Geffen Quotes

Lack of accomplishment is one thing; deceit is quite another. Everyone who has followed her career knows that Hillary is dishonest to the core, a “congenital liar” as columnist William Safire once put it. The writer Christopher Hitchens titled his book about the Clintons No One Left to Lie To. Even Hollywood mogul David Geffen, an avid progressive, said a few years ago of the Clintons, “Everybody in politics lies but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”3

I was not doing what I was told to do. And they sued me for making music "uncharacteristic of Neil Young." That was Geffen Rocords' biggeest mistake, I think. The mistakes all started when I caved and didn't give them Island in the Sun. They wanted me to be commercially successful, and I wanted to be an artist expressing myself-those two goals are not always compatible. I was expecting to have the same artistic freedom that I had at Asylum Records, but Geffen Records wanted me to be a smash, selling millions of records. Most important, Geffen was not a hands-on at Geffen Records. He had other people doing that. It showed.

Mann Tracht, un Gott Lacht Man Plans and God Laughs.

Anybody who thinks money will make you happy, hasn't got money.

So if you go from the hippie thing to more of a Gatsby community, so what? Life is short and you have an opportunity to explore as much of it as fortune and time allow.

Hillary served as a U.S. senator from New York but did not propose a single important piece of legislation; her record is literally a blank slate. Liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas admits that she “doesn’t have a single memorable policy or legislative accomplishment to her name.”2 Despite traveling millions of miles as secretary of state, Hillary negotiated no treaties, secured no agreements, prevented no conflicts—in short, she accomplished nothing. Lack of accomplishment is one thing; deceit is quite another. Everyone who has followed her career knows that Hillary is dishonest to the core, a “congenital liar” as columnist William Safire once put it. The writer Christopher Hitchens titled his book about the Clintons No One Left to Lie To. Even Hollywood mogul David Geffen, an avid progressive, said a few years ago of the Clintons, “Everybody in politics lies but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”3 She said her mother named her after the famed climber Sir Edmund Hillary, until someone pointed out that Hillary was born in 1947 and her “namesake” only became famous in 1953. On the campaign trail in 2008, Hillary said she had attempted as a young woman to have applied to join the Marines but they wouldn’t take her because she was a woman and wore glasses. In fact, Hillary at this stage of life detested the Marines and would never have wanted to join. She also said a senior professor at Harvard Law School discouraged her from going there by saying, “We don’t need any more women.”4 If this incident actually occurred one might expect Hillary to have identified the professor. Certainly it would be interesting to get his side of the story. But she never has, suggesting it’s another made-up episode.

They had to call a bunch of people, including the accountants at Geffen. It didn’t help that Slash’s check was made out to “Stash.

Dr. Cable attended the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA to obtain his MD.

Compared to all this, Ronstadt and Browne were still trying to graduate from the kids' table. Ronstadt had released her first album for Geffen, Don't Cry Now, in September 1973. Browne followed a few weeks later, in October, with his second album, For Everyman. Both albums sold respectably, but neither cracked the Top 40 on the Billboard album chart. And while Geffen had great expectations for both artists, in early 1974 each was still building an audience. Their tour itinerary reflected their transitional position. It brought them to big venues in Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, but also took them far from the bright lights to small community theaters and college campuses in Oxnard, San Luis Obispo, New Haven, and Cortland, New York. At either end, there wasn't much glamour in the experience. They had moved up from the lowest rung on the touring ladder, when they had lugged their gear in and out of station wagons, but had progressed only to a Continental Trailways bus without beds that both bands crammed into for the late-night drives between shows. "The first thing that happened is we were driving all night, and the next morning we were exhausted," Browne remembered. "Like, no one slept a wink. We were sitting up all night on a bus."' "Touring was misery," Ronstadt said, looking back. "Touring is just hard. You don't get to meet anybody. You are always in a bubble . . . You saw the world outside the bus window, and you did the sound check every day."9 The performances were uneven, too. "While Browne is much more assured and confident on stage than he was a year or two ago, he's still very much like a smart kid with a grown-up gift for songwriting," sniffed Judith Sims of Rolling Stone. She treated Ronstadt even more dismissively, describing her as peddling "country schmaltz."' The young rock journalist Cameron Crowe, catching the tour a few days later in Berkeley, described Browne's set as "painfully mediocre."" But Ronstadt and Browne found their footing as they progressed, each alternating lead billing depending on who had sold more records in each market. By the time the cavalcade rolled into Carnegie Hall, the reception for Browne and Ronstadt was strong enough that the promoters added a second show. In February 1974, Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt were still at the edge of the stardom they would soon achieve.

