Music: New Day at Black Rock

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The mood was tense as Columbia Records' annual sales meeting got under way last September in San Francisco. Columbia had recently been rocked to its storage bins by the firing of its adroit, youthful (41) president, Clive Davis, on grounds of improperly diverting corporate funds to personal uses. Fears of a scandal concerning "drugola"—the alleged currying of favor by supplying acid, pot and cocaine to rock groups and disc jockeys—hung over the entire industry, Columbia included. When Davis' successor strode to the podium and began his remarks by quipping: "A funny thing happened to me on my way to retirement," everyone laughed—but not too hard. If there was one person who could clean Columbia's house quickly and thoroughly, and in the process give it new life, it was Goddard Lieberson, 62, the man who during the late 1950s and early '60s pushed it to the top in the first place.

Since 1967, when he stepped aside for his protégé Davis, Lieberson had been toiling in the highest echelons of CBS, Columbia's parent organization, as a senior vice president. Now back in his old territory, he was somewhat appalled. If the record business had finally nosed past the movies as the biggest entertainment medium in the U.S., it had also begun to tilt dangerously out of control. "I came back," says Lieberson, "because I didn't want to see something I'd been building for 25 years go down the drain."

Surprisingly, drugola did not seem to be the central problem. Vestiges of the drug-oriented youth culture of the late '60s linger on in the rock world. But so far there is little likelihood of a scandal approaching the scope of the payola debacle of the '50s. A federal grand jury in Newark is investigating the matter, but is reported to be months away from any conclusions or possible indictments.

What did worry Lieberson right at the start was the shortage of vinyl now beginning to hit the industry hard. Vinyl, known in the trade as PVC (polyvinyl chloride), is the chemical byproduct of crude oil from which records are made. As a result of oil shortages, Columbia has been forced to suspend its $1.98 Harmony pop label; it also trimmed its November output by postponing several releases until 1974. In general, the industry will probably have to opt for greater selectivity in its releases—or, as Lieberson puts it, "an end to buckshotting—throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks."

High Bidding. Lieberson was also concerned that the record world seemed to be "drinking that fatal glass of beer" that many movie studios had taken—a switch in emphasis from artistic control to mere entrepreneurism. Like other large record companies, Columbia under Davis had moved more and more into the distributorship of smaller labels (Stax, Philadelphia International, Monument), more and more into high bidding for established stars (Neil Diamond and Laura Nyro for multimillion dollar deals) and less into its own experimentation and development of talent.