Earl McGrath, an oversized character, played various roles as a record company director, film executive, screenwriter, and art dealer before his death at the age of 84 in early 2016. After that, the contents of Manhattan’s Midtown apartments were carefully cataloged and evaluated. His art collection, including valuable works from Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly and Ed Moses, was put up for auction at Christie’s. His treatise, including correspondence with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Stephen Spender, was donated to the New York Public Library archives.
However, the box (filled with old recording reels) stored at the top of McGrath’s large walk-in closet was mostly overlooked. When journalist Joe Hagan intervened, they were blindly trying to sell to record wholesalers.
Hagan came across McGrath while studying “Sticky Fingers,” a biography of Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner. “It was little known outside the jet sets of the rare rock’n’rollers, movie stars, social notables, and European notables of the ’70s,” Hagan wrote. “His name was once a secret handshake.”
After passing through the McGrath closet in the spring of 2017, Hagan’s first tape was an unedited master copy of The Rolling Stones’ 1978 album, Some Girls.
“I quickly sweated cold,” Hagan said in a telephone interview. He also found rare unreleased recordings from Hall & Oats, David Johansen of the New York Dolls, Terry Allen, and Jim Carroll Band. “It was like peeking through a keyhole in time. I thought it was a real treasure trove. Wouldn’t it be great if people could hear something like this?”
After buying about 200 tapes from McGrath’s real estate, Hagan spent several years researching and editing the material with co-producer Pat Thomas. this week, “Earl’s Closet: Lost Archive of Earl McGrath, 1970-1980“ It will be released on the attic reissue label Light. The 22 tracks featured materials collected by McGrath during his years as an Atlantic Records executive, and later ran his own imprint, Clean, before running the Rolling Stones label.
Throughout the 1970s, he moved musically and geographically from California’s country rock to New York’s post-punk “Earl’s Closet.” Is a snug and eclectic sampler that places the souls of Delbert & Glen’s Hillbilly alongside the hustle and bustle of Warhol’s “superstar” Ultra Violet surrealist.
“I wanted to capture Earl’s spirit on vinyl,” Hagan said. “He’s really all the muses. He’s like having a party at Earl’s house. I don’t know who he’ll meet.”
To that end, the collection throughline is McGrath’s role as an abundance of social connectors.
“When you sum up Earl’s achievements in terms of record production and art sales, it wasn’t who he was,” Jan Wener said in an interview. “He thrived on friendship. He loved talented people, interesting people — and his range of acquaintances was literally amazing, from Zen Masters to Z Listers.”
The Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger emailed him to remember McGrath as a “joker.” He said, “I knew New York and everyone else and it was a lot of fun to be with.”
McGrath introduced actress Anjelica Huston to her husband’s sculptor Robert Graham, who died in 2008. “He was fun,” Houston said of McGrath. “He was bold. In his own way, Earl, he was the glue that united many people.”
McGrath’s humble child In the Midwest, it was so far away from the A List world that it was as easy to navigate as an adult, but it turned it into a more stately story.
“If you ask Earl,’Where are you from?'” Said artist Ed Ruscha. of course — Wisconsin. And I lived in the ground — Of course — Avenue. That is his way of speaking. “
McGrath’s nimble attitude believed in the troubled family life he had endured as a young man, including physical abuse by his father. “He got drunk and hit him,” said Valerie Grace Ricordi, a friend of his family who is currently the Managing Director of the McGrath Family Foundation. “Earl couldn’t understand what he made a mistake in his father’s eyes.” According to interviews with several McGrath friends and a biography included in Hagan’s Reiner Notes and 2020 photobook essays, he was 14 years old. Occasionally, after his father broke his arm, McGrath left home forever and moved to his local YMCA. As a dishwasher until he can get out of town.
Primarily self-educated, McGrath found the comfort of devouring literature, poetry, and philosophy, and began to consider himself a Proust figure. As a young man, McGrath, who transformed from a dishwasher to aestheticism, revealed the qualities that would carry him throughout his life. It has a sense of disarmament humor and a mysterious ability to make friends with culturally famous and wealthy people.
During his mission as a merchant sailor, McGrath drifted to California and visited Aldous Huxley in Los Angeles and Henry Miller in Big Sur. He also made an unlikely friendship with the English poet WH Auden, who provided an introduction to McGrath when he moved to New York City in the early 1950s. So he is the writer Frank O’Hara and the godfather of pop art, Larry Rivers.
In 1958, 27-year-old McGrath began working as an assistant to composer Gian Carlo Menotti, helping to host the Spoleto Festival in Umbria, Italy. There he struck an unlikely romance with his heirs, Camilla Petch Brandt, the daughter of Marquesa in Florence, and an American financier. The couple married in 1963 against the wishes of their families, and for the next few decades they endured physical separation for a long time, but he continued to devote himself to their union.
One of his next moves was to move to Los Angeles. So McGrath entered the film business and built a close social circle of Hollywood literary figures, including Joan Didion, who dedicated the 1979 essay collection “White Album” to McGrath. Writer Eve Babyts biographer Lili Anorik said McGrath was “one of the most influential and damaging people in her life,” McGrath unfairly asked one of her. In the early 70’s Babits explained how he worked as an excellent artist and album designer. Color choices. Her self-confidence “she switched to writing her focus,” Anoric said. “So, in a sense, we, the culture, have a great responsibility to Earl.”
