The music man

"Right before we signed R.E.M.," Waronker says, "[guitarist] Peter Buck told me he had all those old Beau Brummel records, he had Van Dyke singles--things I had forgotten! It was just fantastic. All those [old] records were an enormous investment of time and energy with very little coming back in terms of financial success, but I realized that it was good. I always knew something good would happen; I just couldn't figure out what good it was going to be. I just knew."

Rufus Wainwright likes to talk of how "lucky" he is to be in business with Waronker and DreamWorks, how they are on the "front lines" of the battle between art and commerce. But Wainwright is young enough not to believe that the glories of the good old days will help him sell records, and he's ornery enough to want success now instead of tomorrow or the day after that. He's much like DreamWorks itself--experiencing growing pains, hopeful and not a little desperate, a brilliant idea waiting anxiously to become something bigger than that.

"It's a battle to get on radio and to sell, to make money, and Lenny really is a master of persuasion," Wainwright says. "He's so good at encouraging me, and it was a dream come true to sign with him, and once I got out of the gates, oooooh, it's the valley of death out there. Lenny's a dreamer, and it's wonderful. But it's not realistic right now. I am lucky to be in this situation, but for me, it's my first record, and my thing is that they need me more than I need them.

"I love being associated with Lenny and Mo--they're like my best friends--but I also don't want to be their little pet on a string kind of a thing. You have to admit that though they are well-known and successful, DreamWorks is not a big label, and it does lack sometimes the muscle of more established labels. And I've had to deal with a lot of that...vacuum. It's still the early days of the label, and maybe in the '70s it was better. But the honeymoon's over.