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If you're an artist and things are working out well, there will come a time when you need a manager. You need someone to take care of the business end of things while you focus on the music. You need a manager. A manager does everything from booking gigs to devising career strategies. That includes promotion and marketing, networking and conducting any negotiations on your behalf. And the manager is in charge of financial management. Hold on to that thought.
A manager is incentivized by your success. The usual fee is 15% of whatever you make. And obviously, the more you make, the more the manager makes, and everyone is happy, right? This entire relationship is based on trust. You, as the artist, must believe that your manager always has your best interests in mind. And you must believe that your manager will never take advantage of you or rip you off.
Again, you trust your manager with your money. In the vast majority of artist-manager relationships, things are professional and legal. The best managers will take a bullet for their clients. Some are even legendary for their skills, dedication, and loyalty to their clients. That includes Peter Grant, who did whatever he needed to do to protect Led Zeppelin and to extract maximum profit from record deals and concert tours.
It includes Paul McGuinness, a veteran that took a very young U2 under his wing in 1978 and built them into the biggest band in the world. And then there's Peter Mensch and Cliff Bernstein, who have looked after Metallica, AC/DC, Smashing Pumpkins, The Chili Peppers, Muse, Def Leppard, Snow Patrol, and Cage the Elephant, among others. But it's not always sunshine, chocolate, and unicorns. There are bad managers, too.
And I'm not talking about general incompetence. I'm talking about people who steal, embezzle, and extort from the very people they're supposed to protect and nurture. This is Uncharted Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry, episode number 18. These are three of the worst, most unscrupulous, and most dishonest managers in rock. I've got some stories for you. If you are an artist, a manager is essential to your career.
While you're working on music and performing, you need someone you can trust to handle the business end of things. Most managers take pride in their job, knowing that the better they do, the better their client will do, and everyone will make lots of money over a very long career. Managers can also be predators, people who look at their artists as a mark, somebody that they can exploit. Some are hucksters and fraudsters from the start. Others find themselves drifting over to the dark side at the very beginning.
Some of these bad actors are caught. Others skate away, often with millions of dollars in other property that wasn't theirs. Evil managers in rock and roll are as old as the music itself. Colonel Tom Parker was one of the first. He set the standard for how awful a supposedly trusted person can exploit an artist for his own gain. Now, in case you don't know, Colonel Tom Parker was not a colonel. His name wasn't even Tom Parker.
He was born in the Netherlands as Andreas Cornelius van Kuijck. When he was 17, he somehow managed to illegally enter the United States, probably by stowing away on a ship. He was caught and sent back, but in 1929, at the age of 20, he made it back into the US, probably sneaking in through Canada, and this time he stayed. His departure from the Netherlands was odd.
He left quickly without telling anyone. He left behind his identity papers, all of his expensive clothes, and with no money. He then broke all contact with his family. Why? Because it's very possible, not proven, but possible that he killed someone. The wife of a grocery store owner. Anna Van Den Eeden was a 23-year-old who had been beaten to death behind her new husband's store, which was very close to where Parker's family lived. The murder was never solved.
Now, there has never been any proof that Parker was the killer, but suspicions linger. To hide his real identity, he enlisted in the US Army, stealing his new name from the officer who interviewed him at the recruitment center. Things went well for a while, but then Parker went AWOL, ended up in solitary confinement, and was diagnosed as a psychopath, someone with an uncontrollable and dangerous temper that got him discharged.
Parker liked showbiz, but the only work he could find at first was as a carny for the old Royal American shows. That eventually led to promoting musical events, and from there he moved into managing artists. Clients included Eddie Arnold, a big singing star of the 1940s. Instead of the usual 15% manager's fee, Parker helped himself to 25%.
In 1948, Parker got the honorary title of "Colonel" bestowed upon him by Jimmy Davis, the governor of Louisiana, as a way of thanking Parker for helping him with his election campaign. Even though the title "Colonel" meant absolutely nothing, Andreas Cornelius Van Cuyck called himself "Colonel Tom Parker" or just "The Colonel" for the rest of his life. Colonel Tom invented a fake backstory for himself, saying that he was born in West Virginia,
He never had a U.S. passport, and he never rose above the rank of private in the Army. And to make sure he never got drafted into World War II, he ate and ate and ate and ate, eventually tipping the scales at 300 pounds. Nobody wanted a 300-pound soldier. The colonel managed several artists beyond Eddie Arnold. There was also Tommy Sands and Hank Snow. But then in 1953, Arnold fired Parker.
