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2012 12: 3Journal of Consumer CultureDevon Powers

intermediation, and the rise of the 'company freak'Long-haired, freaky people need to apply: Rock music, cultural

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Article

Long-haired, freakypeople need to apply:Rock music, culturalintermediation, and therise of the ‘companyfreak’

Devon PowersDrexel University, USA

Abstract

This article explores the phenomenon of the ‘company freak’ at American record labels

of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It presents historical research on company freaks as

well as theorizes how the concept of cultural intermediation might be recast as a means

of complicating the standard narrative of rock’s commercial ‘co-optation’ during the

period. In highlighting that company freaks were no simple appropriators, I argue that

scholarship on consumer culture needs a sharper focus on historical instances of cul-

tural intermediation in order to avoid gross caricatures of cultural commodification.

Keywords

1960s, commodification, counterculture, cultural intermediaries, rock music

Introduction

‘At the moment, the concept of the ‘company freak’ is extremely popular,’ observedJerry Hopkins in a 1968 Rolling Stone article on the music scene in Los Angeles.Also known as ‘house hippies,’ Hopkins described company freaks as ‘the recordcompany’s equivalent of the ‘‘necessary Negro’’’ – implying not only tokenism andsubjugation but also acquiescent subservience. ‘They are there by invitationand although their titles are euphemistic at best, they are assigned specificresponsibility – sometimes involving talent acquisition and producing, but alwaysincluding flackery’, Hopkins continued. Through such ‘hip flackery’, the recordindustry more easily worked with underground newspapers and countercultural

Corresponding author:

Devon Powers, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA

Email: [email protected]



bands. ‘In LA, the so-called underground . . . and the Establishment indulge in a lotof mutual back-scratching’, Hopkins surmised (1968: 492–93).

For a few years spanning the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, anumber of American record labels employed at least one ‘company freak’ – anunofficial, usually tongue-in-cheek, and at times pejorative designation for ‘hip’personnel who worked on rock music within publicity, marketing, or promotionsdepartments. During these years, both the title of ‘company freak’ and the peoplewhom it described were signposts of the arrival of rock as a keystone of theexpanding music industry. Yet, by the mid-1970s, the term had fallen out offavor, the duties freaks fulfilled rendered normal or obsolete, the freaks themselvesdeparting the industry or, in some cases, ascending its ranks. To outward appear-ances, it would seem that the company freak is less a noteworthy artifact of rock’srebellion than a curious relic of a groovier era. It should not surprise, then, thatwhile specific individuals who worked as company freaks have figured into schol-arly and journalistic accounts of the music industry of the period, the position itselfhas by and large escaped critical scrutiny or even mention within any of the poten-tially relevant disciplines, including popular music, cultural and media studies,marketing, and public relations.

At a moment when the music industry was flush with cash but unaccustomed todealing with rock, labels began to explore strategies on how best to capitalize onthe music and market it to its rightful audiences. The company freak was one suchstrategy: hired hands charged with bridging what was thought to be a troublesomegulf between the countercultural rock audience and the mainstream rock business.Yet while it would be easy to write off company freaks as ‘sellouts’ – phony accom-plices of a hipper capitalism – the goal of this research is to transcend such reduc-tive categorization. Based upon interviews with persons who held these jobs,historical research into the music industry, and a theoretical investigation of cul-tural intermediation and co-optation, I argue that company freaks complicate thestandard narrative of rock music’s commercialization, still a widely contentiousand sometimes misconstrued topic among scholars of music and popular culture.Taking such jobs seriously forces recognition not only of the motivations andsentiments of the people who prodded rock along its commercial path, but alsothe fits, starts, successes, and failures of an industry gambling on unpredictablecultural product.

A companion goal to sharing my empirical findings is to elaborate upon and re-imagine the nature of the cultural commodification or ‘co-optation’ of popularmusic, particularly as it played out during and immediately after the 1960s. Inservice of this goal, the next section argues for a focus on ‘cultural intermediation’ –a debatable concept for sure, but one I argue offers a promising path towardrepresenting workers such as company freaks as more than loyal agents of capit-alism. Following that discussion, I will present a historical analysis of companyfreaks in American music companies. The article will conclude with a reflection onhow historical research on cultural intermediation is a necessary element of theo-rizing cultural commodification.

