Giorgio Gomelsky Dead at 81

[Strider]

A man who needs no introduction if you're a fan of the Yardbirds, Rolling Stones, and British music history in general, Giorgio Gomelsky has died of colon cancer. He was 81 years old. And yes, a man of this stature deserves a thread of his own! 

Rest in Peace Giorgio Gomelsky.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/01/15/arts/music/giorgio-gomelsky-rock-producer-who-gave-the-rolling-stones-their-start-dies-at-81.html?_r=0&referer=http://www.google.com/

[Strider]

Mojo Magazine's obituary...

http://www.mojo4music.com/22872/giorgio-gomelsky-1934-2016/

 

[kingzoso]

Giorgio Gomelsky was the man that told Peter Grant, after Peter took over the management control of the Yardbirds, that Peter better be aware of one Jimmy Page.  According to Peter, Giorgio said that Jimmy Page was a trouble-maker and asked too many questions about the Yardbirds finances and royalties. 

According to legend, when Peter regaled this tale to Pagey, Jimmy 'said your damn right we did tours of America, Australia, etc... and we only received a check for 115 pounds' (I am paraphrasing because I do not know the exact words or quotes) but this is actually a somewhat accurate summation of what I have read from a couple of different and actual sources (books).

[reswati]

 

43 minutes ago, SteveAJones said:

Yes, you are!

I'm glad we cleared this up.

Good for you fat Texan, hope you enjoyed the attention.

Now back to topic please.

 

 

[SteveAJones]

38 minutes ago, reswati said:

 

Good for you fat Texan, hope you enjoyed the attention.

Now back to topic please.

Not fat, not a Texan and never seek your attention, cyber-stalker.

 

 

[Patrycja]

12 minutes ago, the chase said:

Boy.. this is shaping into a moving tribute. 

... every tribute thread, man, it's like some weird OCD about denigrating them. I hope the mods consider cleaning it up like they did the 'Happy New Year' thread from the shameless posts that have no redeemable contribution whatsoever.

Anyway, rest in peace, Giorgio, and thank you.

[Walter]

My listing said Scarlet McCaw had made the last post here - what happened?

I agree, Strider, anyone associated with the band is official news for the official website of Led Zeppelin.

RIP Giorgio.

15 hours ago, Patrycja said:

... every tribute thread, man, it's like some weird OCD about denigrating them. I hope the mods consider cleaning it up like they did the 'Happy New Year' thread from the shameless posts that have no redeemable contribution whatsoever.

Anyway, rest in peace, Giorgio, and thank you.

Spot on, as usual, Patrycja!

[luvlz2]

On 1/16/2016 at 2:38 AM, kingzoso said:

Giorgio Gomelsky was the man that told Peter Grant, after Peter took over the management control of the Yardbirds, that Peter better be aware of one Jimmy Page.  According to Peter, Giorgio said that Jimmy Page was a trouble-maker and asked too many questions about the Yardbirds finances and royalties. 

According to legend, when Peter regaled this tale to Pagey, Jimmy 'said your damn right we did tours of America, Australia, etc... and we only received a check for 115 pounds' (I am paraphrasing because I do not know the exact words or quotes) but this is actually a somewhat accurate summation of what I have read from a couple of different and actual sources (books).

OK I remember reading about that, R.I.P. Giogio Gomelsky.

[Patrycja]

6 hours ago, Walter said:

My listing said Scarlet McCaw had made the last post here - what happened?

I agree, Strider, anyone associated with the band is official news for the official website of Led Zeppelin.

RIP Giorgio.

Spot on, as usual, Patrycja!

Thanks, Walter  I appreciate that this thread has been cleaned up, thank you. Also, thanks to Strider for starting it. Even if people aren't familiar with Giorgio Gomelsky, they have an opportunity to learn about his part in music (in general) and Yardbirds (In particular) history which is easier to find and focus on in a separate tribute thread.

[Disco Duck]

On 1/16/2016 at 3:38 AM, kingzoso said:

Giorgio Gomelsky was the man that told Peter Grant, after Peter took over the management control of the Yardbirds, that Peter better be aware of one Jimmy Page.  According to Peter, Giorgio said that Jimmy Page was a trouble-maker and asked too many questions about the Yardbirds finances and royalties. 

According to legend, when Peter regaled this tale to Pagey, Jimmy 'said your damn right we did tours of America, Australia, etc... and we only received a check for 115 pounds' (I am paraphrasing because I do not know the exact words or quotes) but this is actually a somewhat accurate summation of what I have read from a couple of different and actual sources (books).