Then the center of influence shifted to London, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Cream, the Who, the Kinks, and all the bands that orbited them. San Francisco, with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Santana, had its moment in a psychedelic spotlight around the Summer of Love and the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, but as the 1960s gave way to the '70s, the center of the musical universe shifted unmistakably to Los Angeles. "It was incredibly vital," said Jonathan Taplin, who first came to LA as the tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band and later relocated there to produce Martin Scorsese's breakthrough movie, Mean Streets. "The nexus of the music business had really moved from New York to Los Angeles. That had been a profound shift . . . It was very clear that something big had changed."'' For a breathtaking few years, the stars aligned to glittering effect in Los Angeles. The city attracted brilliant artists; skilled session musicians; soulful songwriters; shrewd managers, agents, and record executives; and buzz-building clubs. From this dense constellation of talent, a shimmering new sound emerged, a smooth blend of rock and folk with country influences. Talented young people from all over the country began descending on Los Angeles with their guitar cases or dreams of becoming the next Geffen. Irving Azoff, a hyper-ambitious young agent and manager who arrived in Los Angeles in 1972, remembered, "It was like the gold rush. You've never seen anything like it in the entertainment business. The place was exploding. I was here—right place, right time. I tell everybody, `If you're really good in this business, you only have to be right once,' so you kind of make your own luck, but it is luck, too. It was hard to be in LA in that time and have any talent whatsoever in the music business—whether you were a manager, an agent, an artist, a producer, or writer—[and] not to make it, because it was boom times. It was the gold rush, and it was fucking fun.

We can never know just how far we're prepared to go until our worst fears are actually realised

Asylum Records became a power base for David Geffen, with one of the best artist rosters in the business. It became the home label for what was to be known as the California sound. Elliot continued running the management company, most of whose artists recorded on Asylum, whose corporate philosophy was “benevolent protectionism.” The record company was different from other labels and was proud of its noninterference with the private and artistic lives of its artists, who in turn looked to David Geffen and company to insulate and protect them from the shocks and insults of commercially oriented sales and marketing types, aggressive promotion men, and demanding producers. The opening lineup at Asylum included Jackson Browne, the Eagles, and Joni Mitchell, with Linda Ronstadt joining shortly after. In 1974, the legendary Bob Dylan would leave Columbia and release two Top 10 albums with the company before returning to his original label. That didn’t matter to David. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were Atlantic artists and they were doing quite nicely, thank you very much. Besides,

Geffen waved him down, as if he wasn’t worth his time. ‘I’m taking it, arsehole.’ He marched off. Cowl watched him go, murmuring, ‘I’m not talking about the Hold, fool.’ Lee hesitated. ‘The house, you mean … you gonna try to enter it?’ The mage’s gaze remained aside, following Geffen. ‘Someone will, and soon. It’s in the air.

ultimately resulted in Geffen becoming a billionaire, largely on the huge success of Guns N’ Roses, Whitesnake, and Aerosmith. It’s always a kick in the butt for artists to watch label owners get rich beyond reason on creative work that those owners were lucky enough to market. If you think they’d give bonuses to the people who helped make them so rich, think again.

I owe David Geffen big, with regard to my growing self­ awareness at the time. One night we were having dinner and in the course of talking about something or other, he said, "Angry people like us..." I couldn't get the phrase out of my mind: "Angry people like us..." Finally, I realized that I wasn't angry. I was furious.

It wasn’t easy to find someone who could read a script as shrewdly as a spreadsheet: there were only a handful besides Eisner, including David Geffen, Barry Diller, Terry Semel, Bob Daly, and Frank Price.

man cannot predict how his decisions will affect his life and the lives of those dear to him. Everyone just tries to do their best.

And we waited patiently. We believed him that we would still get there, and after all, it was good for us in Poland in those days. How could we have known...

We’ve waited for two thousand years, we can wait two more,

How could they have known that the day would come when all that remained of their pretty wooden house, which was home to that happiness, would be a handful of ash? That a wicked hand would wipe from the face of the earth all that was built with love. How was it possible, in the face of all this beauty, to know how much evil there is in the world?

We already have the travel papers and permissions, and who knows what will be. We must take action, not wait. We must rebuild our homeland.

The year was 1939. The world was still in a deep slumber, just like Sleeping Beauty, cursed by the evil witch. None of the leaders was looking ahead; they did not want to recognize the signs of terror that had begun to form a crack in the world.

At Woodland, in walked David Geffen, Anjelica Huston, maybe Dustin Hoffman, tennis shoes under his arm. “Did I miss the game?” Alain Delon … Mengers and Evans at the pool, drinking a bottle of white wine cellar–plucked for the occasion: “Now really, Sue … Do you get white wine at Columbia?” Giggling: “You and I have never agreed on any kind of material. And so far you’ve been right.” Now down to casting. “I think of De Niro.…

Compliancy is the father of disaster