4 Journal of Consumer Culture 12(1)



Commodification, co-optation, and cultural intermediaries

Discomfort with commodification has a long history in critical examinations of theeconomy and culture, especially those stemming from Marxism and critical theory.Within this tradition, the extension of market logic into cultural production hasbeen blamed for impoverishing the richness of culture, lessening cultural optionsand ‘co-opting’ cultural meaning. It is this last point, co-optation, that has heldparticular sway for popular music, notably rock music and especially that of the1960s. As Frith has explained, ‘there was a moment [during the 1960s] when eventhe most mindless groups . . . had to present themselves as something other than‘‘entertainers’’’, though soon enough, ‘rock’s claims to be different from pop, toevade the logic of mass culture, turned out to be baseless’ (Frith, 1984: 61). A morerecent argument from Garofalo expresses much the same sentiment. He writes:

The 1960s may have been experienced by artists and audiences as a period of political

awakening and cultural development, but for the music industry it was a period of

commercial expansion and corporate consolidation. Far from disappearing, as the

activists of the 1960s would have had it, capitalism simply became hipper. (1999: 337)

The worry that ‘any ‘radical’ possibilities that might arise in the production ofpopular music are merely absorbed and ‘co-opted’ by a ruthless, cynical andexploitative commercial system’ (Negus, 1995: 318) – common among scholars,fans, and critics of popular music – draws not only from the ‘absurd reduction’(Gitlin, 1993: xiii) to which the 1960s in general have been subjected. It also con-nects to early work from the field of cultural studies, notably Hebdige, whoseSubculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) provides the basis for much subsequentthinking about non-mainstream cultural activity and influentially theorized thenature of co-optation. Hebdige defines ‘incorporation’ as a ‘continual process ofrecuperation’ through which subculture becomes little more than ‘a diverting spec-tacle within the dominant mythology from which it in part emanates’ (1979: 94).One of the chief mechanisms through which incorporation transpires is commodi-fication, i.e. ‘the conversion of subcultural signs (dress, music, etc.) into mass-produced objects’; coupled with ‘the ideological form’ of incorporation, whichinvolves the ‘(re)definition and digestion of subcultural resistance by dominantgroups’, including the media (1979: 94), incorporation has the potential tostymie and de-fang subcultures of any stripe. For Hebdige, cultural resistance –and the degree to which that is a proxy for meaning itself – is no match against theagile power of capitalistic forces. The best option, according to his prescription, isto keep a few steps ahead of incorporation, but not to dodge the threat of itentirely.

Critics of this perspective argue instead that audiences, not producers, ultimatelydetermine the meaning of a cultural product. For example, Grossberg, writingspecifically on rock music, is more forgiving in his understanding of the marketas a necessary component of music as mass-produced culture; his views

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of co-optation, as a result, are more compelling. Interested most in the productivecapacity of ‘affective alliances’ among members of the rock audience, Grossbergargues for a limited view of co-optation, occurring only when rock music ‘loses thatinitial sense of its own struggle against something’ (1983/84: 114, 116). Yet byfocusing so heavily on fan experience, Grossberg fails to adequately address therole of the industry in producing affect, characterizing an industrial emphasis astoo ‘purely economic’ yet also ‘partially correct’ (1983/84: 115). By not acknowl-edging that the realm of the economic is likewise comprised of human relation-ships, affective alliances, and fan sentiments, it is easy to assume that consumptionis still the main locus of meaning and salvo against the co-opting forces of themarket. Views such as these uphold, rather than void, the idea that capitalism is all-powerful, through which it becomes ‘not an uncentered aggregate of practices but astructural and systemic unity’ that ‘is relatively impervious to ordinary politicaland cultural interventions’ (Gibson-Graham, 1996: 255–6).

What if, instead, we consider how the work of the economy can itself producemeaning? One means for accomplishing this is to consider cultural labor as amongthe ‘uncentered practices’ Gibson-Graham suggests provide a truer picture of eco-nomic activity. Critical of accounts ‘where class is reduced to two fundamentalclass positions’, Gibson-Graham instead advocates the embrace of ‘diverse classprocesses’ where ‘individuals may participate in a variety of class processes at onemoment and over time’ (1996: 19). These views are especially useful when puttoward thinking about cultural labor in general, and the notion of cultural inter-mediation more specifically. Originally conceived by Bourdieu as those whose ‘spe-cific power’ derives from ‘control over the mass media’, Bourdieu identified ‘newcultural intermediaries’ as journalists, critics, television and radio producers, andthe like, a subset within the ‘new petite bourgeoisie’ (1984: 323, 325, 354).Expansions on Bourdieu’s work have suggested that cultural intermediaries per-form ‘information and knowledge intensive forms of work’ that are ‘increasinglycentral to economic and cultural life’ in our post-industrial, information-centriceconomy (Nixon and du Gay, 2002: 496). Other scholarship has suggested thatcultural intermediaries have a ‘rising trajectory within the social space’ and havebeen ‘numerically on the rise’ (Featherstone, 1987: 64); in relation to music inparticular they have been called ‘the central object of the sociology of creation’(Hennion, 1989: 403) and the true makers of records, shaping otherwise unformedacts into marketable products (Jones, 2002: 150).

Debate over the value and application of the concept of the term cultural inter-mediaries has accompanied, and in certain cases attempted to stave, the growingscholarly focus. Proposals to expand the term to include overlooked forms ofsymbolic work (Negus, 2002a) have been met with criticism that ‘the confusingarray of uses to which the term [cultural intermediary] has been put’ limits its use asa conceptual tool for analyzing cultural production (Hesmondhalgh, 2006: 227),while historical work has questioned whether they are new to the culture industryafter all (McFall 2002). Writing elsewhere, Hesmondhalgh has favored a return tothe term ‘creative manager’ to describe those who ‘act as brokers or mediators




between . . . the interests of owners and executives’ and the needs and desires of‘creative personnel’ (2007: 64).

While these arguments have certainly produced useful scholarship, for my pur-poses here they are inadequately focused. I have traded the term ‘cultural inter-mediaries’ for ‘cultural intermediation’ as a means recasting the conversation, awayfrom classifying kinds of work and toward making sense of the nature of powermanifest in the processes of cultural production. Instead of attempting to enumer-ate who does or does not perform these acts in a widely heterogeneous and mal-leable culture industry, what Molloy and Larner call ‘cultural mediation is moreproductively thought of as a function of the multiplicity of activities and relation-ships organised around the new economic spaces . . .which are subject to the exi-gencies of capital accumulation’ (2010: 362). While labor processes certainlydemand greater visibility, my use of cultural intermediation is meant to index theexisting scholarship while underscoring the great degree to which these conversa-tions turn on the nature of and embodiment of cultural authority. To this end, it istelling that Macguire and Matthews offer the following perspective (2010: 407):

It is not only that cultural intermediaries use media to accomplish their promotional

work, but that in doing so they are an effect of and contributor to the corporatization

of the media . . . In the search for audiences and consumer markets, the work of mass

production increasingly co-opts aspects of legitimate, restricted culture in order to

lend cachet, legitimacy, value, and so forth . . .The cultural intermediary is the agent

and mass media the conduit for the strategic migration and translation of ‘restricted’

culture into the field of larger-scale production.

The argument that cultural intermediaries are the ‘agents’ of co-optation isuseful in so far as it understands cultural commodification as embodied practicerather than a faceless, autocratic force. Yet their conception also reproduces manyof the problems apparent in theorizations on co-optation explored above, as well asthe reductive, binary construct of capitalism Gibson-Graham so convincingly ques-tions. As per Macguire and Matthews, cultural intermediaries are little more thancogs who keep the wheels of commodification turning, straightforwardly reprodu-cing the desires of the greater system in which they labor. What results is thereforeonly a slight improvement on the agentless views of co-optation, giving us verylittle by way of how actual people work, what motivates them to do their jobs, andthe conflicts that arise, both knowingly and unintentionally, in doing it.

More open and realistic views about the nature of this intermediating powerarticulate the complex positioning and uncertain outcomes of work within theculture industries. For instance, Cronin’s work on advertising professionalsexplains that they not only mediate the relationship between producers and con-sumers (as the description of them as ‘agents’ and ‘translators’ would suggest) butinstead occupy a ‘dual status as producers (of ads) and consumers (of ads andproducts)’ (2004: 353) mired in the confusion of cultural trends rather than omnis-ciently directing them or cunningly absorbing them (2004: 354). Cronin’s point

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supports my thesis that cultural labor is always trickier than the selling/selling outcharacterization implies, as well as that cultural intermediation results in manifoldallegiances that only sometimes emerge as conflicts. Moreover, Taylor’s discussionof the use of electronic music in advertising brings to light the possibility that adagency employees see themselves not only as kindred spirits to the independentmusicians who made music for their ads, but also as sensitive benefactors, wary ofthe fine line between corruptive and auspicious promotion (Taylor, 2007). This isnot because (as Frank cynically suggests of 1960s admen) they fake a kinship so asto appear more hip (Frank, 1998: 113). On the contrary, Taylor’s insights under-score the degree to which their work was not so much hypocritical as paradoxical.It likewise should be a reminder that none are fully represented by their labor; noneoccupy their jobs without friction; and none can entirely shut off the rest of theirexistence from 9 to 5 (especially if, as McRobbie (2002) has argued, for many workand leisure are thoroughly intermingled).

