Take That Next Step

The Capitol Tower years — a teenager named Mike Curb, and a band called Pink Floyd.

The Tower

It’s 1964, and Eddie Ray is packing up his office at Imperial Records, bound for something new: Capitol Records’ freshly launched Tower division. He’s leaving on his own terms. A decade earlier, Imperial bet he wouldn’t last sixty days; instead he built its national sales network from nothing, city by city, and carried Fats Domino, Ricky Nelson, and Slim Whitman past a million records apiece. Capitol wants that same builder’s instinct upstairs, at a bigger address.

The boxes are half full, an old Imperial sleeve still propped among them, when his secretary interrupts with an odd bit of news — a visitor is waiting, no appointment, no name on the calendar. He’s a teenager. He says he has studied Eddie’s entire career and wants five minutes to play him a song. Eddie, mid-move, gives him the simplest answer he can: find me at Capitol.

The move itself is a real promotion, and a historic one. At the Tower, Eddie becomes a vice president of A&R — and, by the family’s account, the first African-American executive at a major U.S. record company.

The boy makes good on the invitation. On Eddie’s very first morning behind his new desk, the kid is already standing in the doorway — he’d tracked the start date and arrived precisely on time, record in hand, ready to perform. Eddie recognizes it immediately: not just talent, but preparation, nerve, the willingness to take an extra step nobody asked for. He offers the teenager, on the spot, a producer’s contract at a major label. The teenager turns it down — he has a ten-year plan of his own, and a staff job isn’t part of it. Eddie ends up more impressed by the refusal than he had been by the audition.

A Teenager Named Curb

The teenager’s name is Mike Curb, and Eddie doesn’t let him walk out empty-handed. Instead he offers something better than a job: “Why don’t you produce the record yourself — under your own label?” They name the label right there in the office, playing off Curb’s own name — curb, sidewalk — and Sidewalk Records is born. Eddie picks up the phone and orders the first five hundred pressings himself. Within months, the instrumental “Apache ’65,” credited to Davie Allan & the Arrows, is climbing the national charts. One of the great mentorships in American music has begun.

It lasts the rest of both their lives. Years later, when Curb apologizes for pushing too hard, too fast, Eddie stops him cold — with the same lesson his own father gave him at a Carolina bus stop, thirty years before, sending a sixteen-year-old off to a school that would have him: It’s those extra few things you do that make you stand out. Now Eddie is the one handing it down.

Never apologize for taking that extra step. Reminds me of what my parents taught me.

Eddie Ray, to Mike Curb

In his memoir, Eddie calls Curb — barring family, he’s careful to add — the longest, strongest, most colorful thread in my life’s tapestry. It isn’t an idle line. The teenager Eddie gives his first break in 1964 goes on to found Curb Records and serve as Lieutenant Governor of California, and the two men keep turning up in each other’s photographs for the next four decades — at an MGM office in the early seventies, at a Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony decades after that. Same two faces, same regard.

Signing Pink Floyd

Eddie’s Tower years produce one decision he’ll dine out on for the rest of his life. A British band is tearing up the clubs and charts of Europe — psychedelic, experimental, unlike anything that has reached America intact. Capitol holds the American rights, and Capitol passes. The paperwork tells the rest of the story on its own: an option contract on Eddie’s desk, a calendar ticking down. Fewer than two weeks remain before the band is free to sign with anyone, anywhere.

Eddie listens to the records himself. Then he exercises the option on his own authority and signs the band to Tower for the United States. The band is Pink Floyd.

Riccardo Caiati, via YouTube

He meets them at the Los Angeles airport and throws the party that introduces their first American album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn — a Hollywood ballroom full of industry people meeting four young Englishmen who look and sound like nothing else on the Capitol roster. Those first U.S. pressings sell modestly — Syd Barrett’s band is still a strange, small signal in 1967 America, visiting the States just long enough for a memorably odd turn on American Bandstand — but because Eddie keeps them inside the family of Capitol labels, the worldwide success Pink Floyd builds in the years that follow belongs, in part, to that one signature. In his own memoir, decades later, he allows himself exactly one line about it, tongue-in-cheek: I saved Pink Floyd.

The Arranger of the Age

Back on West Adams Boulevard, years earlier, Eddie had heard a piano player working toward a USC degree and given him his first record work — Ernie Freeman, the same man who’d once complained that “Hearts of Stone” had too many bars in it and been told, simply, Ernie — I just want the feel. The promise Eddie saw in him then pays off in full now. By the mid-1960s, Freeman is the arranger of the age, in constant demand across Hollywood’s biggest sessions. He scores “Strangers in the Night” for Frank Sinatra and “Everybody Loves Somebody” for Dean Martin. His arrangement of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” wins a Grammy. Eddie had heard it coming fifteen years early, over a bar piano in a little club — proof that his ear for talent was never limited to singers and songs, and that a career could be heard in a single sitting.

By decade’s end, that same ear has carried Eddie to executive vice president over both television and recorded music at Capitol. The next step waits down the road, at a studio lot in Culver City.

MGM

Mike Curb is named president of MGM Records, and Eddie moves to MGM with him — the mentor following the protégé now, into the Thalberg Building on the old MGM lot in Culver City. The two men’s talent-collecting habit continues without a pause. Curb loves to tell the story of Sammy Davis Jr. strolling into an MGM session, cutting a song cold, and heading for the door. Asked if he wants another take, Davis just smiles: “No — I just do one take.”

Under Curb’s presidency and Eddie’s label leadership, MGM puts together a run of national hits — Eric Burdon and War’s “Spill the Wine,” the Osmonds’ “One Bad Apple.” Eddie isn’t the songwriter or producer behind these particular records; his role is the one he’s spent two decades building — running A&R and label operations, finding the talent, getting the record into stores and onto the radio stations he already knows by name.

The Pure 70s Pop Channel, via YouTube

He still has ideas of his own, too — the kind that have nothing to do with A&R and everything to do with selling records to people who’ve never set foot in a record store. One sleepless Sunday night produces what everyone at the label calls a classic Eddie Ray idea: put Dionne Warwick, Burt Bacharach, and Glen Campbell together on a single premium album, and give it away free at every Chevrolet dealership in the country. In Detroit, a boardroom of skeptical auto executives looks the record man up and down — until John DeLorean approves it on the spot. The albums ship within weeks — a car company doing a record label’s promotional work, coast to coast.

Home

Life at home changes too, through all of it. In 1966, Eddie marries Joyce Simmons. They have a son, Michael, and Eddie adopts Joyce’s son Tracy, raising the two boys as full brothers, no daylight between them — a family built on the same instinct as everything else in these years: take the extra step, and do right by the people in front of you.

Then MGM’s record division is sold to a European conglomerate, and a chapter closes. California has given Eddie Ray everything it has across twenty-eight years — Imperial, Capitol, Tower, MGM; a marriage and two sons; a mentorship that started with an uninvited teenager; a band called Pink Floyd. It’s time for a new sound, in a new city.

He has reached the top of the tower. What he finds there, more than anything else, is the view he likes best: watching the people he believed in rise.