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  For Thalia, the angel who dropped into my arms from the sky. Your eternal love and commitment, and my long journey to find you, has changed my life forever. Te amo mucho por siempre.

  For Sabrina, whose beautiful sparkle makes me believe that dreams really do come true. When you wake in the morning and I hear you say, “I love you, Popi,” it’s like hearing music for the first time.

  For Matthew, whose huge smile and enthusiasm to spread it make me stop and count my blessings twenty times a day.

  For Sarah, my precious princess, who has taught me more than she’ll ever realize, and who I love more than she’ll ever know.

  For Michael, who has the kindest heart and the strength that comes with it, and who makes me proud as a father simply to see him as a brother.

  For Mom and Dad, who were there for me every step of the way, who filled my days with love, music, great food, and the most festive Christmases ever, who made me everything I am, and who I miss every day.

  For my dear sisters, the twins, Jean and Joan, and Mary Ann, to whom I apologize for terrorizing for the first five years of my life, but also thank for giving me a complete sense of family, and for that radio blasting out of their bedroom every day.

  Introduction

  When you see the songs set at the beginning of each chapter, you’ll be looking at a snapshot of the music that helped inspire and define me. Though they’re not set in chronological order, these songs became the fabric and sound track of my life.

  These are just some of the songs, melodies, and lyrics—as simple as they were sometimes—that helped me do what I did and become who I am.

  By the end of this book, you will have gone through a library of music that had an overwhelming and profound influence on my life—all the way from Elvis to the iPod. It was without a doubt the most golden age of music in history, and the voices at the end of various chapters will offer other takes on what was happening during this amazing time.

  I know you’re curious about my involvement with Mariah and Michael and Bruce and Billy Joel and so many other great artists from this dazzling period that will never be duplicated. I’ll get into all that.

  Maybe you’re interested in knowing what the star-making development process was like before it became releasing a song and going viral on YouTube. Or how the Latin Explosion got started. Or what it was like when Napster came along and music was ripped away from the artists and the companies that were producing it. I felt the earthquake coming. We had many plans to restructure at the time, including trying to have Sony work in tandem with Apple at the cutting edge of the digital era, and maybe you’ll be interested to know why that didn’t happen. I’ll get to all of that, too.

  Eight billion units of CDs and cassettes were sold during my fifteen-year tenure as chairman of Sony Music. It will take some explaining to cover the strategies we used during that time to reach $65 billion in sales.

  But nothing I say will have perspective unless you take a walk with me in the place where I first heard the music: the Bronx. So we’ll start at the intersection of 187th Street and Arthur Avenue.

  The beauty of going to Arthur Avenue is that it always opens its arms and takes you back even if you’ve never been there before.

  There are no longer teenagers singing doo-wop on the corners, and there are now flatscreen TVs in all the restaurants and bars. But outside of that, Arthur Avenue doesn’t look much different than it did when I was a kid.

  The butcher. The fish market. The bakery. The pasta store. The fruit stands at the huge indoor market. The old-school espresso machine at DeLillo’s pastry shop. There aren’t many other places in America where you can find lettering over a restaurant’s doorway that says Five Generations. Hey, you want some clams? We can have them fresh, right on the street, they’re over there on ice in front of Cosenza’s. Let’s get a dozen. Here, try it with a little cocktail sauce with horseradish, a touch of vinegar, a squeeze of lemon, and a drop of Tabasco. What did I tell you? The best!

  You get your mozzarella fresh out of the water at Casa Della Mozzarella. And your onion bread at Madonia Brothers—but remember, they only make it on weekends. Look, there’s Full Moon Pizzeria. It was the first stop to feel better after every funeral when I was a kid. In this neighborhood, there’s a pizzeria on almost every block. But each one does it a little differently, which gives you its own particular reason to come through the door. It’s like music.

  Arthur Avenue was one of my first tastemakers. It taught me what is good.

  We all went to church at Our Lady of Mount Carmel. The people who got married there when I was a kid didn’t get divorced.

  My parents were married for seventy years. It’s important that you know that because family framed my youth. Music has taken me around the world, and I was fortunate enough to meet and work with some of the biggest stars and most influential people in business. But my successes were accompanied by personal mistakes—some very public. In so many ways, I’ve spent much of my life trying to become the man that my father was.

  My father, Thomas Mottola Sr., was a quiet man whose sole mission in life was to take care of his family. I couldn’t imagine having a better dad. It was no secret what drove his complete devotion to his children, and to me in particular. My father never knew his father. The only image he had was a framed photo of his dad in an Italian army uniform. I don’t think he ever found out how his father died. My father was born on Bleecker Street in Manhattan, as the nation was struggling through some hard financial times. His brother and a sister were taken in by a kind woman who owned a farm in the Bronx and could better care for them. That was how it was done back then.

  As a teenager, my father went to Roosevelt High School on Fordham Road in the Bronx at night so that he could work during the day downtown as a runner for a customs brokerage firm. He ran entry forms to the Customs House for approval, enabling the importers’ goods to enter the country. After scraping together $750, he left the company he was working for and started his own business. It was called Atlas Shipping. His office was the definition of paperwork and drudgery. Every case of liquor brought in by Seagram’s and every crate of furnishings made in India had to be meticulously documented. While it didn’t elicit passion, this work took care of his family, and very well. I watched my father go off every morning like clockwork, and I often went with my mother to the train station in the evening to pick him up. He steadily moved us up from a small apartment only a few blocks from Arthur Avenue. First, to a home connected side by side with another only a few miles away on Pelham Parkway. And then, eight years later, to a comfortable suburban house about thirty minutes north in New Rochelle that might have been his father’s idea of the American Dream.

  My father wasted little time when it came to starting a family. He met my mother—Lena Bonetti, whom everyone knew as Peggy—when she was fifteen in the Fordham neighborhood of the Bronx. My mother had wanted to be a singer. But her father was very strict and traditional. He did not believe it respectful for a young woman to go into show business. When she told him of her career aspirations, he made his point by smacking her across the face.

  I remember how my mother loved to sing, but she did so only in church
as a child, or in our home in the company of family and friends. My father played the piano and the ukulele, and my uncles joined in on the guitar. On weekends, the family room in my house was filled with food, guests, food, music, food, laughter, and more food. The foundation of my parents’ marriage couldn’t have been more solid or clear. They had a common ancestry—her family came from Naples and Bari, and his came from Naples and Avellino. They had their church and religious traditions. They shared an unrelenting devotion to their kids. And underneath all that and the personal chemistry, Thomas and Peggy Mottola were connected by a love of family meals and music.

  My parents had three daughters long before I was born: Jean and Joan, the twins; and Mary Ann. But they’d always wanted a boy, so my arrival made me the Christ child. The godfather they chose for me bore little resemblance to Marlon Brando or Al Pacino. His name was Victor Campione and, early on in his life, he’d worked for the FBI. So much for stereotypes.

  After he left law enforcement, my godfather decided to go into local politics, and he eventually evolved into the Democratic district leader of the Bronx. Uncle Vic was one of those guys who wielded tremendous power behind the scenes in the age of Tammany Hall, a kingmaker, who helped people like Abe Beame get elected mayor of New York City. He was a stern and direct man, and you paid attention to his every word. All I had to do was look at Uncle Vic to know that it was my duty in life to become a prominent professional and make my parents proud.

  My three older sisters had grown and moved out of the house by the time I was five. That gave me 1,000 percent of my parents’ time. My mother took me to school. She picked me up from school. She worked with me on my homework. She rubbed me down with alcohol when I had a fever. She was also the disciplinarian. She had to be. I could do no wrong in my father’s eyes. Once, when I was very young, maybe three or four years old, I was in the basement playing with a hammer and hit one of my older sisters in the head. When she complained, my father asked: “Who left the hammer out?”

  I was bursting with a boundless energy that today would probably be diagnosed as ADD. It sure came in handy much later on when I became chairman of Sony Music, because that kind of energy and personality was perfectly suited to the constantly shifting demands of the job. But it got me into some trouble when I was young, even though I wasn’t a bad kid, because I was incredibly restless and always sticking my nose into something new. My oldest friend, Ronny Parlato, remembers a day when I turned the ignition key that had been left in a bulldozer and drove it around the empty lot behind my home on Pelham Parkway. He swears I was only three years old at the time. My endless supply of energy often took me where I wasn’t supposed to be, and I rarely met a wall that I didn’t want to smash through.

  The Christian Brothers of Ireland at Iona Grammar School in New Rochelle had ways of dealing with kids who deviated from their rigid expectations. The brothers used to walk around with cat’s-paw straps under the sleeves of their habits and whack you if you got out of line. Once, I stuck my tongue out at the principal and another kid snitched. The principal took me into his office and beat the crap out of me. That night, when I was getting into the bathtub, my mother noticed bruises and welts on my behind. She immediately told my father. My father was the kindest and sweetest man you could imagine. But you’d never want to threaten or harm his children because that sweet man would turn ferocious in a way that you didn’t want to imagine. My father didn’t say a word—he just put on his coat, left the house, and went directly to see the principal. I was never told what was said or what transpired. But I can tell you that the Christian Brothers of Ireland never touched me again.

  C’mon, let’s go to Dominick’s and get a quick bite to eat.

  Oh, boy, we’re only on page 6 and I’m already in trouble. I just know the hard time I’m going to get from my friends at Roberto’s and a few other restaurants for not choosing their place. Listen, before you die you’ve got to go to Roberto’s for the cavatelli with sausage and broccoli rabe sautéed in garlic and oil because it’s to die for. But that’s another meal for another day.

  By the way, there are no menus at Dominick’s. Either you tell the waiter what you want and you get it, or he tells you what you want and you get it. There are long tables. Everyone sits together. If there’s one place you want to eat in your life with your best friend, it’s Dominick’s.

  And right now I want to talk about my oldest and dearest friend. My connection with Ronny Parlato will explain a few things that may surprise you. For instance, you probably didn’t know that I once converted to Judaism. It’s a long story, and we’ll get there in time. But it all starts with Ronny and the neighborhood I grew up in.

