Steely Dan co-founder Walter Becker said they’d hired Azoff because he “impressed us with his taste for the jugular … and his bizarre spirit.” Jimmy Buffett’s wife grabbed him outside a show at Madison Square Garden, pushed him into the back of a limo and said, You have to manage Jimmy, although Buffett already had a manager at the time. He didn’t seem to care if people liked him, and his artists loved him for that. Without Irving, I’d still be in Chicago.”Īzoff became even more infamous for the pit bull brio he brought to business negotiations on behalf of the Eagles and others, including Stevie Nicks and Boz Scaggs. “We had to check out with a lawyer and a construction foreman,” Walsh remembers. And Irving’s role was to keep us out of prison, basically.” He recalls a pleasant evening in Chicago in the company of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, which culminated in Walsh laying waste to a suite at the Astor Towers hotel that turned out to be the owner’s private apartment. “We could do anything we wanted, so we did. “This was a different age,” Walsh says of his time as the band’s premier lodging-deconstructionist. “Artists,” he once observed, “like knowing the guy flying the plane is sober.” This didn’t stop him from trashing his share of hotel rooms, frequently with guitarist Joe Walsh - whose solo career Azoff shepherded before Walsh joined the Eagles, and who was very much not sober at this time - as an accomplice. The Eagles lived life in the fast lane he was the designated driver. “No doubt about it.”Īzoff never took to pot or coke. “I got my swagger from Glenn Frey and Don Henley,” he says. He met the Eagles while working for David Geffen and Elliot Roberts’ management company and followed the band out the door when they left the Geffen fold they became the cornerstone of his empire. He grew up in Danville, Ill., booked his first shows in high school to pay for college, dropped out of college to run a small Midwestern concert-booking empire and manage local acts such as folk singer Dan Fogelberg and heartland rock band REO Speedwagon. His father was a pharmacist and his mother was a bookkeeper. In photos from the ’70s - when he was considerably less professorial in comportment, a hipster exec with a spring-loaded middle finger - he sports a beard and a helmet of curly hair and mischievous eyes behind his shades, and looks a little like a Muppet who might scream at Kermit over Dr. He’s only 5 feet, 3 inches, a diminutive Sydney Pollack in jeans and a zip-up sweater. Trailed by Larry Solters, the Eagles’ preternaturally dour minister of information, Azoff makes his way down the hill from the house for dinner at the golf club’s restaurant. Maybe we should leave him there for a while.’” The ‘My kid’s in jail’ one was a funny one, because the artist then said to me, ‘Y’know, I’ve thought about this. “My calls can be everything from ‘My knee buckled, I need a doctor’ to ‘My kid’s in jail,’” Azoff says. The work never stops when you view the job the way Azoff does, as falling somewhere between consigliere and concierge. Azoff has Zoom calls at 7, 8 and 9 tomorrow morning, and only after that will he squeeze in a round. As a partner in Full Stop Management - alongside Jeffrey Azoff, his oldest son and the third of his four children - he steers the careers of clients like the Eagles, Steely Dan, Bon Jovi and comedian Chelsea Handler, and consults when needed on the business of Harry Styles, Lizzo, John Mayer, Roddy Ricch, Anderson. Beatles manager Brian Epstein and Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham are already in, but Azoff and Landau are the first active managers thus honored. They are the first active managers so honored.Īzoff is 72, and this weekend he’ll be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside Bruce Springsteen’s longtime manager Jon Landau. 6, 2020 An earlier version of this post said Irving Azoff and Jon Landau are the first living managers inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
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