The Man Who Sells the Sizzle

There are only a few clues at the house in the valley.

The furniture, marginally stylish when new, shows the wear of a decade and the impact of two lively kids. A Kiss album has been left abandoned on a sofa that Elton John wouldn't allow in the servants' quarters. A silver-blue Mercedes-Benz is parked in the concrete driveway, but automotive ostentation is endemic to Los Angeles, even to such a comparatively modest suburb as Woodland Hills.

The license plate gives a little away: NUM 1. This is not wish fulfillment on a rear bumper, though. The owner of this Mercedes rates. In a time of phenomenal success for the record business (698.2 million albums, singles and tapes were sold for $3.5 billion in 1977), Al Coury, president, head honcho and chief dervish of Robert Stigwood's RSO Records, has taken a penthouse on top of the sales curve, even as his family stays snug in their San Fernando Valley tract house. "Yeah, I live in the same house I did when I was making $18,000 a year for Capitol," Coury says. "Who needs Bel Air? My kids go to good schools, my wife's involved with the women's league at church. It's just my lawyers. They think I'm crazy."

They are the only ones. This year, RSO will sell more than $300 million worth of records. Al Coury spearheaded the runaway success of the Grease and Saturday Night Fever sound tracks, making them two of the alltime Top Ten albums. He insists that the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band sound track package will sell 4.6 million units. For 42 weeks of 1978, RSO albums occupied the top slot on the charts. During one of those weeks, the RSO logo--a benign, bright red castrated bull--graced the labels on three of the top five albums. During two of those weeks, across the way on the singles charts, RSO claimed four of the top five. Music biz stats like this burn the giant tails of such outfits as Columbia and Warner Bros.-Elektra/Asylum-Atlantic. Such a fact was not lost on anyone in the record business, least of all Robert Stigwood. "I knew Al was dedicated to music," Stigwood said. "I just didn't know he was that dedicated." The grateful board chairman cut Coury in for some additional pieces of the corporate pie, a consideration valued at well over $5 million. Said Stigwood: "Al's worth a lot to me."

He not only still lives plain, but Al Coury. 43, talks as tough ("Don't call me back. Just do it") and speaks as straight ("If someone brought me Kiss today on a silver platter, I still wouldn't sign them") as he did 21 years ago, when he started hustling records around New England for Capitol. At RSO, Coury is given his head ("Robert's always on a boat somewhere. He says the L.A. smog affects his breathing"). Coury plunges into all areas of the biz. He engineers marketing strategy, designs ad campaigns, even pitches in on planning those mammoth Sunset Strip billboards, which are for the music indus try what heraldry was to Camelot. He also brainstorms with the talent, helping art ists choose material. Singer Yvonne Elliman calls him "the man with the golden ears -the best in the business at picking singles." Coury says, "I don't tell big artists like the Bee Gees or Eric Clapton what has to go on their albums, but they ask me and I give them my opinion."

This communal commercial approach yields a uniform sound to RSO's product: smooth, sweet and very airy, like a sauna filled with Cool Whip. Coury boasts that he has sold Eric Clapton better than anyone, but Clapton's RSO albums (like the recent Backless) are bleached-out blues for easy listening. Coury's golden ears have helped create a theme song from the new RSO movie Moment by Moment that seems just right for slow dancing in elevators. Consequently, Coury is often on the aesthetic defensive, making heated claims for such slick popsicles as the Bee Gees by stating, "They're having a greater impact on music today than ten Bruce Springsteens! Rita Coolidge sings their songs and so does Frank Sinatra!"

Coury's major gifts, as he would be the first to concede, are in sales. "Sales like ours don't just happen," he snaps. "We make them happen! And I sell the sizzle!" How he does this could serve neatly as a crash course in the fine points, and pressure points, of selling records. Two basics from the Coury primer: "Nobody gets rich on singles: singles advertise an album. Most important: get your records on the radio."

To launch a hit, Coury will deploy his force of promo men (who make up almost half of the company's 68 employees) after giving them a Sunday-night pep talk on the phone that one trade-paper publisher compared to "listening to Vince Lombardi." As a breed, record promo men look like blow-dry Willy Lomans. Dressed in satin warmup jackets that hype the latest company acts, they hunker down for long sessions with program directors of radio stations all over the country, pushing the product, offering occasional sweeteners that can range from free T shirts to gram bottles of coke. But, says Radio & Records Editor and Publisher Bob Wilson, "gifts alone can't get a record played more than a couple of times if the public doesn't like what it hears."

Promo men work record stores too, but it is radio that gets their best shot. Meanwhile, back in the three-story Sunset Strip offices of RSO, Coury is on the phone, eagerly reading the new charts --delivered to his office before they go to press--and placing calls to the various trades about the new positions of RSO products. If, as RSO National Sales Manager Mitch Huffman says, "the charts are Coury's bible," then the boss is certainly not averse to applying for a revised standard version. He'll bluster, cajole, even strongarm an editor for a more favorable chart position. Says Wilson: "Coury's the only record company president that makes those calls. And I mean the only one."

Such playground infighting is fueled by the high odds against the success of any new record: as program directors at the stations narrow their play lists and the Top 40 shrinks to the Top 25, companies try to introduce an average of 150 new records every week, of which maybe three will be hits. But the rewards can be as big as the risks. "We've shaken off our dependence on the whims of twelve-year-olds," says Elektra/Asylum Chairman Joe Smith. "No longer is the Establishment above pop music." Adds Coury, "What we've done is put the industry on notice that there are no longer limits to album sales. Now the audience ranges in age from 15 to 50, and we're only seeing the beginning."

Coury, playing guarded, projects RSO business for next year at 75% of 1978, but admits: "That's a lot." The Bee Gees are dishing up a new album in February that Coury predicts will be "a gorilla." There will be new albums from the small roster of 13 RSO acts, and a record package of Evita, a pop-top opera about Eva Peron that is S.R.O. in London. Al Coury has to love it all. "I don't love vacuum cleaners and underwear. But I love music, and I can sell it." And it will be sold. What comes out of the RSO outfit may not seem a whole lot like real rock 'n' roll, but it sure sounds like money.

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