For more years than I’d like to remember my friends have suggested I write a book about my exploits in show business. I’ve always suspected that they were less interested in seeing my tales in some dust-collecting tome and more hopeful that they would no longer have to suffer through my cocktail banter about David Bowie’s fear of flying and vegetarian Paul McCartney’s weakness for the smell of bacon.” - Joe Dera, Entertainment Publicist
After some 40 years in the entertainment public relations and marketing business in New York City, renowned show business publicist Joe Dera decided to retire to Mississippi. He bought a small gentleman’s farm complete with a fully-restored 1857 antebellum mansion, known as the Bradshaw House to local historians, in nearby Yazoo County. “The move was unexpected,” adds Dera. “My original plan was to move to Santa Fe, New Mexico. I’ve had a 30 year love affair with the Southwest, as have other members of my family who had various businesses in the Land Of Enchantment.” The Bradshaw House was found online by Dera’s girlfriend, Mississippi native Suzanne Case, and the two moved to the Magnolia State in February of 2016. What the local media quickly discovered was that the unassuming transplant had a history in music business unlike no other.
Dera’s introduction to the music business began in 1971 when he secured a summer job between his freshman and sophomore year in college as an office boy at Track Records & Management.
“Track was an interesting production and management company for The Who and Thunderclap Newman. The New York office was run by legendary producer/composer/manager Vicki Wickham. Vicki had just reinvented Patti LaBelle & The Bluebells as they were about to release their new look and sound via Warner Bros. Records as a Track Records production. Wickham was a well-known artist/producer in Great Britain where she produced England’s first must-watch Friday night pop show, “Ready, Steady, Go” that frequently featured The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who. Along with LaBelle, Wickham also managed Dusty Springfield and co-wrote her hit “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me” with Simon Napier-Bell. In 2013, on Queen Elizabeth’s birthday, Vicki was appointed An Officer Of The Order Of The British Empire (OBE). I last spoke with Vicki Wickham about a year ago. She called me to find out if in fact I had abandoned Manhattan for the Southern tip of the Mississippi Delta.”
Dera says his tasks at Track ranged from running contracts and other legal papers to Pete Townshend at the Plaza Hotel, to painting Vicki’s office.
“I was 20 years old and I didn’t care,” he recalls. “I was in the music business. I was working for The Who and LaBelle. One memorable moment happened as I walked off the elevator onto The Who’s floor at the Plaza Hotel. As I stepped off I noticed a burly bearded John Bonham of Led Zeppelin being chased down the hall by Who drummer Keith Moon brandishing a firehose. They’re both gone now. Dying within a couple of years of each other. That was my introduction to The Who via baptism by firehose. Welcome to rock’n roll.”
A couple of weeks into his gofer job it abruptly came to an end when The Who’s tour manager Peter Rudge (he also managed the Rolling Stones, Roger Waters and Lynyrd Skynyrd) arrived from London.
“For some reason he immediately decided I would be The Who’s record promotion guy in the Midwest. Keep in mind I knew nothing about record promotion. Rudge didn’t care and began giving me a quick crash course in record promotion that lasted no more than 30 minutes. Upon completion he instructed me to call my mother and let her know I would not be home for dinner for the rest of the summer. With no clothes and no luggage he handed me a fistful of hundred dollar bills, put me in the band’s limo and off I went to LaGuardia Airport for a flight to Cleveland. I was to buy a suitcase and clothes upon arrival and call Rudge for further instructions. Cleveland was followed by Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis and so on. I was the Under Assistant Midwest Promotion man for The Who and Labelle. What could possibly be cooler?”
Once his tenure with Track ran its course, Dera served as tour manager for an eclectic British classic rock band called Jade Warrior.
“They were an interesting mix of new age and Japanese-influenced art rock,” explains Joe. “It was their first and last tour of the States. They were ahead of their time and were paired with other acts, from the Kinks to REO Speedwagon. Not the audience for this band. They would have been better paired with Yes or King Crimson. I was being paid more than the band ($300 a week) which did not sit well with the musicians and the only real money gig on this summer tour was a three night run at LA’s Whiskey A Go-Go. It was the date that would put the tour in the black. Upon arrival at a Travelodge in Los Angeles, the band’s drummer, a freckled pale-skinned redhead promptly opted for a poolside marathon tanning session, and ended up with sun poisoning that sent him to the emergency room. The Whiskey date never happened.”
