Ben Apatoff: Remembering Howie Klein

See below for why this is important

This continues our tributes and reminiscences about this site's founder Howie Klein. For others in this series, click on the tag "Howie" at the end of any of these posts.

This is a fascinating account of Howie's time in the music industry. Ben Apatoff is the author of the Bloomsbury books Metallica: The $24.95 Book and Body Count (33 ⅓).

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Remembering Howie Klein

by Ben Apatoff

The first person to tell me I needed to speak with Howie Klein was Jello Biafra. I was a little surprised—sure, Howie was a progressive activist and punk champion, but Jello Biafra? Outspoken anti-corporate, anti-authoritarian Jello raving about a Warner Bros. executive? Of course I had utmost respect for Howie, especially as the executive producer of the Sire Records album I was writing a book about (Body Count’s 1992 debut). I’d been awed by accounts of Howie in Dan Charnas’ book The Big Payback, which described him as Ice-T and Body Count’s “chief supporter and coconspirator at the label,” and a staunch advocate for the band throughout the scandal over the song “Cop Killer.” It’s just that I had trouble seeing the Dead Kennedys leader respecting anyone in the upper ranks of the corporate music industry.

But there was Jello, ranting to me over a facetime interview while his cat danced across his keyboard, crediting Howie for putting him in touch with Ice-T (initially for the song “Shut Up, Be Happy”) and spilling into stories about Howie’s time at 415 Records, writing for zines, standing up to Tipper Gore’s PMRC, and fighting for Ministry’s The Land of Rape and Honey on Sire Records. When Jello got back to the main reason I called him—to discuss Body Count—he heaped praise on Howie.

“How did they get away with this on a major label? It's because nobody else at the major label except Howie was looking,” Jello grinned. “That Body Count album says, ‘Executive Producer Howie Klein.’ So I've not asked Howie directly about this, although I kind of owe him a phone call…but anyway, it says ‘Executive Producer: Howie Klein.’ And that means, yeah, OK, he's the one who slips this through, isn’t he? Yay, bravo, Howie.”

“I always got along with him,” Jello added. “I kind of had seen some other things we talked about, you know, wanderings in Nepal as a youth. And so like, OK, there's more to this guy than just some jerk rock biz writer who kind of likes punk and stuff.”

I sent Mr. Klein an interview request for my book, which mentioned Jimi Hendrix in passing. He responded 11 minutes later.

“Call me Howie. I'm happy to do the interview. If you didn't do Hendrix yet, he was an old friend and I have several entertaining stories about him:

1- pawning his guitar

2- the night before he left for the UK with The Animals

3- concert I booked him to play at my school

4- smoking a joint with my mom

5- hanging out in Easaoura (Morocco) in 1969

Someone is doing a TV show about Body Count and they came over and interviewed me for that... so some of the stuff is fresh in my mind. When do you want to do it? On the phone or in person?”

With someone else, it would have seemed self-aggrandizing. But there was something engaging about the way it ran out of Howie. He overflowed with stories that needed to be told, because they mattered, because they were revealing, because they were tremendously fun to read and hear. “I really hope this guy writes a book,” was one of my first thoughts.

Of course, within minutes of speaking with Howie I could tell why punks liked him. Howie had a mischievous, anarchic streak that constantly superseded authority, long after so many of the music forms he championed had become mainstream. “When Ice brought Body Count into the company there was not a lot of African American heavy metal. That doesn’t mean that there was none, but they had something to say that other bands didn’t,” he told me. “I sat down with Ice when they delivered the record, and he told me what the songs meant and what he was trying to accomplish.” Howie mapped out the business parts of the process (“Ice-T was a gold and platinum artist on Sire when I was the general manager. And we liked him a lot as a person…So when Ice came with this project, Body Count, Seymour Stein, who was the president of the company, who I reported to, said, ‘Oh, that's Howie’s kind of music, take it to him.”) But Howie spent more time talking about the most important part—he loved this band and wanted to share their music with the world. “Body Count was my kind of music. So I was really ecstatic,” he enthused. “I saw one show before in a club and then I went to see them at Lollapalooza. And they were just amazing.”

Howie regaled me with details such as the shark aquarium in Ice-T’s home recording studio, or the promotional Body Count CDs that were sent to stores and radio stations in little black vinyl body bags. He urged me to learn more from the musicians themselves (“They were a live band, and that's when they told you more…I think you're better off talking to them about that than me, but I always liked that about them.”) In recalling the album’s early moderate sales (“That's a successful record. It's not platinum, it’s not over the top, but it’s good, and it’s good enough to do a second record as well”), he gave context to the chaos that followed when Texas police forces spearheaded a Time Warner boycott over “Cop Killer,” which involved the US federal government and nearly threatened to take down the entire conglomerate. Like many execs, Howie wasn’t in the business to make friends, but unlike many others, he also wasn’t there to make money. He didn’t care if the record hadn’t gone gold, or if it would cost less just to drop the band than to face off with angry shareholders, CEOs, protesters, law enforcement, or lawmakers going all the way to President Bush. Howie also didn’t back down from death threats, which he revealed to be coming from angry policemen.

