inevitability. And you want everyone everywhere to know about it. This is what Hesh on The Sopranos meant when he told Christopher, “A hit is a hit.” “Looking for the Magic” is also an object lesson on the capriciousness of the record industry. It was the title of the third and final single released from the Arista debut of the Dwight Twilley Band. The band seemed to have it all: hooky songs, star presence, critical acclaim. But all the label’s efforts didn’t make one bit of difference. The record flopped. This book is about both sides of the search for magic, the times everything clicked into place, and the times nothing did. 

I worked at Arista for a good chunk of the time covered in the book, so I was an observer and/or a participant during some of the events described here. I've kept my personal experiences out of the narrative, but if a sentence reads something like “a number of Arista people,” I might be among those people. Not always, though. Working at 6 West 57th in the late ’70s did feel like being part of a New York City cultural renaissance. Not to over-romanticize, or to claim any exclusivity; I know my friends who were at Elektra, Sire, and Island felt the same way: that it was an exciting time to be out in the street, going to CBGB, the Bottom Line, Seventh Avenue South, the Lone Star, JP’s, Hurrah, or across the Hudson River to Maxwell’s in Hoboken. There was so much going on: no wave, Latin jazz, disco, punk, cabaret. There was a collective feeling that Manhattan was exactly the right place to be, in all its pre-Giuliani seediness and despite its financial travails. (You know the HBO series Vinyl? It was nothing like that. People in film and television attempting to capture the NYC music biz get that era wrong all the time.) On the cover of its March 29, 1976 issue, The New Yorker ran the famous Saul Steinberg illustration “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” where the whole country west of Manhattan is condensed into a small strip of land adjacent to the Pacific Ocean. It was funny because it felt true.