With the abrupt completion of the Jade Warrior tour, Dera teamed up with a firm called The Wartoke Concern, a public relations and management company that grew out of the Woodstock Festival. He was asked to help with the conversion of New York City’s legendary Mercer Arts Center into one of the music industry’s more celebrated underground rock venues.
“It was an off-off Broadway theater complex known for featuring performance art and home to “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” after a brief Broadway run in the ’60,” Dera explains. “The Mercer Arts Center was a collection of four theaters of varying size housed in the old Broadway Central Hotel. The entrance was actually in the back on Mercer Street within a stone’s throw of the Bottom Line and a couple of blocks from The Village Gate, The Village Vanguard and Gerde’s Folk City. It was a wonderful addition to the thriving music, poetry and art scene of Greenwich Village at that time. The owners of the complex almost immediately took issue with our line-up of acts and the clientele they attracted. Where theater workshops were once the order of the day, we were bringing in glam rock acts like the New York Dolls, Eric Emerson and the Magic Tramps and Wayne County & The Queen Elizabeth. Many were part of Andy Warhol’s crew at The Factory just a few blocks north. It was a period of great and sometimes bazaar artistic expression. We had a young poet every weekend with ambition to become a singer named Patti Smith. It was a rich mosaic of creativity that did not sit well with our landlord and we were tossed out before the end of the year. The building collapsed the following summer on August 3, 1973 and was depicted in the premiere episode of HBO’s short-lived series “Vinyl,” written and directed by Martin Scorsese. While the film suggests musicians were playing when the building came down, the truth is we were evicted months earlier.”
The lesson learned for Dera was that he did not want to work in record radio promotion, tour management nor theater management.
“Throughout these learning experiences there was an element of publicity and public relations which I found more interesting,” he says. “As a result, I managed to land a position with Levinson Associates Public Relations, an L.A.-based firm with a satellite office in New York City’s Upper Westside. While small in size, Bob Levinson’s firm had an impressive list of clients for the time, from Glen Campbell and Mac Davis to Island Records and Richard Harris. My introduction to actor/singer Richard Harris came when we received a call from his wife Ann Turkel to come to Sardi’s Restaurant where we found him in the middle of a barroom brawl. My associate Mark Stern, who was much more familiar with Harris, managed to defuse the situation and avoided Harris being hauled off by an amused NYPD.”
Dera was only with Levinson for two years, but it was a rich experience, he says. The highlight was not Richard Harris, as amusing as that was, but working with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Levinson had been hired to promote beautifully-packaged recordings of the Bible as read by Sir Laurence Olivier which Fairbanks had produced. Olivier wasn’t available for promotion, so it fell on Fairbanks. Spending time with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. at his Park Avenue office completing interviews for the project was a highlight for Dera personally.
“Visions of watching ‘Gunga Din’ and ‘The Prisoner Of Zenda’ with my did on an old B&W as a kid kept spinning in my head,” he says. “I would work with Fairbanks again a few years later when helping to promote the first ‘Night Of 100 Stars.’”
In 1976, Dera received a call that would put his fledgling two-year publicity career on a trajectory that would define his marketing reputation for decades to come.
“In the Spring of 1976, executives at Rogers & Cowan Public Relations contacted me to see if I would like to join their team in New York City,” Dera explains. “For those not familiar with Rogers & Cowan, it was and still is the largest, most powerful entertainment public relations firm in the world. My move was the equivalent of a AA pitcher being called up by the New York Yankees. And I hadn’t even developed a fastball.”
Rogers & Cowan was a combination of contemporary actors and musicians, as well as artists from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
“When I arrived at R&C their client list included Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, as well as Nick Nolte, James Caan and Sylvester Stallone,” Dera says. “Throughout their 100+ clients were names like Groucho Marx, Fred Astaire and George Burns. Principals Henry Rogers and Warren Cowan cut their publicity teeth representing Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, Errol Flynn and Kirk Douglas. I was brought onboard to give their music division a decidedly more rock’n roll identity. The R&C music roster was top heavy with crooners and composers that pretty much flew in the face of why I was brought onboard. Don’t get me wrong, these were great and successful artists that included Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Burt Bacharach, Tony Bennett, Anthony Newley and George Benson.”
Balancing this music division with a more rock’n roll identity would be an interesting task that would get a jumpstart from a former Beatle.
A couple of months after Dera’s arrival, Paul McCartney hired Rogers & Cowan as his new PR firm in the States and England.
