Cliff Burnstein
In 1973 and at the age of 25, the music industry was beckoning for college boy Cliff Burnstein. “The fellowship money was running out,” he says. “I looked at lots of different record labels and then I got an interview with Mercury and then I got a job. I kind of sussed it was the only thing I really loved.” Just months later, the post of “national head of album promotion” came up, an opportunity Cliff thought was too good to miss. He was in the right place at the right time: young, but so was the label. “I just basically raised my hand and said let me do it,” says Cliff.
Album promotion meant dealing with FM radio, as opposed to promotion of Top 40 music to AM. One of Cliff’s first tasks was to represent Mercury at a New York Dolls concert in Cleveland. Cliff was instrumental in Mercury’s signing of Rush, and a year or so later he took over the band’s A&R responsibilities. “At the beginning I was dealing only with Vic Wilson, I did not know about Ray Danniels,” he says. “To me Vic was the front guy and Ray was very much behind the scenes.” Cliff worked tirelessly for a number of bands, including Rush and also the New York Dolls. “They were kind of a critics band that didn’t actually sell very many copies,” says Cliff. “I tried the best I could to get them played on the radio, and that wasn’t easy.”
Five years after Rush, the same approach was adopted for the Scorpions in 1979. “There was another whirlwind thing,” he says. “I went to Germany one night, saw the concert, talked to the guys and signed them up immediately. People laughed, they said, I understand you just signed a German rock group, you know these guys don’t speak English very well. I didn’t care, I thought they were great.” As time passed, Cliff found he was increasingly defending the needs of his artists, sometimes against the wishes of the label. “One of my functions much of the time was to tell people not to try to meddle in what the bands were doing,” says Cliff. “I thought psychologically or emotionally I would feel better just having a clear cut role being an advocate of the artist.”
It wasn’t just that – he saw there was more to the economics of the music business than releasing albums and plugging songs. “When Rush played the Palladium in New York in 1979, so many people bought t-shirts. Kiss had been the pioneer of the selling of merchandise, but I saw Rush do it, in front of my eyes,” he says. “I can tell you that there were many bands in the 80s that we totally financed off of merchandise sales.”
Cliff was friendly with ex-radio programmer Peter Mensch, “a great schmoozer,” according to Cliff, and who was now AC/DC’s manager. Peter worked for David Krebs, who had such bands as Aerosmith, Ted Nugent and the New York Dolls on his roster. When Cliff left Mercury in January 1980, shortly before Rush toured ‘Permanent Waves’, he joined David Krebs’ agency alongside Peter. Together, the pair built up an admirable selection of hard rock bands, adding the Scorpions, Def Leppard and the Michael Schenker Group to their portfolio. Two years later, when Cliff and Peter parted ways with David, the only band willing to come with them was Def Leppard – and that was before the band had made it big. Cliff decided it was worth the risk. “I was willing to make less money in order for the chance to make it on a really big scale,” says Cliff. The launch of Def Leppard’s ‘Pyromania’ in January 1983 was exactly the boost the pair had been looking for. “That really got us up on our feet,” he says.
Cliff and Peter’s company, Q-Prime, started out with the aim of focusing on long- term success rather than short-term gain. When they later took on Metallica, Cliff approached the situation the same way as he had with Rush. “If you believe in them and think that they have the real ability, then you go with it,” says Cliff. “The groundswell built up on Metallica just like it built with Rush and so that felt very comfortable to me, because I knew that there was ultimately a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.” The strategy is one which Cliff and Peter continue to follow, and have built up an impressive roster of clients in the process – not least Muse, Q-Prime’s most recent signing for North America. “I feel about Muse the way I felt about Rush,” says Cliff. “People say, Oh man, I am never going to play that Matthew Bellamy on my station, I don’t like his voice. I go fine, you are going to wind up playing him sooner or later. I don’t know how it will develop exactly, but they are great artists, they are not just about this year or next year or last year, they are going to be around for ages.”