  The Pelham Parkway neighborhood where I first started to hang around with Ronny was a mixture of Italian and Jewish families, and Ronny was a mixture himself. His mother was Jewish and his father was Italian.

  My mother and Ronny’s mother, Libby, were like sisters. No, they were closer than sisters—almost joined together at the hip. As soon as we moved from the Bronx to New Rochelle, Ronny’s mother and father moved from the Bronx to New Rochelle. Every day Peggy and Libby would go out together.

  When Ronny celebrated Chanukah there was always a present for me as we lit the candles of the menorah. My parents sent me to an all-Jewish camp for a couple of summers that included Friday night services. So I knew what it was like to put on a yarmulke, light candles, follow the prayers in Hebrew, and drink Manischewitz. I thought it was fun to say baruch. I always liked the khhhhhhhh sound.

  Likewise, there was always a present under my family’s Christmas tree for Ronny. Every year my mother would prepare almost thirty different seafood dishes to celebrate the holiday, and over the years Ronny probably tasted every one of them. I can’t remember a better time than my childhood Christmases. But from early on I was comfortable at any holiday. Religion seemed and felt seamless to me. The only walls I didn’t have to smash through in life were religious and cultural walls. They didn’t exist for me. That was a gift from the streets of the Bronx.

  I soon was putting a towel around my shoulders in the school bathroom so it would look like a cape when I tried to mimic the dance moves of James Brown singing “Please, Please, Please.” When I was about fourteen my parents allowed me on many occasions to take the train to Harlem with my friends to watch Stevie Wonder, Wilson Pickett, and Joe Tex sing at the Apollo Theater. When I met Gloria and Emilio Estefan nearly twenty-five years later, they were immediately like family because their Cuban culture made me feel like I was back in the Bronx. This openness to all cultures became a real strength as I became the head of a multinational corporation, and it also was reflected in my personal life. My first wife was Jewish; my second was part Irish, part black, and part Venezuelan; and the beautiful woman I now wake up to every morning, Thalia, was born and raised in Mexico City. So, years later, when Michael Jackson staged a press conference to call me a racist and a devil, it had nothing to do with race, heaven, or hell. It had to do with an artist who was starting to melt down because he couldn’t adjust to his shrinking album sales. Michael was lashing out at authority and simply looking for a way to get out of his contract with Sony.

  The attack was sad and pathetic. As the head of the company, I remained above the fray and most certainly did not comment on it. Now that Michael has passed there’s little benefit to me in bringing the incident back up. But if you know me, you know that I’m not the kind of guy to avoid it. This is the story of my life, and it’s important to get it straight for the record. So I’ll tell you what really happened. You just have to be patient. It’ll be a little while before we get there.

  You want some wine?

  One of the things that writing a book about your life forces you to do is to think back on the earliest moments that helped turn you into what you have become.

  For me, timing and growing up in the Bronx were key elements. On the day I was born I had fifteen-year-old twin sisters and a thirteen-year-old sister. From the first
day I woke up in the tiny apartment that was our home, my ears were listening to pop hits blasting from the radio in their room. As soon as I could walk, I would stop in my tracks when I heard different sounds that attracted me—and my mother was keenly aware of this. She’d be holding me by the hand as we walked to Alexander’s department store on the Grand Concourse and Fordham Road when I’d just stop, stand still, and listen to the sound of music coming out of the many storefronts up and down the street. When that happened, she didn’t impatiently tug me along. She’d stop and even sing the melody to me.

  There were so many diverse sounds booming out of those stores—doo-wop, salsa, rock, Sinatra—or if you were shopping late on a Thursday night, you might even hear Tito Puente’s band playing on the Concourse. Back in my home I would hear my mother sing and my sisters harmonize every single day, and on weekends I would watch my father on ukulele and my uncle Ray on guitar. Music was around me from morning till night. From the time I was two years old I would climb on the stool and bang on the keys of our family’s piano.

  But there was one single defining moment that ran through me like a bolt of electricity when I was eight years old: that was the first time I heard “Don’t Be Cruel” blasting through my sisters’ AM radio. The beat and the rhythm of that song branded me forever and was everything that motivated and inspired me to become what I became. Elvis Presley, the King.

  I pestered my mother relentlessly to take me to the record store on Fordham Road, and I reached into the bin with two hands for my very first album. That first album was Elvis’s first album. I loved everything about it. I loved the photo of Elvis in action on the cover with his mouth wide open, his eyes closed, and the guitar in his hands. Elvis was spelled in pink vertically down the left side of the album and Presley came horizontally across the bottom in green. I loved looking at the RCA label in the upper right-hand corner with the dog listening to the gramophone. I loved taking off the plastic shrink-wrap. I loved smelling the vinyl as I slipped the album out of its thin paper sleeve. And I loved placing the record on the turntable, setting the hi-fi to 33 1/3, picking up the arm, and lowering the needle into the groove. In my mind and in my ears back then, the clicks and pops on that vinyl actually enhanced the sound of the music.