{{{http://www.amazon.com/exe...380978520/ "Exploding: The Highs, Hits, Hype, Heroes, and Hustlers of the Warner Music Group" by Stan Cornyn, Paul Scanlon

Hmmm, I wonder whether it mentions Prince... Review by Barney Hoskyns (who once upon a long time ago wrote a decent book on Prince, and who was also one of the authors of that great Mojo piece of Prince in early 1997) at the bottom, the editorial reviews are courtesy of Amazon.com.}}}

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly:

When did the money become more important than the music? Cornyn, a veteran of Warner Bros. Records from its birth in the late 1950s, fondly recalls when it was about the music (and the dames and drunken fun didn't hurt), a time before such terms as "units," "product," "industry" entered the vernacular. He's frank about the people and circumstances that have forever changed the business. Also realistic, he knows changes will continue (which is why he urges readers to turn this into a "living book" by contributing their own observations online). Having spent 34 years with the company in its many incarnations, Cornyn could've chosen the route of raunchy expose, but instead he delivers good gossip with high humor and class. He describes the unknowns who stepped in and rescued Warner during down times, like Bob Newhart with his comedy album in 1962, and later Madonna. Snappy stories of artists itching to break contracts Sinatra did so with "laryngitis," the Sex Pistols with urine, Jackson Browne with tears. But even juicier, as the company history unfolds, are the insider takes on the men (and the occasional women) behind the music, the boardroom brawls, midnight calls, hush-hush deals, and talks with Teamsters. Endearingly, he freeze-frames the grander moments, when someone makes the perfect quip or sings a line just right. This music narrative has all the elements drama, mystery, comedy, a course in business (royalties, payola, severance pay), debauchery (Queen's outrageous party in New Orleans) and history.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

If anyone knows the whole story of the Warner Music Group, which in its heyday included the high-flying Atlantic, Elektra, and Reprise pop labels, Cornyn does. He started working there in the '50s, stayed, and prospered, writing liner notes before progressing to greater responsibilities and winning more Grammys than the Singing Nun. Of course, this book isn't as much about music as about the corporate machinations anent packaging and merchandising music, so there is way more of David Geffen and Mo Ostin than of Sinatra and Zappa in it. So what? Sleazy business practices in the recording industry have made fun reading before, and they still do. On the other hand, Cornyn includes plenty on what the likes of James Taylor, Led Zeppelin, the Dead, and the Stones are really like, so stargazers can't grouse too much. Meanwhile, Cornyn's deposition will seem absolutely essential to those who still would like to know why grown-ups consistently give such ludicrously lucrative deals to adolescents with guitars. Mike Tribby

Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From Library Journal:

A creative executive at Warner Bros. Records for 30 years, Cornyn presents a provocative, witty, and engrossing insider's story of that label and the cutthroat machinations of the record industry. Beginning with the takeover of Warner Bros. Pictures by the despicable Jack Warner, he charts the rise of Warner Records in the late 1950s with Mike Maitland, who first brought success to the label. He then moves to the merger of Warner Bros. Records with Frank Sinatra's Reprise label, its absorption of successful independents Atlantic and Elektra, and the buyout of Warner by Steve Ross of Kinney National, who created Warner Communications. Cornyn continues with Warner's assimilation of Asylum Records, its merger with Time, and its eventual union with Ted Turner's communications empire. Giving little emphasis to the artists except as fleeting commodities, the author graphically reveals the transition of Warner from a fledgling record company dedicated to unearthing the newest music trends to a corporate conglomerate obsessed with greater market share and escalating profits. Fans of record mogul tell-alls will enjoy this. Highly recommended for popular music collections. Dave Szatmary, Univ. of Washington, Seattle

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Book Description:

