The Genre-Defining Rock Album You Almost Never Heard
A&R man Tom Zutaut put his career and reputation on the line for a gritty LA band he believed in
,Los Angeles, August 1987. A music industry executive who has spent the past 2 years cultivating what he believes will be the next big thing in music sits down with his boss for a high-pressure meeting. “We’re going to cut our losses and let them go,” the boss tells the man, referring to the band their record label had signed two years’ back. While shocking news to the executive, you couldn’t blame his boss — the band’s debut album had reached a peak position of 182 on the Billboard 200 chart, sold only around 200,000 copies, with a future that looked anything but promising.
“I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to go above your head on this one,” the executive tells his boss. “It’s nothing personal”.
The executive gets up and walks down the hall into the office of the president of the record label, a man who has built the company from a small, scrappy outlier into an industry powerhouse. “Why are you here without an appointment?” he asks the executive, who informs him that his boss is about to change the course of music by releasing the band he has nurtured for two years from their recording contract. Knowing full-well that not just his job, but his entire reputation (the currency of the A&R trade) is at stake, the executive asks the president of the company for a favor: call MTV and ask them to play the video we made for the first single off the album, as that will surely weight people’s appetites for the band.
The president agrees to do it and comes back later with news: MTV will play the video one time, at 4am EST that upcoming Sunday night. Take it or leave it.
The executive goes to bed Sunday night and wakes up Monday afternoon to see his answering machine blowing up. He calls his boss, the one who threatened to release the band, who informs him that for the first time in history, MTV’s phone lines blew up (literally) from the 10,000 calls they received from the video broadcast, and that they plan to put the video in heavy rotation from that point forward as they are confident the band can help build the still-fledging cable network’s audience.