But Arnold had to buy his way out of the contract he had with the Colonel, something that cost him $50,000, which is more than $600,000 in today's money. Parker's big break came in 1955 when he heard about a singer in a trio called the Blue Moon Boys. That singer's name was Elvis Presley. And after jousting with some competitors, Parker was, by early 1956, Presley's manager and special advisor.
And he immediately began to suck away at Presley's earnings. Now, to be fair, Parker turned Elvis into a huge star. He also invented the modern music merch industry.
At one point in the 1950s, there were 78 different Elvis items for sale, generating more than $22 million in 1956 alone. Parker was clever, too. Parker sold I Love Elvis buttons to fans, and I Hate Elvis buttons to people who didn't like rock and roll. Parker realized he'd hit the jackpot. But instead of prioritizing Elvis' career and best interests, it all became about the colonel.
First, he was all about short-term gains instead of long-term planning. The colonel had no idea when the Elvis gravy train would end, so he signed dubious quick money deals, taking his usual 25% cut. He seemed to be right when Elvis was drafted into the army on March 5th, 1958. That was it for the King of Rock and Roll, right? But when Elvis was discharged two years later, the colonel was there to capitalize on Elvis' return.
After a discussion with Frank Sinatra, he became convinced that Elvis needed to be a movie star. So Parker laid out a plan: three feature films a year and three soundtrack albums a year, every year until the end of 1969. Elvis found himself trapped into contracts that forced him to make cheap bad films and substandard albums.
The Colonel was a master manipulator, extinguishing almost all of Elvis' artistic freedom and diverting him from other career opportunities that may have been more beneficial. He simply did everything the Colonel told him to do. And while this approach worked for a few years, it eventually derailed Elvis' career. He faded as acts like the Beatles and the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones blew past him.
The colonel also didn't want Elvis touring anymore because, well, that was expensive. And under no circumstances was Elvis to ever tour outside the United States. Why? Because Parker couldn't go with him. Remember, he had no U.S. passport. He was living in the States under a fake name and a fake identity. He had entered the U.S. illegally. He couldn't risk leaving the country lest he be unmasked at customs on the way back in.
And he wouldn't let anyone else look after his one and only client because, well, that could potentially lead to a loss of control. And control of his boy Elvis was everything to the colonel. When Elvis was in the army, Parker was petrified at not being able to oversee everything in his life. When Elvis returned to public life in March 1960, the colonel vowed to never let that control ever slip away again. No one would be permitted to influence Elvis, even if it was for his own good.
Elvis, however, didn't know any other kind of manager than the Colonel. So on January 2nd, 1967, he signed a new contract with him. The Key Clause was the one that increased Parker's cut of Elvis's earnings from an already outrageous 25% to 50%. His bank account was more important than Elvis's long-term financial security. There was some real underhanded stuff going on too. Take for example, what became known as the Elvis Tax.
Elvis did not write any of his songs, relying instead on professional songwriters. Yet the Colonel saw to it that Elvis secretly received one-third of all songwriting royalties. The thinking was that Elvis was doing the songwriter a favor by recording one of his or her songs and was therefore entitled to some extra compensation. Of course, the Colonel took 50% of that one-third share in the royalties.
This, by the way, is a practice that secretly continues today, with some managers demanding anywhere from 1% to 50% of the publishing just for allowing their act to record someone's song. Now, credit does have to go to the Colonel for revitalizing Elvis' career with a massive TV comeback special on December 3rd, 1968. That event got big ratings and had Elvis performing in front of a live crowd for the first time in seven years. ♪
Elvis popped again. Demand was insane for a world tour. But again, the colonel said, no, he couldn't risk leaving the country. Instead, Parker devised a way for fans to come to Elvis.
In 1969, Elvis played his first casino show in Las Vegas at the International Hotel, soon to become the Las Vegas Hilton. Between 1969 and his death on August 16, 1977, Elvis performed more than 600 times at the Hilton. And while Elvis made a good amount of money from these gigs, he grew to resent those performances. Meanwhile, a colonel had a gambling problem. It began in the mid-1960s, with Parker often spending 12 hours a day in the casino, and
He eventually racked up $30 million in debts at the Hilton's tables. He booked Elvis in Las Vegas and kept him there just so he could service those debts. When not performing in Vegas, the Colonel booked Elvis into small towns across the United States, cutting costs by using crappy motels. Elvis' mental and physical health deteriorated, and he began to rely on drugs to keep going.
