The legendary music industry insider Shep Gordon has been described as a “one-man history of cool.” The minute you meet him, you realize that they weren’t talking about the velvet rope kind of cool, where only a select few are allowed to enter. He’s the kind of chill guy who’s incredibly generous with his time.
Music manager Seth Kallen found this out when he nervously asked Gordon to meet him for a cup of coffee when he and his wife were visiting Hawaii. Gordon’s two-word reply? “Aloha. Sure.”
That eventually led to an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner at Gordon’s house in Maui. The two have remained close to this day, so it makes sense that Kallen, founder of the artist management company This Fiction, would interview Gordon for the release of his memoir They Call Me Supermensch. They chatted a little about the book, and a lot about Gordon’s life, at a stand-room-only event at WeWork Times Square.
Working as manager, agent, and producer for some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry—think Blondie, Alice Cooper, and Teddy Pendergrass—Gordon acknowledges that the music business is just that: a business. But he disagrees that it has to be a cutthroat environment.
Gordon had several pieces of advice for those starting out in the music business—or any business, really.
Don’t stress out if the cannon doesn’t work. One of Gordon’s earliest publicity stunts was shooting rocker Alice Cooper out of a cannon. Cooper was supposed to slip out through a trapdoor, have a dummy propelled through the air, and appear unscathed on the other side of the stage. The dummy only made it about a foot, ruining the trick. Gordon had to resort to plan B, then plan C. “So the cannon worked, the cannon didn’t work—it doesn’t matter,” says Gordon. “I was a young man who didn’t know what he was doing. I hadn’t thought through all the consequences. You live and learn.”
Push forward, even if the see-through clothes fog up. And then there was the time Gordon hit on the brilliant idea of having Cooper get arrested for wearing see-through clothes. They fogged up immediately, making them not at all risqué. The cops wouldn’t go along with the publicity stunt. “Anyone who’s been in a creative field understands rejection,” says Gordon. “It’s a business of rejecting. It’s very rare that an artist isn’t rejected hundreds of times before being accepted. I try to really encourage my artists to embrace the rejection. Every rejection is a step closer to acceptance.”
Treat people kindly, even the jerks. “Being around his holiness the Dalai Lama, I saw how he’s always look at a person and sees the miracle first,” says Gordon. “You can’t change the jerks. You can’t let the jerks win. But you can feel sorry for them and illuminate them along the way.”
Gordon says he realized early on in his decades-long career that he “never really had to hurt anybody to make a living.”
“I stayed with clients for 20 or 30 years and never had a contract,” says Gordon. “The most selfish thing is to be good to everybody. It pays you back.”
Photos: Lauren Kallen