Eddie Rosenblatt may be best known for signing Nirvana to Geffen Records. But in the 30 years before Nevermind, Rosenblatt worked independent distribution in the Midwest, handled sales for A&M, played a major executive role at Warner Bros. on the West Coast and joined David Geffen shortly after he launched his label.

Who moves to Ohio from Queens, N.Y., to jump-start a spectacular career as a record executive?

Eddie Rosenblatt, in 1957, thought of himself as “just another loudmouth New York guy with minimum education” —sprung from the Army, married and mired in Macy’s management training program.

“I had become friendly with a guy named Mike Lipton, who worked for Cosnat Distributing in New York,” Eddie explained over lunch at a small café on a perfect fall day in Montecito, Calif., where he’s lived for the past 15 years. “He also managed the Cleveland branch. Mike always seemed to be having more fun than me. He called me the Sunday before Thanksgiving and said, ‘I need you in Cleveland, because I fired everybody. I didn’t trust anybody. Come out and I’ll teach you the record business. You’ll be the assistant manager.’”

Eddie got a jolt of music-biz magic early on, when he picked up a phone call from [Atlantic’s] Jerry Wexler that was meant for Mike. “I say, ‘He’s not here’ and Jerry wants to know who he’s speaking to. I say, ‘I’m his assistant manager.’ Jerry says, ‘OK, I’ve got a new Ray Charles single. How many do you want?’ ‘I put Jerry on hold, and I say to the two guys in the back room, who were African-Americans, ‘Excuse me. Who the fuck is Ray Charles, and how many do we want to order?’ I loved it.

“In 1960, when ‘Money,’ the Barrett Strong record, was out, I got a call from a guy I’d never heard of, asking did I want to be his distributor. Good thing I said yes, because the guy was Berry Gordy. I didn’t think for a minute that this guy was gonna become Berry Gordy.”

Besides distributing sermons by Aretha’s father, Rev. C.L. Franklin—“they came on 78s, like three or four of them with the printed text in a huge envelope”—Cosnat also distributed Chess and Checker Records, so Eddie got to know Phil and Leonard Chess, future legends but, to Eddie, just guys. Their product, of course, was sensational: Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters.

“Cosnat had some good things about it—they taught me the business—and some not-so-good things. They were in competition with many of the independent labels because they had Jubilee Records, and Jerry Blaine was the owner both of Cosnat and Jubilee. That was a conflict.”

Eddie left Cosnat in 1962 to join Main Line Distribution, an independently owned RCA Victor distributor, where he built his own staff from scratch. He stayed for five years, picking up lucrative accounts and forging crucial relationships. “I met Jerry Moss and became an A&M distributor. He’s a wonderful guy; he came to Cleveland at Yom Kippur and we went to temple together. I met Jac Holzman and became an Elektra distributor.”

Eddie sums up life as a distributor: “You bought records, you promoted records, you sold records, you collected money, and you paid your bills…or you didn’t pay your bills, as the case may be.”

GO WEST, YOUNG MAN. AND STAY THERE.

Eddie’s first moments in the Golden State, in January 1966, were mind-blowing. “I had to fight through a snowstorm to get from my house to the airport. I’m wearing a suit with a shirt and a tie—that’s how you traveled in those days—and a scarf and a hat with a feather, an overcoat, the whole thing. We land at LAX, and it’s one of those January, 85-degree killer days, clear as a bell. And as I’m walking down the stairs from the plane, I start throwing off my coat, my hat, my scarf and my gloves, and whatever. I walked off and left ’em there, and said, ‘This is for me.’” Talk about shedding East Coast trappings.

Eddie went west to work for A&M in the sales department. While at Main Line, Eddie had gotten close with A&M President Gil Friesen and General Manager Bob Fead. They dug that while he was selling Herb Alpert’s monster hits he also pushed other A&M acts like The Baja Marimba Band and Claudine Longet. He stayed at A&M for two and a half years, but ultimately, it didn’t work out; it was the only time he’d ever been fired.

The 1970s were approaching, and Eddie was hell-bent on staying on the West Coast. He landed a transitional gig at a new label, TA Records, part of talk-show host David Susskind’s enterprise. A year later, his big break arrived when Joel Friedman brought Eddie in as sales manager of Warner Bros. Records just as WEA was coming together as a branch distribution powerhouse.

Warner’s freewheeling culture underscored that Eddie really, truly wasn’t in Cleveland anymore, and he adjusted accordingly. “I remember going to one of the first meetings with [the legendarily hirsute, hip Warner Bros. creative services director] Stan Cornyn and his staff. They were talking about some record and I’m going, ‘Wow, I better grow a beard.’ I didn’t have a beard in those days, and I thought I’d better make myself a little more ferocious-looking because Stan was the king of the hill.”

