Deadline is reporting that David Libert, a founding member of the ’60s pop group The Happenings as well a tour manager for Alice Cooper and Prince, manager for George Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic, Bootsy Collins, the Runaways, Living Colour and many more, died February 20, according to a post on his official Instagram page. He was 81.
The title of Libert’s 2022 memoir is Rock and Roll Warrior, and it’s an apt one. Over the course of his decades in the music business, the Paterson, NJ-raised Libert found success as a musician, songwriter, road manager, concert promoter, author and (briefly) drug dealer, for which he spent about a year in prison.
Just out of the Air Force in 1961, Libert started The Happenings with four other kids from Paterson. The group’s major hits were “See You In September” in 1966 and a cover version of George & Ira Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” the following year, both of which peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. Two other singles, covers of “Go Away Little Girl” and “My Mammy,” hit to Top 15.
Despite that success, Libert decided to leave the group in 1970 to pursue other interests that had roots in his unique role with The Happenings.
“I was also the manager of the band. I liked it because I was dealing with record companies and booking agencies, promoters and publicity firms,” said Libert in a recent interview.
His big break came when he connected with supermensch and ubermanager Shep Gordon. Gordon managed Alice Cooper — among many other acts — but, according to Libert, “didn’t want to have to be on the road” because he had so many other responsibilities than just being on tour.
“I owe Shep almost everything that I learned about the business, no doubts,” Libert once said. “Not just tour managing, which I did not know really much about it, before meeting him but a lot more too. Working with Alice was really a tremendous job, travelling the world, hanging out with Alice and the band. It was just one big happy family, back then. I learned from Shep also how to handle complex situations and what it takes the whole touring machine going day in, day out. Shep wasn’t only a business administrator, really, he was part of the creative force of it all,
Libert became the Alice Cooper Band’s road manager in 1971 and lasted in that grinding gig until 1975. It was the peak of the group’s commercial success, when it racked up five consecutive Top 10 albums including the chart-topping Billion Dollar Babies. He also contributed backing vocals on that smash 1973 LP.
In Rock And Roll Warrior, he wrote of the tour manager gig: “There was no job manual, no job description, and no one telling me what my job was. My initial perception was a collection of about thirty or so crazy-looking people, completely unsupervised and crawling all over everything like giant insects. Oh God, what have I gotten myself into? I just quit my nice, convenient, cushy job road managing Rare Earth for this insanity? I thought I had made the biggest mistake of my life.”
What he discovered, however, was that Cooper and his crew were pros.
“All the people that worked for Alice were professionals. They really knew what they were doing,” he said. “There was a lot of equipment and props. Before anyone else, we carried our own lighting systems and sound systems and staging. It was my responsibility to make it run like a well oiled machine. It taught me responsibility, discipline and how to work with other people.”
Read more at Deadline, and watch David Libert tell insider tour stories in the video below from Produce Like A Pro:
