Mike Bone: Record Exec Who Broke the Mold

Talk about a hard sell.

When Mike Bone was a record company promotion man and couldn’t persuade an ornery rock radio program director to play a new single, he sent the programmer a pig’s head with a cassette of the song in its mouth and a note which read: “Don’t be so pig-headed. Play the record.”

Bone has also appeared at a record industry fund-raiser with his entire body painted yellow (to tout a band called Yello) and once hyped the Boomtown Rats (“Live Aid” organizer Bob Geldof’s old band) by mailing rock deejays packages filled with huge sewer rats.

So what’s this wild man doing now?

At 38, Bone is president of Chrysalis Records, a CBS-distributed record label that’s home to such rock luminaries as Billy Idol, Pat Benatar and Huey Lewis & the News.

An informal, accessible executive, Bone worked his way up to the top post at Chrysalis after more than a decade in various promotion and marketing positions. But now that he’s running his own label, he’s not sure if he’s really comfortable in the cat bird’s seat.

“I was at an industry convention recently and it was a weird experience,” Bone said between phone calls in his 15th-floor office here in mid-town Manhattan. “People are suddenly afraid to come over and talk to you, as if you’re suddenly different or something. Even people I’d known for 10 or 12 years were kind of shy--almost intimidated--about stopping by.”

Most record chieftains here operate out of stylish offices the size of a squash court. Bone’s workplace is considerably smaller, adorned with a scuff-marked carpet, a glass-top table with a broken leg and a wall plastered with an office calendar and two dog-eared maps of the United States.

The no-frills approach is company-wide. When his secretary relayed a request from a label executive asking about hiring a limousine to drive him to an awards ceremony that night, Bone growled good-naturedly: “Tell him he’s taking a cab there--like me and everyone else.”

Even as it’s about to enter its fifth decade, the record industry is still a peculiarly closed society, dominated by power brokers like CBS chief Walter Yetnikoff, David Geffen and MCA Records’ Irving Azoff, who act as if they leaped off the pages of a Philip Roth novel.

To say that Bone--soft-spoken and almost painfully modest--stands out from this crowd would be an understatement.

Raised in Macon, Ga., where his father was a mechanic and his mother sold shoes at the local department store, Bone has never lost touch with his Southern roots--or patois. Acknowledging he has little time to worry about details, he explained: “It’s like we say down South--give it a lick and a promise and move on.”

“Hey, he’s a cracker--he’s totally unpretentious and couldn’t care less about all the record label power trips,” said Peter Paterno, Bone’s attorney and an influential industry lawyer. “He’s also scrupulously honest, which you can’t say about most record presidents.

“When Bone was still a promotion man, I’d call him up to ask how a new record from one of our firm’s clients was doing. I’d say, ‘Geez, you guys don’t seem to be working our record.’ And Bone would immediately say, ‘You’re right. We’re not.’ You don’t get those kind of straight answers very often in this business.”

Walking in the shadow of the skyscrapers here, wearing a sky-blue shirt, jeans and boots, Bone still looks a little out of his element--like a country boy in King Arthur’s Court.

He’s more at home prowling the corridors of his offices, where he recently spent a long day soothing the nerves of several excitable rock managers, bidding on a coveted new artist and keeping tabs on how Chrysalis’ current acts were faring on the radio charts.

“Remember the guy they’d always have on the old ‘Ted Mack Amateur Hour’ who’d start spinning a plate on a stick,” Bone said, poring over the latest radio playlists. “And once he got the plate going, he’d start another and then another and pretty soon he’d have to rush back to the first one and spin it again ‘cause it was slowing down?

“That’s what it’s like here. You’ve got all these plates spinning. One for radio airplay, one for a concert tour, one for MTV, press coverage, your distribution machinery. And that’s all just for one new record--and we’re working a bunch at the same time.

“So when it actually works and we can get a young band like Icehouse over 200,000 in sales or land a Top 10 single for Paul Carrack after he’s been kicking around for a dozen years without his own hit--then it’s magic. And it’s fascinating just to be a part of it.”

Not every day offers such fascination. Bone spent much of his morning with the managers of the Divinyls, a young Australian group whose promising debut disc was followed by a disappointing second album. That makes the band’s new release--its third--a crucial record.

Bone watched a rough-cut of the band’s new video, which mixed performance footage with some dreadful concept sequences which did little to capture the charisma of the group’s lead songstress. Proclaiming the clip “pretty awful,” Bone told the managers to re-cut the clip.

