Eyes on the Promised Land
In the mid‘60s, singles from L.A. were occupying the No. 1 spot for impressively long amounts of time – a stark contrast from New York’s radio pop scene. Record company execs in New York started commuting regularly between the East and West Coasts, scoping out the industry scene.
Photo by Michael Putland / Getty Images
“We’d picked over the East Coast pretty well,” said Jac Holzman of the Elektra label. “L.A. was less the Promised Land than the untilled field.” And when it came to harvesting and thus profiting from such untouched, fertile land, no one did it better than David Geffen. And his story is one for the history books…