The Colonel tried to restrict Elvis' access to drugs, but that would mean keeping him from performing. And that just wouldn't do. So, on with the show. Meanwhile, behind Elvis' back, Parker sold Elvis' entire back catalog of songs to RCA Records for a measly $5.4 million. That's far less than what it was worth. Elvis got about $2 million of that, but then half that amount went to Priscilla in a divorce settlement.
This meant that going forward, Elvis would receive zero royalties from any songs he recorded prior to 1973. Zero. And that was all his biggest songs. Elvis finally had enough of Colonel Tom Parker. And after a big fight after a Hilton show on September 3rd, 1973, Parker was fired. But that separation lasted all of two weeks before Parker was back in Elvis's good graces and back in charge.
But by this time, it was obvious that Elvis was in bad shape with drugs and his weight. Parker ignored the problem and set about finding new ways for his clients to generate money for him. At one point, Parker reportedly shouted at an Elvis associate who found a doctor administering drugs to Elvis and dunking his head in a bucket of ice water. "'You listen to me!' Parker screamed. "'The only thing that's important is that he's on that stage tonight. Nothing else matters.'"
There was an offer to star along Barbra Streisand in a remake of A Star Is Born, but the Colonel screwed up those negotiations by asking for too much. There were offers for concerts in South America for $2.5 million a pop, a crazy amount for the time. Parker said no. The government of Saudi Arabia offered $5 million and then $10 million for a show in the kingdom. And once again, Parker said no.
Elvis did talk to a couple of people about taking over his management, including something with Peter Grant, the man who ran Led Zeppelin's career. But he didn't have the courage to walk away from the only manager he ever knew. For the last couple of years of his life, Elvis almost never spoke to Parker. And even after Elvis died in 1977, Parker still had his hooks in him. He was still entitled to 50% of whatever income dead Elvis generated, and he was going to collect it.
But then some long-buried secrets started to come out. In 1979, it was learned that Parker gave Elvis some bad advice when it came to royalty collection, something that probably cost Elvis millions of dollars. In 1980, Priscilla Presley hired someone to investigate how the colonel was running Elvis' estate, including Graceland. A judge ruled that Parker had been grossly negligent in running everything and that a 50% management fee was insane.
Meanwhile, the IRS was demanding more than $15 million in back taxes. The Elvis estate was close to bankruptcy. Three years later, the Elvis estate sued Parker for mismanagement. There was a countersuit before everything was settled out of court. Parker walked away with $2 million for all the Presley recordings that he owned. Meanwhile, Parker was evicted from his suite at the Hilton in Las Vegas, largely because of those unpaid gambling debts.
Still, Parker somehow managed to get back into the estate's good graces and did a little work with him throughout the 1990s. But by 1994, he wasn't well, suffering so badly from diabetes and gout that he couldn't leave his home. And on January 20, 1997, he suffered a stroke. He died in hospital the following morning at the age of 87. Over the course of his life, it's estimated that Parker made over $100 million from Elvis.
And when he died, he had a net worth that barely reached a million. Parker was unapologetic to the end. Back in the 90s, when asked about how the estate was flogging Elvis everywhere, he told a reporter, I don't think I exploited Elvis as much as he's being exploited today. I'm not sure if he was complaining or wishing that he'd done more. Next up, the management issues endured by David Bowie. David Bowie knew he wanted to be a star in the late 1950s. He was still a teenager.
But the 60s were nothing but dead ends and failures for him. It wasn't until 1969, when he scored a surprise hit with Space Oddity, that he began to find his footing. The next 10 years were absolutely incredible. Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the blue-eyed soul singer, the thin white duke. He introduced new levels of theatricality into rock. He pushed the boundaries of what popular music could be. He saw the potential of music videos before virtually anyone else. And there were plenty of hit singles and platinum records.
And all this happened after Tony DeFreeze became his manager. DeFreeze helped make Bowie a star, but he also made life very difficult. By the end of the '70s, Bowie, despite all his notoriety, all his fame, all his success, was broke. How was that possible? Let's start at the beginning.
Tony DeVries got into music from the legal side, working at a London law firm that just happened to have some musicians as clients. He was very good at the intricacies of publishing, copyright, image and likeness rights, and so on. If things went to court, DeVries knew what to do for his clients. At least one of his cases set precedent in UK law when it came to music publishing rights. In early 1970, he heard through a mutual acquaintance that a young singer named David Bowie was unhappy with his current manager and was shopping around.