Wait, I thought Simon Napier-Bell was the Yardbirds' manager with whom Jimmy Page crossed swords.  I thought he had already taken over as the band's manager by the time Page joined them.  Do I have my Yardbirds history wrong?

From what I've read, Giorgio Gomelsky was responsible for Jeff Beck's haircut.  Apparently when Beck joined the Yardbirds, Gomelsky thought he looked too square so he took him to a Carnaby Street hair salon for a makeover.  Beck has worn his hair in various versions of this cut ever since.  

[kingzoso]

3 hours ago, Disco Duck said:

Wait, I thought Simon Napier-Bell was the Yardbirds' manager with whom Jimmy Page crossed swords.  I thought he had already taken over as the band's manager by the time Page joined them.  Do I have my Yardbirds history wrong?

Actually, you are correct.  Gomelsky was the first manager of the Yardbirds who sold his interest to Simon Napier-Bell.  It was Napier-Bell who tried to warn Peter Grant about Jimmy. 

[Kiwi_Zep_Fan87]

For those who don't quite know who Giorgio Gomelsky was and who are rather afraid to ask, well, here is a pretty informative write-up

On a side note, I really appreciate the fact that Sam was able to effectively wipe-out, all the needless and petty childish drivel that was being spewed around this thread.

Giorgio Gomelsky

Founder of the Crawdaddy Club, where the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds got their first break

Giorgio Gomelsky in 1964

Giorgio Gomelsky,who has died aged 82, was one of the unsung heroes of the 1960s British rock scene as the operator of the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond-upon-Thames; he was effectively the Rolling Stones’ first manager, showed the young Beatles around London, produced the Yardbirds and put the Animals on stage.

He established the Crawdaddy Club (the name derived from Bo Diddley’s song “Doing the Craw-Daddy”) in a dingy back room of Richmond’s Station Hotel in January 1963, with the Dave Hunt Rhythm & Blues Band as its first house band. Gomelsky had already heard of the Rolling Stones, then a struggling blues tribute band, having met Brian Jones, who had formed the Stones in 1962. “At the Marquee and in the music pubs, Brian Jones had been bending my ear constantly,” Gomelsky recalled. “He used to say to me, 'Giorgio, Giorgio, you gotta come hear my band. Thith ith the betht blueth band in the land. Weally. Weally. Why are you not coming?’” When Hunt did not show one Sunday night, Gomelsky called the Stones’ piano player Ian Stewart and told him the gig was theirs. The fee was £1 each plus a share of the door takings.

Giorgio Gomelsky and Brian Jones in 1964  Photo: Redferns

It was not a commercial success (later, Gomelsky speculated that posters promising “Rhythm and Bulse” had not helped) and Gomelsky had to plead with customers of the main hotel to come, offering two tickets for the price of one. Within three weeks, however, word had spread and the Stones took over the residency; by April they had two gigs a week at the Crawdaddy. Reviews ranged from ecstatic to horrified. “I didn’t know whether to laugh at the Stones or call for an animal trainer,” said one watching promoter.

In the meantime Gomelsky had befriended a group called the Beatles who were a big noise in Liverpool and had come to London for the first time in early 1963; in April he invited them to the Crawdaddy to see his new house band. Bill Wyman recalled: “ Soon after we began our first set, we were staggered to see the four Beatles standing and watching us. They were dressed identically in long leather overcoats. I became very nervous, and said to myself: 'S---, that’s the Beatles!’ ” Afterwards they all went back to Mick Jagger’s flat in Chelsea.

Giorgio Gomelsky and Mick Jagger in 1964  Photo: Redferns

In June however, Ind Coope Breweries, owners of the Station Hotel, disturbed by press reports of degenerate behaviour and audiences overflowing on to the street, invited Gomelsky to find another home for his club.

He moved to a bar underneath the grandstand at the grounds of the Richmond Athletic Association, which was already playing host to the annual National Jazz Festival. The Stones played there, scoring their first chart hit, a cover of Chuck Berry’s Come On, along with the Paramounts (who became Procol Harum), the Muleskinners (some of whose members formed the Small Faces), the Moody Blues, and the Animals, who came down from Newcastle. Later that year Gomelsky managed to book the Stones into the third annual Richmond Jazz Festival . It eventually evolved into the Reading Festival.

In the meantime, however, the Stones had met Andrew Loog Oldham, a young publicist who had done work for the Beatles and soon signed the Stones to a management contract , effectively stealing them from Gomelsky – and the Crawdaddy. They played their last gig there on September 22.

Later Bill Wyman cited their treatment of Gomelsky as “a fairly brutal example of how useful allies and kindred spirits were jettisoned when an act got a sniff of success… just chopping [Giorgio] out of the gang was insensitive, to put it mildly.” Later Gomelsky discovered that one of the reasons his “friend” Brian Jones had given to other group members for the switch was that “they shouldn’t trust a 'foreigner’ like me to manage their affairs”.

