Larry Harris, Promoter of a Risk-Taking Record Label, Dies at 70
“There was a live camel,” Mr. Harris recalled in an interview for the 2013 book “Nothin’
to Lose: The Making of KISS, 1972-1975.” “Palm trees were brought in, real and fake.”
Though it took Kiss a while to generate record sales, Casablanca had quicker success with a relatively unknown singer it signed in 1975, Donna Summer.
Larry Harris, who helped his second cousin Neil Bogart found Casablanca Records, a flamboyant company
that brought Kiss, Donna Summer and other splashy acts to the mainstream spotlight in the 1970s, died on Dec. 18 in Port Angeles, Wash.
His son, Morgan, said the cause was an abdominal aneurysm.
The two had auditioned Kiss for Buddah, and they quickly signed the band to the new label, though it would take several albums
and several years before the band’s attention-getting stage show translated into significant record sales with “Alive!,” a live double album released in 1975.
In his 2009 book, “And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records,” written with Curt Gooch
and Jeff Suhs, Mr. Harris recalled an early, unexpected brush with the music business.
He founded his own label, Casablanca (the movie of that name, of course, starred Humphrey Bogart), and took Mr. Harris with him.
“Publicity, promotion, advertising, tour support — we went the distance on everything
we could,” Mr. Harris told the website Legendary Rock Interviews in 2011.
