Fantasy (almost?) on the block ... the first time

Google Books’ massive wealth of material includes the complete archives of Billboard magazine, free for anybody to peruse. It’s easy to spend several hours (days?) tripping down musical memory lane, and of course these archives also are an invaluable resource; I used them extensively while researching information for my Guaraldi bio.

Until just the other day, though, I hadn’t considered investigating a search on Fantasy Records. Most of the results were too tangential for my purposes, but I did learn a few helpful details. The first was a squib from March 12, 1955, headlined Zaentz Heads Fantasy Sales. In entirety, the little piece informed readers that “Saul Zaentz has been named national sales manager for Fantasy Records. He formerly held sales and promotion posts with Clef and Norgran. Zaentz’s Fantasy duties will also include deejay relations.”

A little more than a month later, on April 23, that week’s Jazz Best Sellers — a listing always subdivided by label — gave Fantasy’s street address: 654 Natoma Street, in San Francisco. Although I already knew that Fantasy was on Natoma Street in the mid-1950s, I’d never had the actual number. (Yes, I do obsess over such details.)

The most interesting tidbit, however, unfolded during slightly more than four months, starting on New Year’s Eve in 1966 ... when Fantasy Records supposedly was purchased by a rival label (!).

Now, it’s well known that Max and Soul (Sol) Weiss sold Fantasy on September 1, 1967, to a consortium of distributors headed by Zaentz. But I had no idea that an entirely different offer had been floated nine months earlier.

On top of which, this earlier potential deal apparently blew up quite spectacularly.

It started when Billboard reported, on December 31, 1966, that — according to “reliable sources” — Audio Fidelity Records had bought Fantasy. “Contracts have been signed,” the article went on, “and Audio Fidelity is expected to take title in a few days. The label will be moved to New York, and Orrin Keppnews, former Riverside Records executive recently hired by AF, is expected to be Fantasy a&r vice president. The move is AF’s second major acquisition since Herman Gimbel took over the reins of the company. The first was the expansion into the country field with Little Darlin’ Records.”

As Mr. Spock had just begun to say, every Thursday evening that TV season, Fascinating...

At that point in time, Audio Fidelity’s major claim to fame was having released the United States’ first mass-produced stereophonic long-playing record, in November 1957. Under original owner Sidney Frey, the label signed a respectable collection of jazz musicians, including Lionel Hampton, Louis Armstrong, Elmo Hope and Lalo Schifrin. In 1962, Frey became one of the first U.S. record company owners to aggressively pursue bossa nova and Brazilian jazz, releasing LPs by João Gilberto, Luiz Bonfá, Oscar Castro-Neves and several others.

Frey sold the company in 1965 to Gimbel, who expanded inventory and artists; even so, he never became a major player during the rapidly expanding rock era. Ironically, most of the Audio Fidelity LPs found in home libraries in the 1970s weren’t music at all; the label did quite well by its extremely popular line of sound-effects albums. Audio Fidelity was folded into Milestone Records in 1985, and eventually went bankrupt in 1997.

But back to our story...

Despite the apparent haste with which Audio Fidelity’s deal with Fantasy was expected to take place, nothing happened for several months. Then, on March 25, 1967, Billboard unveiled fresh information beneath the headline A Disagreement Stops Buying of Fantasy by AF.

“The acquisition has failed to materialize,” the article began. “Herman Gimbel, AF president, had flown to San Francisco last week to close the deal. Gimbel returned without the acquisition, charging that Fantasy failed to deliver assets provided for in the agreement. These assets, according to Gimbel, include ‘full use of a quantity of masters — including all of the Dave Brubeck material, which is unquestionably the heart of the Fantasy catalog.’ Gimbel added that record club and tape cartridge deals had been negotiated for the expected new Fantasy operation.”

The next step was inevitable: Gimbel sued.

On May 13, 1967, Billboard broke this news under the headline AF Charges Fantasy Welched on Contract. “Audio Fidelity has sought recourse through the courts,” the article began. “The deal allegedly was set by both parties, when, according to AF President Herman Gimbel, Fantasy backed out.