“In 1976 he was still pretty sensitive about the Beatles and all the legal wrangling that represented,” adds Joe. “Prior to Rogers & Cowan, McCartney was being represented by a smaller firm that also publicized numerous Broadway shows. The mistake they made was that they were also the marketing muscle behind “Beatlemania,” which did not sit well with the oversensitive former Beatle and he fired them. Paul McCartney was our first client in the development of a stronger rock’n roll division at Rogers & Cowan.”
The arrival of Paul McCartney began a working relationship with Dera that would span some three decades, from Wings, numerous solo albums, film projects, a massive music publishing empire, the promotion of The Liverpool Institute For The Performing Arts, The Beatles Anthology, Linda McCartney’s cookbooks and photo projects, as well as her vegetarian food line.
“While I was very much in awe of McCartney being on our roster, I was never a hardcore Beatle fan. In the tug of war between Beatle and Rolling Stone fans I always sided with the Stones. Not being a fanboy served me well in my relationship with Mac, Linda, her brother John and father Lee Eastman. The Eastmans would make Paul McCartney the richest musician in the world, much to the detriment of the three other Beatles. In the final breaths of the Beatles, Paul wanted John and Lee Eastman to handle their affairs, while John, George and Ringo opted for Allen Klein’s ABKCO Records & Management. Klein, who was also managing the Rolling Stones, eventually prevailed as the Beatles new manager. As it turned out, it was a short-lived and turbulent period that would see the breakup of The Beatles.”
With the Beatles behind him, Paul was free to have his brother-in-law, John Eastman, and father-in-law, Lee Eastman, handle his affairs moving forward.
“The Eastmans were a fascinating and very private family,” Joe explains. “They had an old money air about them and I found their personal history infinitely more interesting than McCartney’s. In one meeting with Lee Eastman I recall him telling me that when the Beatles broke up their cash value was about $1 million each. There would be future revenues from ongoing record sales and publishing, but $1 million was tough to process after all that success. A combination of mismanagement and the oppressive British tax structure certainly seemed to have taken its toll on the lads. Lee Eastman advised Paul that he should invest existing and future earnings, a concept foreign to the former Beatle. He told Eastman that the only thing he knew was music. So music is where Paul and Lee put their money. They created MPL Communications and began to buy up the publishing rights to Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins and all of Frank Loesser compositions from ‘Guys and Dolls’ to ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’. Lee Eastman’s masterplan made McCartney a billionaire.”
Lee Eastman had made his fortune as one of New York’s more prominent attorneys and John Eastman was certainly following in his footsteps. Lee was an avid collector of 20th Century contemporary art and had professional and personal relationships with Picasso, Matisse, Albers and de Kooning, many of whom paid their legal fees in art. When New York’s Museum Of Modern Art staged their Picasso retrospective one would see countless works from the Collection Of Mr. & Mrs. Lee Eastman. His office, behind MOMA, featured two spectacular Matisse tapestries that would stop all visitors in their tracks.
“People often ask me my most memorable moment working with Paul McCartney for 23 years,” Dera says. “It had to be in the Spring of 1982 when I brought Paul to New York to promote the release of “Tug Of War”, his first and most powerful solo album since the death of John Lennon. My philosophy with Paul was to always have him interviewed in an environment that reflected who he was — a music environment on some level. On this particular Sunday we were going to conduct an interview with Bryant Gumbel for the Today Show at Columbia Records headquarters in Black Rock, the CBS Building. As with previous press interviews I told Gumbel that it could not be a Beatle interview. I agreed to meet Paul in front of the building and, as would often be the case, he came walking down Sixth Avenue carrying his acoustic guitar with no entourage nor security. We went upstairs to Columbia Records President Walter Yetnikoff’s floor. The NBC crew was still setting up their cameras and lighting. Paul and I retreated to Yetnikoff’s personal conference room. There was a grand piano in the conference room so Mac and I sat at the piano bench. While we were catching up on the mundanes of daily life since our last encounter around a Christmas luncheon, he took out his guitar, gave it a quick tune, and performed his classic Beatle composition ‘Blackbird.’ Not only was I the audience of one that brought me to tears, but it marked a turning point where I no longer had to insist that interviewers not focus on the Beatle years. It was as if the tragic death of John Lennon had not only produced one of his most inspired solo works with the “Tug Of War” album, but also allowed him to turn a corner and once again embrace his massive body of work with the Beatles in a more public way.”
With memorable moments there are also relative disappointments. For Dera it came in 1980 during a meeting with McCartney’s father-in-law Lee Eastman.