Later, talk turned to tour possibilities. “Don’t worry, we’re happy to spend money on tour support,” he said. “It’s like (Capricorn Records founder) Phil Walden used to say: ‘Give ‘em an American Express card, put ‘em out on the road and don’t let ‘em come back ‘till they have a hit.’ ”

As soon as the managers left, Bone was back on the phone, this time with the manager of Sinead O’Connor, a popular young Irish singer with a striking look--a shaved head. Bone counseled against overloading her with interviews and personal appearances.

“Listen, if she feels she’s getting exhausted, cancel some of that stuff,” he said. “Don’t be shy about it. We just had another one of our artists--Paul Carrack--here and he did so many interviews that he blew out his voice when he played that night.”

O’Connor was just in New York, where she fulfilled a longtime ambition--she shaved Bone’s head.

“When I first met her, Sinead seemed very shy,” Bone explained. “So I kidded around with her, trying to put her at ease. And the next thing I knew, I’d promised that if her album sold more than 50,000 copies, I’d shave my head.”

Bone grinned. “We’ve sold well over 150,000 albums, so I owed her.”

As Bone told another manager earlier that day, “Chrysalis is like the Marines--we’re looking for a few good bands.”

It’s not easy being a mini-major record company in an era where a hefty percentage of most label’s profits come from sales of their catalogue--vintage albums which are repackaged and sold (at a higher profit margin) in a Compact Disc format.

Chrysalis isn’t seeing a lot of those profits, since it hasn’t built up a sizable catalogue of hit albums. It’s no wonder Bone sounded a bit jealous when told that even stodgy Atlantic Records, which rarely breaks new artists, turned a profit last year.

“Big deal,” Bone retorted. “Give me (Atlantic’s) Led Zeppelin catalog and my year would be made too.”

Without a guaranteed moneymaker, Chrysalis has struggled in recent years, surviving on profits from hit artists like Huey Lewis and Billy Idol while trying to make stars out of a host of obscure new bands.

If anyone has the energy and ingenuity to help Chrysalis break out of that cycle, it’s Bone, who broke into the music business at age 16 managing the Celtics, a Macon high school band whose founder, Ronnie Hammond, later became lead singer of the Atlanta Rhythm Section.

In 1974, Bone got his first job as a promotion man, working for a Georgia-based record label headed by a sharpie who’s now in a federal pen for distributing pornography (Bone, loyal to anyone who gave him a job, still writes him in jail).

Since then, Bone has worked at Mercury, Arista and Elektra Records. His stunts along the way have become part of industry lore.

At Arista, he promoted an Atlanta concert by the heavy-metal band Krokus by organizing a Miss Heavy Metal Atlanta contest.

“We had about 15 girls on stage, all dressed in these wild outfits, with the audience voting for the winner,” recalled Elektra Records album-rock promotion exec Jeff Cook, who worked at Arista then. “One girl was a clear winner--we took publicity pictures with her backstage and Bone was all over her--kissing her, with his arms around her . . . . “

Cook chuckled. “A few minutes later, this guy came backstage and told us that the ‘girl’ who’d won was actually a ‘he’--a female impersonator! Boy, was Bone surprised.”

More recently, Bone brought down the house at a NARM convention when he took the stage to tout Elektra’s new artists disguised as TV pitchman Joe Isuzu. “I had one of my staff hide behind a curtain with a mike, and whenever I’d say, ‘Our last Motley Crue album sold 87 million copies, making it the largest selling record in history,’ he’d whisper into the mike, ‘He’s lying!’ ”

Bone insists the stunts aren’t just gimmicks. “You can’t imagine how big a part psychology plays in this business,” he said. “The whole idea is to motivate people. But now, instead of just trying to motivate program directors to play a record, I’m motivating my staff to do their job--and get the record played too.”

Although Bone made his reputation getting airplay for his records, he acknowledges that radio is no longer a reliable method for the music industry to expose its new artists.

“Radio’s priority is to sell advertising,” he said. “Our job is to sell records. I’m not interested in signing artists that you have to get on the radio to sell. We’ve got to find artists that really mean something to people--artists that people will feel so passionate about that they’ll still go out and buy their CDs 10 years from now.”

Bone shrugged. “Nothing would be a bigger compliment to me than if whoever takes my job after I’m gone would look at this company and say, ‘Man, whoever that guy was, he sure built a hellacious record machine!’ ”