But McGRATH MADE Probably the biggest impact on his Atlantic Records.
When he met the label’s co-founder Ahmet Ertegun in the early 1960s, the two quickly evoked friendships. “Earl made him laugh,” Hagan said. “Ahmet really loved taking him.” McGrath’s connection with European society also helped Eltegan impress Mick Jagger, who brought the Rolling Stones to the Atlantic Ocean in 1971.
That same year, Ertegun, along with Bee Gees and Eric Clapton’s manager Robert Stigwood, decided to support McGrath and offer his own Atlantic-distributed label, Clean Records (company motto: “Everyone”. Must have a Clean record. “). McGrath’s West Hollywood home became the headquarters of Clean, where instead of A & R meetings, Kool Skool artists, Old Hollywood Grande, and New Journalists regularly held parties.
“He had these afternoon soirees, had an 18-year-old musician on the edge of the OD in one room, and was walking the grass outside Joseph Cotten and Patricia Medina,” said a Texas singer. The songwriter said. -Singer-songwriter Terry Allen, one of the first artists signed by McGrath. “When I went to Earl’s, I didn’t know what would happen.”
One of the groups McGrath discovered was the fledgling Folk Soul Duo of Philadelphia, Hall & Oates, and John Oates. They had a hard time finding a record deal when a music publisher flew them to meet McGrath in 1972.
“All these interesting people were hanging around,” Hall recalled in an interview. “I think one of the Everly Brothers was there and there was also a young Harrison Ford.” They played a few songs on McGrath. “The next thing I learned was that it was signed.”
The history of clean records may have been quite different from what Hall & Oates actually recorded for the company. Sensing the potential hit of the duo, Ertegun took them from McGrath and put them in the right places on Atlantic, where they sold millions of records. Meanwhile, Clean will release just a handful of unsold titles before shutting down in 1973.
McGrath, who moved to New York in the early 70’s, became a ubiquitous figure in the pre-punk scene in New York. “I met him everywhere,” said New York Dolls singer Johansen. His first solo work will appear in “Earl’s Closet”. “Interestingly, I didn’t know Earl as a man in the music business. That was just one of the things he did.”
McGrath’s true passion was to gather his many wonderful friends. Opposite Carnegie Hall, McGrath’s West 57th Street apartment is a venue for endless dinners and parties with a variety of cultural giants. The cast of “Star Wars” may come across Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. The place where Jim Carroll, who turned from a poet to a songwriter, mixed with Anita Loos, a pioneer in the silent film era. And where Jaguar first turned to his future partner, Jerry Hall. (Rallyings were often taken by Camilla McGrath, and a collection of photographs was featured in Knopf’s 2020 book “Face to Face.”)
In 1977, The Rolling Stones were looking for someone to run a record label on behalf of longtime company manager Marshall Chess. With the help of El Tegan, McGrath lobbyed Gig in a letter to Jaguar, admitting that he wasn’t very successful in the music industry, but “I’m good enough to marry an Italian princess. Successful”. He got a job.
“He was a very rare choice to run a record company,” Jaguar said. “But he had a great talent.”
Many of the artists in Earl’s Closet have been considered by McGrath on the Stones label, including Detroit saxophonist Norma Jean Bell and Texas soul combo Little Whisper, but the signature has come true. did not do it. “Earl was good at recognizing talent, but not very good at following through,” Hagan said.
McGrath’s tenure ultimately led to some success. He negotiated a deal to take the acclaimed reggae star Peter Tosh to the label in 1978 and signed Carol a year later. Carroll, who died in 2009, said in an interview with Musician magazine in 1981 that McGrath is an anomaly in the music industry. “He knew what I was doing,” Carroll said then. “He had some literary references that no other record executive would have had.”
After working for Stones for several years, McGrath realized that he was in the midst of an increasingly difficult relationship between Jaguar and Keith Richards.At some point he was, as the guitarist said in his memoir “Life” in 2010. If he didn’t rule Jaguar, he threatened to throw McGrath off the roof of Electric Lady Studios. Jaguar, fishing to launch his solo career, was delighted with the sourness of bando Kankei and the label’s business. McGrath resigned from his position at the Rolling Stones Records in 1981, effectively ending his career in the music industry.
next Thirty years later, McGrath traveled between the coasts, opening and closing art galleries in Los Angeles and New York. Although he and Camilla did not have their own family, McGrath eventually became the godfather of nearly 30 children. Later in his life, McGrath’s sister finally revealed a secret that was kept from him: his birth was the result of an incident between his mother and his father’s brother.
As McGrath considered his complex past, the death of Camilla in 2007 after a series of strokes was even more devastating. Within a few years, McGrath developed a serious health problem. He died on January 7, 2016 at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital. After suffering from cerebral hemorrhage.
McGrath was pleased not to be in the limelight for years. “He didn’t want to be a public figure, he only wanted to be well known among celebrities,” Hagan said. The release of “Earl’s Closet” finally justifies McGrath’s legacy, his unique talent as a kind of artistic alchemist.
“I feel like I used some kind of core sampler from the 70’s,” Hagen said. “It’s a cultural story, where the artistic emphasis was heading, about the end of one period and the beginning of another. And, of course, connecting everything with this record, as he did in life. The element to match is Earl McGrath. “
