Mariah Carey Connection

Don Ienner, IMO president/owner and the former Sony Music chief, recently sat down with Billboard for his first extensive, on-the-record talk in more than a decade.

Below, is an abstract from the first of a two-part, extended sit-down, Ienner touches on his early days in the music business, his mentors, working with music icons like Mariah Carey:

What did that look like? I mean, strategically, what were the biggest challenges and what did you have to do?

The foundation of, to me anyway, of Columbia, obviously was Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Barbara Streisand, Neil Diamond and Tony Bennett. But, we were nowhere in the alternative music area. On my first trip to the West Coast for Columbia, in May of ’89, I heard two bands and we signed them both. And we broke both those bands – Alice In Chains and Toad The Wet Sprocket – and that was a really important thing for us to do. I brought in Steve Tip, he was maybe the most important marketing and promotion executive at Warner for alternative music. We built street teams. Obviously, Tommy had signed Mariah Carey and that was a wonderful way to kick off the new Columbia, and we worked very closely on it, from a creative standpoint, from a marketing standpoint and, really, it was an incredible run.

You were there when that first record came out, “Vision of Love”?

I was the head of the company and “Vision of Love” was my pick. Not too many people wanted that song, but that was the one that I knew was the pick because it was an R&B record, and it was only her—she was the only one that could have written and sung that song. Of all the great songs on that album, this is the one that I felt would define her most, and it went on to be one of the songs of the year. Number 1 R&B record, number 1 pop record. It set up an incredible string of number 1’s for her.

What do you think of Mariah’s career trajectory at this point?

Well I’m thrilled that she had a comeback from the unpleasantries of a few years ago, with the movie ["Glitter"] and everything. It just shows her resilience and it shows she stays in touch, she stays current, she knows what she’s doing.

You’ve signed and worked with all of these great bands over the years. Do you have some sense when an act will have this sort of monolithic career, versus an act that’s going to have a few hits and maybe not a whole lot more?

There clearly and absolutely were. You need luck. Sometimes you’d rather be lucky than smart. For example, the New Kids [On The Block] were on Columbia. Before I got there they were going to be dropped, from what I heard. I just did a “Behind the Music” where they brought that up and I didn’t think that we should drop them. I wanted to get a second shot at what they were going to do because I thought they were good and I thought [producer] Maurice [Starr] was great. They were sort of robots on that first record – very, very young – but they had something to offer and I made it a priority at the company that we go after it. Obviously, the rest is history. Even as that was going on, once you had that sort of success – I called Maurice one day and said we should make a Christmas album and I think that was in August. Ten days later a Christmas album appeared at my desk and we sold like 3 million copies. So, we go from there into Mariah Carey, into lord knows whatever else was going on at the time, and all of a sudden we became the hottest record company in the world. It was gratifying.

Source: Billboard Magazine