Danny Goldberg

Danny Goldberg reviewed Woodstock for Billboard in 1969, was hired as Led Zeppelin's publicist in 1973, and became vice-president of the band's Swan Song label. Label jobs filled the three decades after: president of Atlantic Records, chairman of Warner Bros. Records, chief executive of the Mercury Records Group, and founder of the independent Artemis Records in 1999. As a personal manager he looked after Nirvana, Hole, Sonic Youth, Bonnie Raitt, Stevie Nicks, the Allman Brothers Band and Rickie Lee Jones. Bumping Into Geniuses, published in 2008, is the memoir of that career, arranged as a run of encounters rather than a ledger of deals. Serving the Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain followed in 2019, drawn from the years Goldberg managed Nirvana, 1990 until Cobain's death in April 1994 at the age of twenty-seven. Its argument is that Cobain was a deliberate and ambitious craftsman rather than the reluctant star of legend, a case Goldberg can put because he was both employee and friend.