Placing these issues into a historical context adds an important dimension to theconversation. Stephens has argued that during the 1960s, ‘‘‘work’’ was radicallyredefined’, privileging the expression of pleasure as ‘inherently subversive’, even ifthat pleasure happened at one’s place of employment (Stephens, 1998: 86).Accordingly, this redefinition not only allowed ‘ample space for enterprising hip-pies to profit from the 1960s movements’ (1998: 86–7), but also provided impetusfor the widespread revision of workplace norms in a host of industries as well as the1970s introduction into both work and leisure culture of what Binkley (2007) hascalled ‘looseness’. Spanning the late 1960s and early 1970s, the phenomenon ofcompany freaks is a fruitful place in which to witness these transitions taking place,as well as the variety of kinds of work cultural intermediation could entail.Moreover, focusing on the histories of cultural intermediation adds a necessarydimension to inquiries into immaterial and affective labor and the hybrid nature ofleisure-oriented work (McRobbie, 2002). While these studies shed useful light onthe present, their lack of historical focus makes them prone to finding too muchnovelty in these practices. Following the guidance of McFall (2002), I see companyfreaks not as the first or the last instance of these transitions, but rather a tellingmoment in a long tradition of laborers who have found opportunities and contra-dictions in the developing cultural industries.

To summarize, I am arguing that cultural intermediation is most useful if thecategory helps to complicate our understandings of the dynamics of commodifica-tion and the culture of economic practice, rather than simply confirm our worstsuspicions and prove our most vulgar theorizations. When intermediation is seen ascarried out by agents who flatly mediate the relationship between culture andcommerce or reflect static class positions, it is easy to see those people as bluntinstruments of capitalism rather than situated people who make choices about andhave opinions regarding the ends of their labor. This last point in part borrowsfrom McFall (2002), who argues that such understandings deny the fact that ‘the‘cultural’ and the ‘economic’ are entangled dimensions of practice rather than dis-crete spheres’, (2002: 534), and that ‘culture is not something that intervenes in




economic processes, rather it is constitutive of them’ (2002: 548). Cultural inter-mediation does not just introduce culture into the economy, but instead highlightsthe necessity of their co-production and the totality of their connection. My use ofthe term is therefore an attempt to apply this insight toward a more productiveunderstanding of the history of rock as a commodity.

Company freaks and selling (out?) music

As noted above, scholars have often characterized commodification as one of thechief problems of popular music generally and 1960s rock specifically, making itdifficult to interpret and be sympathetic to both the pressures and the opportunitiesthe music industry has created as it has grown and commercialized. Nonetheless,even the most pessimistic accounts of the music business of the time report howrock music dramatically reshaped industry practices – the first sign that capitalistappropriation is hardly one way. For instance, Goodman’s (1998) The Mansion onthe Hill, a trenchant critique of the commercialization of the rock business, is also ameticulous account of the commercial success of rock during and immediately afterthe 1960s, both in terms of its profitability to labels and its infiltration into theheart of the music business. As he exhibits, this rise was the result of both initiativewithin the major labels and entrepreneurship beyond it; individuals and industriesemerged to depend upon and amplify the growth of rock (such as live venues andconcert promotion, radio stations, underground newspapers, and talent agencies)at the same time that the labels themselves were changed by the injection of musi-cians, producers, and managers who were not acculturated to the business. In manycases, labels already had staff among their ranks who found opportunity within thissea change; these were often the business’s youngest employees, who in some casesstaked their careers on rock music. Likewise, Goodman rattles off a litany offorward-thinking label presidents (Jac Holzman, Clive Davis, Ahmet Ertegun),domineering managers (Albert Grossman, David Geffen), and intuitive A&R (art-ists and repertoire) men (John Hammond) as some of the music history’s mostdynamic visionaries.

The present study is not interested in adding the names of particular companyfreaks to the list of music industry ‘greats’ of the period, though what follows doesfocus on only a few individuals for reasons I will shortly detail. Goodman’s point isthat these figures, as pioneering as they were, were also catalysts of rock’s undoing,powerbrokers who led an industry toward troubling horizons. My argument, how-ever, is neither that company freaks were mercenaries fighting an ignoble fight northat they should be heralded as its ‘real’ leaders. Instead, it is to recast what kind ofbattle was in fact going on, to blur or even erase the lines that exist between alliesand enemies.

Three company freaks will comprise the bulk of my analysis: (1) Billy James,who worked for Columbia Records from 1961 until 1966, first in New York andlater in Los Angeles, before transitioning to Elektra’s LA offices; (2) Jim Fouratt,employed in ‘creative services’ in Columbia’s New York offices from 1968 until the

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early 1970s; and (3) Danny Fields, publicist for Elektra Records in New York Cityfrom 1967 who later moved to Atlantic. I choose James, Fouratt, and Fields notonly because they are the company freaks most frequently mentioned within his-tories of rock music, but also because over the course of my interviews, their namescame up more than others among other ‘freaky’ types; this is especially true ofJames and Fields. In addition to these men, I will more briefly mention the experi-ences of several other figures: William Yaryan, a publicist who moved betweenMCA, Atlantic Records, and independent firms between 1970 and 1975 in LosAngeles; Sally Stevens, who worked in promotion in a number of labels duringthis time period; and Michael Ochs, regional publicity director at Columbia in LosAngeles from 1969 until 1972.

