Michael Ames Viner ( ; February 27, 1944 – August 8, 2009) was an American film producer and record producer, who later shifted into book publishing and became an innovator in the
audiobook
An audiobook (or a talking book) is a recording of a book or other work being read out loud. A reading of the complete text is described as "unabridged", while readings of shorter versions are abridgements.
Spoken audio has been available in sc ...
field. A widely sampled percussion break in the recording of the song "
Apache
The Apache () are a group of culturally related Native American tribes in the Southwestern United States, which include the Chiricahua, Jicarilla, Lipan, Mescalero, Mimbreño, Ndendahe (Bedonkohe or Mogollon and Nednhi or Carrizaleño an ...
" by the
Incredible Bongo Band
The Incredible Bongo Band, also known as Michael Viner's Incredible Bongo Band, was a project started in 1972 by Michael Viner, a record artist manager and executive at MGM Records. Viner was called on to supplement the soundtrack to the B-film ' ...
, a group he assembled in the early 1970s, has been frequently integrated into many
hip hop recordings.
Early life
Viner was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Jeanne (née Spitzel) and Melvin Viner.
[Adam Bernstein]
"Jeanne Viner Bell, 85; Public Relations Expert"
''The Washington Post
''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...
'', May 22, 2008. Viner attended the
Chadwick School
Chadwick School is a nonsectarian independent K-12 day school located in an unincorporated area on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in Los Angeles County, California, United States. Specifically it is located at the top of the neighborhood referred t ...
in
Palos Verdes, California
The Palos Verdes Peninsula (''Palos Verdes'', Spanish for "Green Sticks") is a landform and a geographic sub-region of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, within southwestern Los Angeles County in the U.S. state of California. Located in the Sou ...
, majored in English at
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
, and studied at the
School of Foreign Service
The Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service (SFS) is the school of international relations at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. It is considered to be one of the world's leading international affairs schools, granting degrees at both ...
at
Georgetown University
Georgetown University is a private university, private research university in the Georgetown (Washington, D.C.), Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded by Bishop John Carroll (archbishop of Baltimore), John Carroll in 1789 as Georg ...
. He worked on
Robert F. Kennedy
Robert Francis Kennedy (November 20, 1925June 6, 1968), also known by his initials RFK and by the nickname Bobby, was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 64th United States Attorney General from January 1961 to September 1964, ...
's 1968 presidential campaign.
[Elaine Woo]
"Michael Viner dies at 65; tabloid book publisher"
''Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...
'', August 13, 2009. Viner began his entertainment industry career working summers during high school in the mail room at
Twentieth Century Fox
20th Century Studios, Inc. (previously known as 20th Century Fox) is an American film studio, film production company headquartered at the Fox Studio Lot in the Century City area of Los Angeles. As of 2019, it serves as a film production arm o ...
; after Kennedy's assassination, he worked for movie studios, and ran a record division called Pride for
MGM
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., also known as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures and abbreviated as MGM, is an American film, television production, distribution and media company owned by Amazon through MGM Holdings, founded on April 17, 1924 a ...
.
He was the producer of the inaugural ball for President
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913April 22, 1994) was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as a representative and senator from California and was ...
in 1973.
[Michaelangelo Matos]
"Remembering Michael Viner, The Man Who Recorded “Apache”"
''Rolling Stone
''Rolling Stone'' is an American monthly magazine that focuses on music, politics, and popular culture. It was founded in San Francisco, San Francisco, California, in 1967 by Jann Wenner, and the music critic Ralph J. Gleason. It was first kno ...
'', August 14, 2009. Retrieved August 19, 2009.
Record producing
Viner produced a record in 1970 called ''The Best of Marcel Marceao'', a joke album produced for under $50 and consisting of nineteen minutes of silence followed by one minute of applause on each side of the record, purportedly recording performances by the famous
mime artist
A mime artist, or simply mime (from Greek , , "imitator, actor"), is a person who uses ''mime'' (also called ''pantomime'' outside of Britain), the acting out of a story through body motions without the use of speech, as a theatrical medium ...
Marcel Marceau
Marcel Marceau (; born Marcel Mangel; 22 March 1923 – 22 September 2007) was a French actor and mime artist most famous for his stage persona, "Bip the Clown". He referred to mime as the "art of silence", and he performed professionally worldw ...
, his name intentionally misspelled on the album for unstated reasons. The album led to a production deal with
Mike Curb
Michael Curb (born December 24, 1944) is an American musician, record company executive, motorsports car owner, philanthropist, and former politician. He is also the founder of Curb Records where he presently serves as the chairman. Curb also ...
at
MGM Records
MGM Records was a record label founded by the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio in 1946 for the purpose of releasing soundtrack recordings (later LP albums) of their musical films. It transitioned into a pop music label that continued into the ...