BRANCH DISTRIBUTION GROWING PAINS

The motivating force behind WEA was that in order for the three component record companies—Warner, Elektra and Atlantic—to reach their vast potential, they had to control their own distribution.

When Eddie came aboard, WEA was just starting to open up branches, and there were growing pains. For one thing, the indies about to lose major accounts had no incentive to plan ahead.

“I went out to the East Coast distributors. We had James Taylor’s Mud Slide Slim, a Deep Purple album with ‘My Woman From Tokyo’ on it. There was a Jethro Tull—the one with ‘snot hanging from his nose’ [Aqualung]. So, I mean, we’re talking gold.

“With Stan Cornyn’s help, we created these great presentations. We gave everybody books filled with great album covers, we played this amazing music for them, and all of that. Of course, nobody paid attention. They were throwing shit at me. I was appalled. How could this happen? We are Warner Bros. Records! Well, I realized 10 minutes into it, they were losing our business and didn’t give a fuck anymore.”

I reminded Eddie that Jerry Wexler once said that the worst branch distribution is better than the best independent. “Exactly,” Eddie confirmed. “Jerry would say it just that way.”

The big difference between the WEA companies and their major competitors in those days— Columbia, Capitol, RCA—Eddie stressed, was “those companies were heavily marketing-oriented and we were an A&R-oriented label. Capitol was bringing over this guy who was the head of selling refrigerators in Australia, and now he’s running Capitol Records. And RCA was just RCA. At Warner Bros, Atlantic, Elektra, it was all about the artists.

“Mo [Ostin] was the boss…period. And the greatest. You could never go to Mo and stab somebody in the back; it did not work. You could voice things and not be afraid that it was going to cost you.

“Joe [Smith] had Warner Bros. Records, and Mo had Reprise, because Mo had started with Frank [Sinatra]. He was Frank’s guy. When Joe left promotion he certainly had the knowledge of how to do it, but he was more involved with signing bands, as was Mo. It was perfect. The bosses were signing bands, we were promoting and selling.”

Eddie stayed at Warners until September 1980, rising to the position of Senior VP of Sales and Marketing and operating like a partner with Cornyn. When inter-company conflicts arose, Warner Communications chief Steve Ross—“the best guy I ever worked for from the corporate level”—came in and straightened things out.

Case in point: Joel Friedman ran WEA as a tight ship, but the strong-willed execs who piloted Warners, Elektra and Atlantic needed more promotional and marketing support for their constant stream of releases.

“Joel wanted to be the hero and keep his costs down and show Steve Ross that he was the greatest thing since sliced bread. So we’re sitting at a meeting at the Hotel Bel-Air, and it’s all the guys running the three companies: Mo, Joe, Ahmet, Nesuhi, Jac and Mel Posner and Davey Glew and myself, and some other people.

“Then Steve explains to us, with everyone present, that the profits came from here [i.e., the labels]. So he made sure we got our own promotion people, and certain marketing things were taken care of. Then our business just exploded.”

DAVID GEFFEN REDUX

Eddie had struck up a friendship with David Geffen years earlier when David was managing Joni Mitchell during her Blue period. Geffen had left the business in the mid-1970s when he was diagnosed, wrongly as it turned out, with cancer. Early in 1980, Eddie got wind that David was coming back with a label that Warner Bros. would distribute, Geffen Records.

“I thought this might be something I would like to do. I talked it over with my wife, went to see Mo and I said, ‘I think I want to do that, maybe as President.’ Mo said, ‘Go for it.’ Partially, his thinking would have been, ‘Eddie knows the business; he’s good with money; and he and David will work so well together.’

“I’m set to start with David right after Labor Day [1980], and I take a week in Hawaii. The minute I walk into my hotel room in Hawaii, David calls and tells me he signed Elton John and Donna Summer. I say, ‘Holy shit, it’s serious.’ I come back. We start.”

“I get a call from Phil Spector, who I knew from A&M. He says, ‘[John] Lennon’s in the studio—he doesn’t have a deal.’ ‘Oh, thank you, Phil!’ I go up to see David and I say, ‘Do you know Yoko?’ He says, ‘Of course.’ I say, ‘Call her and make the deal.’ Which of course he did.”

DEC. 8, 1980

Eddie tells a riveting story about the awful night of Dec. 8, 1980.

“I’m in New York, staying at the Sherry Netherland. David had an apartment right next door, still does. I’m in bed. I know something’s happening, but it’s all vague. So I call David and say, ‘What’s going on?’ He says, ‘Meet me downstairs in two minutes.’ I go downstairs, we hop a cab to Roosevelt Hospital. It was too late. John had already passed.

