Ticket 2 Ride

Promoting rock albums has to be the ideal job. For Paul “Rap” Rappaport, he spent over 30 years at Columbia Records, working his way up from part-time work as a college student, to senior vice president of the label.

The draw of the book is reading all of the crazy rock and roll stories. Don’t expect any Led Zeppelin mud sharks or driving cars into swimming pools, but it’s entertaining and nostalgic of a bygone era in music. Before the intranet and MTV, record companies hired people to work the radio stations to get artists airplay, sponsored concerts, appearances and gimmicks to draw attention to new albums.

If you enjoy FM rock music the seventies, this is a fun read. It’s not rocket science, it’s rock and roll. Rappaport got to know the artists that passed through the record label like the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd and many more. Some of the best stories are when the artists had yet the break big, but the signs were there.

Springsteen had released a couple of thoughtful albums and had a huge East Coast following, but he had yet to be embraced by West Coast radio stations. A concert designed to be broadcast live by an L.A. radio station would help change that. That was a great story including the many hurdles to arranging a concert airing live.

Members of the Rolling Stones appear in various chapters during the eighties, as do Pink Floyd without Roger Waters, and Roger Waters minus Pink Floyd. Rappaport writes that Floyd and Waters each faced challenges without the other, although each would be fine. Rappaport would have to navigate the litigious ocean between the former bandmates since everyone released albums on Columbia. He tells the story of Pink Floyd bestowing a birthday present to Rappaport, playing guitar on one song during their upcoming concert in London. The song would be “Run Like Hell” and Rappaport would perform part of a solo. How’s that for a happy birthday?

Elvis Costello had not yet broken out in America, yet he and his band had released an album and were touring America. These four Brits were wide-eyed and drinking it all in, and sampling their first Mexican meal. To launch Blue Oyster Cult’s 1976 album Agents of Fortune, Rappaport rented this huge laser beam light, blasting it across the sky while the album played on KNAC-FM. No airplane pilots were blinded or military jets launched, yet the laser beam could be seen 30 miles away.

Sadly, the record industry changed, and the days Rappaport described are long gone. Radio stations don’t operate like they did and breaking new artists has changed. And on top of that, the music isn’t the same either.