“According to the complaint, the defendants entered into a written contract with Gimbel for the sale of their music and sound recording business. Sale price was allegedly $235,000, with another $200,000 for royalties to be paid over a five-year period. Gimbel said he made a $5,000 down payment last November.

“Gimbel charges that on March 9 he met with the defendants in San Francisco, to sign the final contract, but that the defendants refused to deliver the business and assets.”

The rest of the article specifies various sidebar details, including advance orders that Gimbel already had taken for the expected Fantasy library, which “would have yielded him a net profit of at least $70,000” (and which sounds rather like counting one’s chickens before they’ve hatched).

“Gimbel seeks an accounting of the Fantasy operation for 1967,” the article concludes, “along with court costs, and, if the court rules that the contract cannot be performed, damages of $95,974.32 and such additional damages as may be established by the evidence.”

I’d love to know how they came up with that 32 cents...

All kidding aside, I was struck by what seems to have been Fantasy’s rather modest value. Just a quarter-million for the whole shebang, plus not quite that much in royalties? Seriously? I know everything cost less back in 1967, but that still seems low.

Maybe it was, and maybe that’s why Soul and Max backed out. Alas, we’ll never know. That was the last Billboard reported of the matter, which suggests things were settled out of court.

Zaentz and his fellow investors were more successful a few months later, paying $325,000 for the label and all its assets ... which, on the surface, seems a worse deal than Soul and Max were offered by Audio Fidelity. As history quickly demonstrated, Zaentz made one helluva deal. Thanks to the incredible popularity of Creedence Clearwater Revival, he was able to pay off the five-year note in 18 months. As quoted in Billboard on May 3, 1969, Zaentz now insisted that he “wouldn’t take $6 million for Fantasy.”

Zaentz’s subsequent adventures with Creedence and John Fogerty, of course, became an entirely different story, and the stuff of both rock and precedent-establishing courtroom legend. If you’re curious, check it out here.

In hindsight, it’s interesting to note that the Audio Fidelity imbroglio was taking place at the same time that Guaraldi had filed his own lawsuit against Fantasy, seeking release from his oppressive contract. That suit wasn’t resolved until December 27, 1967, shortly after Zaentz took over the label. (I remain convinced that Zaentz, far smarter about such things than the Weiss brothers, recognized and quickly dealt with what almost certainly would have been an embarrassing courtroom loss for Fantasy).

As journalist Linda Ellerbee is so fond of saying, And so it goes...

Childhood Fantasy

Researchers rely on the kindness of friends and strangers, who occasionally point us in the direction of something — a key piece of information, a fascinating anecdote — that we wouldn't otherwise have found.

In that way, I'm grateful to a good friend for calling my attention to a delightful online profile of Dogpaw Carillo, the sort of cheerful, colorful figure who typifies San Francisco's still-quite-lively counter-culture vibe. Dogpaw — and that's how he prefers to be called — is the star of this engaging and informative article by Viktorija Rinkevičiūtė, which she wrote during her post-graduate stint as a master's student in media, journalism and globalization, while at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. She subsequently returned to Lithuania, where she maintains an engaging blog and looks back fondly on the time she spent in Northern California.

As you'll discover, reading Viktorija's charming piece, Dogpaw spent part of his childhood living directly adjacent to the Treat Avenue headquarters of Fantasy Records. He grew up in a house at 841 Treat; Fantasy was next door, at 855 Treat.

(A quick sidebar: We have become conditioned to assume — thanks in part to a Vince Guaraldi composition — that Fantasy's most famous early home was on Treat Street. But Guaraldi's tune isn't the only source; this slight error has been promulgated by scores of musicians who refer to the good ol' days, when "Fantasy was on Treat Street." Many of them are quoted saying as much in my book. The lapse is understandable; "Treat Street" rolls more swiftly off the tongue, and the rhyme is hard to resist. But it's a mistake nonetheless: Although San Francisco does possess a tiny Treat Street, it's nowhere near the Mission District locale where Fantasy Records made its home ... on Treat Avenue.)