“We walk out with Yoko—a photo of us made the front page of the Daily News. We get into two police cars and they take us into the underground of the Dakota. We go up to their apartment, where I had been the previous day talking to Yoko about marketing and all the stuff we were gonna do with John.

“We stayed with Yoko all night. In the morning I went back to my hotel, passing throngs of saddened fans lining the streets in front of their building. I tried to pull myself together. What a tragedy. Words cannot express my grief, and the grief that shook the world.”

BRINGING IN THE NEW

Geffen Records had made a splash by spending big dollars to sign established superstars like Elton and Summer.

“Now it was time for us to break new artists. We signed Quarterflash, and we put out their album at the end of 1981. It had the ‘Harden My Heart’ track. We did our job by installing them as the opening act on the Elton John tour, and lo and behold, we broke a band. It’s the greatest feeling in the world.”

Around the same time, Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins became available; Geffen decided to go after Gabriel.

Eddie recalls, “Bruce Lundvall got to see Peter in Paris, and we got to see him outside of Lisbon. It wasn’t even Lisbon itself—that’s how low we were on the totem pole.

“David and I get a car and we go out to this resort to have dinner with Peter, who we’d never met. Next night, we went to see him and it was awe-inspiring. We sit down with Peter, Gail Colson, his manager, and the guy who manages Phil Collins and the band.

“I saw David in action really for the first time. Before we have a piece of bread, he starts in: ‘OK, here’s what they’re saying about us. Now here’s the truth.’ And he did the most brilliant 10 minutes you ever heard in your life—why we were great, how great I was. He was just fabulous. I knew we had it. And Peter Gabriel was just a wonderful person.”

“We signed Don Henley, Ric Ocasek and Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell. We had now become a viable record company.

“What turned things around for good was Whitesnake. The first track out of their album was like eight minutes. We make this fabulous video, and all of a sudden, MTV takes that eight-minute track and beats the fucking shit out of it. Ka-boom! And we decide we gotta go into the hard-ass rock & roll world.”

That strategy led to superstar after superstar, including mega-million sellers Guns ‘N’ Roses and Aerosmith, plus artistic torchbearers Beck and Sonic Youth, whose signing led to Nirvana.

MAKING OF NIRVANA

Geffen Records signed the Seattle trio Nirvana in 1990. They become not only the breakthrough artist of the early ’90s, but also—despite releasing only three studio albums during their short-lived career—one of the greatest and most influential rock bands of all time.

Eddie tears up as he recalls the overwhelming sense of loss felt by so many millions, including his staff, at the news of Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994.

“Kurt had a very hard time dealing with his success. A group of us went to Seattle for his funeral. We were all grieving, and found it hard to get back on track.

“A lot of the grief at our level was due to the fact that so many young people—the fans, the people at our company who worked with Kurt and loved and believed in him, and in his music—never thought a band with that kind of musical integrity could achieve the success that Nirvana did. That was really tough.”

When Universal acquired Geffen Records and consolidated operations in the late 1990s, Eddie left the company. But he’s hardly bitter.

“They were very good to me—they wanted me to stay. I was so fortunate to be able to work with David Geffen, Doug Morris, Jimmy Iovine and Mo Ostin. And to work for Lew Wasserman and Sid Sheinberg.

THE AMAZING STEVE ROSS

I asked Eddie whether he thought corporatization always had to lead to the kind of consolidation—and commodification—that robbed creative businesses of their soul. That sparked a memory of a corporate leader who, time and again, went against perceived wisdom, and won.

The back story: In 1976, Ross gambled big time by acquiring and pouring resources into the hot videogame company Atari. At first, sales soared, but when a scandal erupted within Atari, revenues plummeted and so did Warner’s stock price. The entire Warner empire, including the record companies—which were profitable—was threatened.

“We’re having a meeting with the national people—Nesuhi, Mo, Joe, Ahmet, David and I, Joel Friedman. Steve walks in and the air leaves the room, because we know he’s gonna say, ‘I want a 25 percent cut’ or whatever. You know the drill, you’ve heard it a thousand times.

“So Steve stands up and says, ‘I’ve just got a few words to say to you guys. I want you to do what you’re good at and keep doing it. Sign those bands, market those bands. I’ll take care of the guys in the stock market.’ He gets up and leaves, and I look around the room and like, wow. I wanted to applaud. It was the most brilliant thing I’d ever heard.”

With that in mind, Eddie’s parting words at the Montecito café were happy ones: “I left the business in ’99 and moved up here and lived happily ever after. That’s my story.

“What a ride. I was given the opportunity to work in a business I loved, in a very exciting and great time in the music world. I was fortunate to work with a fabulous group of in-house record people, and so many creative and talented artists, engineers, and producers. I was, and am, so very proud of the music we made available to everyone.”