The Story of Laguna the Puma
Laguna the Puma has been suppressed first by Ferdy Unger Hamilton/and more specifically his devious lawyer Andrew Meyers + later by Universal for over 25 years - Finished in 1996, it almost came out in 1997 when it got great press but then suddenly never came out + in 2008 when the same record received amazing press again and never came out (Doc 1 and 2, I could only find one article from the '97 press.) All documents can be found on the Documents page.
Here's the story:
I was signed to Go! Discs Records by Ferdy Unger-Hamiton, an up-and-coming a&r guy for having Portishead and Gabrielle on his roster - Go! Beat was Ferdy’s sub-label - In 1996, Go! Discs was bought out by Polygram - everybody quit the label except Ferdy who was given tons of money to stay on as the head of Go! Beat with Lucian Grainge (now the CEO of Universal) @ Polydor aZ the overlord - the record was finished in June 1996, Ferdy asked me to be patient as he got on his feet with his new label + he did make Laguna the Puma his number one priority - he wanted to prove he could have a hit record on his own without the machine of Go! Discs - This Music Week article shows the pressure Ferdy must have felt when the MD of Polygram expressed his high hopes for the record - it mentions Lucian/Polydor as well ` (Doc 3)
Geoff Travis of Rough Trade Records, who quit being my manager once Go! Discs collapsed, was back in the fold again once he knew a lot of big US labels were interested in the record + how upset I was waiting around for Ferdy to just put the record out - so Travis connected me with nyc lawyer Richard Grabel, who further complicated and enhanced the insanity, either through uncharacteristic incompetence or willful obstruction, or both. Grabel introduced me to Ken Friedman, who was besties with Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, who was besties with Jeffrey Epstein. Ken Friedman became partners with Grayden Carter, opening up a restaurant called Spotted Pig, and Ken Friedman like Epstein and others in that circle was accused of sexual assault and was ordered to pay out hundreds of thousand of dollars in settlements to his poor female employees. The nerve of this guy, one evening while at Nur Cah’s Sway Bar in New York, Ken Friedman went up to my wife and said why are you with this guy, you’re a hot woman - maybe it's because I don't assault women… or worse. More on Ken Friedman later.
Lucian Grainge was the money decider (I'm pretty sure) who paid for my overpriced 'Stud Boy' video that was never released as well as other marketing waste - I was kept on ice for 1 year as Ferdy and others schemed how to make this a big record + break america - I pushed for my friend Josh, a well known child actor with no experience making videos, to make the video in LA because I felt the industry video directors were all lame - Ferdy met Josh one night at the Sunset Marquis in West Hollywood and saw Josh with his good friend Toby McGuire (spiderman) + Leo Dicaprio, so Ferdy was so impressed he went with it - the video sucked - I take a lot of blame for it but not the super high budget `
Lucian oversaw the sale of 20% of Universal Music to the CCP-controlled company 10cent a couple of years ago. 10cent owns WeChat, who of course were involved in using their app's location tracker to round up 1 million Uyghurs and throw them into torture camps and harvest their organs `
Polydor was part of the Polygram group eventually sold to Edgar Bronfman when it merged with Universal about 25 years ago. This ruined the industry...another story.
In 1996/97, Danny Goldberg ran Mercury Records, which was 1 option for US distribution for Go! Beat. Goldberg and his right-hand woman Dana Millman felt Stud Boy was going to be a huge success, and after Hanson, the boy band, they planned on making it their biggest priority. Dana met with me and told me all of this over Thai food in midtown Manhattan, however they said it would be a 10-month marketing leadup and at my age I felt like that was forever. I told her at that meeting how I loved Ferdy even though he lied all the time and the real issue was his inept marketing team and mean-spirited office manager Viki Savage who was SAVAGE to me - except once at a festival because she was probably on MDMA - who knows
I left Go! beat in 1997 without being dropped because Ferdy kept lying all the time - I just left, humiliating Ferdy although this was not my intention. Simon White from boy band Menswear had given me some courage to leave after smoking a spliff with me and playing the vinyl of Wichita Lineman at his flat + saying how much he loved my songwriting and with me saying I wouldn’t be able record another record for years as Ferdy had already taken almost 2 years to put this out because he wanted to ‘break America' with this record so badly `
Knowing I was still under contract with Ferdy, Walter Yetnikoff offered to fly me out of the UK, gave me $5k (Doc 4) to get settled, rehearse a new band and to make sure I did not talk to other labels - a few weeks later Walter Yetnikoff offered me $100k in cash as an advance to allow me to start recording a second record and to put the first record out on his new vanity label called Velvel, but I started to feel wrong about that situation because my lawyer Richard Grabel said ‘Walter’s label is gonna fail, just take the 100k and I’ll be able to get you on Interscope with Debbie Southwood Smith or something.’ I felt bad about taking money from Yetnikoff knowing he was gonna fail + didn't want to diminish his faith in humanity - Then came Trent Reznor @ Nothing Records, Michael Goldstone @ DreamWorks and a few others in between wanting to buy my record/take over the project `
Ken Friedman ran 'Nothing Records' started by Trent Reznor. The label had Marilyn Manson and one other band called 'Jerusalem'. Supposedly, in the fall of ’97, Trent wanted me to come to his house in New Orleans to discuss taking over the album - at the time Reznor was on the cover of Rolling Stone being hailed as the god of music while I was living in the Riverview hotel on Jane Street in NYC which at the time was full of rats, drug dealers and prostitutes who I shared a public shower/toilet with - I told Ken Friedman I would not go to New Orleans because I felt a bad vibe from Reznor - this made my lawyer Grabel + Ken think I was crazy - Ken Friedman was very unhip and a total creep. Why he was down with the uber happening Reznor in 1997 and was as well a friend of the much cooler beastie boy Mike D can only mean they ran in some other weird circle. Friedman moved on from working with Trent Reznor to become a restauranteur with Graydon Carter, Jeffrey Epstein’s bestie - until Friedman was forced into seclusion after paying off several employees for several thousand $’s for sexual assault.
Michael Goldstone, who signed Pearl Jam and Rage Against the Machine, wanted the record as well at DreamWorks the year before when Michael Ostin, son of Mo Ostin, asked Ferdy to leave the UK and head their A&R - but Ferdy was too chicken + attached to his artist Gabrielle. Scott McGhee, the brother of Doc McGhee who managed Kiss and Motley Crue, connected me with Goldstone a year later in 1998. Michael Goldstone wanted me to re-record the entire first record, which also messed with my head because I thought ''how could i possibly do that'' and little did I know the reason was because Ferdy was blocking everyone from getting the record by making unreasonable terms for its transfer that no one dared accept, because he had confided in someone at Polydor that it would make him look bad if my record did well.
Goldstone, or ‘Goldie’, probably also felt wary of my weak vocals so I think it was both -
At one point when another label found it hard to get my record off Ferdy, Grabel said ‘’What did you do to this guy, I've never seen anything like it - the terms his Lawyer Andrew Meyers is proposing are insane.’’ Grabel never showed any negative emotion, except one time he said angrily, with a red face 'We'll have to see what Andrew Meyers sends next!'
If Ferdy was spearheading this effort to suppress the record, his devious lawyer Andrew Myers was the vehicle with which he was able to achieve this. After I left Go! Beat, Myers was deceitful and played dirty by stalling for months and months saying that they couldn’t release the record nor give it to another label. The reason they listed on the attached document (Doc 5) was ‘’Go! Discs has not yet received all rights in the album.’’ By rights they meant they never got the signatures from the musicians who played on it.
The musicians who played on it were my highschool friends and all they wanted was $2000 each or they wouldn't give their signatures. One member, Doron Gura, who is now head of streaming at disney, even went to see Ferdy on his own saying ‘’can I just have $2000?’’ and Ferdy would not help him. The first year alone before they even spent $200k in today’s money on a music video for Studboy, they spent $250k (in today’s money based on the 1996 pound/dollar exchange rate) just on the record (Doc 6), and if you see musician costs it was only £2389 which was used to pay the session drummer, who was a union musician, and other session musicians such as cellist, violin player, tabla player etc. So they paid $250k and refused to pay musicians in the core band who worked hard on it. The musician’s names are Doron Gura (lead guitarist), Adrian Capozzi (keyboards, ambient noises and solo for Children of the Garden Unicorn), Jerry Hawkins (the session drummer who wound up being a roadie for Madness), and Mark Cevallos (a great bass player who disappeared).
In England I had to get a couple replacement guys for my band because my bandmate’s parents forbade them to tour with me and made them stay at NYU because they had little faith in the project as Geoff Travis refused to meet the band once + Ferdy treated them like an underclass + never met them when I asked him to visit us in the studio in New York - The replacement guys were Vladimir Carboni, Simon Fischer and Mike Boito on keyboards. Boito was Beck's childhood friend and collaborator on his first 2 records, although I do not believe he was credited much and I don’t know why.
October ‘96 - Charlie Zacks, still working at the soon to be defunct Go! Discs before Ferdy took total control of Go! Beat as a stand alone, screwed up at securing me a UK work permit on time so I had to stay in Europe + play a show outside of England and get a review from a magazine (which we did) to prove that we were an international band worthy of a work permit. While we were in Amsterdam about to do rehearsals for this show, where all of the label came over at a very large expense and partied, dined out and stayed at hotels before the show, Charlie on behalf of Go!'s lawyer John Kellett sent me this letter: (Doc 7) saying it would cost £600 if they were gonna get our equipment across to Amsterdam from England for the rehearsals and the show, and they’d get all my publishing rights for $50,000 minus the loan of £10,000 if I didn't sign a publishing deal within 4 months. Charlie Zachs, said in the letter ‘’I am not prepared to rush around sorting things out at the last minute as it is not my job and is totally unfair on me’’ is the very person who messed up getting the work permit, forcing us to leave England. It is absolutely a label’s job to provide tour support as the band has to promote the record that the label owns - especially when they spend over 200K on a video! They said I would have to find equipment and hire it in Amsterdam but I had no money. I eventually got the equipment for the show by signing it` Grabel later said this was not a legit thing + not to worry they won't get the publishing `
Because some people think I was dropped or the album was shelved, Doc 8 shows that 1 ½ years after the record was mixed the album was a huge priority - On a personal level, I could feel the fiending, desperation in the 2 predatory industry men Ferdy hired after he was thrust into running the Go! Beat under the watch of Lucian Grainge @ Polydor, Paul Franklin and Richard Chamberlain - Franklin and Chamberlain were trying to blow up their careers and become big shots on the coattails of Ferdy’s success but especially wanted to be the guys known for breaking Laguna the Puma - The pressure was toxic because these guys were not too soulful, had no game + were just grinding and grinding for success.
I had chronically bad migraines during this time + saw every type of doctor I could - playing live would instantly start a terrible headache + I couldn't breathe so well - The more Ferdy’s marketing guys were grinding the worse my headaches got - Every time I saw these guys or got a fax from them I could just feel the oppressive energy of their desperate lust for success based on my work which was intended to bless the kids with joy + new ways of looking @ shit ` The reason I got my wisdom teeth pulled was out of desperation because nobody could figure out why I had such bad headaches, which by the way only started happening after Jimmy Page’s daughter Scarlet took photographs of me, her assistant was training to be a chiropractor and she cracked my back, then these terrible headaches started and I thought that maybe I was cursed because Jimmy Page was a Crowleyist. I didn't really want his daughter to take my photo because I thought she was a good photographer, I just wanted her to take my photo because she was Jimmy Page's daughter and I felt that was somehow an abusive thing to do as an artist -
Ferdy sold my record to Island Records UK when he went to run Virgin Records
In 2006, I called Island Records to ask them to do something with the record - Elanzo Burgess was cool and we spoke often - a year later after zero progress I told Claire Sugrue that I'd make a youtube video explaining how Ferdy and his lawyer blocked the record 10 years earlier + island are just sitting on it - So she said she'd release it on itunes and amazon - which is odd because in 1997-99 Andrew Meyers, Ferdy's Lawyer, said they could not release it because they didn't have the signatures (doc 5 again)
There was no intention for Claire to do a physical release, tour support or marketing budget - So I flew myself over, rounded up a marketing team, went into the office and got them to reluctantly pay $1000 for an indie press guy Jamie Woolgar - I said to Claire in her office “I paid for my plane ticket, I'm paying for my monthly room, I appreciate the $1k but if i get good press will you set me up a meeting with a&r to see if we can do something with this?” Claire said of course if the press does well we will do that - My press guy Jamie Woolgar got me great press - Everyone under 30 years old at the label would play the record and were so excited except for Claire Sugrue and Darcus Beese and anyone under Darcus Beese in A&R - Once all the good reviews (doc 2, 2008) came out they got weird and wouldn't speak to me! Island owned the record and I couldn't even meet with a&r -
Ferdy met me in 2008 during all this for the first time in 10 years for drinks and said "'i'm so sorry I bet you want to kill me" He was super humble and nice and asked who was doing my press. I told him it was Jamie Woolgar, who had recently told me that "I was the golden goose" and "he was so thrilled to be working with me and had plans to get lots of great press features moving forward" - Two days after telling Ferdy that Jamie was doing my press, Jamie calls me and says "Michael I can't believe it, Ferdy called me and offered me a job at Virgin!" I told him congrats and Jamie said "But there's one thing...Ferdy said I can't work with anyone outside Virgin so I can't work with you." crazy!
