Manager to Hollywood’s A-List (Shep Gordon) on Why You Must Be Willing to Work for Free to Create Opportunities

Audio Transcription

Clay Clark:
Thrive Nation. On today’s show, we are interviewing Shep Gordon while he is on a golf course in beautiful Hawaii.

Shep Gordon:
It’s in the hole.

Clay Clark:
Occasionally during today’s show, to provide clarity as to what he’s saying, if the audio signal cuts out intermittently, I will be inserting some audio narration from myself, so you can better understand what Shep just said. Shep Gordon, welcome onto the Thrive Time Show. How are you sir?

Shep Gordon:
Aloha from Valley, a beautiful day here and very excited to be on your show.

Clay Clark:
Shep, you now live in Hawaii. You now can count former clients as Raquel Welch and Kenny Loggins and Blondie and Rick James and Alice Cooper, but I’d love to start off at the very, very bottom. At the very beginning, what prompted you to move from New York to L.A.?

Shep Gordon:
I moved out for a job in Los Angeles, and it was in the late ’60s, when every hippie, and I was a hippie, in America wanted to be in California. There was that very famous song, wear a flower in your hair. Come to San Francisco and wear a flower in your hair. I had the flower, and I ended up in L.A.

Clay Clark:
Okay, so you caught the fever. You had this vision to move out to L.A. You followed the job out there. How did you go from your first job to landing your first client?

Shep Gordon:
Well, my first job lasted a day. It was at the Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall.

Clay Clark:
That’s the Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall. Back to the interview.

Shep Gordon:
I had very long hair, and in those days they didn’t really like that in California. They probably would’ve liked it more if they knew that I was a pharmaceutical dealer working in their jail.

Clay Clark:
Shep Gordon was a pharmaceutical dealer, aka, a drug dealer, working in a juvenile hall. Back to the interview.

Shep Gordon:
But so they sort of gave me a heavy hint to resign the first day, which I did. And I drove into Los Angeles proper and checked into a motel, and to a bizarre, lucky break, ran into Janis Joplin and she introduced me to Jimmy Hendrix. He said, “What do you do for a living?” I said, “Well, I sort of sell pharmaceuticals illegally.” He said, “Are you Jewish?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “You should be a manager, too.”

Clay Clark:
So Shep Gordon goes into a hotel. He meets Janice Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. He explains to them that he is a drug dealer, and Jimi Hendrix asks him if he’s Jewish. He says, “Yes.” Jimi says, “You should be a manager.” And that is how it happened.

Shep Gordon:
And he introduced me to Alice.

Clay Clark:
And that Alice would be Alice Cooper. Back to the interview. So you were, at this point, selling drugs illegally. You’re at a hotel and in just a random circumstance, you met these people. You meet Janice Joplin, you meet Jimi Hendrix. If I’m getting this right, Jimi Hendrix says you should become a manager and you say, okay. Am I getting something wrong here?

Shep Gordon:
Well, he was also my best customer in the pharmaceutical business, so I wasn’t going to argue with him.

Clay Clark:
Okay. Okay. Did you know what a manager was? Did you know what that involved?

Shep Gordon:
No idea. No idea. I’m still not quite sure.

Clay Clark:
What was your marketing strategy, when working with Alice Cooper? I mean, my understanding is you guys still have a handshake deal today. You don’t have a contract? I mean, how did that relationship start, and how … what was your marketing strategy?

Shep Gordon:
I don’t think any of us really thought about it in terms of marketing strategy. It was how to try and get enough money to buy lunch. And we realized pretty early on that his music was, at least at that point, very obscure and not really something that radio was going to play, so that wasn’t a path for us. What we saw was that people really started to hate him. Older people would leave the buildings. People would throw stuff at him. And that’s an emotion, that’s a reaction. And every kid goes through a period of rebellion. So we said, Let’s hook onto that. We know how to make parents angry. Let’s see if that gets kids happy. And that’s what happened, we got lucky.

