All of this was now being paved over. Shelby’s new “downtown” was a long string of cookie-cutter corporate franchises along either side of Highway 74. There was a Wal-Mart, a movie theater, a strip mall, a Chick-fil-A, another strip mall, a Bojangles’, and a megamall. The stores were arranged in a single-file line, which even in a town as small as Shelby tended to create traffic problems. They were all surrounded by high-capacity parking lots.
Car culture, the great equalizer of American life, was on the rise again. Rank, status, and style were displayed via the vehicle one drove and the accoutrements one added to it. The price of gasoline was the topic of endless discussion, comparison, and speculation among Shelbyites—they talked about it the way New Yorkers talked about their rent. This clogged, anonymous strip of highway was now the center of Shelby’s social and cultural life.
Such as it was. Glover liked his hometown, but he was the first to admit that life there could be terribly boring. On weekends, he headed to Charlotte, North Carolina’s largest city, located about an hour’s drive east of Shelby. There he found excitement at Club Baha, or Club 2000, or any of Charlotte’s other half dozen dance floors, where promoters and DJs spun hip-hop records to raucous, racially mixed crowds. There was energy to the nightlife there, spurred on by a recent reinvention of the popular sound. Radio-friendly bubblegum was out; hard-edged gangster rap was in. Glover fast became a Charlotte fixture, sometimes accompanied by Dockery. Young and handsome, with a deep voice and an affected nonchalance, Glover was generally successful with women. Dockery was not.
The clubs weren’t too far from Shelby, but they were far enough. Two hours’ drive for a few hours of fun wasn’t the best trade-off, and if, by some ill-starred arrangement of fortune, you found yourself driving home alone at the end of the night, there was the ever present hazard of the DUI. So it was often easier to bring the club to you, which you did by blasting the music out of the trunk of your car. The new trend in rap seemed specifically designed to encourage this activity. Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, and the other pioneers of the West Coast sound were pushing a resurgence in car culture that popular music hadn’t seen since the Beach Boys. In the parking lots of Shelby and Charlotte, Glover was exposed to this strange new world of hydraulic suspensions and window tints, powered subwoofers and chrome rims. A well-equipped car could turn a barren expanse of asphalt into a spontaneous party zone where dozens of people laughed, danced, flirted, and drank. It could even lead to the promised land: a joyride with your girl, up and down the town’s main drag.
Despite his good looks and demeanor, Glover was at a disadvantage in this respect. His Cherokee was serviceable as a commuter vehicle, but unsatisfactory as either a mobile stereo system or a chick magnet. The advantages of a better vehicle and the standard suite of aftermarket upgrades were apparent, and the need for them was urgent. From early on he was driven by a sort of narrow-minded cupidity: he wanted a better car.
Soon. For now, though, the Cherokee would have to do. On that Saturday in 1995, after a long shift of dropping and boxing, Glover and Dockery were ready to relax. Something different was on the agenda for that night. One of the machine technicians had invited the two to a house party. Both Glover and Dockery were angling for better-paying permanent positions, and, although their coworkers sometimes seemed a little stiff, attendance at the party was a chance to network.
The night turned out to be full of surprises. The party was more enjoyable than Glover had expected, with plenty of alcohol, and girls, and other things as well. Several representatives from plant management were there, and Glover was startled by how friendly they were outside of work. As things progressed, the host put on music to get people dancing. Glover, the club fixture, was keyed into the popular sound, but he’d never heard any of this music before, even though much of it was from artists whose work he enjoyed. A few drinks in, he had a hazy epiphany. Of course he’d never heard this music before. It hadn’t been released yet. The host was DJing the party with music that had been smuggled out of the plant.
CHAPTER 3
In June 1995—just after Karlheinz Brandenburg’s meeting in Erlangen, just before the party Dell Glover attended with his coworkers—Doug Morris, the North American head of Warner Music Group, walked down the corridors of Time Warner’s Manhattan offices for a meeting with his boss. On the walls around him hung hundreds of gold records commemorating a series of successful releases that went back to Sinatra. Warner Music was itself part of the larger Time Warner entertainment conglomerate, whose legacy went back further still, all the way to the original Warner brothers, and a significant portion of twentieth-century American entertainment history belonged to it.
Morris, who had come to power just eight months earlier, felt confident this streak would continue. Since his appointment as CEO, Warner had dominated the record business, and Morris had been rewarded with a company car, a personal chauffeur, a corner office with a piano, and access to the company jet. Managing the most profitable music company in America, at the most profitable time in its history, he was earning ten million dollars a year, plus stock options. And on the strength of recent signings, the future looked even better.
At 56, Morris was approaching late middle age, but he retained the body language of a teenager. Broad faced and clean shaven, he eschewed late nights and went to the gym every morning. Years ago he had gone bald on top, and when he smiled, he raised his eyebrows and the lines on his forehead arranged themselves around a smooth notch of scalp where there once had been a widow’s peak. He affected an air of perpetual bemusement, but his eyes conveyed an expressive, penetrating intelligence, and his personality was magnetic.
A nice Jewish boy from Long Island, Morris had been raised in the tranquil middle-class hamlet of Woodmere, one of America’s first suburbs. There, he developed a pronounced regional accent, and for the rest of his life coffee was “cawfee,” water was “wahduh,” and Long Island was “Lawng.” Morris’ father had been an attorney, but illness had hampered his professional life, and so his mother, a dance instructor, was the family breadwinner. Doug’s ambition had been apparent from childhood, as had that of his brother, who went on to become an oncologist. But although more respectable careers beckoned, Morris, from an early age, knew he was destined for show business.
At Columbia University he was a straight-C student, neglecting his studies to focus on the piano and a potential career as a musician. This wasn’t just a pipe dream—Morris played concerts throughout high school and college, and was even briefly signed to Epic Records, who released his only vinyl single. (It didn’t chart.) After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1960, he was drafted into America’s peacetime army and stationed on a military base in France for the next two years. In 1962, he returned to permanently settle in New York City, then in the middle of the Greenwich Village folk music revival. But Morris was out of step with this scene, more Bobby Darin than Bob Dylan, and he failed to make it as a performer.
He decided to try it as a songwriter. He learned the craft at Laurie Records, as an assistant to Bert Berns, the hitmaker responsible for “Hang On Sloopy” and “Twist and Shout.” Despite appearances, successful songwriting was a challenge, even though most hit pop songs consisted of little more than a few saccharine lyrics and a rearrangement of the chords C, F, and G. (Late into his career, Morris would contend that every chart-topping song from the last half century was just a reworking of “La Bamba.”) In 1966, after several years of striving, he finally scored a minor radio hit with the song “Sweet Talkin’ Guy,” performed by the Bronx-based girl group the Chiffons.