Feature

Mix Master

Indeed, in marked contrast to his famously high-living mentor, Ertegun, Kallman avoids most aspects of the club life. He never did drugs, and to this day he doesn't even drink beer. He befriended club doormen, volunteered at the New Music Seminar, and haunted record stores. It was in 99 Records that, in 1981, Kallman, then 16, met D.J. Richard Vasquez from the club Berlin, who introduced him to the art of D.J.'ing. He worked his way up from playing Motown for yuppies at the Mansion on lower Second Avenue to Friday and Saturday nights at Danceteria -- where, he recalls somewhat wistfully, "I went from playing Kraftwerk into Loleatta Holloway into Nitzer Ebb into Parliament/Funkadelic, and the dance floor stayed packed."

At Brown, he D.J.'d funk nights in the campus dining hall, programmed the student radio station's urban- and alternative-music shows, and worked as a college rep for Columbia Records, earning $45 a week to promote acts like LL Cool J, the Psychedelic Furs, and Bruce Springsteen. Most notorious were the annual "Mike's parties" Kallman and some friends threw, promoting them with cleverly cryptic flyers and primitive but hilarious videos that played in the student post office.

When Kallman graduated in 1987, his father recalls, "I suggested he go immediately to Harvard Business School, but he said he wanted to start his own record company." To school himself in the various facets of the business, Craig took a job at Billboard tabulating radio charts and another promoting videos at Factory Records, home of New Order, while continuing to D.J. at night. When he was shopping in a record store one day, he heard a catchy house-music demo. He tracked down its creator, hired a singer named Tara Vhonty, borrowed a friend's equipment, and emerged with a song called "Join Hands."

To figure out what to do next, Kallman read William Krasilovsky and Sidney Shemel's standard text, This Business of Music, drew up a contract, pressed 1,000 copies of the single, and gave it to club-D.J. friends and radio people he'd met through Billboard. It started getting on KISS and BLS, record stores started calling, and soon Kallman was literally wheeling a shopping cart through the streets of Manhattan, selling door to door. "Before I knew it, I ended up selling 5,000," he says.

He quit everything but D.J.'ing, an invaluable test-marketing tool, which he says taught him "how long an introduction should be, how often to repeat the hook to get the crowd to repeat it." His second single, Kraze's funky "The Party," sold 300,000 copies worldwide. Soon, Big Beat was a $3 million?a?year business and Kallman had assembled a twelve-person staff. When he signed dance singer Tara Kemp, the major labels waged a bidding war for her. Kallman sold her contract to Irving Azoff at Giant for enough money to fund Big Beat's annual payroll.

Kemp's record ended up stiffing, and Kallman started to worry. "Vinyl was dying," he says. "You couldn't make as much profit on singles, and I didn't have the hundred grand it took to make competitive videos. I needed to hook up with a major." In 1991, when he had another indie hit, by the group Jomanda, the majors all came calling again. Kallman sold half of Big Beat, along with his services, to Atlantic's then-chief, Doug Morris. Three months later, Atlantic bought the other half, too.

Still, Kallman has yet to find and break a career artist of the caliber he admires -- the Van Morrison or Joan Armatrading of the next decade. Of course, these days it's hard to imagine an artist coming in with a record as sprawling as Morrison's Astral Weeks -- one of Kallman's all-time faves -- and getting any kind of support from the label (or even being signed in the first place). Kallman is pinning his hopes for posterity -- and a lot of Atlantic's money -- on Nicole Renée, a budding female Prince (she writes, sings, plays, and produces) whom he bested Sony's Tommy Mottola to sign. Renée is the Ur?Kallman act: On her self-titled album, scheduled for a September 15 release, she covers a mind-bogglingly broad musical terrain -- hard rock, jazz, folk, classical -- while sounding very up-to-the-minute.

It's the end of a recent workday, and Kallman calls Azzoli into his office to play a homemade demo he got from a rep in England. Azzoli, a former manager who has graying rock-star hair and a genial air, sits in a chair, head bowed, eyes closed, as the tape rolls. A drum machine and organ give way to a woman's poppy, girl-group vocals, layered with a processed sound reminiscent of the Eurythmics.

Kallman paces back and forth, grooving to the music, sucking a cough drop, but not saying anything. Before the song is half over, Azzoli can't contain himself. "It's the best!" he cries. Kallman finally cracks a grin: This is what they all live for, a hit so palpable that, as he says, "all you have to do is get out of the way." When Azzoli likes the second song even more, he demands, "So, we signed them?"

"No," Kallman says. "I just got this today." But by the end of the week, he's in London, signing the duo, Pocketsize, and now he hopes to get their album out by February. By then, of course, he'll be on to five more projects, searching for the elusive next new thing. "I don't want it to sound like anybody else," Kallman says. "I want what's next.