Shortly after the Stones’ departure, Gomelsky was taken by a friend to hear a young band “rehearsing on top of a pub in East Sheen”. “As we’re going up the stairs,” he recalled, “I hear ta-ta-ta-ta TATATATA. They’re playing a sort of manic accelerando, and it caught my ear instantly … Open the door and there they are – the Yardbirds. The first thing I told them when the song finally stopped was: 'You got the job.’ ”

The Yardbirds and friends with (left, front) screenwriter and playwright Lord (Ted) Willis and ( front, back turned) Giorgio Gomelsky  Photo: Redferns

Gomelsky took a more active role in the Yardbirds career than he had with the Stones, as their official manager and producer. After Eric Clapton joined the band in October 1963, replacing Anthony “Top” Topham as its lead guitarist, it was Gomelsky who coined his nickname “Slowhand”, both as an ironic reference to his ultrafast riffs and to the slow handclaps of the audience whenever he broke a string on his Telecaster and had to replace it.

Gomelsky signed the Yardbirds to EMI’s Columbia label, and managed their tours and gigs . He was also instrumental in Clapton’s decision to leave the group, having persuaded the other members to record the Graham Gouldman composition For Your Love, which became their first big hit but which Clapton, a blues purist, found too “poppy”. The good news was that Clapton was replaced by Jeff Beck .

(l-r) Giorgio Gomelsky, Eric Clapton and screenwriter and playwright Lord (Ted) Willis at Willis's country house in 1964  Photo: Redferns

But Gomelsky’s relationship with the Yardbirds eventually soured – the group were reportedly irritated by some of his publicity ideas – and they fired him in 1966.

The following year he founded Paragon, a design and public relations company with a record label, Marmalade, which had a Top 10 hit in 1968 with This Wheel’s on Fire, sung by Julie Driscoll with Brian Auger & the Trinity, and also produced early recordings by Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page , Rod Stewart and others.

The fact that his firm was otherwise not a great commercial success did not bother Gomelsky: “At Paragon I had 35 employees. Swinging… All these record business guys when they came to London wanted to have a good time, wanted to get laid. We had this collection of call girls. These girls were so good, after two days these guys were [exhausted]. So we’d have the girls for the rest of the 'booking,’ and they’d come to my office at 4 o’clock in the morning and do dances for us. Oh man, we had such great fun.”

At the end of 1969, however, he fell out with Polydor Records and Deutsche Grammophon, which had provided much of the finance for his new venture, and decamped to France, never to return to London. “By then the Brits had blown it,” he explained later. “They had been seduced by the American dream of making a lot of money playing music in incredibly bad conditions like stadiums.’’

 

Giorgio Gomelsky was born on February 28 1934 in Tiflis in then-Soviet Georgia. The family fled Stalinist oppression in 1938 and after a nomadic six years in Syria, Egypt, and Italy, settled in Switzerland in 1944. Georgio was educated at a Benedictine school in Ascona and later at a progressive private school, the School of Humanity, in Hasliberg Goldern.

Aged 13 he took off and hitchhiked his way around European jazz clubs and existentialist cafes. By 15 he was writing reviews for an Italian jazz magazine . He played drums with his own trio and in 1953 organised the first Zurich open-air jazz festival, ZuriFest.

By this time his parents had divorced and his mother, a milliner, had moved to London. Gomelsky, who learnt English at school by reading copies of Melody Maker , followed her in 1955. “There was no nightlife to speak of, everything was grey and depressed,” he recalled. “I was used to being up all night in cafes and clubs on the continent, discussing the future of humanity and scheming away at stirring things up. This bohemian culture just didn’t exist in London.”

Hoping to make things “happen”, he and friends set up the Olympic Coffee Bar, with an Italian expresso coffee machine, in a street off the King’s Road: “Soon, all the young heads with something to say showed up. ”

Things looked up when the London County Council changed the licensing laws to allow clubs to serve drinks until 3am if food was also sold, inaugurating the thriving London jazz club scene of the 1960s. When some clubs began giving up nights to non-trad jazz bands, Gomelsky introduced r&b nights, one of which was at the Marquee Club, in Wardour Street, where he first met Brian Jones. On a visit to the Jamaican Blue Beat club off Portobello Road he had a chance encounter with Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, and invited them to visit the Marquee Blues Night. The publicity generated turned the Marquee into one of London’s leading blues venues.

