BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : JULY 17, 2000 ISSUE
BOOKS Drugs, Rock 'n' Roll--but Where's the Sex? A&R A Novel By Bill Flanagan Random House -- 342pp -- $23.95 As entertainment industries go, the music biz seems to get short shrift in other media. Sure, music has its journals--Rolling Stone and Spin for fans, Billboard and Hits for insiders--and album and concert reviews are a staple of any newspaper's entertainment pages. Musicians are well-represented in celebrity press coverage, and who can ignore the cultural juggernaut that is MTV? Still, writers have not produced literature about the music industry--especially anything aimed at adult audiences--the way they've penned tales about the movie business, television, journalism, or even book publishing. Somehow, the glamour and struggle of making, packaging, and selling a good tune just hasn't resonated beyond a young or cultish fan base. Bill Flanagan, a senior vice-president at MTV sister channel VH1 and author of a handful of nonfiction music books, attempts to rectify this situation with his new novel, A&R. The title is short for ''artists & repertoire,'' and the A&R man or woman is the lifeblood of any music company: a scout in the wilderness of smoky, dingy bars, trying till all hours to find the Next Big Thing, sidle up to it, and persuade it to sign a contract on the best possible terms (for the record company). With his insider's eye, Flanagan concocts an entertaining, occasionally poignant, though sometimes syrupy, tale. The masterpiece that the music industry deserves may not yet be written, but A&R is an enjoyable summer read. The protagonist, 30-year-old Jim Cantone, is a well-intentioned stalwart of the New York A&R whirl. At the book's opening, Cantone leaves the small label where he works, succumbing to the lure of big bucks to take a job as head of East Coast A&R at big conglomerate WorldWide Records. A family man, Cantone--whom one imagines to be a version of author Flanagan as he'd like to see himself (the book's bio notes that Flanagan lives ''with his wife and three children'')--soon gets drawn into a corporate plot to unseat WorldWide's legendary chairman, Wild Bill DeGaul. The scheme is led by DeGaul's amusingly tyrannical second-in-command, J.B. Booth. Cantone keeps telling himself that his move up the corporate ladder is best for his family. But his moral compass--which governs everything from what clothes he wears to what car he drives to whether he sleeps with rock babes--is put to the test. Inevitably, Cantone must decide whether the power he enjoys and his cushy new life justify his backing this betrayal of DeGaul. Various music-industry stereotypes pop in and out of the story; we never get to know them terribly well, but they're fun to spend time with. There's a burnt-out, bitter A&R scout who gets passed over for Cantone's job and then has to work under him; the promising new band, Jerusalem, which WorldWide signs; the conglomerate's smiling velociraptor of a CFO; the chart-topping diva who is also a flipped-out substance abuser; and, of course, a coat-check girl named Cokie who gets her big break after she slips her homemade demo tape into Booth's jacket one night. (Needless to say, it is Booth's driver, Randy, who instantly declares Cokie's sweet warbling ''a hit.'') True to show-business-story convention, before you know it, young Cokie is, along with Booth, DeGaul, and Cantone, aboard a Gulfstream jet, winging her way to a music festival in Brazil. Then the story gets a bit silly: At a remote Brazilian drumming enclave, there's a run-in with local thugs whom 'Nam vet Booth ends up pummeling. Soon, though, he proves less ferocious, barely fending off an assault by kidnappers who mean to steal one of his kidneys and sell it on the black market. Talk about the rock-'n'-roll life! In fact, I couldn't help but feel that the book is too spare on tales of rock debauchery. One suspects that Flanagan has seen and heard a lot in the industry, all of which could provide fodder for his fiction. But the amount of carnality in A&R wouldn't fill out an episode of Behind The Music, the hit show at the cable network where Flanagan works. The author is rather more adept at revealing the verities of the music business, as in this passage about a debut act that no one thinks is going to sell: ''The Black Beauty album was not released, it escaped. And though it was showing a little more life than anyone expected, that was not saying much. There would be no video, no tour support, no bookings on Letterman or Leno. The album was generating nice press, but that was the fool's consolation. 'Nice press' was the famous last words of lost careers.'' To be sure, the plot to oust Wild Bill makes the book a timely riff on the way corporate suits have wrested the industry away from the creative, quirky types whose ears for talent built music into a $40-billion-a-year business. Flanagan could not have asked for a better coincidence than the recent rocky departure of music legend Clive Davis from Arista Records, engineered by the label's multinational owners. Still, my guess is that not many people in the music business will like A&R: They'll find it too predictable and too filled with familiar types. But A&R offers a nice tale for outsiders fascinated by the business, its machinations, and products. In that regard, it's not unlike a lot of the music that dominates the airwaves today. If I were an A&R man and this book were an album, I would sign Flanagan and even throw a little marketing muscle behind him. By RICHARD SIKLOS Siklos is the business editor of Inside.com, which covers the entertainment and media industries. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP					RELATED ITEMS Drugs, Rock `n' Roll--but Where's the Sex? PHOTO: Cover, ``A&R'' INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online

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