DeVries checked him out and immediately knew that Bowie was a superstar in the making. He started by getting a rather naive 23-year-old Bowie out of a tangle of contracts and agreements. A deal with DeVries was signed on August 1, 1970, and within about a year, DeVries had a new record deal with RCA in America.
His new company was called Main Man, and Bowie's first album under DeFreeze management was Hunky Dory. Ch-ch-ch-changes. Turn and face the strange. Ch-ch-ch-changes. Be a richer man. Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. Turn and face the strange. Ch-ch-ch-changes. There's gonna have to be a different man. May change me.
At the very beginning, De Vries and Bowie were like a married couple, working hand in hand on everything. He told Bowie that he was going to make him into the next Elvis. While De Vries worked Bowie in the UK, he knew that the future lay in America. And main man's culture was about making the artists feel comfortable so they could do their best work. Unfortunately, this involved burning through a lot of cash.
For example, DeVries positioned the brand new Bowie as a rich and glamorous rock star with all the trappings, even though he wasn't selling that many records or concert tickets. Yet it worked. The public bought into the facade. DeVries oversaw practically everything in Bowie's life. There was a lot at stake. The management deal with Bowie was a 50-50 net split on everything. Record company advances, record sales, concert ticket sales, and so on.
And Bowie's 50% came after expenses. Expenses that included: DeVries' salary, the salary of all associated Main Man employees, all travel, all recording costs, all musician fees, and various bits of promotion. Bowie's work seemed to finance the operations of Main Man offices around the world. So there was a double dip. DeVries got his 50%, but then Bowie had to pay DeVries from his 50%. Again, all this was written into the contract that Bowie had signed and totally legal.
At first, though, it did seem like a good idea to Bowie, given all the work DeFreeze put in and all the success that resulted almost immediately. There was very little day-to-day money available. There are stories that during the Spiders from Mars tour in 1972, Bowie and the band were so skint that they couldn't afford to buy cigarettes. And Bowie didn't make it easy. He became an alcoholic, a coke addict, and got into heroin. DeFreeze was a strictly no-drugs guy.
Meanwhile, Bowie turned into a paranoid coke fiend. This caused such a strain in the relationship that there was a settlement in July 1975 involving DeFreeze, Bowie, Main Man, and RCA Records. DeFreeze would no longer be Bowie's manager, but he retained control and a share of a portion of Bowie's music. It meant that DeFreeze would earn money in Bowie's music until 1996. That music included earnings from the albums Station to Station, Low, Heroes, David Live, Lodger, and Scary Monsters.
It also meant money from all the singles and all the greatest hits compilations. This put Bowie into an incredibly deep financial hole. In 1975, Bowie was at the peak of his creative powers, yet he was dead broke. He thought he had a three million pound payday coming when in fact he owed money.
Meanwhile, the freeze was just fine. Again, nothing he did was illegal. But there's absolutely no question that he benefited a lot more from David Bowie than David Bowie did. Two things saved Bowie from financial disaster. In 1983, his deal with RCA expired. EMI records swooped in and signed him for a whopping $17.5 million. That, at the time, was an incredibly big deal. It also put him on firm footing.
Then he released "Let's Dance" for EMI, and that solved almost everything. And this time, he retained control of his recordings. Over the next 10 years, Bowie had a series of short-term record deals with him controlling all his creations. And what of his old music?
Well, he licensed his portion to an independent label called Ricodisc, and they issued everything on CD. And that brought in a decent amount of money for Bowie and for Tony DeFreeze, but that was unavoidable. Then, in 1996, the deal with DeFreeze finally came to an end. He no longer owed DeFreeze anything, and Bowie needed to make up for lost time. That's when his business manager, a guy named Bill Zeisblatt, got together with a banker named David Pullman and created a new plan.
They invented Bowie bonds. In exchange for $55 million, the future royalties to all 25 years worth of Bowie's music was turned into a financial instrument with a fixed annual guaranteed return of 7.9%. Everything was bought up by Prudential Financial with the understanding that the rights to all those songs would revert back to Bowie in 10 years.
Meanwhile, the Rykodisc deal expired at around the same time, which allowed Bowie to license all his records to EMI for $30 million. This time, DeVries got nothing. By the end of the 1990s, Bowie was free and clear of all financial relationships with Tony DeVries. Prudential wasn't so lucky because, unlike Bowie, they didn't see the end of the CD and the rise of the internet coming.
Bowie bonds were downgraded again and again and ended up with junk status by the time they came back to Bowie. There was another licensing deal to Warner in 2013, which resulted in more cash. And today, Bowie's catalog, all controlled by his estate, has to be worth somewhere north of $300 million. So what of DeVries?
