Shep Gordon

I am so ready to launch. I’ve been in training setting positive intentions my entire life.

Shep Gordon

That’s an interesting question.

Shep Gordon

Thinking as you’re saying, I’ve never even at least a little bit looked at my life through that pairs of glasses. Here is my journey and why those two completely fit together, and I guess, the overwriting thing comes to my mind is that we do all create our universes through positive intentions, and do things for a reason within our universe.

So in my universe and my primary focus of my life has been to make sure that artists aren’t taken advantage of and that they’d given the freedom, which comes from respect and positive intentions they deserve to be able to create their art. That to me is what I do.

With times, I do it from a white horse, and maybe I’m a bit arrogant about it, but that’s the overwriting focus of just about every relationship I have whether it’s with chefs, filmmakers, and musical artists.

There is this struggle that’s gone on historically of people taking advantage of other people. For me, where I fit into the universe, was being someone who would try to keep leveling the playing field that allowing artists to create through positive intentions.

Shep Gordon

In the documentary, I talked about “Get the money. Always remember to get the money. Never forget to get the money,” Because money allows freedom to the artists to do what they want.

My job was to make sure they had the models they needed to do whatever they need to do it with.

Money is a tool to do what you want.

I was at the highest service to my artists by making sure that they got what society was giving out those days for people of their stature.

Shep Gordon

I think you bring up even a bigger issue about connecting positive intentions with money, which is a knee-jerk reaction to the book covers of life. Money is one of the things that have a knee-jerk reaction, “Oh it’s bad.”

I was a hippie for many years, and living with nothing but with just positive intentions. Many people around me would manifest money equals bad, and money cures cancer.

Shep Gordon

It always comes back to positive intentions to me.

Money is marbles or money’s pearls if you were living in Fiji. It’s a barter system. Humans have a trading system.

But it’s so easy particularly in today’s world where nobody looks behind the curtain. They have a knee-jerk reaction to a word, and they just assume. Then the entire luggage that word carries is always there.

Again, it goes way back to positive intentions, which I think is such an important part of everything.

Shep Gordon

Whenever I’m with this holiness, I always never said it. I’ve been fortunate enough to be around more than my fair share. And even though he never talks about that that was my take away from him. He sees the miracle in everything.

If you see the miracle in something or you can be a supportive and loving to it whether it’s a tree, a cat, or a person. The way he talks about the Chinese is amazing.

Wayne Dyer is interesting. I think he lived part time here in Maui where I live. My only connection with him was that he used to come to my New Year’s Benefit every year.

The hardest part of my doing the benefit was the seating chart. Because the artists who sit with the diners before the show was a very high profile list of artists who typically wouldn’t be found in that kind of a setting, very casual.

Every year, everyone fought to sit with Dyer and almost every year, Steven Tyler won. That was my first real contest saying “Who is Wayne Dyer? I can’t believe how people are positioning to get to his table.” I had to bring people over to take pictures with him. It’s wonderful. I believe he may have even passed away here.

Shep Gordon

Yeah, it was a couple of years ago.

Shep Gordon

First and foremost, Alice Cooper because we learned how to walk together. 47 years later, we still haven’t signed the contract. e still love each other. 47 years, I’ve never heard him raise his voice, be angry, use a curse word, crazy.

So first and foremost, him, and we created this character that will live way beyond us through positive intentions. So it’s very exciting.

I would say the second artist I enjoyed working with through a whole different set of reasons is Groucho Marx.  I would say some of my greatest moments with my father, we’re watching either Groucho Marx and all the family, and laughing together. Those are my fondest memories.

When I had an opportunity to work with Groucho, it just was like eating the biggest bowl of Matsu bowl soup in the world, and he was a great guy.

It was fulfilling with working with the chefs, Emeril Lagasse. I was mentored by Roger Verge, a great chef. I can’t imagine what the path of my life would have led to where it led to without him. I always felt I owed him a lot.

Shep Gordon

The thing I was able to give him was I fought respect for his profession, and Emeril Lagasse was the breakthrough artist who I still work with. They trained the chefs and paid the Verge a whole different level of respect and remuneration.

When I started working with the chefs, there wasn’t any chef in America who could send their kids to private school. They never had a night off. They never could spend time creating or helping other people or doing the things they wanted to do. So I’m very proud of that. I would say those are the big ones in my life.

Shep Gordon

Everyone’s been exciting. Every artist has a different journey and has a different need, and it keeps going exciting. I never signed a contract with my artists, which gave me a lot of leverage and the ability, to be honest at least, in my world that I created. I was able to do it in a way that I was always comfortable in my skin doing it. All my relationships were pretty good.

I have one that I didn’t enjoy, and if it wasn’t working, it ended fast because we didn’t have contracts.