“At the time we were representing dancer/choreographer Twyla Tharp,” Dera says. “Twyla wanted to create a major collaboration with McCartney. I set a meeting with Lee at his Park Avenue duplex, a massive apartment occupying two floors with a circular staircase and a private elevator. There was a ballroom with Picassos and De Koonings at every turn. We met in his study and Twyla began to outline a proposal to create a new work incorporating classic and previously unrecorded McCartney compositions. Part of her plan was to have Stephen Sondheim arrange the music to Tharp’s choreographic interpretations. It was an exciting project that was lost on Eastman who simply dismissed the concept by telling us ‘Paul doesn’t like ballet’. It wasn’t ballet. It was modern dance created by the greatest creative mind working in the genre. Twyla Tharp went on to see her idea come to fruition on Broadway with David Byrne of the Talking Heads to rave reviews and the cover of Time Magazine.”
In 1982, Dera was introduced to singer/composer/actor David Bowie who was in the market for public relations representation.
“A friend and colleague, Harriet Vidal, who was working for me at the time, was friends with Bowie’s best friend Iggy Pop. Iggy told Vidal that David was looking for a new publicist. In November of 1982 a meeting with Bowie at his West 57th Street office was arranged. It was an opportunity for me to make my first big signing and maybe firmly establish a fastball. Bowie and I hit it off immediately. I outlined my proposed campaign that would compliment his forthcoming album ‘Let’s Dance’ and his huge Serious Moonlight World Tour. It would be safe to say that securing publicity for the likes of David Bowie or Paul McCartney is not a difficult task. Artists on this level know that as well, so you better come to the table with a well thought out plan. For all his artistic success, Bowie was not the world’s biggest record seller. The R&B/Pop approach to ‘Let’s Dance’ thanks to Nile Rodgers opened doors to pop, as well as album oriented radio. The Serious Moonlight Tour would be a global arena tour kicking off in Europe during the Spring of 1983 before coming to the States.”
“After a couple of warmup dates in Philadelphia and Hartford, the tour would come to New York’s Madison Square Garden,” Dera continues. “With New York being the media capital of North America I explained to Bowie that we would have to do something special in order to distinguish the Garden show. The publicity generated around the New York show would set the tone for the rest of the tour which still laid before us. The concert industry had made it easy for the general public to acquire tickets to major events through such services as Ticketron. I told Bowie we wanted people lined up for tickets so we should eliminate Ticketron. I got immediate resistance from the show’s promoter Ron Delsener who only saw the additional expense related to selling tickets exclusively through the Madison Square Garden box-office. I was more focused on creating a news event with hundreds of people lined up at the Garden box-office. I explained to Bowie that media manipulation in New York would give us the boost that would sell out his world tour. He agreed we should roll the dice and hope that our scheme would work. The morning tickets went on sale hundreds of Bowie fans were lined up. Some in three-piece business suits and others as known Bowie personas from Ziggy Stardust to the Thin White Duke. The ticket line reminded me of the famous ‘Star Wars’ bar scene. With our strategy successfully unfolding we alerted MTV, CNN and the three networks who all sent crews to interview fans standing in line. Newsweek and Time took note and scheduled simultaneous features, with Time putting Bowie on the cover. Three covers of Rolling Stone followed at various points of the campaign. The gamble had paid off, selling out all three nights and my relationship with David Bowie went from the six-month agreement to an eight-your working relationship.”
As the 1980s unfolded Dera found himself expanding his client list to include Elton John, Robert Palmer, UB40, ZZ Top, Billy Joel, Ringo Starr, Clint Black, Alabama, Les Paul, Queen, Richard Pryor, George Carlin and Duran Duran. He handled the publicity and marketing for Live Aid in 1985, the 1986 Conspiracy Of Hope: Amnesty International Tour starring Sting and U2, and Nelson Mandela’s 1988 70th Birthday Concert at Wembley Stadium.
There are countless other stories working with Rock Hudson, Paul Newman, Bruce Willis and others. Those will have to wait for a future date or that book Joe Dera has been threatening to write.
While he came to Mississippi to retire on his antebellum farm, local businesses ranging from international Chef David Raines (owner of The Flora Butcher and Dave’s Triple B Restaurant) and Kristie and David Nutt’s Reunion, Inc. development in Madison, convinced him to split his time between rescuing dogs and executing marketing campaigns for their respective businesses.
“At this stage in my life I’m not interested in building a firm so big that I could not handle a campaign on a very personal level,” adds Joe.
You can write Joe at joederapr@gmail.com.
