Fire in his belly

It doesn’t take long for Miles Copeland to get to conversion stories: tales of the doubters at the concert in Philadelphia, or on the wind-swept Catalonian hill, who didn’t believe they were about to have a life-changing experience.

“I said, ‘This isn’t like something you’ve ever seen before,’ ” recalls Copeland, speaking louder than necessary on the patio of a Hollywood restaurant. “ ‘It’s something you’re gonna enjoy. Believe me, I enjoy it every night.’ They were, ‘Yeah, yeah. Sure, buddy.’ ”

Copeland, 60, is an intense, sometimes Barnum-esque music executive who over the last 25 years has managed or signed such bands as R.E.M. and the Police; he’s the older brother of Police drummer Stewart Copeland. In 1980, Rolling Stone called him “the most successful New Wave entrepreneur in America.”

But these days, he has a new obsession: belly dance. And if it doesn’t become the biggest thing since New Wave, or “Riverdance,” it won’t be for a lack of determination on his part.

“After the show they came up to me,” Copeland says of two men dragged to a concert by their wives. “ ‘That was great! Where are you playing next? That was beautiful!’ ”

Not surprisingly, Copeland is more than a mere enthusiast. He says his interest got serious in 2002, when he sponsored a belly-dance competition at the Knitting Factory in Hollywood to promote an Arabic record and contestants came from all over the country. The upshot was that within a year he had founded his own 12-member troupe, Bellydance Superstars & the Desert Roses. The group has since performed before nearly half a million people on the 2003 Lollapalooza rock tour, done 20 shows in Europe and embarked on a 21-city U.S. tour that will bring it to North Hollywood’s El Portal Theatre tonight and Saturday. It’s also committed to 25 dates in Britain this spring and, after that, two months at the Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco.

Copeland can still remember a roadie on the Lollapalooza tour who, when he saw lithe young women emerging from their tour bus, told him, “They can’t be belly dancers! Belly dancers are supposed to be fat and ugly!”

That just shows, he says, that the art needs an image transfusion. “I’m going after Blue Man Group, ‘Riverdance,’ ‘Lord of the Dance,’ and New York and Boston ballet. That’s my target. I’m not competing with some small belly-dance show in a restaurant. So I had to have girls who had the goods, who had that star quality. They walk in a room and people say, ‘Wow, who’s that?’ ”

He’s also excited about belly dance’s diplomatic possibilities. Having met with Pentagon and State Department officials, he now aims to take his troupe to Egypt. He’s made a documentary about the Superstars and is preparing a concert film that will be partially funded by PBS and, he hopes, will be beamed to Middle Eastern audiences to serve as a “hands-across-the-sea” gesture.

He’s aware of the coals-to-Newcastle irony of these ideas but points to the way the Beatles took American rock ‘n’ roll, rang changes on it and brought it back to America in the 1960s. The point, he says, is to demonstrate to the Muslim world a love for its culture.

In fact, he contends, his is “the most important entertainment show in the world right now! Who else is doing something to show that Americans [are interested in] the rest of the world?”

There are also more belly dancers in the U.S., he says, than in every other country put together. “The best ones I have seen -- and believe me I have seen a lot -- are right here” in California.

Such fervor can make Copeland resemble a backwoods preacher, but he grew up largely in Cairo, Beirut and Damascus, Syria, the Elvis-loving son of a Central Intelligence Agency founder who helped overthrow the Syrian and Iranian governments in the ‘40s and ‘50s. The elder Copeland once told Rolling Stone that “Miles ... should have been in the CIA instead of me.”

After years of earning and losing money on the fringes of Britain’s pop music industry, Copeland founded I.R.S. Records in 1979 in L.A., signing acts that melded a pop sensibility to punk rock, and saw his roster explode on both sides of the Atlantic.

His reputation took a hit in the late ‘80s, however, when many of his acts -- R.E.M., the Fine Young Cannibals, Concrete Blonde, Belinda Carlisle -- defected, in some cases with animosity. He later started the labels Ark 21 and Mondo Melodia, the latter concentrating on the Arabic music he’d been turned on to during a trip to Paris. He hooked up Sting, whom he managed for a quarter century, with the French Algerian rai musician Cheb Mami for the hit song “Desert Rose,” which also showed up in a Copeland-brokered Jaguar commercial.

Many think he’s never matched his original post-punk roster: Working in the lower-profile world music scene, as well as losing Sting a few years ago, they say, has humbled him. Still, he seems to lack self-doubt almost entirely.

“He’s a very loud person. He intimidates a lot of people,” says someone close to the I.R.S. family who asked not to be identified. “He’s got a style, and it’s not for everybody. He could be a scary guy, with that white hair. He could also be very charming, with almost a Southern accent, when he wants to be.”

Danny Goldberg, who once said that Copeland was “brilliant at spotting talent, but ... not particularly brilliant at keeping talent” because of his lack of diplomacy, calls him an innovator.

“He’s a very, very smart guy who’s accomplished a lot over the years,” says Goldberg, a former Warner Bros. Records chief who now runs Artemis Records. “He always wants to break new ground. He’s intense, opinionated. Years ago, when I managed Belinda Carlisle, who’d been on I.R.S., my impression was he was a guy who raised his voice a lot. But I grew to like him. He’s not everybody’s cup of tea.”

Copeland says the rock world -- despite “immature, self-destructive” artists -- was good training to take belly dance mainstream, and not only because everybody takes his calls.

“It’s exactly like punk, where we’d go to these hip little record stores that sold imports and look for fanzines. Well, there’s that sort of infrastructure for belly dance, but it’s on the Web.”

His initial forays showed him that belly dance, which became popular with a million middle-class women in the U.S. in the ‘70s, was thriving from Birmingham to Boise as a women’s health activity. Time magazine, in 2002, called it a post-9/11 Pilates.

“Unlike most dance forms -- like ballet, where if you don’t start when you’re 6 you’re out of the game -- you can get into belly dancing when you’re 40,” he says. “Also, you don’t have to be thin as a rake. It’s kind of like rock ‘n’ roll: You play three chords, you can have fun with it. You go to some of the belly-dance shows -- not mine -- and some of the women are large.”

The contrast between the just-us-girls workout crowd and a purveyor of smoldering eroticism can cause trouble. Dance websites are full of criticism of Copeland’s motivation. “The belly-dance community was scared to death that I was going to pervert the art, just put bimbos onstage. I got hate mail.”

Indeed, much of the form’s current literature frames it as an “empowering” feminist-multicultural passion with numerous health benefits -- a slightly sexier yoga. Copeland calls it “the only art form created by women for women.”

But Anthony Shay, a dance scholar and founding artistic director of Avaz International Dance Theatre, says that public belly dancing -- brought to America for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair by the entrepreneur Sol Bloom, who came up with the name -- is more ambiguous.

“Dancing publicly is considered disgraceful in Muslim cultures,” Shay says, because Islamic women should be dressed modestly and should not be in a public space. He says the dance has attracted a large body of myth over the years, but is essentially a sensual activity and has been for as long as it’s been documented. “No amount of talking about mother goddesses is going to take that aspect out of it.”

Also, public dancing in the Middle East has long been tied to the world’s oldest profession. “Even if a particular woman wasn’t a prostitute, if she performed as a public dancer she was assumed to be,” says Shay, who co-edited the coming book “Bellydance: Orientalism, Transnationalism and Harem Fantasy.”

Jillina, the L.A.-based choreographer of Bellydance Superstars, acknowledges that the scene is largely a women’s world and that Copeland was met with suspicion. But he’s won over a lot of skeptics, she says.

“It’s a misunderstood art form,” says Jillina, who discovered belly dance about a decade ago after training in jazz and hip-hop dance. “One of the proudest things about the show is that we’re able to represent belly dance at the highest levels, at the best theaters. His name can open doors. He puts his money where his mouth is and pays us all really well.”

Copeland’s company has also spun off instructional videos, CDs and belly-dance clothing. But he rejects the suggestion that he’s in it for the money. That’s never been his motivation, he says. “Money is the hardest thing to predict. How do you analyze that?

“My judgment has always been, I don’t need to know about music to know what I like. I don’t need to know why somebody’s beautiful, or why they’re not beautiful. If they walk into a room and I go, ‘Wow, who’s that?’ ... Accept your instinct.”

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Bellydance Superstars & the Desert Roses

Where: El Portal Theatre, 5269 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood

When: 8 p.m. today and Saturday

Price: $25 and $35

Contact: (800) 594-TIXX or www.bellydancesuperstars.com