A new book seeks to expose rampant sex and drugs in the music industry — not only enjoyed by artists, but by the misogynistic record-company executives who sign them to their labels.
Dorothy Carvello — who started out as Ahmet Ertegun’s secretary and became the first female A&R exec at Atlantic Records in the late 1980s, during the pre-digital era when record companies were printing money — is writing “Anything for a Hit” for Chicago Review Press.
“Caligula had nothing on Ahmet Ertegun and his senior executives,” Carvello told me. “Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll weren’t limited to the artists.”
Carvello recalled how she was once denied office supplies.
“They said they didn’t have enough money for a pen. But at the WEA [Warner Elektra Atlantic] convention that year, they had enough cash in the safe to hire hookers for all the execs.” A Warner Elektra rep had no comment.
As with apparently every other female employee in the business, Carvello — who also worked for Sony Music — said that she was routinely subjected to sexual harassment and what she calls “gender hypocrisy.”
“When I complained, I’d be fired. When men did something wrong, they’d get promoted,” Carvello said.
She’ll share lessons from all the mistakes she made for the next generation of women trying to succeed in an industry dominated by chauvinist pigs. And she said she’ll expose the “sexual payola,” in which artists sleep with record execs to get deals.
“It’s still going on,” Carvello claimed.
The book also will contain stories about Mick Jagger, Robert Plant, Debbie Gibson, Phil Collins and Michael Hutchence, but Ertegun, who encouraged Carvello to write the book, remained her “best friend” in the industry until he died in 2006.
“I would always go to him for advice,” she said, with a laugh. “And it would always be wrong.”