They're With the Band
How women professionals finessed the music biz boys club as rock exploded in the 1970s. "It wasn't some barrier to break," says one. "It was an opportunity and a love."
One of the revelations I encountered when researching What You Want Is in the Limo was the network of young female professionals—agents, publicists, attorneys, technicians, label executives—who co-existed in the 1970s as equals with men in the then-notoriously male-centric music industry.
As I wrote . . .
Invested as it is in an aggressively unprogressive male-dominated culture, the high-grossing rock and roll milieu of the early 1970s nevertheless makes room for women in its ranks more interested in the business than with scoring a night with Robert Plant. More accurately, the women simply make room for themselves. As a group they are smart, resourceful, and possess personalities that brook no disrespect but don’t threaten the fragile egos of the boys on the plane.
Several of the decade’s most influential publicists come from their ranks—among them Marsa Hightower, Carol Klenfner, Jane Ayer, Bobbi Cowan and Susan Blond, who like Cowan and Ayer forms her own successful PR company. Many punch their tickets at the Warner-Atlantic-Elektra labels, possessed of some of the era’s greatest artists and most distinguished executives, among them Ahmet Ertegun, Mo Ostin, and Jerry Wexler. Lynn Volkman, one of the first woman tour managers in rock, shepherds everyone from the Rolling Stones and the Who to James Taylor and Cat Stevens. Volkman conceives the idea for the wireless microphone, developed by her boyfriend, Kenny Schaffer, one of Alice Cooper’s early publicists and an electronics whiz; the Schaffer-Vega wireless microphone and guitar attachment revolutionize live rock performance when they go into wide use in the late seventies.
Mary Beth Medley started booking rock acts in 1969 while an undergrad at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. After graduating and spending three years booking tours on behalf of managers Bud Prager and Gary Kurfust, she was hired by Who co-manager Peter Rudge as his right-hand woman at Rudge’s Sir Productions.
Rudge, Medley says, “didn’t really care whether you were a man or a woman as long as you did the job. And he validated me in many ways when I was doing the deals for the Stones and the Who. There were certain promoters that would say, ‘I don’t like this deal—I want to speak to Peter.’ And Peter would pick up the phone—he called me Mother—and he’d say, ‘What’s the deal Mother gave you?’ ” Rudge would listen, unimpressed, and inform them, “Well, that’s it. I can’t do any better.”
Medley credits this support less to the egalitarianism of men like Rudge and more to a pragmatism exercised at a moment in which the values of the sixties and those that will defne the seventies briefly commingle before diverging for good.
“I never thought, ‘Oh, you’re a woman, you can’t do that,’ ” Medley says. “I never felt like I was given any special treatment because I was a woman—or that it was extraordinary at the time. Ina Meibach, the Who’s lawyer for years and years, and Barbara Skydel, who was a top agent then, neither of them went into the music business because it was a frontier for women. It wasn’t some barrier to break like belonging at Augusta; it was an opportunity and a love. We were all very equal then, or at least thought we were.”
Says Carol Klenfner: “It was a given going in if you were young and pretty you were perceived as a groupie and available. Being at Gibson-Stromberg”—one of the top rock PR agencies of the seventies—”and being made head of the New York office, professionally I didn’t feel a lot of discrimination. But there were times when, because of the whole groupie thing, [the men] just didn’t want you around unless you were a groupie. They were getting down to a different kind of business that I have nothing to do with.”
The reality in the early seventies is that so much of the script for rock culture—and the culture at large—is still very much a work in progress.
“It was an amazing time,” Medley says. “The whole business—radio stations, record shops, clothing stores—all just bloomed. There weren’t really parameters. You created what you could create. There was nobody saying, ‘You can’t do that.’ The music business at that time was so small. In the early seventies you knew every promoter in the United States, you knew the heads of the labels, you knew the agents. And they stayed the same year afer year.”
That nearly all are generational peers with shared values rooted in the music they create together encourages an empowering optimism that it will always be thus. As it happens, 1973 is both the peak for the sensibility and its twilight, though that won’t be evident to those living the moment for several more years. It finally strikes Medley mid-decade when she realizes “the hippie era died, so the feeling that came along with that—that late-sixties freedom—was gone.” And with that, the music business, once an emporium for a generation’s dreams, becomes just another business.
“You could sell shoes,” Medley says, “or you could sell a rock and roll band.”