Claire Sugrue + Elanzo Burgess, who I would eat dinner with sometimes - were my only point people at Island because I was never allowed to speak to a&r or marketing. She dispersed funds of $7K to pay for independent promotion, make cd promos and a remastering. She never told me who was authorizing the funds, so I said to her ‘’I need truth and transparency I just want to know what’s going on’’ and she replied, ‘’Michael, you're going to make me very angry.’’
Other people on the marketing team include Karen Piper for digital marketing and Dylan White.
Dylan White is one of the most famous radio pluggers in UK history. He broke Oasis, Franz Ferdinand, the Strokes and got U2 so much radio and tv play in the 2000s that he was investigated by the government for possible collusion with the BBC and other media. He was originally hired by the label to help promote the record in the 90s, and later in 2007, he said he felt bad about what happened and wanted to help promote the record so much that he worked for free, on the condition that he could be my manager, which lasted for 2 years. The marketing team at Island did not at all help me, the people helping me were all independent contractors working outside the industry doing it for next to nothing or for free.
Many radio DJs wanted to play the record but everytime their bosses would say no! John Peel, of the Peel sessions, was the only radio DJ to ever play anything, he played a very limited 10 inch vinyl of Mickey Maus during the original campaign in 1996 and that was it.
September 2019, I called Johnny Chandler, head of catalog for Universal. He said, ‘'how'd you get this number?'’ and basically hung up on me. So I left him a voicemail saying ‘'I don't know why you hung up on me, my record is called Laguna the Puma by Laguna meth, and it's owned by Island'’ He calls me back right away from his cell phone rife with excitement saying '’I can't believe we have this record, when I owned a record shop in Soho, we were waiting all summer for this record to arrive! And then it just never came out! I can't believe we have it, this is gonna be fantastic, we can put this out now!’' I told him ‘'I already tried to get it out in 2008, and Claire Sugrue would never tell me who was helping me out with promo costs and I couldn't even meet with a&r.’' Chandler says '’this is a new day mate, it's gonna be different. All I need from you is to write an email saying you'd like to license the record to a 3rd party, i know you don't want to do that, and I don't want to do that, but this is the only way I can trigger bringing it up at the board meeting, and once I bring it up, we will find a way to put this out’'. I said 'are you sure?' and he said '’don't worry mate it's gonna be great.'’
I don't hear from Chandler for 2 weeks and he sends me a cold email saying, ‘'as per your request, you are free to license this with a 3rd party label.’' and he ccs island’s legal guy James Robertson with a form attached for a 3rd party option. I had no idea what this form was, I had no lawyer, so I figured I'd call James Robertson and ask him about it. I called, I told him who I was and said ‘’Johnny Chandler just CCd you in an email to me’’, and he cuts me off and goes '’just send me an email'’ and hangs up on me. I thought that was rude but I sent him an email anyway. No reply. I sent him another, no reply. It was maddening. I called Johnny Chandler and he just said, '’im sorry mate, there's nothing I can do.'’ and i said ‘’well what happened at the meeting?’’ he goes, '’i'm just, im sorry mate.'’
I had reached out to Johnny after a call with Ferdy a week earlier - one morning I woke up, smoked a doobie and I thought ‘man I just have to call Ferdy and work this out’ I called him up and he said he was so glad to hear from me and ‘’it’s funny, I was just talking about you the other night, I was at a wedding and I was talking to Clive Cawley (the director of EMI) and Cawley said that Laguna the Puma was his favorite record when he worked at Polydor and he always wondered what had happened to it'’ I felt it was sadistic Ferdy told me that, yet offered no options for me to move forward or volunteered his weight in the industry to help. He just said that we’re good friends, and he loves me `
There is so much more to this and other people involved - I love music + I love humanity - I hope to fulfill my intentions of spreading magic far and wide in the near future - It's been a long time but it’s also been a crazy fuKed up world - timing is everything - I've been consistently working on another record as well as a book modeled on Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man - I trust in life more than I have in any industry or other artifice