All You Need Is Ears

One way to measure the phenomenal popularity of the rock group Oasis in the volatile band’s native land is to simply take a stroll through the subway stations.

Buskers--people who sing for pocket change in station corridors--are smart enough to concentrate on songs that have touched enough of a chord in passersby to prompt them to drop a few coins in the hat. That’s why for years old favorites by Lennon and McCartney or Bob Dylan have been the ones you would most often hear.

No longer.

It’s now Oasis songs in the subways.

At the Charing Cross tube stop last month, you could hear one busker near a train platform singing “Wonderwall” and another a few hundred feet away singing “Don’t Look Back in Anger.”

The sound couldn’t be sweeter to the ears of Creation Records’ Alan McGee.

He’s the maverick record company owner who was convinced, after seeing the band three years ago in a mostly empty Glasgow club, that Oasis was going to be the biggest band in England since the Beatles.

“To me, it was very simple,” McGee says, 18 million in worldwide album sales later. “After so much dance music in this country, people were hungry for something with attitude--like dance music but with tunes and melodies, and I thought Oasis had both attitude and melodies.

“This band had the sexiest rock ‘n’ roll singer in 25 years, the best songwriter since Lennon-McCartney and the best live act since the Clash. What else do you need?”

That prescient decision has increased the value of Creation, the label McGee founded in 1985 with business partner Dick Green, from around $10 million in 1992 to possibly 10 times that amount, industry sources speculate.

McGee’s success is the latest reminder that the guiding principle in the multi-billion-dollar-a-year record business is: “It’s the music, stupid.”

Despite all the high-stakes conglomerate control and massive star-making machinery, the creative and financial health of the industry boils down to the very simple matter of finding a hit act--and anyone with a good ear has a chance of finding that new act, be it someone at a small independent label or on a giant corporation payroll.

It’s a point also demonstrated recently by artists & repertoire executive Guy Oseary, who signed Alanis Morissette at Los Angeles-based Maverick Records after virtually every other label in the business had turned her down.

David Massey, the A&R; executive with Epic Records in New York who grabbed Oasis for America, describes McGee as the “quintessential record man, . . . a visionary with the ability to identify quality artists in their rawest, earliest stages.”

Oasis leader Noel Gallagher describes McGee as a “madman” about music, someone who is so hyper that he insists you listen to his favorite records, but only plays about 10 seconds of each before going on to another record or lecturing you on why you should like it. Gallagher even suggested that McGee’s tombstone should one day read, “Come Round My Grave and We’ll Play Records.”

Besides discovering Oasis, McGee has signed such critical and/or commercial British successes as the Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine, the Boo Radleys and Ride.

What’s his secret?

“I have the best gig in the world,” says McGee, 36, a former punk musician who has never lost his taste for music with passion and personality. “All I do is sign the artists I personally like and then let the artist be true to himself.

“The worst thing I see record companies do--and I see it all the time--is to try and change the artist to fit the record company’s idea of what is commercial. If the record companies know so much about what is going to work, why don’t they just pick up guitars themselves and make a record?”

McGee is one of the most colorful and respected figures in the British record world. A former bassist who grew up idolizing the Clash and other punk bands from the late ‘70s, the Glasgow native has used his Creation label to showcase some of the most acclaimed British bands of the last decade.

His most important find, until Oasis, was the Jesus and Mary Chain, a band that, for a while in the late ‘80s, looked as if it might enjoy an Oasis-like success. Led by brothers William and Jim Reid, the Mary Chain balanced beautifully dark, tormented themes with a wall of sound that mixed haunting melodies and oppressive feedback.

When the group’s debut album, “Psychocandy,” became the rage of Britain in 1985, McGee thought the sky was the limit. But the Mary Chain never lived up to the commercial potential.

For one thing, the group’s jarring musical vision lacked the accessibility of Oasis. McGee, who managed the Mary Chain until he was fired by the band in 1988, also wonders whether the Reids--who battled in public almost as much as Oasis’ Noel and his singer-brother Liam Gallagher do--had the temperament for stardom. Rather than gain strength from attention and expectations, he says, some musicians seem to retreat.

