Catch Fred Goodman on Morning Joe
Monday, July 12th 7:45AM Segment
(subject To Change Check Your Local Listings)Acclaimed Music Business Journalist Fred Goodman Returns to Beat with
FORTUNE’S FOOL:
Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Warner Music, and an Industry in Crisis
To be published July 13 by Simon & Schuster
May 17, 2010 – Fred Goodman, author of the acclaimed music business exposé The Mansion on the Hill, returns to the beat with
FORTUNE’S FOOL: Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music, and an Industry in Crisis. Much as Mansion traced the evolution of the rebellious ideals of rock music into the commercial music business of the mid-1990s through the careers of Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and Bob Dylan, Goodman explores the seismic changes that have rocked the record industry in the last 20 years — from the ascendancy of the CD to the catastrophic decline triggered by Napster—by examining how controversial Seagram heir Edgar Bronfman, Jr., despite losing $3 billion of the family’s money on Vivendi, took a big risk but asked all the right questions about media in the digital age when he set out to recreate Warner Music.
Kirkus Review has praised FORTUNE’S FOOL as a “compellingly told story of the Seagram heir’s music-business adventures at Universal and Warner Music, and what went terribly wrong. . . Goodman tells the story briskly, with total command of both the financial and aesthetic elements of his tale. Especially engrossing is his account of Warner’s catastrophic decline under corporate hatchet men Robert Morgado and Michael Fuchs. The executives who played key roles in the latter-day fortunes of Universal and Warner—canny vet Doug Morris, rap-savvy combatants Jimmy Iovine and Lyor Cohen—are all sharply delineated. Deftly balanced and well-sourced—one of the most solid music-biz bios in recent memory.”
The Mansion on the Hill, which remains one of the most revealing accounts of the music business ever published, won the Ralph Gleason Music Book Award for the best title of 1997. A life-long New Yorker, Goodman also wrote The Secret City: Woodlawn Cemetery and the Buried History of New York. His writing appears in Rolling Stone (where he was an editor), The New York Times, and many national magazines. He began writing about the music industry for trade publications such as Cash Box and Billboard. In 1993 — six years before Napster — Goodman’s cover story in the December issue of Musician Magazine, “Future Shocks: The End of the Music Business As We Know It,” which predicted the rise of downloading and the extraordinary ramifications the development would have for record companies and musician, became a record industry sensation.
Media Inquiries:
Laurie Jakobsen
Jaybird Communications
646-484-6764
laurie@jaybirdcom.com
Read The NY Times Review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/media/04shelf.html?_r=1&hpw
Praise for The Mansion on the Hill:
“A sophisticated moral fable about the collision and fusion of art and commerce… If The Mansion on the Hill has a moralistic outlook, its tone is calm, its portraits scrupulously balanced. And rare for a book of this kind, the musical analysis is as astute as the business reporting.”
– Stephen Holden, New York Times
“This enthralling history of what Goodman, a former editor of Rolling Stone, calls the ‘head-on collision of rock and commerce’ reads like a modern day Faust, underscoring the compromises of a generation that set out to sell its soul for rock and roll and settled for pawning rock and roll’s soul instead.”
– The New Yorker
“The very capacity of the music industry to regenerate itself through myth-making is the subject of Fred Goodman’s invaluable study, The Mansion on the Hill. Goodman, a former Rolling Stone editor who has also written for the Village Voice and Spy, retains a fan’s core passion for the music’s emotional and esthetic power. But unlike most other rock journalists, Goodman is also able to cast a cold, discerning eye on the consolidation of a popular art into an entertainment Leviathan. Goodman’s history discards the conventional arc of rock myth, which typically does little more than trace shaky lines of descent from one idol to another: Elvis begat Dylan, who begat Morrison (Jim or Van, take your pick), who begat Springsteen…Instead, Goodman fastens onto the history of hard-bitten commerce within the rock scene, summoning up some remarkable stories in the process.”
– Chris Lehmann, Newsday
“Informative and infuriating, a story of the wild, the innocent, and the egomaniacal.”
– Washington Post Book World
“This is a book about business, but given its wealth of detail, gossipy revelations and insider insights, it reads more like a contemporary novel about mythic figures in a land the reader may never get to visit… Goodman’s book is in the details, and they are many and marvelous — whether they are of Bob Dylan’s sly conning of Otto Preminger or the hilarious drug-punctuated meetings between the Grateful Dead’ s negotiating team and the desperate businessmen in blue blazers from Warner Bros. Records.”
– Joe Urschel, USA Today
“Much more than just a book about rock music. The Mansion on the Hill is not merely a history of how rock has developed since the ‘60s and how rock musicians moved from holes-in-the-wall to grander lodgings. It is at the same time a chronicle of the cultural changes wrought by rock. Where rock led, society followed… One is only tempted to put the book down when mention of some all-but-forgotten group makes one dust off the vinyl to conjure up that 18-till-I-die feeling. Mansion on the Hill is thoroughly rejuvenating.”
– Gerd Behrens, Time Magazine “Goodman’s entertaining evaluation of how musical dreamers learned to dance with musical schemers is both provocative and persuasive.”
– Ira Robbins, Rolling Stone
“Why was rock-and-roll so important? And what caused its downfall? Although Fred Goodman’s book, The Mansion on the Hill, focuses on just a handful of rock’s
most influential figures, it provides some of the best answers anyone has ever offered for these questions… The Mansion on the Hill provides an excellent chronicle of rock’s sad metamorphosis from a quasi-moral force into an unstoppable money machine.”
– Charles Kaiser, New York Times Sunday Book Review