Bogart was the “ultimate hype guy,” concurs Alperowitz, who asserts the Casablanca founder was “as big a star as anyone [signed to] the label.” Whereas most industry folk are either oriented toward the realms of promotion or A&R, says Alperowitz, Neil Bogart, an executive at Buddah Records prior to founding Casablanca, epitomized the most talented, most aggressive, and most successful qualities of both these career paths. No matter the project under his purview, “Bogart loved to promote. He would just market the hell out of stuff.”

While Casablanca was originally intended to be a label that predominantly hawked disco, the company experienced its first massive dose of breakthrough success with the release of KISS’ Alive! The label also broke acts like Donna Summer and George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, while Neil Bogart developed connections within the international dance music community. These connections, precursors to Casablanca’s modern-day ties to the European EDM scene, would lead to the formation of what Larry Harris refers to as “a list of characters… guys dressed in leather, a construction worker, a cop, and some cowboys and Indians.” Thanks in part to Bogart’s efforts, the Village People, “a half-serious, half-tongue-in-cheek parody,” were “assembled by two French producers”—Jacques Morali and Henri Benolo—“and their novice New York music attorney.”

The Village People

By the late 1970s, Casablanca Records had reached an era of unrivaled gluttony. Says Larry Harris: “There was blow everywhere. It was like some sort of condiment that had to be brushed away by the waitstaff before the next party was seated. Cocaine dusted everything. It was on fingertips, tabletops, upper lips, and the floor.”

Indeed, such rampant substance abuse seemed to fuel the label’s overall aesthetic and ethos. Harris claims George Clinton and his “assistant” Archie Ivy would frequent the Casablanca offices, meeting with executives and rambling “for hours about how they were going to develop Parliament’s stage show into an otherworldly display of pageantry and pomp and how they needed half a zillion dollars to do it.” On one occasion, Clinton showed up with “some uncut and very potent coke, declaring that anyone who tried it would speak Spanish, as the stuff ‘hadn’t cleared customs yet.’” The P-Funk frontman, insists Harris, “would ramble on, giving voice to every thought that came into his head, stream-of-consciousness style, like William Faulkner gone jive.”

George Clinton in 1976

In an era known for its unapologetic decadence, Casablanca, as an entity, managed to stand out. Encyclopedia Britannica claims the label “set the pace” for substance abuse and bacchanalian diversions. The label did things in a larger-than-life sort of way that caricatured the industry. To celebrate the release of KISS’ debut album, in addition to Warner Brothers’ acquiring of Casablanca, a party was thrown in the Los Angeles room at the Century Plaza Hotel; the night became the stuff of legend. “The event,” says Larry Harris, “grew in size and scope until it became the most expensive music industry party in history to that point. Factoring for inflation, it may still hold that distinction.”

Brett Alperowitz agrees with this notion of Casablanca’s almost incredible opulence, intimating that while many label executives in the industry during that era discouraged garish shows of money from their employees, Neil Bogart would get upset with his staff for not spending decadently enough. Larry Harris claims Casablanca “would have birthday celebrations with crates of Dom Pérignon and lavish cakes for everyone, from the top-level employee to the lowliest mail-room worker.”

Casablanca’s corporate culture was one of exceptional licentiousness and a pervasive sort of degeneracy in a record industry that, during the 1970s, wasn’t exactly renowned for its scrupulous business practices. Larry Harris offers one example in discussing his promotional rounds for KISS’ debut record. The problem at the time, claims Harris, was that “Top 40 radio was not yet buying the fact that [KISS] was a viable group.” Harris, who was based out of Casablanca’s Los Angeles offices, was tasked with convincing, apparently by any means necessary, KLOS, “the big ABC-owned station, to jump on the record.” Instead of meeting with the station’s program director, Harris instead ended up getting to know quite intimately the “attractive young woman” working as music director for KLOS. The tryst was ill fated but “no matter,” says Harris with dry braggadocio. “I got KISS added to KLOS, and I got laid many times in the process. What great leverage. I’m sure Neil was very proud.”

Bogart routinely executed risky maneuvers with the label’s finances and Casablanca’s coffers were often in dire straits as a result. Harris says that on one particular Monday morning, Bogart approached him and said, “Larry, we need ten thousand dollars to make payroll for the week. We’re out of money and I’m out of ideas.” Bogart would end up traveling to Las Vegas that Thursday to cash in a line of credit at a casino, using the funds to pay Casablanca’s staff for the week. “Cashing in a line of credit sounds like a simple financial move, and it was,” says Harris. “But it was also a big gamble, because in the 1970s Las Vegas was still largely a Mob-run town. The casinos would not become comparatively clean corporate entities until the late 1980s. Neil was able to pay back his line of credit before anyone knew what he’d done.”

Casablanca’s brush with the mafia didn’t end there. Harris also recalls another occasion when Hy Mizrahi, who, “along with Artie Ripp and Phil Steinberg… had been one of the original partners in Buddah [Records],” threatened Bogart and Harris with a .38 revolver. Though Mizrahi left when Bogart’s colleagues threatened to call the cops, the Casablanca founder soon placed a call to his accountant, one Arnold Feldman, who “was rumored to have connections to the New York Mafia.” After Neil told Feldman what had happened, Feldman sent “two really tough-looking Italian fellows” out from New York to act as Bogart’s personal security staff.