Beloved Rock Manager Sells Up in Rivas Canyon

By JOHN HARLOW | Editor-in-Chief

In rock mythology there are two styles of music management: the monsters and the losers.

The monsters, like Peter Grant of Led Zeppelin, are beloved by their band and feared by everyone else. The losers end up getting sued.

In truth, there is a third way, exemplified by a handful of music label executives such as Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic Records, David Geffen and Chris Blackwell, who introduced the world to Bob Marley and reggae.

They stood up for the musical statement, sometimes even against the musicians who were creating it. They are later thanked for it, if begrudgingly.

Mo Ostin of Reprise Records and Warner Music is one of these music industry heroes, regarded as maybe the most talent-friendly record boss in pop history. Now, at 89, he is leaving us—Ostin has sold up in the Palisades.

The Ostin family trust has sold Ostin’s home on Villa Woods Drive, located off Will Rogers State Park Road, for $4.86 million. The 4,800-square-foot contemporary home was listed last April for $5.9 million, but has now sold to an undisclosed buyer.

The five-bedroom, five-bathroom home was listed by Dena Luciano and Tracy Maltas of Douglas Elliman. Guy Reid of Engel & Volkers represented the buyer.

The family trust has another Ostin home on the market: a $19 million, seven-bedroom, eight-bathroom mansion off River Road in Brentwood.

In recent years, Ostin, while still on the board of the USC and UCLA schools of music, has also been spending time in his native New York. This is where Ostin’s career took off in 1960, when Frank Sinatra asked him to run his newly established label, Reprise Records.

It was unusual in that the artists would retain complete creative control of their output and ownership of their own recordings, an economic handcuff for a record company that would have scared off any other manager less artist-friendly than Ostin.

He did it on his own creative terms: He persuaded Sinatra to sign rock bands to Reprise, despite his personal antipathy toward their raucous behavior. His fears were justified when Ostin signed British group The Kinks, who were then banned by the American Federation of Musicians union from touring the U.S. for years for loutish behavior.

One of his jobs, Ostin recalled, was preventing “The Chairman of the Board” (now literally true, as well as a Sinatra nickname) from releasing a truly terrible reading of Rudyard Kipling’s “Gunga Din.” Sinatra lost his temper, of course, but in the end, when the record was already at the distribution depots, he pulled it back.

History repeats itself: 10 years later, permanently grumpy Neil Young, another Ostin protégée who wrote a song called “Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze,” did not like a mix on a 1978 album called “Comes a Time” and demanded that the run of albums was destroyed.

Again, a decade later, for Prince’s disco-themed “Black Album:” Great music, Ostin said, but Prince wanted to be heard in discos at a time Ostin was trying to promote his “Sign o’ The Times” album. So Ostin had to persuade Prince to at least postpone releasing the “Black Album.”

If Prince rather than Ostin had had his way, the Purple One’s might have flooded and confused his fans and career might have tanked right there.

Later on, Prince would fight in court with Ostin, alleging his contract reduced him to a “slave,” which “bugged” Ostin, as he valued his reputation as musician-friendly, but he still misses Prince’s raw talent.

From the late 1960s, when Ostin helped sell Reprise to Warner Music, where he became boss, to the mid-1990s, the Burbank-based label fostered the careers of Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, various versions of Fleetwood Mac, Van Halen, The Grateful Dead, R.E.M, The Red Hot Chili Peppers and (Palisadian) Randy Newman. Not a bad record.

Many of them turned up in 2003 when Ostin was admitted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Ostin is still around Los Angeles, but he is leaving some painful memories behind in the Palisades.

He loved the house, but years ago he willed it over to his son Randall, a Palisades Charter High School alum.

“Randy” was another famously decent music business mover and shaker who helped The Eagles create “Hotel California.”

As a promoter, Randy helped create big huts for Jackson Brown, Linda Ronstadt and Queen. But Randy died from cancer in 2013, and friends suggested his father never felt at home in the Palisades after that.

And so another musical page in Palisadian history, expressed through real estate, is turned.