There are a handful of other figures who have been identified as a ‘companyfreak’ or ‘house hippie’ in writings on the industry of the period. The most notableof these is Richard DiLello, whose book The Longest Cocktail Party (1972) chron-icles his experience as the house hippie for Apple Records in London, workingunder famed Beatles publicist Derek Taylor. Though his duties – managing pressclippings, taking photographs, interfacing with artists, partaking in nightlife – givehim much in common with the company freaks as I will describe them below,focusing on the American cultural and economic context allows me to present amore nuanced examination than if I were to also make claims about the UK.Beyond this geographic delimitation, during the course of my research I encoun-tered a number complications – not just death or inability to locate certain personsfor interviews, but also what was initially a surprising amount of debate and con-fusion about who company freaks were and what they did. There is much overlap,for instance, between company freaks and the rise of independent publicity firms,some of which were started in response to rock and staffed with individuals whochose, for one reason or another, not to work inside major labels. I have purposelyfocused on a small number of subjects in order to manage the unfixed presence of‘freaks’ in the record labels of the period. Indeed, if they were unruly figures forrecord labels of the time, they have proved to be similarly thorny for myself as ahistorian.

To decipher what I mean, let me begin with an interpretation of the fundamentaltension that exists within the title ‘company freak’ (a tension that also exists in theother commonly used term for these jobs, ‘house hippie’). So-called companyfreaks initially come off as what Hirsch would call ‘contact men,’ whose ‘prolifer-ation’ during this time period is suggestive of ‘the centrality of information onboundary developments’ for culture industries, and the importance of work‘in the field’ (1972: 133–4). Seen this way, company freaks perform typical dutiesof the music industry but with flair: walking the walk, talking the talk, and wearingthe uniform that allows them to consort with the music’s target audience. Writingat the time, Denisoff explained that a ‘house hippie was usually a writer or produ-cer who could explain the ‘new community’ for the record company and the labelto the ‘‘street’’’ but that some labels ‘employed long hairs as a status symbol or asmere window dressing’ (1975: 125). A brief discussion in the 1973 textbook You &




Media agrees: ‘the company freak . . . is decorative, but he has a function’ – tomanage the ‘collision of two cultures’ at the heart of his contemporary musicindustry (Clark and Blankenburg, 1973: 5).

That so much of what a company freak did day-to-day was routine would seemto corroborate the idea that freaks were gussied-up corporate hacks. Writing pressreleases, crafting ad campaigns, or pitching stories might have been fun work for atwentysomething, but it was hardly revolutionary within the record business;beyond this, it wasn’t as if rock artists were the only ones needing companyfreaks’ services. Fields expresses this sentiment when he describes himself as a‘kept hippie’ noting that ‘as much as you can invent your own role, you’re stillworking for the stable of artists’ (1970: 153, 165). The stress in all of this is on theidea of the ‘company’: that, at bottom, their purpose was to represent companyinterests.

But the ‘company’ aspect of these positions is only half of the equation – ‘freak’was also integral, as a foil to and a check upon the ultimate dominance of corpor-ate think. This is what allows Arnold Shaw to boldly proclaim in his 1969 book,The Rock Revolution, that house hippies (‘hirsute A&R men in search of rockartists’) are fundamental to the ‘overthrow of the older generation’s popularmusic culture’ (1969: 2). Pushing against strictures that had persisted in recordlabels for decades, company freaks injected freaky behavior into their work envir-onments, shifting norms around dress, behavior, attitude, respect for authority,and many other arenas. In an interview, Fouratt gave the following example:

I just did whatever I wanted to do, and I talked a lot . . . I would sit at a sales meeting

and, I didn’t realize it at first, but nobody said anything until Clive [Davis, President

of Columbia Records] said how he felt about something. And Clive would say, ‘Oh, I

think this is really great!’ and everyone would say ‘oh, it’s great!’ And I didn’t know

that was protocol. And he would always ask me first, and I would just tell him what I

thought! (Fouratt, interview with the author, 2011)

Such brazen bucking of corporate etiquette was not necessarily a sign of disres-pect – in our conversation, Fouratt was quick to express respect for Davis – butdoes exemplify how naturally, and extremely, the ‘difference’ company freaksmanifested could show through. One of the difficulties of focusing on the ‘freak’criterion, though, is that it becomes much more difficult to absolutely define.‘Working on the business side of music recording [there] seemed to be twotypes’, noted Yaryan, the MCA publicist. ‘Most were interested in money andadvancing up the ladder of success. Some were like me and got jobs in the businessbecause they loved music and had a taste for glamour and adventure that rubbingup against fame might provide’ (Yaryan, interview with the author, 2010). Thesizeable minority of employees interested in rock for cultural reasons becomesespecially visible when regional issues are taken into account. As the musical cul-ture of California – in both the psychedelic communalism of the San Francisco BayArea and the laid-back swagger of Southern California – became of keen interest to