That's how Vanity Fair described the record business turmoil of the 1990s, which moved the Warner Music Group -- the world's number one record company -- from the entertainment pages to the front pages. Suddenly, decades of riotous fun and booming business went splat. Top music executives got evicted from their offices, some escorted by company guards. Why? The answers are in Exploding -- the most insightful and delightful book about the record business ever written.In the rock explosion of the Sixties and Seventies, Warner Bros., Atlantic, and Elektra Records dominated the business as the Warner Music Group. But by the Nineties, the success of WMG was shaken by egos and corporate politics that left the company struggling for identity in a dramatically changing industry. This is the story of that long, strange trip.Your host is the ultimate insider: Stan Cornyn, a key creative force behind the Warner Music Group's stunning rise. During more than thirty years at the company, Cornyn went through what the news media could never uncover. In a freewheeling, vastly entertaining narrative, Cornyn takes us behind the scenes, seats us in the conference rooms, and shows us the interactions between the stars and the suits -- using the same irreverent wit that produced the marketing campaigns that helped put Warner on the map.Exploding is populated by music stars like Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Lil' Kim, Dr. Dre, the Grateful Dead, Queen, Madonna, Ice-T, Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa, Neil Young, Alice Cooper, and dozens more, even the legendary supergroup Scorpio. (Never heard of Scorpio? You'll find out why.) And it introduces you to the most colorful businesspeople ever: hyperintense record sellers who shave their heads; throw doves off a roof; send pig heads through the mail; provide the money, meds, and mammaries -- anything -- to get their records on the air. Here is the music business as you've never seen it: at its wildest, in its wackiest fifty years, bursting with hits and cash, until, by the end, it's just plain Exploding.

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Barney Hoskyns in MOJO, March 27, 2002 :

LET ME 'fess up. This is a book I would kill to have written. It's a book I've been saying should be written for the last ten years a book, a huge book, about possibly the hippest, bravest, most nurturing record company rock'n'roll ever spawned. Now Stan Cornyn, a Warners "insider's insider" if ever there was one, has gone and done it with help from smart Rolling Stone vet Paul Scanlon.

"The really important factor was that we were a younger company than Columbia," Cornyn said when I interviewed him in 1993. "We weren't structured so tightly that we couldn't bend."

Bend Warner Brothers did or at least Warner Bros. and Reprise Records,under the inspiring helmsmanship of sometime Sinatra accountant Morris "Mo"Ostin and Boston disc-jock Joe Smith. For a golden half-decade, roughly 1967-1972, Warner-Reprise was the ultimate haven for the crème of the talent pouring out of (and into) the canyons of Southern California. Between 'em, Mo'n'Joe bagged the signatures of Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young,Randy Newman, Joni Mitchell, Ry Cooder, Fleetwood Mac, Van Morrison, James Taylor, Frank Zappa, Little Feat, Van Dyke Parks and on and on and on. Cornyn calls that "a spurt of prescience heretofore unknown in the record business". Frankly, it's hard to argue.

Warner-Reprise didn't do too badly either side of those halcyon five years, of course: from the Everlys to REM, Ostin and Smith green-lit signings that helped the WM Group shift gazillions of albums. But that heady turn-of-the-decade stretch, full of bold impulses and daring risks, is the guarantor of Warners' place in the history tomes.

It's also why Exploding is as much a lament a "They Don't Make 'Em Like That Anymore" about record execs as it is a racy, fact-packed narrative about company politicking. Like Cornyn, the Creative Services ace who conjured up mad as for the emerging underground press ("Win a Dream Date With the Fugs", "the Pigpen Lookalike Contest"), Mo'n'Joe 'n Lenny Waronker, and others like them cared deeply about talent. And the talent,generally, cared about them.

Don't get me wrong: Stan's yarn is first'n'foremost about players,workaholic Jews jockeying for position in worlds of fast deals and loaded stock options. Stan, a token Burbank goy, is as besotted by the greed and manoeuvring of the David Geffens and Bob Krasnows as he is by the talent-rich rosters of Warner-Reprise, Atlantic, Elektra and the other labels woven into the WM fold. Written in prose that's at once manic and
jovial and with both eyes on a Vanity Fair serialisation Exploding contains swathes of detail about money, sales, executive toilets and, above all, who reported to whom. If you want to read about Joni'n'James and all the other ladies'n'gents of the Canyon, you may be better off elsewhere.

If, on the other hand, you dig sweeping accounts of musical empires, and you loved Hit Men and The Mansion on the Hill, get your teeth into Cornyn, whose sardonically honest take on the vanity, megalomania and brilliance of the key dramatis personae from Ahmet Ertegun and Jac Holzman to Steve Ross and Seymour Stein is never less than entertaining and nearly always affectionate. ("There are the shrewd," he writes nicely, "and then there are the shrewder.")

Cornyn, retired for several years and living the sweet life in Santa Barbara, says he still talks to people at Warners. "Stan, it's just not like it was," they sigh to him. "Now it's just about money and covering your [rear]."

Once 'pon a time, it was about money, covering your [rear] and making astonishing music. Who's to say it couldn't still be?

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