Well, he got into technology with a private research company that ended up receiving a number of patents in the area of optical wireless technology. He's worked with universities like Oxford and Stanford. But while Bowie had no more DeVries problems, DeVries had Bowie problems. In 2011, a number of companies, including Capitol Records, successfully sued DeVries for willful copyright infringement involving recordings by Bowie, Iggy Pop, and John Mellencamp.
At issue were some songs and bootlegs that De Vries allegedly sold through iTunes and Amazon and streamed through Spotify and other streaming music services. They were distributed by a Main Man record label, even though he no longer had the rights to those recordings. De Vries was sued for $9.5 million, and the case dragged on with De Vries refusing to pay. Another judge held him responsible for the judgment in 2017. So, was De Vries unscrupulous?
Can we say he exploited his client even though he helped make him a major rock star? I guess it all depends if your name is David Bowie or not. In a moment, why you should never get your brother-in-law to manage your finances. A Billy Joel horror story is coming up. One day in the late 1970s, Frank Weber, a marketing manager for a military electronics company on Long Island, got a call from his sister Elizabeth. I need some help with my artist management company, she said. Let's talk about it.
Elizabeth was Billy Joel's first wife. They'd been married since 1973, and she was working as his manager through her company called Home Run. But by 79, her husband's career had grown so much with lawyers and accountants and agents and promoters that Elizabeth realized she was out of her depth. She needed help. And who better than to ask her trusted brother? Frank talked it over with his wife, who was dead against it, by the way. So he declined the offer.
But then he got a call from Billy himself. He'd just been robbed after a show in Cincinnati and he needed help. Frank agreed to do what he could. By 1979, Frank was working full-time at Home Run. Elizabeth had basically checked out. Not only was she bored with the whole business, but her marriage to Billy was on the rocks. They'd soon separate and then they got divorced in 1982. This left Frank in charge of Billy's career. He was his manager and he took care of all of Billy's finances.
Things seemed to be going just fine with Frank, although by bringing him aboard, Billy thought that, well, it might save his marriage. But it didn't. Still, he trusted Elizabeth's insistence that Frank should be Billy's main guy. Now, Billy knew about bad managers. The first guy in charge of his career was named Artie Ripp. Yes, Ripp. When things went south, Billy agreed to pay Ripp 25 cents for every album he sold going forward, just to get out of that contract.
From about 1975 to 1986, about $20 million was paid to Rip. Now, to put this all into perspective, let's do a case study. Billy had a gold album with the 1973 album Piano Man. By 1978, five years later, Billy Joel had earned just $7,753 in royalties from that record.
There were other legal problems, including some copyright infringement claims that cost Billy some money. So no wonder he felt that the only people he could trust was family. Sing us a song, young old man. Sing us a song tonight. And you've got us...
Frank took care of all the money, right down to helping Billy find a real estate attorney to buy a new house after his divorce from Elizabeth, which, by the way, ended up in a 50-50 split of assets, right down to the revenues from royalties. But in 1987, Elizabeth sued Billy for nonpayment. That was settled. But then Frank sued his sister, saying that she owed him a piece of some of the royalties that she received in the settlement.
And then Elizabeth countersued for $7 million. And this is when things began to unravel between Billy and Frank. And the documents served to Frank by Elizabeth's legal team were some details that made Billy rather suspicious about how well Frank was actually handling his money. Billy had a condo in New York that he loved. But in order to afford to build a new home on Long Island, he'd have to sell it because he somehow didn't have the cash. By the way, he bought that condo from Frank.
Out on Long Island, Billy made friends with John Eastman, the father of Linda Eastman, the wife of Paul McCartney and Paul McCartney's business guy. They got along so well that Billy terminated his longtime relationship with his old legal firm and signed on with Eastman. And the first thing that Eastman did was take a look at Billy's financial state using the accounting firm of Ernst & Young. A deep audit was conducted and the results were not good.
Billy was worth less, a lot less, than he had been led to believe. In fact, there were some situations in which he owed money. How was this possible for a guy who had sold tens of millions of records over the last decade? Eyes turned to Frank Weber. He'd been in charge of the money. So where did it all go? In July 1989, Weber was fired as Billy Joel's manager and money guy. Eastman then brought in a high-powered legal firm who found evidence of severe financial mismanagement.