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label dons in New York, East Coast bureaucracy came in increasing contact with acooler West Coast vibe. The melding and mutating of these regional ways of beingcould result in one coast’s ‘freak’ being simply de riguer on the other. Sally Stevens,a member of the promotions department at Elektra Records who bounced aroundnumerous record labels in the 1960s and 1970s, made this point emphatically,explaining that ‘we were all company freaks. That was the weird thing aboutthose days – nobody was normal’ (Stevens, interview with the author, 2009).

This is puzzling, contradictory terrain – on the one hand, company freaks astoken eccentrics and on the other as anyone who simply wasn’t normal – but I havecome to find its contradictions instructive. What it elucidates is that companyfreaks should be thought about as not just bridges between cultures oppositionallydefined as ‘counter’ and ‘corporate’; rather, they were forgers of a common culture– namely, an environment in which rock music, the capital of major labels, and theindividuals who transacted that relationship made sense together. As opposed tobeing an adulteration of something old, this rock culture was importantly, inte-grally new, an offspring taking attributes from both parents but resembling neithercompletely. Company freaks, in all their unconventional ambiguity, were symbolsand agents of this (re)birth in and beyond major music labels. This helps to explainhow they can be thought of as exceptions and the (new) rule simultaneously – theywere very much both.

Thus when Negus suggests that rock ‘facilitated the recruitment into the musicof a group of mildly bohemian young people associated with the counter-culture’,(2002b : 120), his view is only partially accurate. Not only does the descriptor‘mildly bohemian’ dismiss the hard work bohemianism could require, even in itssubdued forms; it also undermines the degree to which the job of the companyfreak was inherently performative, involving the active creation of communicationand relationships as well as the claiming and re-claiming of institutional and socialspace. To understand this as ‘mildly bohemian’ is to slight that the work of com-pany freaks was necessarily ad hoc and actively creative in finding outlets for‘freakish’ expression. Fields’s explanation that a company freak was ‘a roleanyhow, not a job, and you invent it as you go along’ (1970: 155) articulates theplasticity – around bohemianness, corporateness, and many other things – that wasnecessary for success and survival.

The career of Billy James makes this point strongly. Hired by the publicitydepartment at Columbia Records in May of 1961, James initially focused on clas-sical and jazz music but, as an early fan of Bob Dylan, began working for him oncethe label signed him in the fall of that year. James moved to Los Angeles in 1964and began taking an interest in the local music scene, eventually coming to workwith The Byrds once they signed with the label. His support of the band bothwithin and outside Columbia meant his star would rise along with theirs in themid-1960s (Goodman, 1998: 54). And with this, James earned something of alegendary status. In recalling his first encounter with James, Fields describes himas ‘[t]his charming, barefoot dynamo, running around the office, sitting on thefloor, putting his feet up on the walls’ (1970: 154) who would prove to be




his inspiration. Capitalizing on this cachet, James was allowed to ‘create a job’ forhimself, establishing the practice of ‘artist development’ – a deeper investment andnurturing between labels and the new artists they signed. Though what artist devel-opment entailed exactly was unclear, his position was soon modeled at other labels,and the people who held such as jobs were often themselves identified as ‘freaks’(Denisoff, 1975: 125; James, interview with the author, 2009).

The amorphous nature of James’s job – extending so far beyond the normalpractices of record labels at the time that a new position had to be created – notonly suggests that his work was truly extemporaneous, but also underlines the risksColumbia was open to taking in their quest to be successful with rock music. Yetthese lengths are not adequately characterized as co-optation per se, which suggestsintentionality, manipulation and, above all, an ability to forecast that such strate-gies would prevail. On the contrary, James’s experience is evidence that such pre-dictions were impossible, because he was making it up as he went along. That said,he has noted that in his role in artist development, he was given ‘freedom, notlicense’ – a turn of phrase that suggests that the liberties he took also made com-pany executives uneasy (James, interview with the author, 2009). The space withinwhich James could do as he pleased had to be located, pioneered, and constantlydefended.