Clay Clark:
Did you have the game plan to get banned from Europe? Did you want to get Alice Cooper banned in Europe? Was that part of the game plan?

Shep Gordon:
Yeah, I mean, by the time we got to Europe, after a couple of years, maybe a year, two years of doing what we do, and we started to realize that that really was our power. That our power was getting word out to the parents around the world, that this monster existed that their kids might possibly go see, who stood for everything they hated. That was our draw. If you tell the kid you can’t do something, that’s the one thing they want to do.

Clay Clark:
Right.

Shep Gordon:
By then, we realized … And the best thing you could possibly do is get banned because getting banned gets you to the front page of the paper. [inaudible 00:05:31], and it gets it all in the right way, so we became pretty good at getting banned.

Clay Clark:
I’ve heard you say that safe marketing doesn’t work, safe doesn’t work in marketing, but you can’t sell something that doesn’t work. If Alice didn’t have the talent, we would have gone up and we would have come down.

Shep Gordon:
Yeah, absolutely.

Clay Clark:
Can you talk to me about why safe marketing doesn’t work?

Shep Gordon:
I mean, maybe it works for some people. I’d say it never worked for me. For what my job was. Maybe if you’re selling underwear and you just need the best. I was selling personalities, and something really abstract that there’s no … you can’t really quantify. It’s not like a paper towel. You can say this paper towel holds more water than the next. When you’re selling art, whether it’s a movie or an artist or music or … you can’t really quantify it, so it’s very abstract. In those kinds of circumstances, safe doesn’t work, because it doesn’t get you above the noise … and it doesn’t really define anything different than what everyone sees.

Clay Clark:
I [crosstalk 00:06:50]

Shep Gordon:
So for me, yes, that was … Part of that is working with artists that allow you to make mistakes. Because if you’re not being safe, you’re definitely going to make mistakes.

Clay Clark:
I think there’s somebody out there, I know that I am, infinitely curious about the day-to-day operations of a manager, when you’re working with huge personalities. Are you the one then booking the travel arrangements and booking the arenas for Alice Cooper? Are you the one booking the interviews? Are you the one ordering all the food, thinking about all the logistics of all the equipment? How far does your relationship go? What do you do? What do you not do? I know you’re willing to do anything, but what do you do with a typical client?

Shep Gordon:
I think every relationship is different, because there’s different needs. Again, manager, there’s no handbook. Basically what you do to be as a manager is it’s your responsibility to make sure everything works. You try and get a travel agent for travel. You try and get a booking agent for employment. You try and get a record company to put out records. You get a business manager to protect the money. You get a press agent to get more word out about you. [inaudible 00:08:13]. You get a lighting designer to do the show. In each particular relationship between an artist and a manager, some of those things are important and some aren’t. With Alice, I help him write the shows. With Luther, he wouldn’t let me see the show until it was broken in for a couple of weeks. That’s about as far a swing as you can possibly get.

Clay Clark:
Yeah.

Shep Gordon:
And I manage both of them.

Clay Clark:
When you say Luther, you mean Luther Vandross?

Shep Gordon:
Vandross, Luther Vandross.

Clay Clark:
Yeah. Yeah. I just want to make sure the listeners know. One thing that it’s … Your career is it spans so much time and space and everybody respects you. If I can, I just want to go through a name-dropping buffet, and I’d like for you to think of the person and share with me maybe a highlight of working with them, or maybe a something that people wouldn’t know because you have so many stories. I mean, your interviews are so good. Rick James, what was it like working with Rick James?

Shep Gordon:
I love Rick. Rick came breaking into my office. I had an office on Melrose Avenue. When it became [inaudible 00:09:21], he literally broke into my office, bypassed the receptionist, so identified tests and said, yo, mother … I don’t know if I can talk like that. I’m just paraphrasing him. I know that I’m from Buffalo, I know everything about you and you’re going to Maddick me. And then he went through it. He talked about where I lived in Buffalo, the kind of car I had. He knew everything about me and, yeah, it was great. So I loved that he was very, very talented. [crosstalk 00:09:57] Mary Jane Girls were one of his inventions.

Clay Clark:
Mary Jane girls.

Shep Gordon:
Yeah.

Clay Clark:
Can you explain what the Mary Jane Girl were for the listeners out there who are not familiar?

Shep Gordon:
Well, the Mary Jane Girls were on Motown Records and had a couple of number one records, but it was something that he sort of created. So he wasn’t just the master of his own career, he produced other people’s music and came up with ideas for groups and found talent. He was a pretty multidimensional guy. Very smart.

Clay Clark:
I love Luther’s music. I think Luther Vandross just unbelievable, super talent, appeared to be a really nice guy. You know, I never met the guy, but I’ve seen interviews with him with Oprah, I’ve seen him over the years. His Live from Radio City Music Hall album was just awesome. And a random circumstance, I was in Tulsa, Oklahoma at one point, downtown Tulsa, and a guy was looking for a ride. I picked the guy up and I found it. He was a background singer for Luther Vandross at the time. So I kind of got a chance to hear a little bit of some Luther stories from the background singer who was trying to catch a ride there. Talk to me about Luther. What was his personality like? What was he like?

Shep Gordon:
He was a pure artist. Everything for him was his art, was his music, his performances on stage. He really directed his shows, he wrote the shows. He was the consummate artists. He led a fairly solitary life, didn’t have a lot of friends, always was challenged by his weight. That was a common thread of his life. So I would put him more in the, not tortured artists, but not ecstatic artists. He was always worried about something, but not psychotic, not erotic. None of those things. He wasn’t the kind of guy who went out on a Friday night partying.

Clay Clark:
The documentary made about you is a fascinating film. Did Mike Myers reach out to you to make the film Superman shorted you?

Shep Gordon:
He did, yeah. He was on me for years.

Clay Clark:
What did it feel like to know? Cause you’re a guy who … I think you’re a very self aware person. I think you’re so self-deprecating and so approachable. I think all your clients have nothing but great things to say about you. What did it feel like when you realized, Uh-oh, I’m old enough they want to make a documentary about me, but I’m still alive. I mean, what was going through your mind at that point?

Shep Gordon:
Well, it was an interesting process cause I said no to him for four or five years and with the thought of really being in my brain, I really feel that there’s no real upside to fame. It’s like a dangerous thing that if you can avoid, avoid it unless you need it to make a living. So I never really wanted to flirt with it. I was in the hospital with an emergency surgery and I had very slight cancer survival and Mike called me up from the hospital. He was my first call and he said, and it was like, okay, you’re ready to do this if you get through this? Because now I have a great story to tell. I almost got an ending and I was so morphinded out that I said yes, my ego took over. And then a couple of weeks later, I called him up and I said, “Did I said yes.” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Can I take that back?” He’d already started the project. So in retrospect, I’m very happy I said yes.

Clay Clark:
The movie is very well done. The movie’s called Supermensch. I’m going to put a link to it on the show notes. The legend of Shep Gordon, Supermensch. It’s a very well done film. And I think in parts it was uncomfortable for me. Now, I was raised, and I am a Judeo Christian, and I’m a big fan of your work. so You lived pretty hard there for a while. Now you seem to be kind of in a meta kind of a time of life out there in Hawaii. And if you don’t want to talk about it, it’s okay. But can you talk about just the lowest, most intense partying of lifestyle part of your career and then contrast that to how you live now?

Shep Gordon:
I never was at least not on self reflection and it’s really hard to look at yourself and come up with judgments. But I never really was a self-destructive partier.

Clay Clark:
Okay.

Shep Gordon:
I never tried that. I never got to the point of trying to hurt myself ever. At least I never felt that way. My lifestyle was completely the opposite. I had a nightclub in LA, it was open ’til two in the morning. Most days I would see the sun come up, get four or five hours sleep, and get to the office about 11. Always sort of a workaholic.

Clay Clark:
Yeah.

Shep Gordon:
And as life started to move on, I started to find some passions. Cooking was a passion, so I started to find some things that filled up my time that were more rewarding to me. And then when I got to Hawaii, I started to live with the sun, go to sleep early, wake up early, and I just feel better. There was no real low point in the partying for me. It was just sort of a natural evolution, and I realized that if I stayed in the groove I was in, I was headed for trouble. That you can’t stay up all night and you can’t do the drugs I was doing, you can’t drink as much. You can’t. All those things, you just … All you have to do is look around you and you see you can’t do it forever unless you want to.

Clay Clark:
This is something that I think a lot of listeners want to know. I know I do. I didn’t expect you, Shep, to do a lot of research on me, but previous to doing this podcast. I’m a father of five and my wife and I, we started our first business together called DJConnection.com and before I sold it, it was America’s largest wedding entertainment company. So we did 4,000 weddings a year. I’d play Rick James, I’d play Blondie, I would play Luther Vandross, So it all kind of led back to it. You know what I mean? So it’s like I always kind of knew of you, but didn’t know who you were. So this is a real, I mean, pinch myself moment here. A lot of the great artists die young. Why? What is the deal? What is going on?

Shep Gordon:
Fame is tough. Fame is tough. I mean, I think it’s tough in that the ones who are driven towards it usually have … are looking for some type of outside source to tell them they’re great. There’s some hole inside them that drives them to take the kind of abuse you have to take to get famous because there’s no such thing as overnight success. It’s everybody’s been beat up for years. And then I think once you get there, it doesn’t fill up that hole. You can have a 100,000 people applauding. If you look in the mirror and think you’re a rotten, miserable person, does it make it all [inaudible 00:17:43] You’re still a rotten, miserable person to you. And that’s when the drugs and stuff start to come in, not to get happy, but to fill up the hole. And a lot of people overdo it or just don’t have a desire to go on anymore. So it’s not uncommon in the world of fame. Whether it’s stockbrokers, musicians, film stars, athletes, you see these people really hurting themselves that want to get really famous.

Clay Clark:
Michael Douglas and Sylvester Stallone have really, really good things to say about you. And I am excessive compulsive, I have a problem. I love Sylvester Stallone, love his movies. I’ve seen Rocky for so many times that no matter how many times I bought the VHS or the DVD, I still owe him more money. I mean, that guy … I just, I love Sylvester Stallone.

Speaker 3:
Oh, here we go. Ain’t so bad, ain’t so bad. Ain’t so bad.

Clay Clark:
What is your relationship with Sylvester Stallone?

Shep Gordon:
I don’t see him much anymore. When I was living in LA and we were both bachelors, we spent a lot of time together. Our relationship started when I got a phone call in my office and the girl said, Sylvester Stallone on the phone, and this was right at the height of Rocky and everything. I said, come on, you’re kidding. She said, no, no, it’s Sylvester Stallone, so I pick up the phone, It was Sylvester Stallone. And he had bought the rights to my life story and he was planning to make a movie playing me.

Clay Clark:
Really?

Shep Gordon:
Yeah. So [crosstalk 00:19:32] so he could study me. It was a book called Billion Dollar Babies by Bob Green, and he’d bought the rights to it. He never made the movie, but that was how we met and we found that we have a lot of stuff in common. I was a cook, he loves food. We both had an attraction to beautiful women … and it all worked. So we spent a lot of time together and we were both in the film world, so we’d go to Con together. So [crosstalk 00:20:07] we had a great relationship.

Clay Clark:
I can’t ask you on a podcast where half a million people are listening to name your favorite artists you worked with. But could you maybe think back on some of the artists or talent you worked where you got that was a special relationship that you guys had or you have? Can you reflect back on that and say, here’s a couple of people that I really [crosstalk 00:20:32]

Shep Gordon:
Yeah, Alice. I would say Alice and Teddy.