Aside from being absorbed by Dogpaw's childhood memories, I was drawn to the several times he mentioned Guaraldi. Viktorija had no reason to pursue these references to Dr. Funk, since her story focused more generally on Dogpaw, then and now. But I sensed that he'd have more to say about Guaraldi, and so I contacted Viktorija. She kindly shared Dogpaw's contact information, and she also sent along several additional photos that she hadn't used in her article.

I found Dogpaw just as amiable — just as eager to chat about his Treat Avenue days — as I would have expected. And he did, indeed, have a great deal more to share about Guaraldi and Fantasy.

(I've tried to avoid too much overlap with the information in Viktorija's article, although some basic details are necessary.)

Dogpaw examines the exterior of 855 Treat Avenue, the
once-upon-a-time home of Fantasy Records, and now
headquarters of the San Francisco Mime Troupe.
(Photo by Viktorija Rinkevičiūtė)

Dogpaw grew up in the house at 841 Treat, and remained there through his teens; his adolescence coincided perfectly with the 1960s, when Fantasy blossomed from a modest jazz label that went "13-1/2 years without a hit" — at which point Guaraldi's "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" came along — to the more ambitious operation that expanded into rock 'n' roll and most famously signed the band that became Creedence Clearwater Revival.

"Fantasy was literally right over the fence," Dogpaw recalls. "They shared the property with a lumberyard; this guy would come in maybe once in a blue moon, and chop and saw some wood, and then take off. His buzz-saw was right next to the studio! But they must've worked it out, because he never made noise when Max [Weiss] wanted to record something.

"At first, I thought the place next door might be a radio station, because you'd see instruments being loaded off vehicles, and going in, and later coming back out again, and all these radio-looking people. That was the vibe, so we kids knew it had something to do with music. Initially, we all thought that every neighborhood had one of these places, like every neighborhood had a playground or a library. This was just normal to us, having a studio on the block.

"But of course it wasn't normal. Growing up on Treat was very, very special."

Saul Zaentz dies at 92

Depending on which artistic realm they inhabit, most people familiar with Saul Zaentz know him for one of two reasons: either as the producer of nine films from 1975 through 2006; or as the music producer and owner of Fantasy Records who got into several quite notorious legal spats with John Fogerty over the Creedence Clearwater Revival catalog.

In the former capacity, Zaentz took home an impressive three Academy Awards for Best Picture: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1976), Amadeus (1985) and The English Patient (1997). His other films included The Mosquito Coast, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and animator Ralph Bakshi's 1978 version of The Lord of the Rings, decades before Peter Jackson tackled the same material.

As the head of Fantasy, Zaentz is known mostly for embarking on a series of shrewd acquisitions of small jazz labels, including Prestige (1971), Riverside and Milestone (1972), Stax (1977), Contemporary (1984) and Pablo (1987).

Additional details about his career can be found in this Variety obituary.

Given this quite famous individual's thoroughly professional bearing — check YouTube for clips of him at the aforementioned Oscar ceremonies — it can be quite jarring to see him scruffy and youthfully laid back, at left, in Ralph Gleason's Anatomy of a Hit. Zaentz gets a fair amount of screen time in this 1963 documentary about Vince Guaraldi and the creation, packaging and subsequent explosive popularity of "Cast Your Fate to the Wind." Indeed, Zaentz was a key player at Fantasy during the crucial decade when Guaraldi blossomed from sideman, primarily in various Cal Tjader combos, to leader of his own groups.

This March 1955 clip from Billboard Magazine announces Zaentz's having been named Fantasy's national sales manager; roughly a year later, he's the one who offered Guaraldi a record deal and three-year contract with the label. Zaentz then faded into the background, at least as far as Guaraldi's career at Fantasy was concerned; the pianist's life subsequently was ruled by label co-owner Max Weiss. That relationship soured due to Weiss', ah, complicated contracts, which eventually prompted Guaraldi to sue the label. The litigation might have continued for years, except for an intriguing coincidence: In September 1967, a consortium led by Zaentz purchased Fantasy and Galaxy Records from Max and Soul Weiss ... and, a few months later, the twin lawsuits between Guaraldi and Fantasy were dissolved, the pianist having won his freedom and a very substantial improvement in royalty payments.