“The police really got crazy about it, and they started calling in bomb threats at Warner Bros. I know this because one of the guys at the Burbank police was an old friend of mine and a real pal, and he warned me what was happening,” he told me. “They would call in a bomb threat and make everyone leave the building . . . hundreds of people in the parking lot while they would go through the building looking for bombs which didn’t exist, which they knew because they called in the threat themselves…That’s a little-known fact by the way. I’ve haven’t talked about that.” It wasn’t Howie’s fight at first, falling mostly on the Warner Bros. Records CEO Mo Ostin and President Lenny Waronker, but Howie made it his.

“Mo, who is a real civil libertarian, he and Lenny fought very, very hard to protect Ice, he called me into his office and said ‘Howie, there’s nothing more we can do. The pressure from Time Warner is so heavy that we fought this for months, and we can’t anymore. If you want to go and fight with them, you have my blessing,’” Howie told me. “So ‘I said I'll do it. I'll go.’ He said, ‘You're gonna go to New York and talk with these corporate people?’ I said yeah. He said, ‘Howie, do you have a suit?’ I said ‘Mo, I was bar mitzvahed.’”

Howie was flown to New York to argue with six Time Warner representatives from finances, well above Howie’s department in the Warner Music Group. “They only had one concern, which was the share price,” said Howie. “They don't care about music. They don't care about civil liberties.” After hours of heated discussion in the conference room, Howie was given an ultimatum. “They just basically said, ‘Fuck you and fuck you.’ And they got up, all six of them rose at once and they walked out of the room,” he recalled. “They don’t care what I think or what I have to say, Ice-T has to be dropped. And if I didn’t like it, I could quit or they could fire me.”

“I love the songs, every single one of them. I love all the guys in the band,” Howie emphasized. “I love that song and didn’t want to see it removed.”

The album was eventually pulled from stores, and shortly afterwards Ice-T and Body Count decided to avoid further turmoil by amicably leaving Sire Records, taking their master recordings with them. According to Charnas’ book, Howie’s farewell business meeting with Ice brought Howie to tears. But my favorite Howie story is when the Body Count record went gold, he had plaques printed for Dan Quayle and Charlton Heston, awarding the conservatives for the negative publicity that helped push the album to 500,000 sales. Being Howie, he also auctioned a plaque to fundraise for People for the American Way.

In our call, Howie slipped in anecdotes about Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks, and the Commodores, and took a brief customer service callback to tell them he was busy being interviewed (sorry, Gus from Spectrum). Our discourse on music and politics led to the time Howie orchestrated a meeting between Lou Reed and Vaclav Havel at the Clinton White House, where he cracked up the American president on camera with a filthy joke (I’m not repeating it here). Some of Howie’s stories sounded far-fetched at first, but turned out to be exceptionally well-researched, or well-lived. At the end of our call, he asked how he could help promote the book and promptly posted about it on social media, my first interviewee to do so. [See above –TN]

Howie’s participation led to getting the band’s involvement in my book. Body Count guitarist Ernie C first reached out to me to comment on my Instagram post about Howie (“Howie’s the man,”) and Ice-T shouted him out in our interview. “We didn't know if we could sign the group to another label while I was signed to Warner Bros,” Ice revealed. “The demo got to Howie Klein at Warner Bros. and Howie was like, ‘I’ll sign this group here.’ Then it was like, ‘Ice can be in the band,’ officially.” When the book was released, Howie once again offered to promote it on his socials and send out a press release. I mailed him one of the first copies, which felt like the least I could do for him.

I stayed in touch with Howie sporadically via email, and sent him photos from the New York Public Library exhibit on Lou Reed. I’m still finding out about his work with music that I love, and maybe would have never heard without his efforts and influence, from his concert bookings as a Stony Brook University student (the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Pink Floyd, Otis Redding, the Who, many others) through his interviews as a DJ and journalist (AC/DC, Cheap Trick, the Clash, Alice Cooper, the Cramps, Devo, Iggy Pop, the Jam, Chaka Khan, the Sex Pistols, Patti Smith, Thin Lizzy, many others) through his stints at 415, Sire, and Reprise Records (the Cure, Green Day, Fleetwood Mac, Madonna, Alanis Morissette, the Pretenders, Ramones, Lou Reed, Romeo Void, the Smiths, Neil Young, many others). I recently learned that his buyout resignation amidst the disastrous Time Warner-AOL merger occurred a day before his successor infamously rejected Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I wish I could have asked Howie about all of it.

Howie continued to fight for free speech, artists' rights, and progressive causes long after the banning of “Cop Killer,” even from his deathbed. He also remained an indefatigable storyteller and schmoozer (Howie: “I don't run into Ice much, but when I do, it's always a pleasure. And I you know, I think I got him to hire my financial advisor.”)

Much as I love stories about Howie the gadfly, the activist, or the adventurer, I mostly think of him as a man of compassion—rachmanus, as he called it in one of his last DWT posts. Sharing the music he loved with the world, and he loved it as much as anyone I’ve spoken to, was as great a gift as any legislation or reform he advocated for in his years of lobbying, or any election he swung with Blue America. His sense of fairness and morality was sharper than any reasonable human would expect from Howie’s industry, and he was not going to be bullied out of it by anyone. I cherish our conversations and will miss him. Thank you, Howie.