"The Manager: ELLIOT ROBERTS" - Essay by Bill Bentley | NYA

Neil Young, Jonathan Demme & Elliot Roberts
(See Neil Young Journeys Film Premiere) 

 

"Roberts, who would have been 78 on February 25, was someone who saw into the deepest center of life, behind the big curtain, and discovered that all things are possible. 

 

If you dream."

 

A major essay on Neil Young Archives on Elliot Roberts by Bill Bentley.

 

An excerpt follows.

 The Manager: ELLIOT ROBERTS 

by Bill Bentley

I'd already known Elliot twenty years during my time at Warner Bros./Reprise Records, where I was luckily a publicist for so many of the great artists of our time. 

David Geffen, Elliot Roberts, & Neil Young
Frame from  'Inventing David Geffen': American Masters

(See So What Makes Neil Young's Muse Tick?) 

 

During those two decades I came to understand that Elliot Roberts had cracked open his own code for how to live, and been able to find a perfect balance between chaos and order. And the day in '06 I was informed my Warner Bros. Records job was over, Elliot called and asked me to come to work for him and Neil Young. That's what we call winning the lottery in the music business. Nothing is worse in that profession than being unemployed, and to walk from a record label into Lookout was a time to shine. 

When I asked Elliot what I would be doing, he just laughed his mischievous laugh and said, "Don't worry. Neil and I will find something."

Joni Mitchell w/ Elliot Roberts
Carnegie Hall, 1969 - Photo by Joel Bernstein

I had always been enamored by how Elliot Roberts' career had followed such a unique curve. His beginnings with Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, then the awe-inducing success of the Geffen-Roberts company, which included the start and quick ascent of Asylum Records as a record label of the future, were storied. David Geffen with Elliot Roberts had birthed a place that let them establish a new community for not only those they represented, but even better allowed them to fashion their own universe, one where they could define the limits of life in the 20th century and enjoy a view very few others had seen. It reminded me of some of the eccentric cowboys I once met as a child at the YMCA summer camp in the Texas hill country in the 1950s. These wise travelers had lived on their horses their whole lives, and weren't about to adapt to a place where they'd have to answer to others. They'd created a way of seeing their place in life, based on an honor system of hard work and virtue. I'd hang around them in the horse stalls when they were working, listening to how they talked and what they had discovered. It wasn't that different when I worked at Lookout Management. I'd listen to Elliot talk and watch how he interacted with people, and think of those Texas cowboys. 

They had something no one else did, and were envied for it because of the freedom they'd earned and how they used it.

The Geffen-Roberts management company had created its own perch in the music business, where they could build the community they wanted to be in and let others come to them there. The pair would wade into a business full of old attitudes and out-of-date practices, and turn it around to how they felt it should be. Where the artist was at the top of the decision-chain, and their freedom ranked above all else. It didn't happen overnight, but that was the beauty of what Roberts and Geffen and others in the new brigade were building. They did it because it was right, and they did it because it was fun. The money was no doubt important in the equation, but it wasn't driving the train. No one could have predicted where the business of music was going, but the early pioneers in this new gestalt were going to be the ones who took it there.

There is a well-told legend of how Elliot Roberts first came to be Neil Young's manager in 1968. Near the end of Buffalo Springfield, Roberts took over the manager position with the band. But at a group meeting in 1968, Young told the manager he was fired. Gone. The next morning Elliot heard a knock on his Laurel Canyon front door, and there was Young, who came in, told Elliot he was leaving Buffalo Springfield and asked if Elliot would manage him. Which he did for more than 50 years. Without a written contract. 

As Elliot once told me, "Contracts can just be torn up, and then everyone ends up suing each other. What's the point of that?" 

Elliot Roberts w/ Neil Young

photo by Jay Blakesberg

 

Full essay on Neil Young Archives on Elliot Roberts by Bill Bentley.

Also, see Elliot Roberts: 1943 - 2019.

Also, see Neil Young News: "The greatest manager of all time": Neil Young’s Statement on Elliot Roberts.

Neil Young, Tour Manager Eric Johnson, Manager Elliot Roberts - 2011
Plan9 Music, Richmond, Virginia
Photo by Emaleigh Franzak(See Neil Young Supports Vinyl & Independent Record Stores) 

Elliot Roberts - July 22, 2009

'Inventing David Geffen' |  PBS | American Masters(Also, see Elliot Roberts Uncut, Never-Before-Seen Interview | 'Inventing David Geffen' | PBS American Masters Archive) 

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