Because the work of freaks was performative and communicative, it was alsopromotional – following Cronin (2004), I intend this to mean that freaks also hadto do the work of explaining their use value to record company executives, musi-cians, journalists, radio stations, and the like. One instance where this took placewas in the use of the term ‘company freak’ itself. Though some I spoke withdescribed it as a joke, or a title others used about them but they never used them-selves, others took pride in it. ‘It meant we had the power. It differentiated us fromthe suits’, noted Yaryan. ‘The 1970s was the high water mark of the undergroundpress and underground FM radio stations operated mostly by hippies and it waspresumed they would listen to us. We felt superior’ (Yaryan, interview with theauthor, 2010). Notoriety could thus be a kind of capital, exercised not only todistinguish one within the label’s corporate culture but also gain authoritywithin it.

Perhaps no company freak understood this balance as well as Danny Fields.Fields is far and away the most frequently recognized figure to have held one ofthese jobs – and, as such, is its consummate storyteller, frequently identified ashaving coined the term ‘company freak’ himself. A graduate of University ofPennsylvania who also attended Harvard Law School, Fields was hired by thepublicity department for Elektra Records in the late 1960s after stints workingfor several music-oriented magazines. At the time, Elektra was an establishedfolk label venturing into acquiring more rock artists; Fields has become infamousfor signing the MC5 and The Stooges in 1968. ‘Mind you, I was a press agent; I hadtaken on the liberty of signing bands’ he explained. ‘A lot of people at Elektradespised me because I was changing their company. I was seen as the inventor ofthis kind of juvenile delinquency’ (Fields, interview with the author, 2008).

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Though calling himself a ‘kept hippie’ suggests exploitation, Fields also exer-cised power that made him a valuable asset to the label. Writing of his position,Fields noted that:

The titans supply his salary and expenses, but his heart is with the musicians, which

makes schizophrenia a very possible occupational hazard . . . their artists are on the

other side of the generation gap, and the company freak is someone who is supposed

to prove the liaison factor between the company and its artists, and also between the

company and alternate media. No hip FM DJ, for example, will have anything to do

with the promotion sharpies in shiny suits . . .And yet a record company has to reach

these cats because they have a lot of influence on the kids who buy records. (Fields,

1970: 153–4)

Keenly aware of his own influence within Elektra as well as its key externalconstituencies, Fields also enjoyed – even toyed with – company resources. ‘I hadexpense accounts – I would take 12, 15 people out for dinner. The publicity budgetswere seemingly infinite’, he has noted. ‘They would fly me to Denmark for a week-end to see some group I never heard of again. The publicity departments were justso full of giving, like buying favors, which I didn’t object to at all’ (Fields, interviewwith the author, 2008). While many might interpret the above as the ultimateexample of ‘selling out,’ another way to think about it is that Fields was simplytaking advantage of the huge amounts of revenue rock was making, playing therecord label’s game and even beating them at it.

Ochs expressed another aspect of this when he noted that, in conversations withmusic journalists, he regularly promoted acts on other labels alongside his ownartists. ‘There was a camaraderie among us music junkies’, he explained. ‘It wasn’tlike we were company loyalists; we were good music loyalists’ (Ochs, interview withthe author, 2009). For Ochs, working for the record label was an instance of ‘goodfortune’ that allowed him the chance to work with artists he loved while gettingpaid to do so, but it in no way made him a lapdog for the company that paid hiswage. Given that he had almost no supervision (a common theme among thefreaks), Ochs recounted how his interactions with music journalists sometimesdirectly abused company resources:

Writers like Lester Bangs or Ben Edmunds would come in and we’d play. Columbia

released so much stuff that I couldn’t even keep up with it – I had stacks of singles that

I hadn’t gotten to . . .And so we used to play jukebox jury. I played the first three

seconds of a song and we’d try to guess if it was a hit or not, and if it was a miss as

most of them were, we’d just throw them out the window. (Ochs, interview with the

author, 2009)

Fouratt also found ways to use company resources to his own ends. An actor,gay rights activist, and member of the New York chapter of the White PantherParty, Fouratt was a ‘cultural radical’ who conceived of his job as ‘working on the




inside as a cultural revolutionary’ (Fouratt, interview with the author, 2011). Thiscultural revolution could take many different forms. For instance, Fouratt told thefollowing story about how he helped to change company policies regarding officedecor:

I had an office on Sixth Avenue between 52nd and53rd, which was a big deal. And you

could not put anything on the walls, and they had a dress code. And I came in dressed

in my hippie gear as I would dress anyplace else, and I’d stop by security and they’d

have to call upstairs. And at night they would take down everything I had put on the

walls, my posters and everything. [Eventually] I went to Clive and said – you know,

I was young and arrogant and all of that – and I said, ‘if you want me to work here,

you have to let me have my office the way I want to have it.’ And the next day,

everything was still up on the walls. And then everyone else was allowed to come in

and dress however they wanted to dress and put whatever they wanted on the walls. It

was a very big victory within the building. (Fouratt, interview with the author, 2011)

