Now on his way to meet with Warner Music chairman Michael Fuchs in 1995, Morris looked undefeatable. It was only June, but Morris had seen the sales figures and was certain he had the number one album of the year: Cracked Rear View, from the gentle frat-rockers Hootie & the Blowfish. The cargo shorts and hacky sack crowd had turned Hootie into state college superstars, with sales approaching eight million units. Their hit single “Only Wanna Be with You” was a song that seemed scientifically designed to play over the stereo system at the Gap.
Hootie had not been an obvious winner by any means. In fact, all of Warner’s A&R men had passed on them. The consensus opinion among major label scouts was that the Blowfish were an unoriginal bar band with terrible stage presence and no songwriting ability. Morris disagreed. Or perhaps he granted that this was true, but then contended that it didn’t matter. For Morris, the only important thing was that the band’s popularity was spiking, crossing over from the University of South Carolina to the rest of the state.
He had learned this lesson many years before, at his first job at Laurie Records, when he transitioned from artist to executive. The shift in roles required Morris to pay closer attention to sales, but in the 1960s keeping score was difficult. Record stores weren’t always inclined to share their sales figures, and even if they had been, in an era before computers, collecting and sorting the data from thousands of retailers around the country was impossible. For this reason the Billboard charts weren’t especially reliable. Neither were radio play statistics—the industry suffered from routine payola scandals, and even in the absence of bribes, DJs tended to play favorites. Only one person at Laurie could provide the numbers Morris needed, a functionary clerk whose real-world job was about as far away from the glamour of the music business as you could get: the order-taker.
Morris haunted him like a ghost. Whenever a big order came in—which at Laurie meant anything more than a crate of a hundred vinyl records at a time—Morris demanded to know who had placed it, exactly how many units they wanted, and why. The order-taker was understandably perplexed. Shouldn’t Morris be at a nightclub somewhere, looking for the next Jimi Hendrix, instead of here, in the accounting department, pestering a back-office employee? But to Morris the order-taker was the key to the whole thing. How could he know what to sell if he didn’t know what people were buying?
One of the acts on Laurie’s roster in those days was a generic garage rock band from Mansfield, Ohio, called the Music Explosion. Side A of their lead seven-inch single was a schlocky two-minute cover of a 1964 British Invasion tune titled “Little Bit O’ Soul.” Morris, however, would forever remember this platter by a different name: Laurie 3380, the catalog number the order-taker used to track the sales of the song. Those sales were generally unimpressive, with one exception: a record store in the small town of Cumberland, Maryland, which had, during the most recent inventory cycle, inexplicably ordered two crates of discs.
Morris was struck by this anomaly. He convinced the order-taker to give him the phone number of the customer. He was soon talking long-distance with the Cumberland store’s owner, who told Morris that through repeated heavy airplay, a local radio DJ had turned this unexceptional song into a regional hit. In fact, the owner was already planning to place another order for the single, as the two crates of Laurie 3380 he’d bought were running out.
Was there anything special about Cumberland, Maryland? No—a town of 30,000 people in the Allegheny Mountains, it was a stand-in for Anyplace, USA. Was there anything special about “Little Bit O’ Soul”? No—the song was about as exciting as a mashed cracker. But Morris suspected that what played well in an Appalachian coal-mining town in western Maryland would probably play well anywhere. He pushed the executives at Laurie to market the song more aggressively, and soon DJs around the country had moved it into prime-time rotation. By the end of 1967, “Little Bit O’ Soul” had peaked at number two on the Billboard charts, and Laurie 3380 had shipped more than a million copies.
Morris never forgot the experience of his first gold record, and he began to trust market research more than he trusted expert opinion—more, sometimes, than he trusted his own ears. Let the other A&Rs scout bands, and go to nightclubs, and fall in love with demos. Let them guess at trends, and fool themselves into believing they had some special insight into the next big thing. From now on, Morris was scouting the order-taker.
Twenty-seven years later and he was still doing it. When it came to Hootie & the Blowfish, Morris didn’t have to listen to their music; he just had to look at the retail sheets from record stores across the Carolinas, where Hootie was outselling even top national acts. Morris believed that the regional audience for a no-name Carolina bar band understood something about music that the more sophisticated A&Rs who worked for him did not, and he was soon proven correct.
Of course, there was an unstated assumption behind this approach: that aesthetic quality and commercial popularity were identical. In other words, the album that sold the most copies was by definition the best. This could sometimes lead to unusual outcomes. For example, to a corporate label executive the best album of 1967 was not Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or Are You Experienced, but More of the Monkees. The best album of 1975 wasn’t Blood on the Tracks or Tonight’s the Night, but Elton John’s Greatest Hits. The best album of 1993 wasn’t Enter the Wu-Tang or In Utero, but the soundtrack to The Bodyguard. And so the best album of 1995 was therefore Cracked Rear View. The critics might howl in protest, but the people bought the album, and at Time Warner that was all that mattered.
But scouting the order-taker didn’t mean that Morris didn’t take risks. In fact, it was precisely this populist economic logic that often led him into dangerous cultural territory. For further down the ledger—and located across an unbridgeable cultural abyss from the anodyne yodeling of Hootie and company—was the 50 percent stake Morris had negotiated in Jimmy Iovine’s Interscope Records. Iovine was Morris’ best friend. Although Iovine lived in Los Angeles, Morris saw him often, and the two talked on the phone several times a day. Morris had first contacted him at Atlantic as a producer for Stevie Nicks, and the collaboration led to her breakout solo hit “Edge of Seventeen.” He’d followed up with albums for U2 and Tom Petty that had dominated the 1980s airwaves. Iovine was short, energetic, rakish, and always wore a beat-up baseball cap that, in more than ten years of friendship, Morris had seen him take off exactly once.
Iovine could, at times, be a little bit difficult. Morris, more of a political creature by nature, knew you had to manage him. Once, in a meeting with Michael Fuchs, Morris’ Time Warner boss, the executive had immodestly described his multifaceted approach to the media business, and then referred to himself as the Michael Jordan of management. Iovine, acid-tongued, had provided a quick retort: “Yeah, but to us, you’re the Michael Jordan of baseball.”
But you needed Jimmy for his instincts, both as a producer and as a scout. He had a terrific ear for the hit song, and his pop music instincts approached clairvoyance. He had, in Morris’ words, the ability to “see around corners.” In touch with hidden currents of culture, he was the greatest trend-spotter Morris had ever known. And lately, he’d been pushing a new frontier: hard-edged gangster rap.