Shep Gordon

I don’t know as much about integrity. For me, integrity is given. I take honesty and positive intentions.

There’s not so much for me but the artists. For those of you who have lived in a world of artists, in any field, I don’t want to put a dark cloud over any category of humans. But, you will hear a lot of time, artists talking about how they were ripped off by their record company, their film company, their manager, their agent, their business manager. I never wanted to be that guy.

If you don’t think I’m earning my money, find someone else. You don’t have to go to court. You don’t have to hire a lawyer. That’s not who I want to be. That’s not why I’m here. I’m going to die. That’s the reality. I want to make sure while I’m living, I enjoy my life out of positive intentions. So if it’s not working, it shouldn’t work.

Shep Gordon

I think for any of you, I’m sure you guys have spent enough time around authors and other people who are always complaining about the book company or the press company. It’s part of being an artist, and half the time, it goes back to having a contract. “I couldn’t believe the company. They did a horrible job. I couldn’t leave the manager.” I eliminated all that, which allowed the artist to be honest with me, and that’s the strength of a relationship.

One of my answers when I was first starting to do some talking because I was always a shy talker, I never talked in public. I was with Alice doing something. I spoke about our relationship became the strongest when I realized that he was going to allow me to fail, and then it created an association.

Particularly, as a manager, if you’re going to do something other than getting a coca cola, you got to go out to the edge of the career. You got to push the boundaries. You gotta push through that brand he’s talking to, and how they’re talking.

Shep Gordon

So you have to have the kind of a relationship with the artist where you feel that you can fail, and you pick each other up harder during the failures.

Again, it leads back to that contract moment of feeling whether or not they have to be there.

Shep Gordon

It’s powerful to hear you talk about that because as you speak, you talked about business as a relationship. You mentioned it as a connection to someone, as a link to creativity, to making mistakes.

To me, one of the things I’m picking up from you and have by doing some of the research on you is you’re not like a lot of people where there’s this separation between client and friend or business and personal life. You try to blend it all into one cohesive piece so that there isn’t a part of you that’s somehow disconnected over here, then comes home, and tries to set the bag over there and doesn’t have a connection.

Shep Gordon

Yeah, it’s a holistic journey out of positive intentions.

If you start compartmentalizing things, you spend your whole life trying to remember who you are instead of being who you are.

“I’m going to be a good man here at home. I’m going to be a horrible man in the business. I’m going to be this here. I’m going to be that there.”

Shep Gordon

That’s an interesting question.

Just like everything else in life, everybody’s different, and everything is different.

Shep Gordon

I used to tell clients when they would come into me to talk about a signing, “Listen. If money is what you care about if that’s the end goal for you, there are a lot of guys who can make you a lot more money than I. If your goal is to like not have to use your last name, I’m the right guy for you. I know how to make you famous. I don’t know how to squeeze the money out of a rock.”

That leads me to my answer. I think there is a particular group of managers. There’s no place to go to school for management. There is no place to go.

I think it depends on what point in a career an artist is. If you’re a young artist, then you can find someone who thinks out of the box like me. There are guys along the way who would do that who were renegades. A guy name Doc McGhee was excellent. He’s still around.

Then there are managers who once you’re successful, they know how to make it work. If your goal is an economic gain, which is respectable, I have no problem with that, and those guys have backgrounds. A lot of them went to the business schools. Some are lawyers. Some came out of PR. They’ve had some training in some different areas. I think there are two kinds. But as opposed to doctors or lawyers or accountants, there is no school for managers.

An accountant takes care of your money. He does your taxes. Manager, I had acts that wouldn’t let me see him until the tenth show because they didn’t want me to see the show until it was perfect. I had other acts who I wrote the shows for who showed up the first day, and we’re just, “Okay. What do I do?” So the management role for every artist is different.

My specialty was being crazy.

Shep Gordon

But I had great artists who trusted me and allowed me to fail.

Things like concerts for women only with Teddy Pendergrass. There wasn’t a person in his life we didn’t tell, “You got to fire him.” “You’re going to get sued.” “This is the worst thing you’ve ever done.” The record company was going to pull the file. Everybody said, “Hey. Is it going to work?” I said, “I think so. I believe that this is it.” And he trusted me and launched them.

I felt safe enough that I could fail, and that’s what I try to do with each artist.

With Luther, I came to him and said, “We’re going to do weddings live on radio.” And he looked at me like I was out of my mind. He said, “Are you kidding me?”

“If you want to be the king of romance, what is romance? Weddings. How do you become the king of weddings? Let’s do the weddings.”

Shep Gordon

Oh, yeah. He was for sure. Still probably is.