, where he helped produce a cover version of "
The Candy Man
"The Candy Man" (or alternatively, "The Candy Man Can") is a song that originally appeared in the 1971 film ''Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory''. It was written by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley specifically for the film. Although the ori ...
", which was a chart-topping hit for
Sammy Davis, Jr. in 1972.
He assembled the
Incredible Bongo Band
The Incredible Bongo Band, also known as Michael Viner's Incredible Bongo Band, was a project started in 1972 by Michael Viner, a record artist manager and executive at MGM Records. Viner was called on to supplement the soundtrack to the B-film ' ...
in 1972, which produced an album that was the soundtrack for that year's
science fiction film
Science fiction (or sci-fi) is a film genre that uses speculative, fictional science-based depictions of phenomena that are not fully accepted by mainstream science, such as extraterrestrial lifeforms, spacecraft, robots, cyborgs, interstellar ...
''
The Thing with Two Heads
''The Thing with Two Heads'' is a 1972 American blaxploitation science fiction comedy film directed by Lee Frost and starring Ray Milland, Rosey Grier, Don Marshall, Roger Perry, Kathy Baumann, and Chelsea Brown.
Plot
Dr. Maxwell Kirshner ( ...
'', consisting of remakes of instrumental songs from the 1950s and 1960s given a characteristic
funk
Funk is a music genre that originated in African American communities in the mid-1960s when musicians created a rhythmic, danceable new form of music through a mixture of various music genres that were popular among African Americans in the m ...
style, and achieving a hit with "
Bongo Rock
"Bongo Rock" is a rock and roll instrumental written and recorded by Preston Epps. Released as a single in 1959, it charted #14 Pop in the United States and #4 in Canada. In 1973 the Incredible Bongo Band recorded a cover version of "Bongo Rock" ...
", a remake of a 1959 song by
Preston Epps
Preston Eugene Epps (July 19, 1930 – May 9, 2019) was an American percussionist.
Career
Epps was born in Mangum, Oklahoma. He learned to play percussion instruments, including the bongos, while he was stationed in Okinawa during the Korean ...
. That success led Viner to produce ''Bongo Rock'', another album for the group, that included "Apache", a remake of the instrumental which was originally a 1960
UK hit for
The Shadows
The Shadows (originally known as the Drifters) were an English instrumental rock group, who dominated the British popular music charts in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in the pre- Beatles era. They served as the backing band for Cliff Richard ...
and in 1961 a US hit for guitarist
Jørgen Ingmann
Jørgen Ingmann (born Jørgen Ingmann Pedersen; 26 April 1925 – 21 March 2015) was a Danish jazz and pop guitarist from Copenhagen. He was popular in Europe and had a wider international hit in 1961 with his version of "Apache". He and his w ...
. Decades later,
hip hop artists started sampling the Incredible Bongo Band recording, with the percussion breakdown from "Apache" appearing in songs by
DJ Kool Herc
Clive Campbell (born April 16, 1955), better known by his stage name DJ Kool Herc, is a Jamaican-American DJ who is credited with contributing to the development of hip hop music in the Bronx, New York City, in the 1970s through his "Back to ...
,
L.L. Cool J
James Todd Smith (born January 14, 1968), known professionally as LL Cool J (short for Ladies Love Cool James), is an American rapper, songwriter, record producer, and actor. He is one of the earliest rappers to achieve commercial success, along ...
and
Nas
Nas (born 1973) is the stage name of American rapper Nasir Jones.
Nas, NaS, or NAS may also refer to:
Aviation
* Nasair, a low-cost airline carrier and subsidiary based in Eritrea
* National Air Services, an airline in Saudi Arabia
** Nas Air ( ...
, as well as
Moby
Richard Melville Hall (born September 11, 1965), known professionally as Moby, is an American musician, songwriter, singer, producer, and animal rights activist. He has sold 20 million records worldwide. AllMusic considers him to be "among the ...
. Among the artists he signed at MGM Records was
Debby Boone
Deborah Anne Boone (born September 22, 1956) is an American singer, author, and actress. She is best known for her 1977 hit, "You Light Up My Life (song), You Light Up My Life", which spent ten weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, ''Billboar ...
, who would have a hit in 1977 with "
You Light Up My Life".