Clay Clark:
Okay.

Shep Gordon:
Those are the two that I would say.

Clay Clark:
What makes that relationship with Alice so special?

Shep Gordon:
I mean, we were the first and we just, we’ve been together 50 years now and it’s sort of like we’re a would-be odd family. We’ve never had a fight. We’ve never raise our voices at each other. It’s just been a beautiful relationship and it’s sort of worked. I’m sure working helps the relationship.

Clay Clark:
Now, Teddy, Teddy Pendergrass is a legendary R&B vocalist. Why did you hit it off so well with him?

Shep Gordon:
I always loved his music, loved ,what he did and we just hit it off. We had again the same kind of thing. We had a love for life, we both were partiers. We both had plenty of women in the world. Great.

Clay Clark:
Yes there are.

Shep Gordon:
That’s very funny. That’s Wayne Gretzky walking by, hearing me talking about women.

Clay Clark:
Is Wayne your neighbor?

Shep Gordon:
Yeah, he just walked by and started laughing when he heard that part.

Clay Clark:
Is Wayne your next door neighbor? Is that how you [crosstalk 00:21:51]

Shep Gordon:
No, no, it was at the golf course.

Clay Clark:
Oh, the golf course. Okay, awesome. Okay.

Shep Gordon:
Wait, hold on one second. I’m on a podcast.

Clay Clark:
Shep Gordon is currently talking to Wayne Gretzky, the best hockey player in the history of professional hockey while on a golf course on the beautiful Island of Hawaii, while also participating with us on the Thrive Time Show podcast.

Shep Gordon:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, no, I just took it.

Clay Clark:
Okay. At some point in your career, you shifted into the phase where you decided to focus on culinary people. You like food, you mentioned, and you started working with Emeril Lagasse and Wolfgang Puck and you’ve sort of … I guess not sort of. You definitely are known as the guy who created the celebrity chef genre. How did that happen? Walk us through that.

Shep Gordon:
I had a mentor named Roger Verge, who was a French chef, very famous [inaudible 00:22:50] cuisine, and I’m traveling with him. I got to meet most of the great chefs in the world and realized that they weren’t really getting paid. That they weren’t getting really a lot of respect. They weren’t getting paid, they didn’t have … none of them could afford to send their kids to a private school. And I sort of felt like I had the skill set to help them, and they trusted me and off we went and we got lucky. We got the Food Network on the air, which really is what launched it all. [crosstalk 00:23:31]

Clay Clark:
How did you get the Food Network going? What was your role? What was your role in launching the Food Network?

Shep Gordon:
I had an acquaintance named Reshad Feild who had started CNN and he was looking to start a cable channel. He was thinking about food and I represented most of the celebrity chefs, so I told him that I could get him free, a pretty talent for a couple of years if he did the cooking channel and gave my guys jobs. And we traded one commercial rather than … In lieu of payment, we got one commercial each show, and that ended … that launched Emeril Spices. That was what we invented, Emerald Spices, to put in that commercial. So it worked out well.

Clay Clark:
Wolfgang Puck, Emeril Lagasse. Talk to me about Wolfgang puck. What’s your relationship like with Wolfgang?

Shep Gordon:
Very good. He has a restaurant here in Maui down the street from me he comes to once a year. And I actually, a couple of years ago, made him Thanksgiving dinner, which I was very proud of.

Clay Clark:
Wow.

Shep Gordon:
Yeah.

Clay Clark:
So you can cook food, too?

Shep Gordon:
Yep. Oh yeah. I’m pretty good.

Clay Clark:
Now, Sylvester Stallone has described you as saying that you’re a protector, you keep the wolf from the door. What do you do for your clients that would make Sylvester Stallone say such high praise about you?

Shep Gordon:
Well, I just think … I have a good stomach for trouble and I keep [inaudible 00:25:08] from it.

Clay Clark:
What kind of trouble did they run into that you keep them away from?

