Word: stigwood
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Nothing here to raise the hackles of even the most paranoid Ahmet Ertegun or Robert Stigwood, except for one curious feature of this "new wave" of bands--there are hundreds of them. People have realized you don't need a 64-track mixing machine and multiple synthesizers to create a listenable song. There have always been garage bands, and 90 per cent of them never made it to the driveway, but today the garages are sending skilled graduates into cities all the way from New York and Boston on down to Akron...
...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...
...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...
These are very lucky men, for Evita's London success far outstrips the show's merits. Though extravagantly staged by American Director Harold Prince, whom Stigwood imported for the occasion, Evita is a cold and uninvolving show that does little to expand the traditional musical comedy format or our understanding of a bizarre historical figure. Evita is often spectacular in its pretensions, but it is not even the best musical to touch on the subject of political repression. That honor belongs to two of Prince's Broadway productions-Fiddler on the Roof and Cabaret...
...Stigwood plans to bring Evita to Broadway next year, where its London reception is not likely to be repeated. New Yorkers, who only this season have seen Prince's On the Twentieth Century, may not go quite so gaga over the lavish stagecraft of Evita. The Webber-Rice score, an immediate hit in England when released as a double album in 1976, has failed to catch on in the States. Still, all is not necessarily lost. If Stigwood can only find a way to package the show that is playing outside the Prince Edward Theater instead...