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In 1995, Interscope Records, then part-owned by Time Warner, was embroiled in an ugly dispute with the entertainment conglomerate over the release of several controversial gangsta-rap albums. Interscope founders Ted Field and Jimmy Iovine felt that the company should either release the albums or release Interscope from its deal. But Michael Fuchs, who had recently taken over as Time Warner's music chief after years of running HBO, refused to compromise.
"It was a war," recalls Iovine. "It was very volatile."
Enter Allen Grubman, longtime lawyer for Iovine, David Geffen, Tommy Mottola and countless other music industry moguls. "He looked Fuchs in the eye," says Field, "and he said, 'I represent 48 of the top 50 people in the record business. You don't renege on a deal. You don't do business that way. This is too small a business to act that way.' And that was that--we got out."
There is no six degrees of separation in the music business, not when Grubman is in the room. When a multimillion-dollar acquisition or contract renegotiation makes headlines, the pudgy 55-year-old lawyer is there. His clients include Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, U2, John Mellencamp, Rod Stewart, Sean "Puffy" Combs, Luther Vandross and Andrew Lloyd Webber. He is the big macher of the music business, a consummate deal-maker whose fingerprints are all over many of the biggest industry transactions of the past decade. When longtime client David Geffen sold his record company to MCA (now Universal) in 1990 for $545 million in stock, Grubman did the deal, as he did when Geffen launched his DreamWorks record label five years later. When Time Warner unloaded Interscope, Grubman orchestrated that deal, too, as he did when MCA bought 50% of the company in 1996.
Sometimes the web of cozy connections seems awfully sticky. When Mellencamp asked then-PolyGram Music chief Alain Levy to let him out of his contract with Mercury Records last fall, Grubman jumped in, negotiating Mellencamp's release with Levy, a close friend, and Mercury chairman Danny Goldberg, another client.
Didn't it worry Mellencamp that he was represented by the same lawyer as the head of his label? "Hey, that's the whole point," he says. "He's everyone's lawyer. How do you think I got out?"
Grubman says, however, that his firm...