Music: At times, music business insider Walter Yetnikoff's autobiography reads like that of a spoilt rock star. A monstrous egotist who hit new heights in hedonism, Yetnikoff had an insatiable appetite for sex, drugs, alcohol, temper tantrums, vitriol and petty, often pointless feuds with friends and foes alike.
Acceptable, indeed entry-level, behaviour for any rock star worth his or her leather trousers; but Yetnikoff was the boss, the one who was supposed to be sitting in a boardroom signing cheques and doing deals, not out getting higher than the talent.
It's safe to say that they no longer make record company bosses like Yetnikoff, and more's the pity - a maverick, colourful figure like him would be a far more enticing figure than the bland bean-counters currently running the music business. But the ambitious Brooklyn lawyer who ran CBS Records during its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s was one of a kind, a man who was easily the measure of any of his artists for excessive behaviour.
His own arrogance and excess are perhaps understandable when you read about the pampering and reassurance required by the acts he worked with. Michael Jackson, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Billy Joel, James Taylor, Barbra Streisand and the other megastars whose careers he guided may have sold records by the million, but they still required the label boss to reassure them of their greatness.
No better man, as Yetnikoff deals with Jackson's demands to organise the Grammy Awards in the singer's favour, Paul Simon's childish petulance when he wants to leave CBS to sign to Warner Bros, and Bruce Springsteen's artistic decision to release the uncommercial Nebraska album (a record Yetnikoff preferred to refer to as "Omaha").
His views on Jackson are particularly interesting because he was the executive who signed the young member of the Jackson 5 in the 1970s (Jackson referred to him subsequently as "good daddy") and watched as he became the biggest act in the world with Thriller. After the success of that album, Yetnikoff begins to note Jackson's plastic surgery binges and other increasingly weird behaviour with bemusement. It obviously didn't bother the record boss unduly: after all, his job was just to keep the act happy and if they wanted to lighten the colour of their skin or hang out with llamas and monkeys called Bubbles, so be it.
Yetnikoff squeezed cultivating such constructive relationships with his artists in between maintaining a destructive lifestyle of his own. He's incredibly candid about how his dependence on drink and drugs, not to mention a stream of extra-marital affairs, ruined his marriage. What is also apparent is that his employers turned a blind eye to what was going on. Yetnikoff may have regularly attended board meetings as drunk as a skunk but, as long as he was making money for CBS Records ("the architect of a well-oiled music machine that keeps getting stronger" is how one paper referred to him), the corporation would tolerate and even encourage such bad-boy behaviour.
When Yetnikoff's world collapsed, it collapsed spectacularly. Having engineered the deal which saw Sony buy CBS Records for $2 billion, he finally admitted he had a drink and drugs problem and went into rehab.
When he came out, he quickly found that the Machiavellian machinations he had used to keep power in CBS were now being used against him by former friends, and that the "happy Japs" (Sony bosses Norio Ohga and Akio Morita) were no longer on his side.
Eventually fired by Sony, he still craved the big hit which would re-establish him as a leading player, but each successive music or movie venture was as unsuccessful as the last. What hasn't diminished in any way is Yetnikoff's fantastic arrogance and chutzpah, and this fascinating, bawdy, entertaining read captures these qualities in glowing technicolour.
While many books about music and musicians are dull, lifeless and stilted, you couldn't say that about anything written about this particular man-behind-the-music. The devil may have all the best tunes but Yetnikoff certainly has all the best tales.
Jim Carroll is a freelance journalist