At exactly 7 a.m. on September 25th, 1989, which just happened to be Frank's birthday, he was served with an 83-page complaint asking for $30 million in compensatory damages and another $60 million in punitive damages. So, $90 million. The complaint outlined issues of fraud and breach of fiduciary duty. I quote, quote,
Weber repeatedly has abused his position of trust and confidence to further his own interests at Joel's expense and has concealed his abuses from Joel by a systemic practice of nondisclosure and misrepresentation. Okay, like what? Millions of dollars in investments in highly speculative gas, oil, real estate, and horse tax shelters. Joel's money was used to keep Weber's business alive. He allegedly took more money from Joel's record sales and tours than Joel received himself.
And to cover it up, he issued phony financial statements. He took secret interest-free loans from Joel's revenues. He overcharged him for the music videos that were made. Videos that just happened to be created by Frank's own music video production company and run by his brother-in-law, Rick London. And as the papers were served, Frank was about to tangle Billy up in some kind of $6 million loan.
And then there was another scam with royalties. This money was being used as collateral in lieu of advances from Billy's record company. And this somehow tangled up CBS in financing the purchase of Billy's house. It was a mess. Everything went to trial. In the end, Billy did not get that $90 million, but just $2 million. And of that, he received just $250,000 before Frank filed for bankruptcy in May 1990, citing that he had more than 300 unpaid creditors
He had $652,000 in assets, but $24 million in debt. Oh, and there were more entanglements. Billy contested that Frank had dipped into their former financial partnership for $2 million after the judgment had gone in Joel's favor. In other words, he alleged Weber stole money from Joel that he'd already stolen to pay a fine for stealing the money. And just as incredible...
There was a clause in the deal between Billy Joel and Frank Weber that said Weber was eligible to collect a 10% commission on Billy's works, even if the termination of the agreement was due to gross negligence, fraud, or willful neglect. Wow. So the deeper you go, the weirder the situation is. Remember the horse tax shelters?
Weber had an investment in a horse named John's Gold. John's Gold was owned by Morris Levy, the mobbed-up music label head from New York City. And Levy was a front guy for all kinds of organized crime, mainly the Genovese family. Levy was eventually busted and died of liver cancer. But get this, Billy was once in the hospital getting treatment for some kidney stones. And in the next room, Morris Levy.
Weber countersued in different states, hoping that a non-New York venue would be more amenable to his arguments. One of the legal actions was against Christie Brinkley, Joel's second wife, accusing her of interfering in the relationship between Joel and Weber. None of those suits were successful. There were more legal moves. One involved a criminal investigation where it was alleged that Weber planned to have some of the horses he invested in killed so he could collect on the insurance money.
In another case, legal firms started suing each other because of how all the clients they represented were tied up in a series of conflicts of interest. Members of Billy's road crew were dragged in. Weber's brother-in-law was dragged in, the video production guy. And Mary Sue, the sister of ex-wife Elizabeth, was dragged in as well. The cases went on for months, and then they suddenly stopped.
On October 25th, 1993, after hundreds of hours of arguments and depositions, everyone agreed on a first round of settlements. The cases with Frank Webber wrapped up for good by the end of 1994, with Joel collecting $8 million. The last battle was against Rick London, the former head of Frank Webber's music video production company. He was charged with using Billy's pension plan to make secret loans to Frank for...
You guessed it, investment in horses. That took a while to sort out, but once again, Billy emerged the winner. By 1995, Billy Joel was free from more than two decades of management and financial drama. He formed his own company called Maritime Music, over which he controlled all his affairs. And today, Billy Joel is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And I'll bet that he knows where every dollar is.
The stories of Colonel Tom Parker, Tony DeVries, and Frank Webber are but three from the world of managers gone wild. So this means that we'll have to revisit this topic in the future so we can talk about Alan Klein, who messed up the Beatles. There was Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp. They made The Who into monsters, but also did some bad things on the side. Albert Grossman, whom Bob Dylan felt so screwed over by that he wrote a couple of songs about him.
We also need to talk about crooked accountants, terrible financial managers, and even criminal housekeepers. All that is coming up in the future. You can catch up on all episodes of Uncharted by downloading them from your favorite podcast platform. Please rate and review if you get a chance. If you have any questions or comments, shoot me an email, alan at alancross.ca.
We can also meet up on all the social media sites along with my website, ajournalofmusicalthings.com. It's updated with music news and recommendations every single day. And there's the free daily newsletter that you should get. And please check out my other podcast, The Ongoing History of New Music. There are hundreds and hundreds of episodes that you can enjoy for free. Technical Productions by Rob Johnston. I'm Alan Cross.