Might Zaentz have helped orchestrate that favorable outcome for Guaraldi? After all, the two had known each other even before their shared involvement with Fantasy, back when Zaentz was a bookkeeper at Melody Sales, and also, later, as the head of sales at Mercury Records. Perhaps Zaentz respected Guaraldi and that long friendship. On the other hand, it's quite obvious — from the various lawsuits with Fogerty — that, as a businessman, Zaentz was tough as nails, and not known for cutting anybody any slack.

We'll never know the truth, but this much is certain: Zaentz played an extremely important role in Guaraldi's career.

Guaraldi in Bayou Country?

For a few overlapping years, both Vince Guaraldi and Creedence Clearwater Revival were housed at Fantasy Records; the rock band signed with the label toward the conclusion of Guaraldi's decade-long relationship with the company.

Nothing special about that, of course; Fantasy represented all sorts of acts, starting with Chinese opera (!) and jazz artists in the early 1950s, and progressing to folk, blues and rock as the musical landscape changed in the '60s.


But the "association" between Guaraldi and Creedence is intriguing for two reasons.


In the first place, the band eventually to be known as Creedence signed with Fantasy specifically because of Guaraldi. As discussed in this historical essay at the band's official web site, John Fogerty, Doug Clifford and Stu Cook -- billing themselves as the Blue Velvets -- started playing small-potatoes gigs and backing up San Francisco-area artists in 1959. John's older brother Tom came on board in 1960, at which point the band became known as Tommy Fogerty and the Blue Velvets. Despite cutting several singles on the Orchestra label, the boys didn't see any action during the first few years of this new decade.


Quoting now from the relevant paragraphs:



In 1963, a jazz artist named Vince Guaraldi put out a single called "Cast Your Fate To The Wind." It became that rarest of entities, a jazz instrumental hit. PBS did a special on the "Anatomy of a Hit." Watching this special, the band got excited when they discovered the label was Fantasy, across the bay in San Francisco. The fact that a local record company was breaking music on a national scale impressed the band. In March of 1964, John and Tom took some Blue Velvet original instrumentals to Fantasy, hoping to sell the tunes to Guaraldi.


The band's energy and audacity impressed Fantasy records co-founder Max Weiss. He signed them as a rock group rather than just for their instrumentals. He also suggested they change their name; the Blue Velvets sounding so passé and '50s. They chose The Visions. Between the time they recorded "Little Girl (Does Your Mama Know)" backed with "Don't Tell Me No Lies," and the release of the 45, Beatlemania happened. Hoping to capitalize on this, without having to go to England and sign a Merseybeat band, Weiss released the record as "The Golliwogs," a sobriquet the band would live with for the next three and a half years.


The assumption, then, is that if Guaraldi's "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" hadn't hit, the brothers Fogerty might never have approached Fantasy ... and who knows? Given the butterfly effect, they also might never have achieved their eventual fame.


As for the second reason the Guaraldi/Creedence pairing is interesting ... well, both ended up deeply unhappy with Fantasy. In early 1966, Guaraldi sued to be released from the label; the resulting legal skirmish took awhile to settle down, but in the end the pianist won his freedom ... and started earning a lot more money, since he no longer was bound by the hideous Fantasy contracts.


While Guaraldi and Fantasy were sparring, the Weiss brothers sold the label to Saul Zaentz, who had worked with the company for years. Zaentz championed the Fogerty brothers, encouraged the band to change its name, and the rest is rock history. Unfortunately, the relationship between the band and Zaentz became famously rocky, first as a result of an investment scheme that soured and prompted years' worth of lawsuits; and later when John Fogerty left Creedence and Fantasy, recorded a hit on another label ("The Old Man Down the Road") and was infamously sued by Zaentz ... for plagiarizing his own sound! Fogerty's eventual response — a song initially called "Zanz Kant Danz" — has become one of rock's best high-profile acts of revenge.


And there you have it: Guaraldi, Creedence and Fantasy Records. Who could have imagined it?