Shep Gordon:
It’s always different stuff. You’re at a restaurant, you see trouble a mile away, the Paparazzi around the corner, or someone tried to do the deal with them. That’s kind of heated pass or you never know what it is. But you know, I tend to err on the side of protecting them rather than self-interest. It’s really tough when you’re inside the bubble, if someone like a Stallone, everybody is trying to get at him and [inaudible 00:25:48] .

Clay Clark:
Right, right. I have three final questions for you. We have about a half million folks who listen to it. Many of them are entrepreneurs, so I’d like to ask you this. How do you get paid? I’m not asking for the specific details of the specific artists, but how do you get paid when you help a guy like Stallone or you help a guy like Wolf?

Shep Gordon:
I mean, I know with all the shots I did it pro bono because they weren’t making any money.

Clay Clark:
Got it.

Shep Gordon:
But with a normal client, I’d take a percentage of their revenues.

Clay Clark:
Okay. Like a gross.

Shep Gordon:
What they generate, so it’s anywhere from 10 to 20% of the revenues.

Clay Clark:
Okay. And that’s how you do it. It’s just pretty much matter of fact. You’re going to go in there, you’re going to make it happen, you’re going to generate revenue, and it’s a percentage of the gross.

Shep Gordon:
Yeah, pretty simple.

Clay Clark:
You come across as a very thoughtful person, one of the most self-deprecating, wisest people that I’ve interviewed. Are there certain books that you’ve read that have brought you to the knowledge that you’re at now or the wisdom? Do you have a certain book or two you’d recommend for our listeners?

Shep Gordon:
Yeah, I would say it’s, for me, the most … maybe one of the most significant was a Bill Moyer series with Joseph Campbell, the Power of the Myths, M-Y-T-H. It’s available, I know, on Amazon because I just bought it from someone. I think it’s a five hour series.

Clay Clark:
My final question for you is you are a resilient guy, you’ve been through a lot of adversity. What was the biggest adversity that you have been through with your career and how did you get through it?

Shep Gordon:
I don’t know if I ever had a huge adversity with my career, I mean, in my life, I’m a cancer survivor. I’ve had a couple of bad medical things, but in my career I never really looked at it like that and I never really looked at it as a career. I wake up in the morning, I did what I did. I’ve had artists that I’ve managed that I couldn’t really help, and that was disappointing for me. Someone like a King Sunny Ade, who was a great Nigerian artists, and that always made me feel bad because they only have one life. I can move from one to the other. So if you’re not successful with someone, you’re really hurting their life. But on an overall basis, not really. Splitting up with my partner was hard, that was back in the 70s. [inaudible 00:28:20] We had gotten to the point where we just felt like we couldn’t do it together. so that was it. That was difficult for me because then I was on my own [crosstalk 00:28:31] rather than having a partner.

Clay Clark:
Shep, our listeners are very action oriented. Is there a certain action step you’d like our listeners to do or you’d advise. You’re sitting down with everybody, you got a half million people sitting in front of you in some kind of stadium or arena. What’s the advice you’d give all of our listeners?

Shep Gordon:
I would say be compassionate, try and help out your neighbors. I think particularly we’re living in a world where there’s so much hunger, which doesn’t need to be. so in a community, it’s compassionate and it’ll provide safety. No one can break into your house if they’re not hungry. That’s sort of my mission in the last few years is trying to feed people.

Clay Clark:
Do you have a specific website or a specific movement or cause or a specific group that you’d like to direct our listeners to, to help join with you?

Shep Gordon:
Yeah, I support the food banks around the country, the local food banks who feed your locals, your neighbors. I think we’re living in a day and age now where probably more than half of the people who get screwed from the food banks have jobs, raising children, so wherever we can help there.

Clay Clark:
Shep, I thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule, for being on the show. And I just want to say on behalf of all of our listeners, thank you so much for the work you’ve done and for investing your time on today’s show.

Shep Gordon:
Thank you so much. Aloha.