After moving to France, his interest turned towards the more obscure avant-garde end of the spectrum. He became manager of the art rock bands Magma and Gong, and was instrumental in developing the French underground and alternative rock circuit .

In the mid-1970s, he made a deal with RCA to start a new label, Utopia Records, which he hoped would be “a kind of underground but worldwide underground label.” It turned out to be short-lived .

Moving to New York towards the end of the decade he became involved in the experimental “new music” scene, establishing the Zu Club in Manhattan . In the 1980s he was a pioneer of digital video and was instrumental in bringing the important Czech group, the Plastic People of the Universe, to the public eye by producing a benefit concert for the band’s lyricist Egon Bondy in 1989.

Giorgio Gomelsky in 2005 with Marshall Lytle of Bill Haley & His Comets   Photo: DMI Photo™

In the 1990s he shifted to working with computer technology.

Gomelsky’s marrriage to Brigitte Guichard was dissolved. He is survived by his partner Janice Daley and by a son and two daughters.

Source : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/12105587/Giorgio-Gomelsky-impresario-obituary.html

[Strider]

^^^Thank you, Kiwi. I've been having trouble posting lately...not short, direct posts but any long posts where I try to upload articles and/or photos creates havoc. 

Thank you Mods for the clean-up.

[ScarletMacaw]

On 1/18/2016 at 8:44 PM, SteveAJones said:

Not fat, not a Texan and never seek your attention, cyber-stalker.

 

 

Nice pic of the Yardbirds. But, SAJ not fat?? Didn't you post a pic of "yourself" as a chubby black dude not long ago? Either you're fat, or that wasn't you. Or you have been recently very, very ill.

[Walter]

27 minutes ago, ScarletMacaw said:

Nice pic of the Yardbirds. But, SAJ not fat?? Didn't you post a pic of "yourself" as a chubby black dude not long ago? Either you're fat, or that wasn't you. Or you have been recently very, very ill.

Mentally or physically, are you referring to?

[SteveAJones]

9 hours ago, ScarletMacaw said:

blah blah blah

8 hours ago, Walter said:

Mentally or physically, are you referring to?

If you'd like to see this thread get trashed again keep it up guys.

[IpMan]

Gomelsky was sure right about the stadium thing, they are a horrid place to present music as the acoustics are typically poor and there are just too many people. I have not attended a stadium gig in a decade and the last two I attended were, for all intent and purpose, a waste of time. Too bad it almost always comes down to making as much money as humanly possible, regardless if the product or presentation suffers in the process. Giorgio was indeed a prophet and will be missed. A visionary indeed.

[SteveAJones]

19 hours ago, IpMan said:

Gomelsky was sure right about the stadium thing, they are a horrid place to present music as the acoustics are typically poor and there are just too many people. I have not attended a stadium gig in a decade and the last two I attended were, for all intent and purpose, a waste of time. Too bad it almost always comes down to making as much money as humanly possible, regardless if the product or presentation suffers in the process. Giorgio was indeed a prophet and will be missed. A visionary indeed.

I wonder how much of Gomelsky's anti-stadium stance was rooted in him having been the owner of a much smaller venue. I think stadium shows have their place in that they allow the artists to put on a much bigger production.

[IpMan]

11 hours ago, SteveAJones said:

I wonder how much of Gomelsky's anti-stadium stance was rooted in him having been the owner of a much smaller venue. I think stadium shows have their place in that they allow the artists to put on a much bigger production.

Sure, bigger production, more money, but a shittier show and experience in general. I do not know any person who would prefer to see a show at JFK vs. say Red Rocks or Celebrity Theatre.

[Walter]

On January 20, 2016 at 6:10 AM, SteveAJones said:

If you'd like to see this thread get trashed again keep it up guys.

Lighten up Steve, just bustin' balls.  Why is it you can say some really bone cutting statements and then be so thin skinned when someone gives you a little jab?   If you want to trash this thread, then do so.  Nobody's stopping nor provoking you.  Your reactions/responses are your choice....

I do agree that stadium shows do have their place.  The Stones and U2 are perfect examples of holding court in 50,000+ seat stadiums.  Bono always has the crowd in his hand and makes a stadium show very intimate, IMO.

[Walter]

1 hour ago, IpMan said:

Sure, bigger production, more money, but a shittier show and experience in general. I do not know any person who would prefer to see a show at JFK vs. say Red Rocks or Celebrity Theatre.

Of course not, but larger productions like U2 or say The Wall are difficult to pull of in small venues.  There is nothing like an intimate show.  Bucket list for Mr and Mrs Walter is to see John Butler Trio at Red Rocks and we WILL make it happen.  Seeing Janes Addiction at the House of Blues is about the most intimate were going to get around here, unfortunately...