Shep Gordon

I would say some of the failures were funny. Some of the failures weren’t so funny, so I’ll give you one of each category.

Shep Gordon

I would say my funniest one was Alice, doing his first stadium show at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh. I was trying to think of what would Alice Cooper do at a baseball stadium. It got me one. I said, “You’d get shot out of a cannon across the stadium. What a cool thing.”

So I went to Warner Brothers, the guys who built our props, and asked them if they could do it, and they’re like, “Piece of cake. No problem.”

I made a rookie mistake because I advertised to see Alice get shot out of a cannon. We sold 55,000 tickets. But we had learned earlier in the game, “Did you had a rehearse?” So we go to our first rehearsal. Alice gets in the cannon. It’s a disaster. The dummy comes out 6 inches. Nobody knows what it is.

We don’t know what we’re going to do. He goes to sleep. I see these fire extinguishers in the hotel. They’d put out foam, so I said “I got it. It’s going to be a giant penis, and you get on it, and you masturbate it, and this white foam is going to cover the first 200 rose. It’s going to be fantastic.”

So he gets on, and he masturbates it, and nothing happens. Now, we’re one day away watch Alice get shot out of a cannon by 55,000 people, and I know he’s not getting shot out of a cannon. This is not a good thing.

Shep Gordon

It’s not going to work. As bad as it is for me, he’s the guy who’s going to be on the stage.

Shep Gordon

Yeah.

Shep Gordon

He comes to the show that night, he said, “What are we going to do?” and I said, “You’re probably not going to like this.” and he said, “What?” “I have a feeling. Just a feeling that the cannon is going to blow up tonight and you may have to spend the night in the hospital.” He said, “Are you kidding?” I said, “No but I think it’s going to be okay.”

So he got in and flew up. We had a fabulous way. He did the whole sling. We had a crew in from Pittsburgh filming it, so they put it on the news that Alice got blown up the night before.

We had a roadie dressed as a doctor, and we did a press conference at the hotel in the morning, around the corner from the hospital. We make believe he was a doctor, and he said, “Alice, do the show.”

He may have to be in a wheelchair, but he doesn’t want to disappoint the people of Pittsburgh. We did the show, and the headline was “Only Alice Cooper would come and perform in a wheelchair.”

Shep Gordon

That was the good one.

Shep Gordon

The bad one was probably my biggest failure as a manager. It’s still tough to talk about. Teddy Pendergrass has an accident, quadriplegic.

My job is to make sure his family supported and that he can support himself.

Career is secondary. Survival is primary.

I figure I don’t have a lot of bullets in my gun, so I keep him away from everybody. No press, no photos, no conversation, no anything.

I know there’s millions of women who made love to Teddy and who loved Teddy. They are waiting to hear “I was there, Teddy,” and it’s their Teddy. It’s very personal. Teddy’s relationship was very one on one. His songs were “Close the door, come in here.” They were very one on one.

So I knew that first moment had to be very special, and I knew that I was talking to one person, not millions. I was talking to one person who would cry a hundred times about Teddy having this accident and was going to see and hear him for the first time. I support hard. I got a chance to do a beautiful 20-minute video that was taken in Teddy’s high school gymnasium.

It starts off with him in the wheelchair which comes in tight by the first lyric. So hopefully you’ve forgotten he’s in a wheelchair by the first lyric.

Now the camera comes in, the first words he says to you, “You’ve been sitting there for three years as I’ve been up, and I’ve been down, but I have never been in love like this before.” It’s powerful even when I say it now.

In about five weeks before the record came out, the record company, called me they were changing the single. I asked, “What was they were changing it too?” They were changing it to a duet with Whitney Houston. Teddy’s first words are “I want to hold you in my arms tonight.” But Teddy doesn’t have hands. He’s going to say that to that woman, who’s been waiting three years, and she’s going to turn the radio off and go on with her life and say “Not too bad, ” and I couldn’t stop it. The rest is history.

So it’s not always fun and games being a manager. But you do what you got to do.

I asked his holiness in a board meeting once, “How do you go to sleep having lost your country?” And he said, “You do the best you can do, and that’s all you can do. It’s the best you can do.” It’s about positive Intentions.

Shep Gordon

I can imagine. Yeah.

Shep Gordon

I would like to get the other lyrics of that voice though.

Shep Gordon

Anyone who’s listening, it’s crucial to go out, and vote, and get your country back whatever your foot at is, get involved because it needs all of you right now.

I think it’s a darker time that I’ve ever seen. It’s way beyond me.

It takes millions and millions of people to want to do something out of positive intentions, and it’s a tough task.

I think engagement would be my word for the day. It’s engagement with positive intentions.

Shep Gordon

Thank you. Aloha and visit Maui.