From the It Couldn’t Have Happened to a Nicer Group of People Desk:

Simon Napier-Bell, onetime manager of the Yardbirds, offers a very long memoir in the Guardian. It has fun passages like this:

I insisted the Yardbirds should produce their own records. I demanded the biggest advance they’d ever paid and the highest royalty - £25,000 and 12 per cent of retail - and they gave it to me. If this was my entrance exam into management, I thought I’d passed with flying colours. I soon learned I’d failed.

EMI had simply advanced the Yardbirds their own royalties and included a host of tricky accounting clauses - for instance the artist was only paid on 90 per cent of records sold, and was not paid on ‘over-pressings’, although these were usually sold anyway. I asked the group’s lawyer why he’d let these things pass. ‘If I told my clients not to sign unfair contracts they’d never get a deal.’

And this, written, conveniently, after Ahmet Ertegun had passed away:

With a view to discovering more about the explosion of music coming out of London, Ahmet invited me for afternoon tea and muffins. I’d only been there five minutes when the door opened and Joe Tex, one of the biggest black recording artists in America, stuck his head in. ‘Ahmet, man, I was just wondering if you could loan me 10 bucks.’

‘You want 10 bucks,’ Ahmet told him. ‘Go downstairs to the studio, find a backing track you like and put your voice on it.’

An hour later Joe came back. Ahmet buzzed the studio and asked the engineer if Joe had done a good vocal. Then he doled him out $10 and offered him a cup of tea. When Ahmet left the room for a minute I asked Joe how much royalties he got. He wasn’t sure he got royalties at all. ‘I don’t know exactly how it works,’ he confessed, ‘but Ahmet and Nesuhi are like brothers. Whenever I’m in New York I gotta place I can hang out. And I always come away with a few bucks.’

And this, from the stories-too-good-to-check file:

Bob [Dylan] was arguing the point but [CBS exec] Dick [Katz] was having none of it. ‘Look, I’m telling you. There’ll be no fucking religion—not Christian, not Jewish, not Muslim. Nothing. For God’s sake, man—you were born Jewish, which makes your religion money, doesn’t it? So stick with it, for Christ’s sake. I’m giving you 20 million bucks—it’s like baptising you, like sending you to heaven. So what are you fucking moaning about? You want 20 million bucks from us? Well, you gotta do what we tell you. And what we’re telling you is … No Torah! No Bible! No Koran! No Jesus! No God! No Allah! No fucking religion. It’s going in the contract.’