by Larry Harris, Curt Gooch, and Jeff Suhs
Anyone familiar with the KISS anthem “Rock and Roll All Nite” will immediately guess how Larry Harris came up with the title for And Party Every Day, a memoir that focuses on the years he spent working for his cousin Neil Bogart at Casablanca Records in the 1970s. What they may not realize, however, is that KISS was only one act in the veritable circus of stars that called Casablanca home during the entertainment company’s golden age—Donna Summer, the Village People, George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic chief among them. Throughout the book, Harris details the wild risks that Bogart took in order to put his company on the map, and though his high esteem of the record exec’s business acumen in the early days of the company is clear, the author also offers a realistic critique of the choices that eventually led to Casablanca’s downfall. Taking a chance on KISS, for example, showed great foresight, as did signing a wide range of disco acts before the genre really took off. By way of contrast, putting out four simultaneous solo albums by the members of KISS and continuing to sign disco acts after the genre had peaked were a sign that things were starting to go south for the company.
Anyone with an interest in the music and culture of the 1970s will find something to enjoy in this memoir—so much so that if the creators of last year’s HBO series Vinyl had based the show more concretely on Harris’s book, it might have been a hit. Indeed the yawning chasm between that series and And Party Every Day suggests that when it comes to the record industry, truth will always be stranger, not to mention more entertaining, than fiction.
—Marc Schuster,
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Shelf Unbound Contributing Editor Marc Schuster is the author of The Grievers, The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom and Party Girl, Don DeLillo, Jean Baudrillard, and the Consumer Conundrum, and, with Tom Powers, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy: The Discerning Fan’s Guide to Doctor Who. He is the editor of Small Press Reviews, and his work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals. Marc teaches writing and literature courses at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania.