One of the songs was Tupac Shakur’s “California Love,” which had become inescapable after Pac’s death several weeks earlier. Glover loved Tupac, and when All Eyez on Me came through the PolyGram plant, on a special onetime distribution deal with Interscope, he had even shrink-wrapped some of the discs himself. Now, on his home computer, he played the mp3 of “California Love,” and Roger Troutman’s talkbox intro came rattling through its shitty speakers, followed by Dr. Dre’s looped reworking of the piano hook from Joe Cocker’s “Woman to Woman.” Then came the voice of Tupac himself, compressed and digitized from beyond the grave.
Glover had heard this song countless times. It was one of his favorites, and he often listened to it with Dockery on the way to work. He had the disc on hand, and had even used his home burner to make a counterfeit copy. Now he ran a head-to-head comparison between the source and the compressed file. As far as he could tell from his computer speakers, the mp3 version sounded identical to the CD.
At work Glover manufactured CDs for mass consumption. At home, he produced them individually, and had spent over $2,000 on burners and other hardware. His economic livelihood depended entirely on continued demand for the product. But if the mp3 could reproduce Tupac at one-twelfth the bandwidth, and if Tupac could then be distributed, for free, on the Internet, Glover had to wonder: what the hell was the point of a compact disc?
CHAPTER 6
Doug Morris got a new job almost immediately. In July 1995, less than a month after his firing at Time Warner, he was hired by Edgar Miles Bronfman, Jr., the CEO of the Seagram liquor company. Junior was the third-generation scion of the influential Bronfman family of Montreal, the so-called “Rothschilds of the New World.” Since taking over the family business in 1994, Bronfman had pushed for reorganization, courageously attempting to transform Seagram from a boring (if highly profitable) beverage distributor into an exciting (but highly risky) global entertainment powerhouse.
As a business strategy it was demented. The Bronfmans had made forays into the entertainment business before, with little good to show for it. Junior’s father, Edgar Senior, had once made a play for MGM Pictures, before being outmaneuvered by Kirk Kerkorian. Junior’s uncle Charles had for many years owned the Montreal Expos, itself an experiment in slapstick. The elder Bronfman brothers had exited these ventures ignominiously, learning difficult lessons along the way about the volatile and unpredictable nature of show business. But they had failed to pass this wisdom on to Junior, who still wanted to be a player.
He had, like Morris, tried to make it as a songwriter. He had skipped college and gone straight into the music business, working pseudonymously for several years as “Junior Miles,” attempting to succeed without trading on the family name. Later, with his father’s backing, he had ventured into Hollywood, producing The Border, a 1982 Jack Nicholson flop. This unimpressive track record behind him, he had returned to the fold as a Seagram executive, where, at the age of 39, he was handed control of the empire.
Seagram’s most profitable asset by far was a stake in the chemical company DuPont. Junior dumped this to raise money to purchase controlling stakes in Universal Pictures and MCA Music Entertainment Group. The two companies were struggling: Universal was mired in the production of Waterworld, one of the most expensive and terrible movies in history, and MCA’s catalog was so old it was known as the “Music Cemetery of America.”
Junior wanted Morris to run a division of the latter, betting he could raise the dead. It was an offer Morris approached with some reluctance. He didn’t know Junior very well, and was aware that the industry had hung a target on this rich kid’s back. MCA was a last-place money-suck with 7 percent market share that was also sometimes called “the sixth of the Big Five.” Morris had several other offers on the table, as well as some ideas of his own. Nor was he hurting for money. Two days after his firing, he had sued Time Warner, trying to pull the rip cord on a golden parachute deal worth fifty million bucks. (Time Warner had countersued, accusing Morris of selling prerelease promotional CDs.)
But after a few meetings with Junior, he came around. With a lifetime of difficult contract negotiations behind him, Morris was a skilled dealmaker. Junior was not. Morris finagled points on profits, stock options at Seagram, and another golden parachute to complement the first. The initial credit line Junior offered for investing in artists was only $100 million, much less than what had been available at Warner, but Morris could see that, sitting on a limitless tap of booze money, there was a lot more where that came from. Best of all, Seagram was domiciled in Canada, where the lyrics of popular rap songs were not a pressing political issue.
Although Jimmy Iovine and Doug Morris were temporarily estranged as colleagues, they remained best friends and hoped to reunite. The betrayal of Fuchs had stung them both, and Iovine had raised such a stink after Morris’ sacking that he was no longer permitted in the Time Warner building. Under normal circumstances, he too would have been fired, but Iovine didn’t actually work for Warner directly—he was an equity partner in a joint venture, and the only way to get rid of him was to sell him back his shares. This was an expensive proposition, as Interscope had diversified beyond rap, signing No Doubt, Nine Inch Nails, and Marilyn Manson.
Together, the two came up with a plan. Iovine, the agitator, would make himself unbearable to Fuchs, and push extreme albums like Dogg Food and Antichrist Superstar that made the provocations of The Chronic seem boring by comparison. Morris, the charmer, would work on Bronfman, climbing his way up the corporate ladder and loosening up the purse strings of the Seagram board. Once both sides of the plan were accomplished, the two would reunite north of the border, outside the reach of grandstanding American presidential candidates.
They executed perfectly. In August 1995, Fuchs announced that Time Warner was parting ways with Interscope. The deal was an early warning sign of the growing dysfunction inside Warner. Whatever the cultural pressures, whatever the personality clashes, the move was indefensible for shareholders: what kind of idiot music label dropped Dr. Dre, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dogg, Trent Reznor, and Gwen Stefani, all at the same time?
In November of that same year Bronfman promoted Morris to run all of MCA, dramatically increasing the amount of money he was authorized to spend. In February 1996, less than a year after their surprise separation, Doug presented his friend Jimmy with a $200 million check, signed by Edgar Miles Bronfman, Jr., representing a permanent commitment to Interscope Records, backed by the full faith and credit of a continent of drunks.
Only one major release fell through the cracks: Tupac’s All Eyez on Me, released during the brief period in early 1996 when Interscope did not have a corporate partner. With its hit single “California Love,” the double album was Tupac’s masterpiece, and eventually became one of the bestselling rap albums in history. But at the time of its release Shakur—gun enthusiast, actor, thug, lightning rod, and convicted sex offender—was too hot to touch. Shut out of Time Warner and still waiting for the Seagram deal to be inked, Iovine instead distributed the album in a one-off deal with Dutch-owned Philips, meaning the compact discs for All Eyez on Me were pressed at the PolyGram plant in Kings Mountain, North Carolina.