May 19, 1978, Gusto feature: Could Be Wild with Bruce Moser and Doug Dombrowski

 

A glimpse of two Buffalo music business legends as they strike out on their own. 

May 19, 1978, Gusto feature

Music Fanatics 

          “Could be wild” is the way Bruce Moser and Doug Dombrowski answer the Mickey Mouse phones in their Elmwood Avenue office. That’s the name of their company. Could Be Wild.

          They’re one month into an innovation in the record-plugging business and they’re beginning to find that the possibilities are endless for an outfit that combines promotion to the radio stations with marketing in the stores. Could be a bonanza.

          For instance, there’s the matter of the record newsletter. Radio programmers read these behind-the-scenes industry tip sheets the way horse players study the racing forms. There are a number of reliable sources for information on singles, but for albums the field has been virtually barren since a sheet called The Walrus developed a chronic case of tin eardrums.

          It was the sort of void Moser and Dombrowski wanted to step into. Some day. Then along comes Mickey Turntable, the lady who runs a radio tip sheet that part of WBLK-FM’s organization. She gives a call to Could Be Wild. Would they like to put out an album supplement to her weekly newsletter? Could be they’d love to.

          So here’s Moser on the Mickey Mouse phone burning up long distance lines to some FM radio music director in Florida or some place and he’s shouting a little over the record player in the next room, which is pulsing with Benny Mardones’ “Thank God for Girls” (“Better,” reckons Moser, “than the new Bob Seger single.”)

          “Yeah,” he’s saying to the phone, “we’re spotlighting six albums a week. The non-obvious things. I think it’s redundant to do, like, Paul McCartney and Wings. And then we’ve got reports from the stations. We’ve got five Abrams stations, five tight stations, five soft AORs and 10 to 15 loose progressives. I was wondering if I can get a report from you … I’ll want your adds and five or six of the hotter things you’re playing. Can you give m something to add for this week? … OK, call me back in half an hour. You can call collect. … Yeah, I’m liberated. It’s great.”

          Liberation came last month for Moser and Dombrowski. They cut themselves loose from Lenny Silver’s organization – Transcontinent Record Sales and Amherst Records – where both of them spent virtually all of this decade learning the record business from the bottom up. They started in the warehouse, unloading boxes of records from trucks.

          Being music fanatics, they worked their way into advancements. After a few years, Dombrowski assumed the task that’ll make or break a record wholesaler. He was in charge of purchasing stock from the record companies and getting it out to the stores.

          Transcontinent’s three-state operation accounts for 4 percent of all record sales nationwide. Working on that kind of a scale, a slip-up can leave you sitting on a pile of good-for-nothing polyvinyl chloride as tall as Mount McKinley. Dombrowski came to call himself “the world’s smartest record buyer.”

          Moser, meantime, became a promotion man for the independent record labels Transcontinent distributed. They gave him a company car and he hit the Thruway, visiting radio stations from here to Providence, R.I. His job was to get those records played on the air.

          There on the wall near the Mickey Mouse phones is a gold record commemorating Moser’s first triumph – Charlie Daniels’ “Fire on the Mountain” on Kama Sutra. The burly Tennessee fiddler had always been considered a Dixie act until he broke through in the North. And Buffalo was where it happened.

          “We got the first gold record for Charlie Daniels,” Moser recounts. “We sold 70,000 of his records. We proved that the Charlie Daniels Band wasn’t only a Southern band.”

          Dombrowski moved on to be vice president in charge of promotion and marketing for Amherst Records. Moser was Amherst’s national album promotion director, hopping from coast to coast on behalf of Horslips, Bat McGrath, Johnny Guitar Watson and Jackie DeShannon.

          It helped earn Watson the first gold records in his 20-year career. A pair of plaques to Dombrowski and Moser bear this inscription below Watson’s picture on the cover of Cashbox magazine: “I couldn’t have made it here without you.”

          Could Be Wild couldn’t have happened without the experience the two of them got at Transcontinent and Amherst, Moser is saying between phone calls. Silver gave them an opportunity to learn. One thing Moser learned was the power of the Thruway.

          “There’s a Thruway chain from Cleveland to Boston that’s just deadly,” he observes. “You can lose 200,000 albums in that chain. A lot of companies write off this area – they don’t want to pay the money for a guy to cover it. But you’ve got 20 reporting radio stations from Cleveland to Boston. By taking them and getting a Northeast breakout, you can create excitement.”

          Moser and Dombrowski are applying this strategy to their first accounts – Heart’s “Magazine” on Mushroom, Horslips’ “Aliens” on DJM, Duke Jupiter’s “Sweet Cheeks” on Mercury and the entire Butterfly Records line. They won’t do it for just anything, though. They won’t work a record they don’t believe in.

          “In two weeks,” Moser says, “I got every progressive station in New York on Duke Jupiter.” Jupiter, he explains, is a Rochester band that was produced by Chuck Leavell, who used to be with the Allman Brothers Band.

          They believe in the albums they spotlight in the new album tip sheet as well. Paul Horn’s “Dream Machine” and Duke Jupiter happened to be accounts, but the rest of them weren’t – Nick Lowe, Les Dudek, Nantucket, the Sutherland Brothers, Dion, Louisiana La Roux, Alvin Lee, Dirk Hamilton, the aforementioned Benny Mardones, and George Thorogood and the Destroyers, which Moser dubs “one of the best white blues albums to be released in years.”

          “The sheet is a good creative thing,” Moser says. “With the FM stations tightening up, the record companies are finding there’s no place to go. Mickey’s got record companies calling up and begging for an avenue to review stuff that gets lost in the shuffle.

          “Two companies that impress me are Cleveland International, which took Meat Loaf and worked and worked until it was a hit, and Mushroom. They’re spending unlimited money on Doucette. That’s something most of them aren’t doing these days. I think if you’re excited about something, you should live or die with it.”

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IN THE PHOTOS: Bruce Moser on the Mickey Mouse phone and Doug Dombrowski flanked by Could Be Wild’s gold record plaques. Photos by Buffalo News photographer Roy Russell.

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FOOTNOTE: I shared Bruce and Doug’s enthusiasm for new music and emerging artists and frequently was on the receiving end of those phone calls. Their office at 41 Elmwood Ave. in Buffalo’s Allentown district was as disheveled as the worst-ever college dorm room. Since it was on my route downtown to The News, I dropped in regularly to get their inside scoops on the radio and record biz and pick up promotional albums from whatever artists they were pushing.

          Could Be Wild’s biggest coup was U2. They gave “Boy,” the band’s 1980 debut album, a Northeast breakout and arranged for their first appearance here – that legendary date where they opened for the Buffalo band Talas at Harvey and Corky’s Stage One club on Dec. 8, 1980, the night John Lennon was shot.

Bono became a longstanding friend and was among those playing tribute to Bruce after he died in June 2020. So was E Street Band guitarist and SiriusXM radio “Underground Garage” host Steven Van Zandt, who said he was “one of the guys who that kept the music in the music business.”

Bruce was the one who was inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame, but Doug played just as vital a role in their success.

“Doug was always the behind-the-scenes guy I could depend on,” In-Store Music’s Bob Catania told AllAccess.com, a website serving the radio and music industry, after Doug died in 2021. “Bruce was the big personality and Doug was the low-key partner who made the magic work.”