[
]
Publishing and audiobooks
Viner married actress Deborah Raffin
Deborah Iona Raffin (March 13, 1953 – November 21, 2012) was an American actress, model and audiobook publisher.
Early life
Raffin was born in Los Angeles, California, to actress Trudy Marshall and Phillip Jordan Raffin, a restaurateur and b ...
in 1974 (they divorced in 2005).[Michael Hiltzik]
"Fiction Genre Fits Big Pharma"
''Los Angeles Times'', October 27, 2005. He and Raffin opened Dove Books-on-Tape in 1985 in the garage of their Coldwater Canyon
Coldwater Canyon is a canyon running perpendicular to and over the central Santa Monica Mountains, in Los Angeles County, California, United States.
A section of the canyon south of Mulholland Drive is also a neighborhood in the Beverly Crest Neig ...
home. Viner had won an $8,000 bet in a backgammon
Backgammon is a two-player board game played with counters and dice on tables boards. It is the most widespread Western member of the large family of tables games, whose ancestors date back nearly 5,000 years to the regions of Mesopotamia and Pe ...
game with the author Sidney Sheldon
Sidney Sheldon (February 11, 1917 – January 30, 2007) was an American writer. He was prominent in the 1930s, first working on Broadway plays, and then in motion pictures, notably writing the successful comedy ''The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer ...
; rather than taking the money, Viner asked Sheldon to let him publish two of his books as audiobooks. Although Viner became known for publishing sensational tabloid-style books such as '' You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again'' and Faye Resnick's book about Nicole Brown Simpson
Nicole Brown Simpson (née Brown; May 19, 1959 – June 12, 1994) was the ex-wife of the former professional American football player, O. J. Simpson, to whom she was married from 1985 to 1992. She was the mother of their two children, Sydney an ...
, among Dove's first successes was the audiobook of Stephen Hawking's ''A Brief History of Time
''A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes'' is a book on theoretical cosmology by English physicist Stephen Hawking. It was first published in 1988. Hawking wrote the book for readers who had no prior knowledge of physics.
I ...
''. The company grew to become a serious competitor of the more established publishers in the audiobook business.
After suffering some financial setbacks, Viner and Raffin sold Dove in 1997, and later obtained a large legal malpractice
Legal malpractice is the term for negligence, breach of fiduciary duty, or breach of contract by a lawyer during the provision of legal services that causes harm to a client.
Examples
A common example of legal malpractice involves the lawyer's mis ...
judgment against their own lawyers relating to this transaction, but after a lengthy appeals process, the judgment was overturned. They founded New Millennium Entertainment, which filed for bankruptcy after a jury ordered it to pay $2.8 million in a highly publicized lawsuit with author and editor Otto Penzler
Otto Penzler (born July 8, 1942) is a German-born American editor of mystery fiction, and proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City.
Biography
Born in Germany to a German-American mother and a German father, Penzler moved to The B ...
. In 2005 Viner established another company, Phoenix Books. Viner sold Phoenix to Dwight D. Opperman in 2007 but stayed on as its president.["Phoenix Books' Michael Viner Dead at 65"](_blank)
''Publishers Weekly
''Publishers Weekly'' (''PW'') is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents. Published continuously since 1872, it has carried the tagline, "The International News Magazine of B ...
'', August 10, 2009. Viner died in Beverly Hills, California
Beverly Hills is a city located in Los Angeles County, California. A notable and historic suburb of Greater Los Angeles, it is in a wealthy area immediately southwest of the Hollywood Hills, approximately northwest of downtown Los Angeles. B ...
at age 65 on August 8, 2009, due to cancer.
Appearances in Television and Film
Viner appeared in a 1970 episode of '' To Tell the Truth'', surrounded by two imposters, each claiming to be the producer of his "The Best of Marcel Marceao" album. None of the celebrity panelists correctly guessed him to be the real Michael Viner, instead opting to vote for the two imposters to his left and right.
The 2013 documentary ''Sample This'' recounts the story of Viner and The Incredible Bongo Band.[Francois Marchand]
"Breaking down Apache (with video): New film Sample This examines ‘national anthem of hip-hop’ recorded in Vancouver"
''The Vancouver Sun
The ''Vancouver Sun'', also known as the ''Sun'', is a daily broadsheet newspaper based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The newspaper is currently published by the Pacific Newspaper Group, a division of Postmedia Network. Published si ...
'', November 15, 2013.
References
External links
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Viner, Michael
Record producers from Washington, D.C.
American publishers (people)
Deaths from cancer in California
People from Washington, D.C.
Harvard College alumni
Walsh School of Foreign Service alumni
1944 births
2009 deaths