Fouratt’s support of countercultural interests also extended beyond the offices ofColumbia. ‘One of the primary cultural goals we had was to make sure that theunderground newspapers that had started up survived’, he noted. When his urgingconvinced Columbia to place ads in the papers, ‘Elektra and Warner Brothers andall the others did it . . . it was how the Underground Press Syndicate survived in1968’ (Fouratt, interview with the author, 2011). Thus, even at moments in which itmight seem like the counterculture and corporate interests were at odds, they wereinterconnected in some very important ways, and embodied in people like Fouratt.‘As radical politically as I was, I had this other side of me that was very involved inthe music culture’, he explained. Though eventually his desire to do more overtlypolitical work won out, especially during his early days at the label, ‘I thought Iwas putting out a political message or a cultural message’ (Fouratt, interview withthe author, 2011).

Though they articulate a certain amount of conflict, the experiences of companyfreaks also highlight the productive nature of these tensions. Given the ability tohelp musicians, build a relationship with some of the industry’s most powerfulfigures, and push the spread of rock music, company freaks were intimatelyinvolved in widening the cultural shifts that were necessarily, intimately tied tothe commercial culture in which rock would continue to flourish. But they werealso involved in changing the companies where they worked – changes that neededto happen if rock was to work as a commercial product. Company freaks were as aresult situated actors who participated in bolstering the terrain in which rock andthe counterculture could better coexist.

Conclusion

With the exception of Fields, who went on to become a prominent music execu-tive, most of the subjects interviewed for this article left the music industry by the

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mid-1970s, for a variety of personal and professional reasons. For that reason,I will refrain from speculating too much on what happened to positions likethese within the music industry after that period; suffice to say, I have comeacross nothing to suggest that the term continued to be used, nor reason to believethat it would have had purchase if it had been. In one sense, company freaks weretruly a freak – anomalies of record companies in transition who have been, at best,footnotes in the historical record.

But on many other levels, company freaks were strong predictors of recordlabels’ future. Artist development, an area James pioneered, has grown to be akey aspect of how a label relates to a musician. The music industry of today is farfrom the culturally conservative place that it was prior to the mid-1960s. And theidea that a music label, or any cultural industry, would hire young personnel for thepurpose of tapping into youth culture is perhaps critiqued by some, but far lessnoteworthy than it might have been during the period under research – and, inmany respects, it is simply good practice. Company freaks, if not catalysts of theseshifts, at the very least deserve to be an aspect of their interpretation. That com-pany freaks have been thought about so little, then, is indicative of how difficult itis to move beyond caricatures of the economics of culture during the 1960s.

Insights into historical cultural intermediation therefore can be useful not justin giving more complete pictures of how cultural industries broached new culturalarenas. They can also showcase how cultural intermediation was and continues tobe a critical component of what it is we mean when we say culture has beencommodified. In the case of rock music, becoming commercial was not as simpleas omniscient appropriators descending upon rock’s cultural centers, but was amessier process that involved many kinds of people with a diverse range ofexperiences and motivations. Company freaks illustrate the way that ‘marketingexperts are subject to their own cultural, philosophical concerns’ while ‘counter-culturals are inclined to shape their own distinct economic conventions’ (Binkley,2003: 246) – and moreover, that ‘marketing experts’ and ‘counterculturals’ can beone in the same. Additionally, as Thornton usefully reminds us, ‘[c]ontrary to theideologies of both the underground and many subcultural studies, culture indus-tries do not just co-opt and incorporate; they generate ideas and incite culture’(1996: 157) in part by helping that culture to become a viable business. Thetremendous role of the rock music industry in amplifying the power of rockdid not come without unintended consequences, but it also produced rewards,both obvious and unlikely.

In the end, company freaks were many things: rebels defying corporate stand-ards; everyday workers seeking opportunity in their early careers; predecessors tothe corporate renegades of our own time; music lovers who sympathized andidentified with countercultural ideas; and rejecters of the strictures of conventionalbusiness, including always kowtowing to the demands of profit. To engage fullywith the notion of company freak revises widely held ideas about the ramificationsof capitalism during the 1960s, providing instructive, if not necessarily tidy, insightsinto what it meant – and continues to mean – to labor in the culture industries.




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Devon Powers is Assistant Professor of Communication, Department of Cultureand Communication, Drexel University. Her research focuses on the intermedia-tion and circulation of popular music, from the mid-20th century to the present.With Melissa Aronczyk, she co-edited the book Blowing Up the Brand: CriticalPerspectives on Promotional Culture (Peter Lang, 2010), which explores the expan-sion of promotion and branding beyond the realm of business and marketing andinto myriad aspects of everyday life. She is completing a monograph about thehistory of rock music criticism, under contract with University of MassachusettsPress.




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