“That was never the case with Oasis. Noel wanted to be the best and the biggest from the start, and it’s still true,” he says. “That doesn’t mean he has compromised his music. He just knew he was good enough to overcome whatever there was out there.”

Oasis is a hit in the United States, where it has sold an estimated $50 million in albums over the last 18 months, but it is a virtual cottage industry in England, where its two albums, 1994’s “Definitely Maybe” and 1995’s “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?,” have generated an estimated $125 million. With another 600,000 copies or so in sales, “Morning Glory” will pass the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” as the biggest seller ever in the country.

When the band’s abrupt cancellation of its U.S. tour in September led to rumors that the Gallaghers had thrown in the towel, the tabloid press here reacted with a frenzy normally reserved for news about the royal family. And more than a dozen books on Oasis have been published in recent months.

The media and fan attention continued at such a fever pitch even after the group began work on its third album that Oasis decided to move to an undisclosed studio in the countryside.

“They are still together,” confirms McGee. “They just needed to get off the road because they had been touring for 2 1/2 years nonstop and they needed a break. They haven’t had any time to adjust to how big they actually are.”

With Oasis and its manager, Marcus Russell, turning down interview requests while the new album is being recorded, McGee now finds himself the target of lots of media attention. In recent days, he has been contacted by everyone from a Japanese music magazine to Vanity Fair. And he seems to enjoy it.

Yes, he tells everyone who comes by, he felt from the beginning that Oasis could be the biggest band in the world. But no, he couldn’t even imagine how rich it would make him.

If he had, he might have tried to get out of his deal with Sony, which bought 49% interest in London-based Creation in 1992 for about $5 million. At the time, McGee says, he thought it was the best deal in history because his company was some $2 million in debt. Sony apparently just had faith in McGee’s taste--that he would eventually strike gold in a big way.

“Alan had a remarkable track record,” said Epic’s Massey when asked about Sony’s decision to purchase part of Creation. “There are very few labels left where people buy a record simply because it is on a certain label. Thanks to Alan’s taste, Creation is one of those labels. Creation means something to people. When you buy a Creation record, you expect a great, young alternative band.”

Despite the competitiveness of the record business, rival executives in England seem pleased about McGee’s success. One thing many of them say privately is that they are glad that he can now enjoy his success--a reference to a severe drug problem in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s that made some in the British pop world fear for his life.

“I was a drug addict until three years ago,” he says now. “I bought into the rock myth and it almost killed me. I was in Los Angeles when I collapsed at a hotel and they had something like 14 paramedics giving me oxygen. It was like a scene from a bad B movie, but unfortunately I was in the movie. Fortunately, I had enough willpower to help myself.”

With everything going so well in McGee’s world at the moment, it’s hard to rattle him. The one thing that causes him to sputter is the suggestion that Liam Gallagher’s aloof, combative attitude on stage hurts the band, especially in America, where many rock fans dismiss Oasis as poseurs and Beatles copies.

“The truth is, Britain gets Liam Gallagher and America doesn’t get Liam Gallagher,” McGee says forcefully. “People love Liam Gallagher in this country because at the end of the day, he is behaving exactly the way most kids would want to behave. He is an absolute rock ‘n’ roll star. He’s not a fake, like so many of those people in America who go, ‘I don’t want to be a star. It’s too hard. Leave me alone.’ ”

Does he worry that the band’s feuding and fighting antics--as well as the heavy party instincts that led to Liam’s recent arrest for cocaine possession--will destroy the group, or at least keep it from touring again?

“They are fine,” he says. “They haven’t said for sure that they are going to tour when the next album comes out, but I think they will get back on the road. I’ve heard some of the new music and there’s no way a band could make music that strong and not want to go out and play it for people.

“Despite all the things you hear about Oasis, I don’t think they are self-destructive. They are young and they are wild, but they are not going to kill themselves. You don’t sit around waiting for the phone call. . . . It’s not like the Kurt Cobain story, bless his soul.”